The Opposite of Buddhism (Article)

My relatively old article ("The Opposite of Buddhism") ended up posted on another blog as a series of installments (this breaks up the text with some illustrations and, perhaps, makes it a bit more enjoyable to read).

Unfortunately, that other blog now has quite a lot of advertising cluttering it up.  This was not the case when I signed up for the service.

Here are direct links to the article's installments, hopefully saving you the trouble of looking at too many advertisements:

• The Opposite of Buddhism, Section 1
• … Section 2
• … Section 3
• … Section 4
• … Section 5
• … Section 6
• … Section 7
• … Section 8
• … Section 9
• … Section 10
• … Section 11
• … Section 12, final.

There's a rather sad story behind the non-publication of this lecture, involving years (not months, but years) of lies told to me by the French editor of a Cambodian journal that is neither prestigious nor has high editorial standards (to be frank, they publish some very casually-written junk).  The editor was aware that the reviewers were rejecting the article for spurious reasons, simply because it was politically challenging to them (rightly or wrongly, I was told that the draft caused a lot of discussion within E.F.E.O. circles… that could be a lie, but even if true, keep in mind that you're talking about "circles" of about five people).

Empirically, it can simply be said that peer review is a process that has worked well in some disciplines, in some cultures, and in some periods of time, but not in others; in the entire mess of disciplines involved in Theravāda Buddhism (including Anthropology) it is a failure.

After wasting years in the peer-review process (that not even the editor, evidently, believed in) this article then instantly reached a much larger audience than that journal ever could have by its promotion through the website that is L'Enfant Terrible of Cambodian politics, KI-Media.

Interview with 東蓮覺苑 (Tung Lin Kok Yuen) in Hong Kong

I provided an interview to the Hong Kong publication of the Tung Lin Kok Yuen foundation (東蓮覺苑).

http://newlotus.buddhistdoor.com/en/news/d/31356

The questions (and the illustrations) largely concern the situation of Theravāda Buddhism within Yunnan (云南) but the answers cover a great deal of ground, both about my own research into Pali, about the historical and current situation of the religion in Southeast Asia, and so on.  Politics are not omitted from the discussion.


It is credit to the editor that this was published (in a conservative, Buddhist newsletter) without censorship.  This is another interesting example of an openly-religious publication being more willing to print both criticism and controversy than "secular Buddhist" publications are, in my experience.

Buddhist Academia, what's wrong with this picture?

Pause to consider just how much is wrong with this picture.

This isn't a poster that was created to promote a temple, nor yoga classes, nor a video-game… it is a poster created to promote graduate-level research in Buddhism.  Where?  At the "Centre of Buddhist Studies", 佛學研究中心, at Hong Kong University, 香港大學.

What does it try to sell you?  Philology?  Language-classes?  Mastery of ancient texts?  No, it tries to sell you happiness (here symbolized with a cartoon of a child sitting on a crescent moon… which is not a Buddhist symbol).

Frankly, no M.A. program in the world should try to sell you happiness: they should try to convince students of the value of their academic program… of what they can learn or, at least, what skills/qualifications students will gain.  Both the image and the promise of "happiness" here make me suspect that the M.A. program is lacking in some of those other things.

It gets worse: why does the poster promise friendship with "your inner self"?  The most fundamental premise of Buddhism is that you don't have an inner self!  This is discussed in English as "no self", and "no soul", but there are also numerous suttas that state (reciprocally) that what's inside you is nothing but "blood and guts" (more poetically, "a synergy of sinews").  The attack on the idealization of "the inner self" (demystifying the body and the self, qua no-self) is one of the distinctive aspects of Buddhist philosophy and religion.

Yet here is an M.A. program in Buddhist studies that is supposedly going to promise you the same thing as every new-age cult: a deeper connection with your so-called "inner self"!  This is especially unseemly for the academic study of Buddhism, but it is also a promise that (probably) no university can deliver on.

