[Buddha-l] Question for acedemic teachers of Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 09:38 +0200, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

> >   
>  From a buddhist perspective I don't see why being a professor qualifies 
> for teaching buddhism. It qualifies only to describe the buddhist point 
> of view from a third person's prespective. In academic circles it was 
> for a long time OK to be a Christian and a professor of Christendom, but 
> it was ridiculous to be a buddhist and a professor of Buddhism, unless 
> of course if you were Asian, in which case you had to play the Jewel in 
> the Crown. 

What you report here may still be true in Europe, but it has not been
true in the United States or Canada for at least twenty-five years.
There are very few professors of Buddhist studies of my generation (I'm
63 years old) in North America who are not practicing Buddhists. There
have been a few excellent scholars of Buddhism who are not Buddhist
(Gregory Schopen, Paul Griffiths, Dan Arnold, Steven Collins and David
Malcolm Eckels come to mind), but at least one I know of felt so
marginalized that he bailed out of Buddhist studies altogether and is
now teaching Christian theology. In the United States the study of
Buddhism is, if anything, in danger of being so dominated by "insiders"
that the valuable perspective of "outsiders" is being subdued. I worry
that the study of Buddhism is becoming a little too much like a Buddhist
equivalent of Sunday school for aging adolescents.

Just for the record, right after I graduate with a degree in Sanskrit
and a specialization in Indian Buddhist philosophy, my first job
involved teaching Christianity. It was well know by the folks who hired
me that I was a practicing Buddhist. It was never seen as an issue that
a non-Christian would be teaching Christianity.

Any time a university course on religion is taught in such a way that it
makes followers of that religious tradition happy, it is not being
taught properly. If people want to feel warm and fuzzy about some
religious tradition, let them go to a church, a synagogue, a mosque or a
temple. Classrooms have no room for such sentimentality.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico