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 merely 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.

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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

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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 resources.  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).

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.

Gaps on the Map (more on "the silence of the internet")

Although I'm glad that anyone read the article at all, I think that my former point was missed about looking at the (imperfect) map of the internet as "an indirect indication of real cultural change".

Looking at a map made in Japan in 1604, the difference in detail between one part of the world and another is telling: while Southeast Asia was a navigable distance from Japan (and there were permanent Japanese settlements in Southeast Asia in 1604), it's nevertheless very hard to make sense of the vague mess surrounding 緬甸 (Myanmar/Burma).  Meanwhile, the coastlines of the Caribbean are very clearly delineated, and are easily recognizable based on what we would expect to see on a 21st century map.  In 1604, the Caribbean was the focus of a great deal of the world's attention: it was where the "fast money" was being made in the slave trade and the sugar industry.  You can see, by contrast, that nobody was making much money in the vague jumble of rivers and mountains surrounding 緬甸 and 安南 --although it would have been much easier for the Japanese to map out the coastline of Southeast Asia.

The level of detail, care and the awareness of what is being depicted indirectly reflects the cultural and economic importance assigned to these places at that time.  Of course, this particular map is an interesting example, because it was made in Japan, but also reflects Japan's reliance (in 1604) on European sources of information (a European "worldview" in a very literal sense).  There's nothing inevitable about that dependency: in 1604, there were Japanese mercenaries in the employ of the King of Thailand (as good a source of information as Herodotus ever had) but the Japanese evidently did not have much interest in that view of the world.

What do we really learn from the declining significance of Buddhism in different online forums?  I've suggested that it is an indirect reflection of something significant, even if we can't be precise about what the decline in interest really is.  The point of  my former article was not that Yahoo groups is of unique importance, nor that the Google Ngram statistic is "a perfect map" of cultural change.  Conversely, why would we ignore them, as indicators of a change of some kind?

Note, for example, that from 1968 to 2008, the cultural currency of "vegetarian" was in decline [click here for figure 1]… but, by contrast, "vegan" was increasing in usage during the same period [click here for figure 2]… I think that is an interesting indication of something.  It certainly isn't a perfect map, but it indicates what people are paying attention to (and publishing books about).  Annoyingly, by the way, words are tracked separately with and without capitalization, setting "Vegans" against "vegans" [click here for figure 3].

Well, here's the menacing chart showing the decline in interest in "theravada" from 1968 to 2008 [click here for figure 4].  You need to compare this to the separate chart for "Theravada" with a capital "T" [click here for figure 5].

These are the annoyances of relying on computer-automated research: believe it or not, the decline in interest in "Communism" (with a capital "C") was more rapid than the decline in interest in "communism" (lower-case) [click here for figure 6].  Again, this is an indirect indication of something: perhaps critics of Communism are more likely to leave the word without a capital letter and apologists are more likely to keep the capital letter, and perhaps people just stopped capitalizing the letter after some point at which it had become overly familiar as a noun.  One strange factoid spins out of this: 1974 was the first year that the lower-case spelling was more common than the capitalized form.

The Google Ngram system also separately tracks the most correct spelling Theravāda (with the second a marked as ā) but the number of uses of this spelling recorded is so infinitesimally small that we have no choice but to ignore it.

Are these charts completely meaningless?  No, I don't think so.  Generally, what we can see is that by 2008 the level of interest in Theravāda Buddhism was only slightly higher than it was in 1968; it briefly reached higher levels of interest for some of the years in-between, and then declined.


By contrast, it will be no surprise to anyone that there was a sudden increase in publications using the word "Islam" in the year 2001 [click here for figure 6].  Even before 2001, you may notice, the numbers for "Islam" are exponentially higher than "Theravada", and were increasingly higher than "Buddhism" over time.

In earlier blogicles, I've pointed out that Buddhism is much less popular than people seem to presume in (1) the U.S.A., (2) Canada, and even in (3) Taiwan.  I've also pointed out that statistics of this kind can sometimes (4) just be misleading junk.

At present, there is no easy or obvious assumption that Buddhism is "growing" or "flourishing".  Everywhere that I've done research in-the-field, the religion is shrinking; moreover, interest in the religion is declining faster than the brick-and-mortar institutions.  Buddhism certainly isn't flourishing in Cambodia, nor in Laos, nor in any part of China I've known.  The facile assumption that Buddhism would rapidly grow in the West has proven to be false, and, meanwhile, the religion is really struggling to survive in many of its homelands.  Although they're very imperfect maps of human activity, I do think that indications such as Google Ngram (and declining Buddhist blogging, etc.) reflect these changes.

Buddhism and the Silence of the Internet

The culture of communication is changing: this makes it difficult to measure any kind of cultural change through the lens of any given medium.  In an earlier article, I commented that one of the problems with counting the number of Buddhists in America through a telephone survey is that the culture of the telephone itself has changed in the last 20 years (who will answer an unknown number in the middle of the work-day, etc.).  However, the simple fact that I'm here dealing with is the decline of the discussion of Buddhism in English.  In some ways, the numbers speak for themselves, and in some ways they require quite a lot of talking to.

Jeffrey Kotyk recently drew attention to the sheer decline in the use of the word "Theravada" itself through Google's own statistics; you can compare that chart to what seems to be declining interest in Zen Buddhism, and other key terms (see his article, here).  Although interesting, staring at that chart (below) raises many questions about what type of change the Google Ngram statistic really measures (in relation to changes in the publishing industry specifically, and the culture of communication generally).  By contrast, the more colorful chart above is very simple: it shows the decline in the number of messages sent to an online discussion forum (namely, "Pali: The Pali Collective").

There was a generalized complaint about declining activity from the "Progressive Buddhism" blog a few months ago, too: "…so many of the 'names and faces' of 2007,8,9 and 10 are gone or have simply shifted interest…".  That complaint is evidently applicable to "The Pali Collective" and many other online discussion groups I've recently glanced over; when I look back at the archives of messages from 2007, I can see the names of a few Pali scholars whom I know/knew and respect, who are evidently no longer active in the forum.  However, "The Pali Collective" is still a relative success story: a large number of groups that I looked up have completely ceased to exist.  Others, like the (declaredly) academic forum moderated by Richard Hayes have gone silent, but have not formally shut down.  Circa 10 years ago, that forum was an extremely noisy place.

The Dhammadutas group (as shown above) declined into silence, and was then taken over by Spam.  Clicking through the archives, 2009 seemed to be the last year of real (human-to-human) communication on the forum, but it had already been in decline for some time.

By far the most active discussion forum shown in any of these charts is "Dhammastudygroup", but we nevertheless must observe a decline over the last several years (the level of activity is now roughly half of what it was at its peak).

This discussion forum for Black Buddhists seems to have been a convivial gathering around 2006, but declined soon thereafter, and now has not had a single message posted in 2012.

The broadly inclusive forum named "Sangha" has now declined to a tiny fraction of its former level of activity.  Although I'm showing a (roughly) 10 year period for each of these forums, I would note that "Sangha" was actually founded in 1998.  As such, this is probably one of the longest-running (continuous) discussion forums for Buddhism (in English), although it is not as old as the (now-moribund) forum overseen by Richard Hayes that I mentioned before ("Buddha-L").

I have seen many, many other examples of decline (and, frankly, I do not know of any real exceptions to the rule).  I've presented charts based on Yahoo groups specifically, because they display their own statistics in a manner that is easier to read than Google groups and other competitors (glance over the grid of numbers, e.g., at the bottom of the Buddhadasa group… also in stark decline).

Are we looking at a change in the culture of communication, or are we looking at an indirect indication of a real cultural change?  Before I started a blog of my own (à bas le ciel) I did look through a long list of possible websites that I could have (instead) become a contributor to.  There were no good options.  Although I do still have three articles in peer review, in the last few years I've surveyed my publishing options on paper, again and again; the choices that exist (for an author) are similarly bleak, and many of the publications are in an ongoing state of decline.

Is the growth of my own blog now an exception to the rule?  Although I'm surprised at my own growing number of readers, I also see this small-scale success in the context of the collapse of other modes of publication that should have (or could have) been available to me.  19th century journals really did contain "notices" written as casually as these blog-articles (often more casual still) and a forum of that kind (on paper) is now severely lacking for anyone in the field.  As I mentioned in recent articles, we no longer have the type of "scholarly pamphlet" that the Buddhist Studies Review and the Pali Buddhist Review used to be (as recently as the 1990s).  In looking over the charts above, however, we seem to be witnessing the shrinking of the internet (as a forum for Buddhism in English) especially since 2006.  If you've been actively searching for blogs or new publications on Theravāda Buddhism lately (and, perhaps, this is how some of you discovered my writing in the first place) you will have noticed: I don't have much competition.  As time goes on, I seem to have less and less competition, not more.

Recently Asked Questions 01

[Question:] Learn Pali or meditate?

The Thai word for "protein" is โปรตีน. [Tipco]

[Answer:] They're not mutually-exclusive.

Your question is something like asking, "Should I read the ingredients, or just eat this thing?"  The two options are only mutually-exclusive if you assume that the ingredients are so bad that you wouldn't want to eat the thing once you know what it is made of.

Anyone would advise you to read the ingredients first, but the religious mentality seems to tend the other way: many people seem to embrace the thrill of biting in deeply without knowing what they're biting into (they want hallowed ignorance, to be blunt).

If you're looking for that kind of mystical experience (i.e., hallowed ignorance) you'd be well advised to convert to almost any religion imaginable other than Buddhism.  The people who don't know Pali also don't know what they're buying: many of them are (in effect) "ripped off" by meditation salesmen, and the rip-off can continue for decades.

As a useful warning, I'd advise you to read the one example I've illustrated of the mistranslation (and misunderstanding) of "breathing meditation", and also to take a look at some of the writing of disillusioned former followers of "Transcendental Meditation":

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2011/09/16/flatulence-and-breathing-meditation/

http://suggestibility.org/whatIsTmLongIntroLecture.shtml
http://tmfree.blogspot.ca/2008/05/thirty-years-later-what-was-all-that.html

It seems to have taken 30 years for "Transcendental Meditation" to produce well-informed critiques from insiders of this kind.  I suppose the clock is ticking for various Theravāda meditation groups to do the same.

[To see my answers to a number of recently-asked questions (sent in by readers), go to www.formspring.me/eisel; you can also click on the blue bar at the top of the question-and-answer box in any of the articles to access the same list of answers.]

 

Buddhist Philosophy 06, When Primary Sources Aren't Primary Enough

[Contemporary Taiwan; source/photographer unknown]

Someone could start a blog dedicated to discussing controversies in Buddhist studies from over 100 years ago.  Sometimes, I feel like I'm the one who did.  However, today's subject is merely 98 years old --and yet it still is news.

The 1914 thesis of L.A. Waddell is both interesting in itself, and interesting for the incidental issues it raises in passing.  It raises questions about how we know (and how we think we know) anything about Buddhist philosophy.

The 14th suttanta of the Dīgha Nikāya is apparently named the Mahāpadāna Sutta: if you look it up (on paper, or digitally) that's likely to be the name you'll see.  If you check the Dictionary of Pali Proper Names, that's the name listed for that suttanta, and there's no explanatory note suggesting that it might be otherwise.

Back in 1914, this man Waddell suggested that it could be otherwise, employing evidence that wasn't really new at the time, and yet still seems new today: "…the texts used for the preparation of the Pali Text Society's edition of this book do not warrant the use of "[Mahā-]apadāna" decidedly, as adopted by the editors.  […] [Of the four manuscripts consulted to establish the title] two (S.t. and K., i.e., Singhalese and Kambojan) read 'Mahāpadāna", but an equal number read 'Mahāpadhāna', [emphasis original] namely MSS. S.ed. and B.m., i.e., [another] Sinhalese and [also a] Burmese manuscript…". (p. 668)

The reader may be forgiven if they now ask, "Well, so what?  What's the difference between -d- and -dh- (ဒ vs. ဓ) in this one word, in this one title?"  As we will see in a minute, if we run roughshod over these sorts of differences, our understanding of whole words and sentences is soon enough quite shoddy.

The -dh- spelling (padhāna, equating to Sanskrit pradhāna) Waddell proposes for the title entails a completely different word from the -d- spelling (apadāna, equating to Sanskrit avadāna, and, in the case of this particular title, the presence or absence of the first vowel (a) is masked by the prefixed mahā-).  Waddell proceeds to point out (p. 670) that we have even more interesting questions surrounding the use of this word padhāna elsewhere that have been "run roughshod" over, in the translation of Buddhist texts.

In the dictionary produced by R.C. Childers (1872–5) this word padhāna is understood as meaning "exertion".  Waddell quotes for us the instructive example of the line chabbassāni mahā-padhānaŋ padahitvā, translated by Childers as, "having spent six years in strenuous efforts".  If you clicked on the link to the range of meaning for the Sanskrit pradhāna, you may well have noticed that it has a long list of meanings, but "exertion" isn't one of them.

Waddell proceeds (p. 671) to state bluntly that this is entirely wrong in his view: padhāna has been mixed up with an etymologically unrelated padhana (and it is the latter only that should have this meaning related to striving and exertion).  Right or wrong, this analysis has been ignored by the Dictionary of Pali Proper Names (as mentioned above), and also by the PTS Dictionary (that offers more-or-less the same definition as Childers: "exertion, energetic effort, striving, concentration of mind").  The possible existence of a separate word (or etymology) with a short a (padhana) is not mentioned in the PTS Dictionary.

Waddell then tries to reconstruct the meaning of padhāna with the same sort of methods that people regard uneasily in the work of K.R. Norman: he offers comparative reference to philosphical usage in historically-subsequent sources in Sanskrit (some Hindu, some Buddhist).  However, he is not entirely without evidence from within the Pali corpus of texts: does it really make sense to read padhāna as "exertion" in compound words such as padhāna-bhumi, padhāna-ghara or padhānaniyangaŋ? (p. 672)

R.C. Childers… nobody's perfect.

The coincidence of Pali padhāna with Sanskrit pradhāna doesn't mean that the two would have exactly the same meaning in any specifically Buddhist context (and the Sanskrit use of the word itself has a wide range of meanings for us to consider, in contrast to the PTS Dictionary); however, the connection is enough to make "exertion" seem dubious.  In the Hindu context, pradhāna is an "epithet for the Supreme Brahmanical god" (p. 673) and can have a number of other meanings in specific philosophical contexts.  Any number of meanings might make sense for its Buddhist application, but it seems difficult to imagine how "exertion" came to be presumed as the default for every instance within the canon (aside from the direct influence of the pioneering efforts of R.C. Childers to scrape together a dictionary from a box of manuscripts, and a bunch of conversations with Buddhist monks).

Whether or not you agree with Waddell's analysis, we have here already a set of reminders of just how tenuous our connection to primary sources may be: the correct spelling of the title of one suttanta (in the PTS edition) looks like it was decided by a coin toss between two spellings (equally represented in four sources) and a whole series of concepts (tied into the religion, philosophy and meditation of Buddhism) seem to predicated on a dubious reading of the same word that he suggests may have been overlooked in that title (pradhāna).  Waddell could be wrong, but, if so, the significance of the warning wouldn't change much: our assumptions about these texts are tenuous, and real difficulties can be obscured by the seeming-certainty of dictionary definitions.  Small but important distinctions can also disappear in under the hands of European editors (d vs. dh, and a vs. ā) --and, thus, primary sources start to become secondary, as they reflect the active interest (and revisions) of a modern author.

Also, explicitly enough, the article reveals the tension that surrounds the (white, western, English-language, 20th century) revalorization of the canon: Waddell is willing to get to grips with the plain fact that (as he says) "the compilers of this Pāli canonical book did not regard the Buddha as a mere man." (p. 674, emphasis in the original)  Already, in 1914, Waddell was dealing with an articulated agenda (amongst his contemporaries) to discount supernatural material in the Buddhist canon as if it were confined to later "accretions" (i.e., to assert that they are not found in the most ancient part of the Pali canon, where European rationalism was expected to be vindicated, etc.).  Of course, it would be convenient for anyone with a bias opposite to Waddell's to be able to treat the various compound words including padhāna as having something to do with exertion ("hard work") rather than something analogous to the concept of [Sk.] pradhāna in either Hindu polytheism or in Sāṃkhya cosmology.

We now have our attention drawn to three very different words, that look very similar in Romanized transliteration, and that some sources (editions, translations and dictionaries) may not be willing to admit exist as three separate words at all: apadāna, padhāna, and padhana.

There's nothing conclusive about Waddell's analysis of the issue: it reads like the start of a conversation that is still very worthwhile, circa 100 years later.  Part of the problem (today) is that people regard dictionary definitions as conclusive (and as having great finality) simply because they are published in the form of a dictionary entry (with all the connotations of the word "definitive" haunting the reader).  Dictionary entries, too, should be regarded as a single moment in a still-ongoing conversation.

"…the future of the 'Anthropology of Buddhism' will be dharma-tourism decorated with quotations from Foucault."  E. Mazard, 2009.  [Photo by Darren Donahue]

I have no idea, incidentally, if K.R. Norman or anyone else has since written an article investigating this specific issue; I asked one colleague before posting this short notice if he had heard of any recent publications on the matter ("recent" meaning "from the last 50 years", perhaps).  Posting informal articles of this kind is about the only method I have to find out (from others) if they know of more progress on an obscure issue of this kind.

Of course, it shouldn't be obscure: the word padhāna appears hundreds of times in the core canon, often in the midst of long compound words that evidently had a more precise meaning in the minds of their ancient authors than they do in the minds of their modern readers today.  It isn't a trivial matter at all, and there's no reason to assume that this word had the same meaning in various contexts (and in various compound words) throughout the canon.

Even if we only shift our understanding of the word by a few degrees, it would change our translation of (e.g.) the debate between Buddhists and Jains preserved in the Devadaha suttanta (MN no. 101).  What exactly should we assume about the meaning of this word, in a context that involves both Buddhist and Jain doctrines?  Should we totally disregard the denotations and connotations that the word has in Hindu and Sanskrit sources in such a context?  Does the translation "exertion" really make sense here at all?  That seems to be a conversation worth having.

Padhāna appears conjoined with samādhi in many phrases that modern readers care about, under the heading of "meditation"; it also appears in passages that make modern readers uncomfortable, under the heading of the "supernatural powers" that monks are supposed to acquire.  It is easy for a translator to run roughshod over its meaning in translating long compound words like chanda-samādhi-padhāna-saṅkhāra-samannāgataŋ (found, e.g., in MN no. 77, and elsewhere).  Given that this phrase is used in explaining the acquisition of "supernatural powers" (iddhi) it wouldn't be surprising if the word meant something more than just "hard work" --but, conversely, insisting on the Childers/PTS translation only might be convenient for a translator trying to make the passage seem more mundane.


A Bibliography of Just One Entry:
L.A. Waddell.  1914.  "The So-Called 'Mahapadana' Suttanta and the Date of the Pali Canon".  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Jul., 1914, p. 661-680.

Buddhist Philosophy 05, Traditionalism and Translationism

I've only seen one critique of K.R. Norman in print, and the author was K.R. Norman himself.

As I have recently mentioned the paucity of criticism of Bhikkhu Bodhi's translations, a colleague reminded me that the scarcity of thought directed toward K.R.N.'s translations is no less dire.

In 2004, however, K.R.N. wrote a retrospective evaluation of his own translation of the Sutta-Nipāta (a collection of poems located in the KN, and usually given the confusing abbreviation of "Sn", not the same as "SN").  The article is unusual article for the genre, in that K.R.N. offers some evaluation of his own prior work, as well as reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the array of primary and secondary sources now available, including what could be called "his competition" (i.e., other translators who have worked on the same text in the years before and since).

"The aim of my [1984] translation [of the Sutta-Nipāta], as of those I have made of the Theragāthā and Therīgāthā (Elders' Verses I & II, London, 1969, 1971) was to produce a literal, almost word-for-word, translation which I hoped would, when considered alongside the original Pāli, adequately convey my understanding of the original speakers' words, i.e. to give the meaning of the text as it was intended by the original speakers, or as it was accepted by the first hearers.  This is not necessarily, therefore, the meaning it had for the later commentaries…" (p. 72)

If there ever were a crowd of Pali scholars gathered into one room, sharp gasps of astonishment might be heard in response to the last sentence there (although, as it happens, I completely agree with K.R.N. on this point myself).

In this 2004 essay, K.R.N. presents a shrewd argument: he demonstrates that several scholars claiming that they follow the interpretation of the commentaries do not, in fact, practice what they preach.  Instead, in the process of editing and translating, these same translators sometimes diverge from and contradict the commentaries (when they see the latter's interpretation to be wrong) and sometimes misrepresent the commentaries, as a way of misrepresenting themselves.  This pokes holes in the premise that the commentarial "layer" is entirely consistent with the (more ancient) primary source --and it also erodes the translators' claims to represent (in English) some kind of continuous religious tradition.

Although K.R.N. does not explicitly state this in his article (and, really, he should spell it out more clearly) the underlying contest here concerns the vague claim to "traditional authority" made by his rival translators.  K.R.N. quotes the the introduction to N.A. Jayawickrama's 2001 translation of the Sutta-Nipāta, where we are ominously told that any departure from the commentaries "can result in micchādiṭṭhi — heresy — from the orthodox point of view". (p. 70)  Jayawickrama's work is recent enough that it could have been influenced by (and built upon) the earlier work by K.R.N., but, in effect, Jayawickrama boasts that this is not the case, because he instead devotes himself to following the commentaries entirely, and eschewing any "…arbitrarily emended readings on the grounds of metre or parallel versions seen in versions posterior to Pali." (p. 70)  That may be as clear as mud, but what Jayawickrama is saying is that he's throwing away the conclusions of K.R.N. (as the merely "arbitrary" machinations of a secular academic!); he is also suggesting that you should trust his own translation because it is a more consistent expression of the commentarial tradition.

The type of metrical and etymological analysis that clutters up K.R.N.'s work may seem "arbitrary" (as Jayawickrama complains), but it isn't; it is simply evidence presented in a form that's hard to understand.  Conversely, the choice to disregard an explanation of a word because it relies on metrics or etymology would really be arbitrary.

The commentaries do provide evidence (and K.R.N. also makes extensive use of that evidence) --but the type of evidence involved is just as imperfect, confusing, and susceptible to multiple interpretations as the original text being commented upon.

For example, K.R.N. details some specific instances wherein the translator omits to mention to their readers that the commentary offers more than one explanation; thus, the translator has (covertly) selected one of many options, to then refer to it as "the" commentarial interpretation.  In other cases, K.R.N. points out, the modern translators (falsely) claim that the commentaries are silent about something they are not silent about (but the translator wishes to contradict the commentary without appearing to do so).

There isn't a simple choice to be made between "traditionalism" and some competing "academic" approach.  Many translators invite their readers to imagine that there is such a choice (e.g., the controversy surrounding the "three lifetimes" interpretation of the 12 links, etc.) but this 2004 article by K.R.N. demonstrates that a translator saying "trust me, I follow the commentaries" doesn't have much more force than someone saying "trust me, I wear the robes of a Buddhist monk".

This is considered contentious (sometimes even religiously offensive) by the majority of people who care about Theravāda Buddhist texts.  I here refer to people who "care about" the texts, because, sadly, they're not the same people who actually read Pali: I have seen people explode at the suggestion that the authors of the commentaries were anything less than omniscient --however, in my own experience, people with this attitude do not actually read the primary sources for themselves.  Reading things (in their original language) tends to reveal the extent to which the words we have on paper are merely the work of human hands; in most cases, the authors have no affectation of infallibility, often enough expressing their doubts or offering more than one possibly-correct interpretation, and so on.

When a translator declares his devotion to the commentaries, it offers a false reassurance to the ordinary reader who can't scrutinize the source text.  This article by K.R.N. has many reminders of just how false this reassurance can be.  Certainly, an "ordinary reader" would be at a loss to explain the difference between H. Saddhatissa's (1985) translation of bhūnahu as "slanderous" and K.R.N.'s rendering "abortionist" (p. 81–2).  This is not a subtle difference of interpretation, and the commentary is vague enough for both sides to pretend it supports their case (although, frankly, it would be hard to K.R.N. to be wrong on this one --but he's the guy choosing the examples in this article).

[Yes, I've used this illustration before, and I may be tempted to use it again…]

The article also demonstrates many of the problems with Theravāda studies that make the whole field seem opaque and inaccessible even to the people who are most passionate about it: there's a strange reliance on innuendo and "inside knowledge" that's quite counterproductive (and, in some ways, typically British).  At one point, K.R.N. suggests, archly, that a brief note on a particular word by one of the translators he is surveying "may prove surprising to his readers". (p. 79)  The "surprise" in question requires a comparative knowledge not only of multiple translations, but also of the variations between multiple editions of the (untranslated) Pali; yet also, apparently, we need to know an essay published only in German (Hinüber, 1982–3, "Zum Perfekt im Pāli") in order to detect the problem --or, at least, we need to know K.R.N.'s opinion about it (perhaps stated in a footnote to his own translation).  Such a discovery wouldn't be "surprising" to any of the readers of the poem in question: it would be completely invisible.

The contention (alluded to above as "surprising") concerns a sequence of letters that shows up in the Sinhalese [BJT] edition as -tvā ajjha-, but in other editions as -tvājjha-.  K.R.N. reads the -jjha- as obscuring a lexical -ja-, and this is not surprising in itself (it is even less surprising if you've studied traditional grammar, such as Kaccāyana).  The insinuation is that "his readers" should be surprised that Jayawickrama has dared to disregard K.R.N.'s conclusion on this point.  The whole controversy is stated in such an involuted and unclear matter that it is difficult to share the presumption that the more recent translator intentionally disregarded the work of the earlier one, and I wonder how few people alive today can even follow the controversy as it was here restated in 2004.  K.R.N. is providing evidence, but it is presented in a form that's difficult to read, and difficult to even see the significance of.

There is one other (unstated but obvious) area of competition between K.R.N. and his "rival" translators.  Although K.R.N.'s argument about (or against) commentarial traditionalism is both shrewd and strong, he admits that Jayawickrama's "translation is clear and easy to read". (p. 84)  He also praises Saddhatissa's translation for containing many "splendid phrases". (p. 72)  K.R.N.'s own work, by contrast, is barely comprehensible to other specialists, and his lack of influence on later translators (including Jayawickrama) may reflect the difficulty that people have in following his writing (be it translation or explanation).  That's a type of rivalry that has nothing to do with commentarial authority, nor religious authority, nor even with the strength of philological evidence: if you can't express your conclusions in a way that others find convincing (or at least clearly comprehensible) then your work will fall silent.  In general, the paucity of criticism of K.R.N.'s translation may reflect this peculiar "silence" (despite the hardbound covers and institutional imprimatur that mark his work out on the library shelves).

Unlike Bhikkhu Bodhi, I don't have the impression that K.R.N. is widely read by Buddhist monks or laypeople, and his publications are rarely reacted to by the general public or --relatively speaking-- by other specialists.  I say "relatively speaking" because K.R.N. has, in fact, published a significant percentage of all of the new research on Theravāda Buddhism in the last 50 years --and yet I neither see much criticism of it, nor other reactions to it of any kind.

To the best of my knowledge, K.R.N.'s first language is English, and yet he manages to produce translations that are nearly incomprehensible, even to other native speakers of English.  This is a subject that deserves criticism elsewhere, partly because the process of that criticism might draw out the useful observations (embedded in K.R.N.'s research) into some form that would be more easily understood by specialists and non-specialists alike.  If (if!) the objective of translation is to render a text that can be understood without comparative reading of the primary source, we may say that the leading edge of K.R.N.'s research still leaves us very far away from that goal.

Vague claims of the same kind that K.R.N. has quoted from Jayawickrama's introduction can be found in many English books on Buddhism (from informal pamphlets to hardbound tomes) with the insinuation being that textual scholarship is inimical to "tradition".  There are very few advocates for the opposite point of view, i.e., that textual scholarship itself is the tradition.  Sometimes monks engage in textual scholarship; sometimes non-Buddhist laypeople (like K.R.N.) engage in textual scholarship; however, what transpires on both sides of that equation is the entire substance of the tradition --not something that detracts from it.

[A Bibliography of just one entry:]
K.R. Norman.  2004.  "On Translating the Sutta-Nipāta."  Buddhist Studies Review, Vol. 21, No. 1.

Buddhist Philosophy 04, The Trouble With Transcendence, Critique of Bhikkhu Bodhi 02

The format of debate shifts speakers away from their most-familiar definitions, to make the contrast between themselves and their opponents clear.  Some percentage of the Buddhist canon is stated in the form of debate, and the attention of modern scholars tends to be directed to those debates more than to material of other kinds, for the simple reason that the contrast makes both sides easier to "see".  I'm now turning to an article that Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote criticizing Prof. Asanga Tilakaratne for the same simple reason: the contest draws Bhikkhu Bodhi into making many statements of his own convictions to delineate what his own philosophy is (in contrast to something it is not).

In some ways, B.B.'s thematic direction (writing in 1996) shows a striking continuity with his article of fully 20 years prior (written in 1976, discussed in a prior article).  However, he is now stating his case much more clearly, and he links his argument to his preferred primary sources more directly.

Tilakaratne has argued that nirvana is not transcendental (lit. "non-transcendental").  In Theravāda Buddhism, this claim could be very controversial, or not controversial at all, depending on how the word transcendental is defined.  We should be clear that the English word "transcend" is no more magical than "ascend" or "descend".  Our prefix "trans-" does not lend anything supernatural to the meaning of "transact", nor "transfix"; nevertheless, this one word "transcendent" seems to conjure up connotations that cannot be explained by the combination of the word's parts.

B.B. and Tilakaratne agree inasmuch as they both reject the possibility that Buddhism supports the type(s) of transcendence found in (i) [mono-]theism, (ii) Hindu mysticism, non-dualism, monism, and so on.  They also reject (iii) attempts to impose some of these ("non-dualistic") notions onto Buddhism, in books that seemed important at the time (e.g., T.R.V. Murti's theories --and, yes, I'm just barely old enough to have read Murti's work while I was in university).  However, B.B. disagrees with Tilakaratne on transcendence in certain other senses of the term.

The cloud hanging over this issue derives from Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), John Locke (d. 1704) and Baruch Spinoza (d. 1677) first and foremost --sources that are neither ancient nor Asian (nor especially relevant to Buddhism).

The idea that the transcendent is "the opposite of" the immanent is very European (and very Judeo-Christian) in its origin and function.  The profound dread surrounding the opposition of the transcendent to the immanent derives entirely from the English words involved (and the German, Latin, etc.) --which is to say, they do not result from any difficulties in translating the Pali, and don't have obvious correlates in Pali vocabulary.

I don't mean to state any of this in an overly harsh or castigating manner, however, if I did not frankly state this problem's European "heritage", there would be a misleading impression that this (modern) debate about transcendence-vs.-immanence is continuous with a debate found in the canon.  Without the European template, would this debate be important in Buddhist philosophy at all?  Well, B.B. does find a foothold for the transcendental debate in a short passage found in the post-canonical Visuddhimagga --and I think that B.B.'s article tries to understate the influence that this source (p. 507-509, PTS ed.) has on his thinking on the subject.  Very reasonably, B.B. acknowledges that it is post-canonical, reflecting a later period of Buddhist philosophy, and (thus) is not really authoritative (nor definitive) in the same way as (canonical) primary sources.  As you'd expect, the actual debate in the Visuddhimagga's (medieval Sinhalese) context has almost nothing in common with the "transcendental" categories of Europe in general (nor Spinoza in specific); there's a generalized mismatch of cultural assumptions.

If you're reading the Pali canon directly, the answer to the problem of what nirvana "is" primarily has to be understood in relation to (and as the result of) a form of monastic training --and, on this subject, we have a huge quantity of repetitive instructions and exhortations in the ancient texts.  Working from these sources, the simplest definition of nirvana would be "the result of this monastic training, if correctly performed/achieved" --and, in a practical sense, it would rarely be necessary to say more than that.  However, more nuanced definitions do arise in specific contexts, for specific purposes; for example, the Buddhist notion of nirvana is sometimes contrasted to another religion's notion in the context of debate.  Whereas the instructional materials are almost consistent to a fault (and are hardly lacking in repetition) there is more diversity in those context-specific definitions that seem to focus on one aspect or another, to prove one point or another.  Those materials are produced by debate, and they certainly give us the material for yet more debate in the centuries to come.

For the moment, my point is merely that this whole question of transcendence devolves from Europe's centuries of wrestling with the question of the immanence of god, and it been applied to Buddhism with an unseemly substitution of nirvana for god and an expectation of profound results.

Have the results been profound?  Well, we have this interesting "discourse" between B.B. and Tilakaratne, at least.  I don't think that any of the followers of Spinoza today consider Theravāda Buddhism a challenge to their philosophy, nor, vice-versa, do any Theravāda Buddhists respond to Spinozism as a challenge.  The interaction between these things is fairly artificial and academic, whereas other (ongoing) clashes between Buddhism and its detractors (Islamic, Hindu, Christian, Communist, etc.) are very palpable --and demonstrated through the burning of books or, sometimes, people.

[A razed temple in Bangladesh, 2012. Photo credit and rights: A.M. Ahad.]

B.B. sets out to defend the notion "of Nibbāna as a state utterly beyond the conditioned world" (p. 165) against Tilakaratne's pragmatism.  He sets out the claim that Tilakaratne has made an "acutely narrow selection" of primary source texts, and suggests that the Pali canon contains texts ignored by Tilakaratne that would instead favor B.B.'s position.

Tilakaratne's assertion is that merely-empirical reality is the domain of both saṃsāra and nirvana; in other words, nirvana is part of our experience of reality and is not something completely different from it.  What would be meant by "completely different" here?  It would be something transcendent to the mundane reality, and impossible to perceive (or comprehend) through empirical means for that same reason.

In the European tradition, this sort of transcendental thing is often said to be god, despite the total lack of resemblance to what you'll find in the Old Testament, and the lack of any connection to revelation in the Biblical sense.  Western transcendentalism leans more toward deism than anthropomorphic theism (although many Christian philosophers have struggled to make the two parts fit together --along with Sufi poets and Jewish philosophers, I suppose).  Among the causes for papal censorship here is this: we have no reason to imagine the supreme abstraction on the other side of the transcendental divide must be a kindly benefactor (with a beard) rather than a mere metaphysical substance.  Or, even if the philosophers decide to call this abstraction a god, it could be an indifferent god, or even a malicious one.  For European intellectuals of the last 300 years, this was not a minor source of consternation, nor a minor source of inspiration: thousands of pages have been filled with speculations expanding on Spinoza's theme.  Notably, in Schopenhauer's case, what awaits our discovery on the other side of the veil is the cruelty of nature in its myriad expressions of "The Will" (and this is, in large part, a hunger to survive and procreate, although, reciprocally, Schopenhauer ends up valorizing kindness, compassion, and asceticism as a sort of antithesis to the almighty and indifferent "Will").  The short-lived religion of Robespierre in France is another significant example, whereby deism was disconnected from the Biblical tradition (although, apparently, it didn't run far after being let off of the leash).

Returning to our Sri Lankan discourse: what B.B. does not tell us is the qualitative difference between the types of text (within the canon) that the two sides use to support their respective views of nirvana.  Tilakaratne can appeal to a range of pragmatic texts (including direct instructions to monks, from the Buddha, as to how nirvana is to be attained, and direct descriptions of how the Buddha himself attained it, etc.) whereas B.B.'s preferred sources are more poetic.  In this, also, B.B. is following the direction of the aforementioned commentarial debate (Vsm 507-509); it relies on (and concludes with) poetic hyperbole quoted from the Itivuttaka and the Udāna.

This weakens B.B.'s position, because it entails that Tilakaratne's explanation does not contradict the sources B.B. cites, but can instead accept them as mere poetry.  Conversely, B.B.'s treatment of the poetic sources as definitive (or, at least, definitively inspirational) raises the question of why these sources he prefers differ so sharply from the large bulk of pragmatic texts (at least entailing the need for some further explanation).

Tilakaratne's case is favored by the working assumption that (1) precise sets of instructions make sense because they're written precisely, whereas (2) devotional poetry is imprecise (and expressive, emotive, etc.) because it is not even attempting to provide the same degree of precision.  The reverse assumption is difficult to argue for: why would the canon's short, vague, poetic statements be more definitive than long, repetitive, detailed lectures and dialogues?  If the pragmatic argument doesn't create a conflict between the two, this is itself an advantage over a transcendentalist argument that does bring the two genres into contradiction.

I infer that B.B. is aware of this issue, as he comments that the Buddha's descriptions of nirvana, "…fit into either of two distinct moulds.  One stresses Nibbāna as the most desirable goal of all: blissful, peaceful, sublime, liberative, secure, the cessation of all suffering.  The other highlights the practical inner work that must be undertaken to attain release from suffering; Nibbāna then becomes [described as] the destruction of craving, the eradication of defilements, [and] the relinquishment of all attachment." (p. 171)  What B.B. has here called two moulds corresponds to the distinction I've drawn between (i) poetic declarations (exalting nirvana as "blissful, peaceful, sublime", etc.) and (ii) the more pragmatic prose (offering instructions, definitions and the details of the "inner work" to be done).  Of course, B.B. uses terms that reflect the greater importance that he places on the first of the two "moulds", and I use terms that reflect my own biases.

The first text cited by B.B. in support of his version of transcendence is stated as MN (PTS) vol. I, p. 435–7.  This is the Mahā-Māluṅkya-suttanta.  The second text is AN PTS vol V, p. 7–10.  This is the Samādhi-suttanta situated within the Ānisaŋsa-vagga.

Bodhi cites both of these on p. 166, and says of them collectively, "These suttas suggest that Nibbāna is indeed a distinct object of knowledge on the basis of which the defilements are destroyed and to which the arahant has special access in an extraordinary sphere of contemplation that the ordinary person can hardly think of without bafflement."

I must ask, (1) do these two cited texts support B.B.'s argument, and (2) even if so, does the argument really challenge Tilakaratne's position?  We would need to put a great deal of emphasis on the "extraordinary sphere of contemplation" for this line of inquiry to be incompatible with Tilakaratne's position.  The reader may also want to know if (3) these sources fit into my own (prejudicial) set of categories, suggesting something of an opposition between the poetic and prosaic sources.

Last things first: this pair of sources that B.B. has cited are prosaic and explanatory texts (unlike B.B.'s preferred descriptions of nirvana in short poems, found in the KN's Sutta Nipata, the aforementioned Udāna, and so on).  So, in this case, my warning does not apply, and I do not evaluate these citations in terms of poetic hyperbole.

I have grave doubts, however, as to the other two questions.

The particular Samādhi-suttanta cited by B.B. seems to offer a conclusion that is not at all transcendental (neither in the sense defined by B.B. in this same essay, nor in the broader European tradition alluded to above).  For the monk who has acquired the correct mental praxis (we are told) there is neither the consciousness of this world in this world, nor is there consciousness of another world in another world, and yet there is nevertheless consciousness (na idhaloke idhalokasaññī assa, na paraloke paralokasaññī assa, saññī ca pana assāti).  That's an interesting philosophy, but it does not support the specific claim that B.B. attributes to the passage in any way whatsoever (i.e., there is no clear connection to B.B.'s assertion, "These suttas suggest that Nibbāna is…", quoted in full above).

The logic of the thing follows a standard (Theravāda) "neither/nor" pattern: the text in full starts with the four material elements, and proceeds through space, thought, etc., telling us the same thing about each (i.e., that there is no consciousness in it) --however, the text does not counterpose anything else/beyond.  The only thing counterposed is consciousness itself.

The text cited offers no contrast to anything transcending the material-and-mental reality (nor is there anything presented as "more real" than this empirical/tangible reality).  A simple transcendental model would instead valorize "the other world" over this world, or at least offer some "true" substance in contrast to the world of appearances.  The Samādhi-suttanta offers no such argument, and no such opposition.  It states that there is no consciousness in earth, air, fire, water, etc. --rather, there is merely consciousness (not existing "in" any of these things, not even in thought, and not in a supernatural "other world").  Although interesting in various ways, there is no obvious support for B.B.'s assertion of nirvana as a transcendental "distinct object of knowledge" to be found in this particular text; it could easily be seen as consistent with Tilakaratne's argument instead.

The other source that B.B. has cited here does not deserve any lengthy consideration in this context: the Mahā-Māluṅkya-suttanta is a morality lecture, about overcoming the orambhāgiya (if you know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink).  We have a huge stack of morality lectures in the canon, but this one seems to have zero salience to B.B.'s argument on transcendentalism.  The suttanta is a somewhat broad-ranging lecture on the orthodox theme of overcoming desire (and the sensual/sensuous category of the "five lower fetters"), but there is no obvious connection to B.B.'s argument here.  This seems so irrelevant that I wonder if an error was made in the citation, and perhaps B.B. had meant to cite the Cūḷa-māluṅkya-suttanta instead (i.e., confusing two similar names?).  The Cūḷa-māluṅkya deals with the recurrent issue of death after nirvana (in contrast to other religions' assumptions about "life after death") but it would take a great deal of imagination to link this to B.B.'s specific argument.

Given that B.B. opened this contest with a bold reproach that Tilakaratne has employed an "acutely narrow selection" of texts to support his argument, the reader is now in a position to complain that B.B. has appealed to some acutely miscellaneous texts.  The salience of the sources he invokes is dubious: if there is some important way in which any of these texts support B.B.'s argument, the burden is on the interpreter to demonstrate it to the audience (and not to leave it up to our imaginations).

