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

[L.S. Cousins]

Andrew,

Well, I think I shall be a pedant too. It seems to me that the 
problem here is not that the overseas perception is wrong as that it 
is out-of-date. It is perfectly correct to say that Pali and 
Theravada studies were dominant at one time in the UK. Indeed, there 
were only a few people interested in other Buddhist traditions as 
late as the 1970s.

>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.

Well, no. Pali has a much larger history than that.

>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.

Quite true. But before his elevation to that position he held a post 
which did include Pali in its remit.

>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.

Yes, ironically the long term result of Gombrich's elevation has been 
the loss of a permanent post in Pali.

>  (Progress on that front is so far largely the result of more 
>Japanese sponsorship, I believe!)

No, you are thinking of funding for the planned Chair in Buddhist 
Studies. If the plan for a post in Pali is successful, the funding is 
practically certain to come from one or  more of the Theravada 
countries.

>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).

He is a Prakrit specialist and he does teach Pali.

>   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.

That is not correct. Cambridge has two (or one and a half): Margaret 
Cone (a full-time post funded by the PTS for Dictionary work) and 
Eivind Kahrs. It is true that it is no longer restricted to Prakrit 
alone as it was in the days before K.R.Norman received a Personal 
Chair. You are also leaving out people in Religious Studies or 
similar: e.g. Rupert Gethin, Damien Keown and Peter Harvey. The list 
could also be expanded considerably if we include younger scholars 
not currently in post or only in short-term posts.

>  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.

Since the departure of Jaini (who held a post in Pali and Buddhist 
Sanskrit if I remember correctly), Pali has until now been rather 
weak in SOAS. Let us hope Kate will be able to revive it fully.

>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.

Well, no. But it has come under threat in the last decades. This is 
no doubt the reason for a certain stridency of advocacy among those 
interested in Theravada.

>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.

As I indicated above, I don't think it was wrong, but I agree that it 
is out-of-date.

>Buddhist studies in the UK has a pretty balanced spread.

Well, not quite. It is decidedly weak in the area of Far Eastern 
Buddhism. This is perhaps improving a little now.

>  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.)

You are including people here who are working in a range of 
disciplines. We haven't done this for the U.K. and we could, e.g. for 
social Anthropology.

>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.

I think there is a point of substance here. Both in scholarship and 
among Buddhist adherents. I am  more sure of the latter.

If you go back to the 1950s and early 1960s, there were posts held by 
people mainly working in Pali language in Edinburgh, Oxford, 
Cambridge and to some extent SOAS (Jaini). Most other teaching of 
general Buddhism elsewhere was orientated towards Pali to a greater 
or lesser extent. My impression is that there was no such Pali 
linguistic base in the U.S. at this time. Later quite a few people 
move from the U.K. or via the U.K. to North America. Obvious examples 
are Moreton Smith, A.K. Warder and Steve Collins. There was also much 
more interest in Chinese and Japanese Buddhist traditions over there.

As regards Buddhist practice, there is a sharp difference from the 
U.S. Again in the early 1960s I met people who had a long-standing 
involvement with Theravada in a continuous tradition dating back to 
the pre-World War I Buddhist Society. As far as I know, there is 
nothing like that in North America. There is no way to estimate 
reliably relative strength among Buddhist traditions in the U.K. now. 
Tibetan-aligned approaches are certainly very prominent and indeed 
impressively energetic. Theravada tends to be much less 
organizational in its approach, with some  exceptions. But my 
impression is that Theravada remains about as widely practised as the 
Tibetan or Far Eastern traditions i.e of the order of a third. But it 
can only be a guesstimate !

We should  of course also remember that the situation among 'born 
Buddhists' is a little different. Both the U.K. and the U.S. have 
significant numbers of immigrants from the Theravada countries. 
Likewise from the Far East. I don't think (but am not sure) that 
numbers of Tibetan immigrants are on anything like the same scale. In 
the U.K. that might mean that some kind of Theravada makes up around 
50% of all Buddhists. But it  may depend on how many Chinese you 
count as Buddhists :-)

Lance Cousins