[Buddha-l] Re: Protestant Buddhisms

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Fri, 2005-03-25 at 11:51 -0800, Franz Metcalf wrote:

> Similarly, I'm not sure I'd call the study of Buddhist texts on what
> one ought to do the study of Buddhism.

Probably no study of just a part of what has been included within the
purview of Buddhism should be called the study of Buddhism, which means,
I suppose, that no one does the study of Buddhism. To be honest, I have
never known what to call myself academically. (I love to steal
Foucault's line "I leave it to the bureaucrats to figure out which
category to put me in.") My most advanced degree was in Sanskrit and
Indian Studies, with a focus on Indian philosophy, but I definitely have
never thought of myself as an Indologist. (Hell, I've only been to India
once, for two weeks, and never want to go again.) I've been employed in
two departments of religious studies, but have never thought of
religious studies as my field, and surely have never thought of Buddhist
studies as my field. I'm now in a department of philosophy but am
decidedly not a philosopher.

> In the end, one becomes an odd form of a practicing Buddhist, willy-
> nilly, and thus perhaps one *is* studying Buddhism, all along. So,
> perhaps never mind distinguishing these studies, after all.

There is a certain bankruptcy in labels, especially if one takes them at
all seriously. I rather like Rorty's notion of being an ironist. In one
of his descriptions of that concept, he says an ironist is someone who
does most of the rituals of his tribe but sometimes wakes up in the
middle of the night and wonders if he was born into the wrong tribe.
It's a person who makes solid commitments but is fully aware that if
circumstances had been otherwise, she might have made other ones. An
ironic American is one who is willing to play the American game to a
certain degree while fully realizing that he could just as easily have
been a Russian, a North Korean, a Cuban or a Syrian. When I think about
it, I could have been pretty much anything. Except a Republican, of
course. 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico