[Buddha-l] Re: US/UK Buddhalogy again

[Andrew Skilton]

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 F.K. Lehman (F.K.L. Chit Hlaing) wrote:

>Come now! In UK, there's the legacy of former
Burma and Sri Lanka/Ceylon colonies, which
spawned the enterprise of Pali scholarship --
obviously Theravada, not least institutionalised
in SOAS and at Oxford.

Picking up on a point like this makes me feel like a pedant (well, if I feel like one, I must be one, right?) but Pali is not and has not been institutionalised either at Oxford or at SOAS in the way that this comment suggests. The situation at SOAS has only recently been extended to include Theravada with the appointment of Kate Crosby as 'lecturer in Pali and Theravada' studies about 4 years ago. Furthermore this was a new post, funded by the Agonshu!  (Is that irony?) I think this is the first post in the UK actually dedicated to the subject of Theravada/Pali. Prior to that Pali teaching was left to the tender mercies of visiting Profs from Sri Lanka in the dept. of South Asian Studies and so was not regularly taught there. 

In Oxford Pali/Theravada was the personal interest of Richard Gombrich, but just that - a personal interest.  The only formal presence of Pali was as a subsidiary paper on the undergraduate Sanskrit degree.  Of course, Richard is a great enthusiast, and accepted a number of doctoral students working in Pali/Theravada, but he was the Boden Professor of Sanskrit. There is no post in Pali at Oxford and I gather that it is one of the ambitions of the now retired Gombrich to try to establish, for the first time, such a post there. (Progress on that front is so far largely the result of more Japanese sponsorship, I believe!)

The Pali Text Society library is held in Cambridge, but the society does not run any activities there (or anywhere else, other than an annual public lecture).  There is a Pali collection in the Uni library at Edinburgh, but no-one is working in Pali there either (though I know Paul Dundas can read it as well as the next man, he has other fish to fry).  Therefore I know of only the one formal post in the UK in either Pali or Theravada, and that is the new one at SOAS.  If one takes SOAS as an indicator of  the shape of Buddhist studies in the UK (after all it has the largest number of permanent lecturers working in this area in any UK  university) then only one of those seven people works in Theravada/Pali.  The remaining six all work in Central (incl. Tibet) or East Asian Buddhism! If I am wrong about any of these observations on UK Buddhist Studies I hope someone will correct me.

I am beginning to think that people outside the UK have funny ideas about the status (i.e. dominance) of the scholarly study of Theravada/Pali here.  It seems to me that the permanent establishment, or institutionalisation, of Pali/Theravada in UK universities even at a minimal level will be a new phenomenon, and pretty much down to Japanese enthusiasm and money.

Rolling the discussion back to its start, I think the underlying premise, that British study of Buddhism is dominated by interest in Theravada (and implicitly Pali?), was simply wrong. Buddhist studies in the UK has a pretty balanced spread.  I suggest that if there is anything to discuss, it would be why there is an imbalance (i.e. away from Theravada/Pali) in the USA, but I am not convinced that even this is either true or if true very strong.  It strikes me there are a number of guys in the US working on Theravada related stuff. (Bond, Reynolds, Strong, Jaini, Hallisey, Blackburn, Collins, Samuels, Walters, Swearer, Anderson, Holt, Trainor, McDaniel, Hansen, Thompson, Bertwitz * not to mention the likes of Skilling, who has a regular slot at Berkeley, or Schopen, who regularly avails himself of Pali materials when it suits him... My personal list peters out here, but I do not imagine the above is exhaustive.) 

So if people want to talk about the links between US Transcendentalism and the study of Buddhism, just do it.  It seems weird to bandy around false premises to justify an otherwise reasonable discussion.

Andrew


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Andrew Skilton 

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