Let's be honest: they're asking you to pay thousands of dollars to read some books, write a bunch of exams, and then receive a diploma that will never help you to get a job.  That's what an M.A. in Buddhist studies really is.

They cannot possibly offer you "quality relationships" nor even "a decent environment" in downtown Hong Kong.

As terrible as this poster is, I can say that it is more ethical than McGill University (Canada) that simply publishes a pamphlet with a direct lie, claiming that they offer Pali as a language of instruction when they don't have a single employee who knows anything about Pali, nor Theravāda Buddhism.  That is false advertising on another level entirely.

Prof Lorna Williams Defending (or Abandoning?) First Nations Language Education

If it were impossible to teach languages in the classroom, it would be unethical for universities to charge money (and offer degrees) for students to learn languages in the classroom.  Nobody makes such claims for languages like Chinese (that are certainly difficult to learn in the classroom) and yet this is offered as a very casual excuse for why educational programs in Canada's indigenous languages are failing --and it is offered as an excuse for why their failure shouldn't matter.

In an apparent riposte to my earlier article on my efforts to learn Cree, and mentioning my more recent lament that I'll have to throw my Cree books in the garbage, Lorna Williams wrote in to inform me that you can't learn a language in a classroom anyway.  Well, that certainly is a convenient justification to simply "give up" on a system of classroom education that is failing, while other languages are being successfully taught right down the hall (in the same universities, etc.).  Lorna Williams is not mere a professor, but also a "Canada Research Chair" (which means that she makes big decisions about how big sums of money get spent).  My reply follows her message, below.

----------

Eisel, I find your email distressing in that you make sweeping claims that
no one cares about or wants to learn Cree. It is true that one cannot
learn a language by taking a course, you need to be immersed in the
language for a period of time. I also cannot believe that there is no one
to give the books to, I know if you brought them to Dr. Jan van Eijk he
would be happy to redistribute them to other students who would benefit
from them. I hope you will find what you are looking for as you continue
on your travels. Lorna

----------

L.W.,

> Eisel, I find your email distressing…

It is distressing.  The situation at F.N.U. is distressing.  I'm
distressed.  If you've read my article about my experience at F.N.U.,
and you find it distressing, that's good: the article is intended to
raise difficult questions, that nobody inside the institution wants to
ask.  The president of the university, etc., have all seen the article
already.

> It is true that one cannot

> learn a language by taking a course…

That is not true:
• Nobody in the department of Japanese would make this excuse,  claiming that it is impossible for the students to learn Japanese inside a classroom anyway, etc.
• Nobody in the department of Chinese would make this excuse, claiming that it is impossible for the students to learn [Chinese] inside a classroom anyway, etc.
• Even in the case of "dead languages", nobody in the department of Latin, Greek, etc. would make this excuse, claiming that it is impossible for the students to learn [Latin or Greek] inside a classroom anyway, etc.

In reality, it is much more difficult to learn languages like Chinese
than it is to learn Cree.  In many ways, it is more difficult to learn
dead languages than living languages (including even endangered,
living languages).

If the institutions want to provide language-instruction, they can.
None of these institutions lack the resource[s].  In Cambodia, Laos,
etc., I have seen institutions that lack the resources.  Here in
Canada, we have working electricity and chalkboards: aside from a few
people who really care (and want to get the job done) that's all you
really need.

> …you need to be immersed in the language for a period of time.

Well, there are language departments teaching Japanese that make
arrangements for their students to have some immersion in the
language: but nothing like that is possible for First Nations
languages here (despite the fact that it is much cheaper to take a bus
to Prince Albert than it is to take an airplane to Japan!).  I am well
aware of the benefits of language-immersion, and I discuss them in the
same article about learning Cree (I don't know if you read it in full
before replying) where I complain that institutions need to take a
more active role (even if it is just in organizing bus-trips!) so that
students will have more direct language exposure --because it is much
easier to meet people who speak Chinese than it is to meet people who
speak Cree in downtown Regina.

My short article, again, is here:
http://a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.ca/2012/09/on-learning-cree-and-not-learning-cree.html

> …I know if you brought them to Dr. Jan van Eijk

(Image from "Rate my Professors")

I have met and spoken to Prof. Jan van Eijk many times, and he knows about every stage of my personal tragedy (in trying to learn Cree, etc.).  If you think he cares in the slightest, think again.  I begged for his help many times.  The only help that I received was one short e-mail, suggesting that I write to a certain professor at U.B.C., to ask if there was any hope there; I did receive a very useful reply from U.B.C., saying that their situation was even more hopeless (for language instruction) than F.N.U.

> I hope you will find what you are looking for as you continue
> on your travels.

I won't: my life and all my aspirations have been destroyed.  If I
can't learn Cree within Canada, I can't learn it anywhere.  I searched
this entire country for any possibility of learning Cree or Ojibwe
(from U.B.C. to Montreal) and I didn't find any viable option (on the
contrary, many of the replies I received were just as bleak as the one
I've mentioned from U.B.C.).

First Nations language education is in a situation worse than a
crisis.  Don't make excuses that nobody in their right mind would
offer for any other language: if it was impossible to teach a language
in a classroom, why is the classroom of such vital importance for
every other language on earth?  Why was classroom teaching of such
enormous importance to the revival of other endangered languages?

Yes, people do need classroom instruction in Cree: I'm one of them.  I
couldn't get it.  I'll never have the opportunity to study the
language again.  This is a personal tragedy for me --and it wasted two
years of my life.  That's how the story ends for me --[and] 99.9% of people
who have a similar disappointment will not be able to publish an
article about it (and won't have the nerve to complain directly to
people like Prof. Jan Van Eijk).

E.M.

----------

For the sake of contrast (and because this was mentioned, in passing, in the message above), here is the exceedingly polite response to the same article that I received from Vianne Timmons, President of the University of Regina.

V.T. on the C.B.C. (source).

----------

Eisel,
Thank you for your email.  I read you Blog with interest.  I will share your concerns with the President of First Nations University.  You raise so may issues that are important. Preserving the Cree language is important and I know that your insights will help in improving language instruction.
Thank you again for taking the time to write.
Dr. Timmons

----------

The photograph of President Timmons, above, was pulled from a C.B.C. article on the long-term scandal of how high the salaries are for university administrators.  I appreciate that she took the time to read my work and reply; however, I neither expect that she nor anyone else in power (and earning above $350,000 per year) is going to take on the challenge of fundamentally improving the situation for the study and preservation of Canada's indigenous and endangered languages.  Both the opportunity and the obligation to make a positive difference are unique to Canada: we can't expect London, Paris or Berlin to excel in the study of these languages.  Sadly, the leaders in the field will either be educated here, or else nowhere at all.

F.N.U., big lawn, big windows… bad language courses (Image = Wikipedia).

Giving Away my Copy of the Pali Canon

(It occupies more than one box.)

I struggled for many years without owning my own copy of the Pali Canon, and I'm now giving away the only copy I ever owned (after a very short time with it).  Although published in Sri Lanka, this edition spent more time in a warehouse in Thailand than it spent on my desk.  I am now giving it away to another student, who will be able to work with it (while I won't).

That is, of course, heartbreaking.

On a much smaller scale, it is also heartbreaking to be throwing my box of books on Cree into the garbage --because I still do not know a single student of the language whom I could give them to.

I have another small collection of books on Hokkien (閩南語) that, similarly, has no possible recipient, and so will end up in the garbage.

The Ordination of Women in Buddhism, Old Facts & New Fables

MacBeth vs. MacDuff.

One of the recurrent issues in my own writing is the misconception that "crazy theories" come from the fringes: on the contrary, in Buddhism, the craziest theories can (and often do) come from the pinnacle of prestige, influence and academic authority (sometimes from the centers of religious authority, too).  I dealt with this question generally in my (still-unpublished) lecture, "The Opposite of Buddhism", and I discussed a (stunning) particular example in my earlier work on the "standard misinterpretation" of the 12 links of "dependent origination".

English speakers often work from a false assumption that what is "central" is conservative and reasonable, and what is "fringe" is radical, original, creative, and more likely to be unreasonable.  That may be true of some areas of scholarship, but I can tell you (and I must warn you) that Buddhism isn't one of them.  There is plenty of craziness at the center of the halls of power (and there isn't much power in those halls).

Often enough, however, what academic publications provide is a certain style of obfuscation for just how crazy these theories may be.  In the case of my critique of a theory proposed by Bhikkhu Pāsādika, I honestly think that the theory was refuted simply by writing it out clearly; in other words, as soon as the obfuscation was removed, any reader could see for themselves just how far-fetched it really was.

Below is an alert that I sent out to colleagues several years ago (as an e-mail), about a genuinely crazy theory propounded on the origin of the ordination of women in Buddhism.  I'm not really offering a critique of it here, but simply (1) pointing out that the theory exists, (2) warning the reader about all of the obfuscation, and then (3) restating what the theory really is without that obfuscation.  As with Bhikkhu Pāsādika's theory about a "materialist conspiracy" re-writing portions of the canon, I think that this "feminist conspiracy" theory is (likewise) so far-fetched that nobody could really take it seriously.  However, none of these theories come from the fringes: this stuff is all being published from the pinnacle of power and privilege, with the imprimaturs of wealthy institutions stamped onto the flyleaves.

-----Begin quotation (May, 2010)-----
It would be difficult to imagine how anyone would know that an exciting new article was published by Hinuber in an obscure journal called ARIRIAB in 2007.

In fact, even if you did stumble upon the ARIRIAB website, you would not be able to guess that this article is available for download as part of ARIRIAB-11.PDF, as there's no list of authors, and the files are scanned images (i.e., not searchable as text).  Resultantly, this is a nearly-hidden gem, and I will be so gauche as to send out a fan-club letter alerting my colleagues to its existence:

http://iriab.soka.ac.jp/orc/Publications/ARIRIAB/index_ARIRIAB.html

Now, even if you see the article, and even if you start reading it,
you might well miss its hypothesis:

Hinuber "dramatizes" the article, by delaying the revelation of his
own thesis until the latest stage possible.  Although this approach has
its advantages, the main defect is that you get an easily readable
opening, followed by a lengthy digression into the details of K.R.
Norman's mis-translation of a single passage from the Vinaya in the
middle portion of the essay (and, I think, there's some joy taken in
Hinuber outdoing K.R. Norman in this respect) --alas, I think many
non-specialist readers will simply give up at this point.

However, in the last act of the drama, the article returns to subjects
of mainstream interest that deserve a broader audience than they
are likely to find (hidden away in the pages of ARIRIAB).  Partly by
sheer co-incidence (e.g., an unpublished thesis that I read some years
ago) I happened to be already familiar with most of the passages that
Hinuber draws together here, but (1) many readers will not be, and (2)
some readers will only be familiar with this stuff as re-phrased (and
indirectly alluded to) in the most evasive and obsequious terms
possible.

As suddenly as MacDuff declaring that he was born of no mortal woman,
the last act takes yet another dramatic turn (terminating in a
footnote) as Hinuber decides to take the further step of concluding
that the ordination of female Buddhist monks took place AFTER the
Buddha's death (whereas, formerly in the article, he had merely
suggested that it took place very late in the Buddha's life) --a
reasonably radical change in interpretation of familiar facts (and,
frankly, I wonder if Hinuber didn't add this just to startle his
audience).

The real value of this article, for the larger number of reasons, will be that it draws together the material on the status of women during the lifetime of the Buddha without the usual evasions of what the primary source texts actually say.  In one of the very last footnotes, Hinuber draws attention to the fact that, at a minimum, the women's ordination was neither equal to the men's, nor simultaneous with it --nor was the women's ordination merely a few years after the men's.

Additionally, for those who do not already know it, the middle portion of the argument (that will be difficult for non-specialists to follow) does demonstrate (with some new examples, and some old) just how fragmentary the Vinaya now is --and how many peculiar influences (from Jainism, at least) were able to creep in (both doctrinally and
linguistically) before the canon was closed.

While I am very pleased at my own sheer luck in discovering this
article, others will not be so lucky (and it would be even more
difficult to find if English were not my first language, etc.) --and
this reminds me of my long-ago proposed project to start some sort of
annual newsletter on new publications on/in Theravada Countries (so
that all scholars in related fields at least have a list, perhaps with
a few articles and illustrations to brighten it up).
-----End of quotation (May, 2010)-----

The replies I received from this notice (at the time) were very much along the lines of, "You can't possibly be serious!" --and I then had to reiterate that this is certainly not a theory that I support myself.

From my perspective, this theory that there were zero ordained female monks during the Buddha's lifetime, and that they were instead falsely added into the canon at a later date (as part of a "feminist conspiracy", so to speak) is completely crazy.  It would require an absurd series of assumptions, and would undermine the same textual sources that the theory relies on to support itself as (presumed) historical evidence.  Such an interpretation would be entirely created and sustained by a series of "self-fulfilling-prophecies" of the most absurd kind (discarding evidence of female monks existing during the lifetime of the Buddha, and grossly reinterpreting other evidence, etc.).  Nevertheless, this completely crazy theory passes the highest levels of peer review, receives the highest levels of institutional support, and is supposed to be taken very seriously, etc., etc., just as with so many examples from the 19th and 20th centuries.

In contrasting the 21st century to the 19th: change is an objective fact, but "progress" is merely an ideology.

It is has never been the case that "the center" had a monopoly on virtue, nor that "the fringes" had a monopoly on crazy theories.  There's a great scarcity of virtue all around, and there's a great deal of corruption, nepotism, incompetence, and sheer stupidity at "the center" everywhere I've been (and I've been almost everywhere).

Recently Asked Questions 02

The t-shirt is actually for a rock band, not the religion…

[Question:] Do you have any recommendations for translations of the Sutta Pitaka?

[Answer:] Sadly and sincerely, my answer is no.  The translations that now exist (in English) only offer you a range of options varying from "professional fraud" to "pious fraud" (and some are a mixture of the two).

One of the few books that I do suggest people seek out and read is Richard Gombrich's first major publication, "Precept and Practice"; sadly, I can't really make this endorsement without mentioning that (by contrast) I don't recommend Gombrich's more recent work.  His later books are both badly misleading and badly misled.  I do actually like Gombrich as a person (and as a personality), but the only book of his that I can endorse is that first one, written when he still identified himself as an Anthropologist.

Incidentally, Gombrich was quite friendly and encouraging toward me for some time, until the moment that he saw that I'd written a single word of criticism against his published work.  After that, I never heard another word from him again.  Sadly, while Gombrich has invoked the philosophy of Karl Popper many times, he has been unable to practice his own precepts in this regard.

Why do I provide this answer in reply to a request for a translation of the Sutta Pitaka?  Well, if you read Gombrich's first book ("Precept and Practice") you don't get primary sources, but you do get to see an anthropological sketch of the religion in its cultural context, with contrasting statements about the philosophy set down in the ancient texts, and the reality of Buddhism in this world today.  Right now, if you can't read Pali, this is probably the best that you can do.  Anthropology doesn't have all the answers, but it has some of the right questions; by contrast, "Buddhist studies" is in a defensive, hyper-conformist state, and nobody can even ask the important questions (let alone discover new answers).

Buddhism in English is simply not at the same stage that (e.g.) the philosophy of Lucretius achieved (thanks to the work of hundreds of scholars, over hundreds of years, with massive institutional support).  You can't read about it in a reliable translation.  You can't just buy the t-shirt and put on the necklace.  The work simply hasn't been done to make it easy for you.  The fact that people like me find it impossible to do more of that work (and don't have institutional support anywhere: neither in Thailand nor in Taiwan, etc.) means that it won't happen in this generation.

Sorry, but that's the answer to your question.