[Buddha-l] Loving your object of study

[Richard Hayes]

On Sunday 18 November 2007 21:20, Joanna Kirkpatrick quoted someone who wrote:

> "...It appears to be less controversial to be a committed Buddhist and a
> scholar of Buddhism than to be a committed Hindu and a scholar of Hinduism
> in the contemporary academy.  I would add that it is also less
> controversial to be a committed Hindu of South Asian descent and a scholar
> of Hinduism than it is to be a committed Hindu of European descent and a
> scholar of Hinduism."

One of my former colleagues, who died some years ago, observed that in the 
United States and Canada it would be completely unthinkable to have a non-Jew 
teaching Judaism in a department of religious studies, equally unthinkable to 
have a non-Christian teaching courses on Christianity, highly improbable to 
have Muslim teaching Islam and of no real consequence to have a non-Buddhist 
or non-Hindu teaching those religions. He said that he suspected the 
prevailing prejudices were that only Jews or Christians have insight into 
their own religions and therefore only insiders can teach them, while Muslims 
would be fanatical and therefore incapable of the kind of objectivity that 
the academic study of religion requires. Hinduism and Buddhism, he 
speculated, had not yet managed to constellate a consensual prejudice either 
for or against them.

Like any very broad generalization, this one would have to be taken with a 
grain of salt and would have to be stated with more nuances to be accurate, 
but it seems to me, very broadly speaking, pretty much correct. At a 
conference held in 2000 on teaching Buddhism in the academy, several people 
reported that they felt it important to hide their commitment to Buddhism 
from their colleagues, lest they be perceived as incapable of objectivity. I 
never saw anything like that in Canada; indeed, the fact that I was known to 
be a Buddhist practitioner was seen as a great asset when I was hired to 
teach Buddhist studies. (Little did my colleagues know that a good many 
Buddhists over the years have seen me as a fraud and a charlatan, because I 
allegedly don't have the right view of Right View.) 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico