[Buddha-l] "Western Self, Asian Other"

[Richard Hayes]

On Dec 31, 2009, at 2:41 PM, Katherine Masis wrote:
 
> What puzzles me is that there are western scholars of Buddhism who seem to subtly disdain the entire field of study and practice, western as well as Asian.  I’m thinking of Donald Lopez here.  I’ve only read a couple of his articles plus one-and-a-half of his books (completed *Prisoners of Shangri-La* and am now reading *Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed*).  Am I the only one with that impression on this list?  Don’t get me wrong—I think he’s an excellent historian of Buddhism.  I’m just puzzled about what I perceive as an undercurrent of contempt in his writings.

That's an interesting observation, Katherine. Although I don't have an explanation, there are a couple of ideas rattling around in my head. More than twenty years ago I was at a conference on Buddhism attended by Buddhist practitioners and scholar-practitioners, including Donald Lopez, Luis Gómez, Anne Klein, Alan Sponberg, Carl Bielefeldt and a few others. Something that happened fairly often during the nine or ten days of that conference was that scholar-practitioners were criticized by other Buddhists for not really being sincere practitioners. That happens often enough to all of us that a kind of reactivity may set in. Different people reqct in different ways. More than one scholar-practitioner I know has become fed up with trying to be convincing as both that mythical beast known as an "objective" scholar and as that other mythical beast known as a sincere practitioner; some get fed up by dropping their identity as a scholar, while others drop their identity as a practitioner. Whichever way such a person goes, a side-effect of that decision may be a detectable trace of subtle disdain in what they say about those who have not given up trying to be both. People who fail at something like to think that they failed because what they were trying to do was impossible. So if one fails to be taken seriously as a scholar-practitioner and then gives up either the left or the right side of that hyphenated description, one is likely to say it is simply impossible to be both, which implies, of couse, that those who believe they are successfully doing both are simply deluded. (Isn't having a human mind awful!?! )

Another possibility that occurs to me stems from a remark I got on the very first teaching evaluation I got in an academic course on Buddhism. The comment was "This course would be great if only a professor could be found who did not have so much contempt for his subject matter." Reading that comment made me conscious of how afraid I had been of being perceived as an overly enthusiastic proselytizer for my own chosen religious path who was using the podium as a pulpit. So I had consciously and unconsciously managed to desist from making every positive remark about Buddhism that crossed my mind. It reminded me of when I was in the fifth grade and was suffering the pangs of my first crush on a girl in my class. I was so smitten by her that I never missed an opportunity to say something negative about her so no one would suspect I was smitten. (It puzzled the hell out of me why I couldn't get to first base with her. It took me another forty years or so to realize that being hypercritical is not an effective courtship strategy. But I digress.) I wonder whether any academics recognize a similar dynamic over overcompensation in themselves.

Richard