However, B.B.'s own interpretation of nirvana as "transcendental" is not quite the same thing as his refutation of Tilakaratne's non-transcendental one.

B.B. proposes a division between "mystical" transcendence and "non-mystical" transcendence.  He agrees with Tilakaratne in asserting that the Buddha's teaching does not contain the usual tropes of the mystics of other religions.  For example, the two authors agree that the Buddha's silence in response to certain questions is not mystical, and should not be construed as a tacit indication of a belief in a transcendental other-reality. (p. 168–9).  B.B. agrees that, "The Buddhism of the Pāli Canon adopts a decidedly non-mystical stance, and in this respect contrasts significantly both with non-dualistic Vedānta and with theism, as Tilakaratne rightly and repeatedly points out." (p. 172)

Very briefly, however, and without even one cited source, B.B. indicates that he interprets asaṅkhatā dhātu as "the unconditioned element", and that he considers this to be "affirming a transcendent reality".

It is conspicuous that B.B. proceeds (after this declaration) to discuss many different sources and subjects in rapid succession, but does not actually discuss (nor cite a single example of) the texts pertaining to the one term that he identifies as "affirming a transcendent reality".  An incomplete list of what B.B. discusses in the pages remaining would be, (i) samādhi, (ii) the status of the arahat after death, (iii) the adequacy or inadequacy of language to express nirvana, (iv) the meaning of the term lokuttara --and yet we somehow never return to this point about the supposed "unconditioned element".

You might think that this would be very important for B.B. to explain, but no, instead, B.B. more-or-less runs away from the claim after announcing it.  We are led to imagine that important facts about this term (asaṅkhatā dhātu) "…are there in the texts, and it seems that it is only by a wilful denial of their explicit content that one can get them to say something other than they appear to be saying." (p. 172)

B.B. does not claim that Tilakaratne is misinterpreting or ignoring these unspecified sources, so we are also left to wonder if Tilakaratne is unaware of the particular texts that B.B. has in mind that are so irrefutable, or if this is something they actually disagree about.

To add my own opinion to the matter, there are indeed many things explicitly stated in the canon about nirvana that are avoided through "wilful denial", but I'm not thinking of the same things that B.B. seems to be thinking of.  Throughout the entire canon, for instance, we are assured that nirvana results in superhuman powers, including flight, and radiating flames.  The ability to fly is so much part-and-parcel of nirvana that we find it declared amongst the Buddha's list of super-powers when he is defending his own legitimacy as the founder of the religion.*¹  It also appears, for example, when the monk Ānanda decides to resolve any doubts that he had attained nirvana: he demonstrates the fact by flying (rather than walking) to take his seat at the first council of monks, after the Buddha's death.*²  In one suttanta, we have several of the Buddha's prominent monks demonstrating that they can fly and radiate flames, in a surreal attempt to outdo Brahma; this works, and the story concludes with Brahma being very much impressed at the supernatural powers that the Buddha's students acquire.*³

[Religious conversion through means other than rational debate; 

a mural at Kelaniya.  Photo: Johanan Ottensooser.]

There are many things explicitly stated in these texts that I think people are in "wilful denial" about, but I'm not at all convinced that the significance of asaṅkhatā dhātu is one of them.  If we should reconsider the importance of such terms as asaṅkhatā dhātu, this article from B.B. only provides us with the suggestion that we might do so (and neither evidence nor any conclusions on the matter).

To use radically simpler terms: when we talk about nirvana, are we talking about a transformation of the person, or something that exists separately from the person?

The advantage of Tilakaratne's pragmatism is that is comes down wholly on the side of nirvana being something that people accomplish --and, thus, it is neither a place they go, nor a separate plane of existence, nor an "unconditioned element" (except as poetic hyperbole).  Although I imagine that I would find many things to disagree with in Tilakaratne's work, the danger of B.B.'s approach is that it starts to construct nirvana as a substance, contrasted to the mere appearances of things, in a manner reminiscent of European philosophers such as Locke, Kant, and Schopenhauer.  This possibility is, in fact, objected to in the aforementioned passage of the commentary (Vsm 507-509), where the interlocutor asks if the "permanence" of nirvana is not therefore the same as "the atom" (Ñanamoli's translation).

If we started from the canonical primary sources, I think we would have very different debates about the meaning of nirvana.  The issue of transcendence-vs-immanence imposes a European puzzle onto the Buddhist puzzle-pieces.

Although I myself am bored of typing out the name of Schopenhauer so many times, I'll mention again that he was a massive influence on modern readings of Buddhist philosophy in both the West and the East.  The basic idea that reality is an illusion masking something else (apprehensible through means other than the senses or discursive thought) is very much Schopenhauer's screed.  He started building a metaphysical bridge linking Europe to India by endorsing the abnegation of the will (through asceticism) as one means (although not the only one) of gnosis with this reality-that-lies-beyond-reality.  In many ways, Schopenhauer took the raw materials of European philosophy and used them to re-invent some of the basic principles found in (at least some schools of) Jain and Hindu thought (though he was not an expert in the latter).  The resulting philosophy, however, had much less in common with Buddhism than Schopenhauer himself thought it did (and, I think, many Europeans who "grew up" reading Schopenhauer were eventually disappointed when they graduated to reading Buddhist primary sources).  If you don't want to take my word for it, you can read the meticulous studies by Urs App, who has lately been scraping together the archival evidence of exactly how little Schopenhauer knew about Buddhism.

[Am I the only one surprised that Spinoza doesn't have his own postage stamp?]

Whereas Spinoza and Kant have haunted the minds of many men, it is really from Schopenhauer that we have the expectation that these issues matter to Buddhism, and that Buddhism has something important to teach "us" (Europeans) about the transcendence of the merely-sensory world.  Of course, that expectation is not based on anyone's reading of the Pali canon (neither Schopenhauer's, nor anyone else's).

If we weren't burdened with the influence of European philosophers, we would not even be asking these questions in these terms.  Wouldn't it be more natural for someone to ask how it is that nirvana came to be so strongly linked to the power of supernatural flight rather than dealing with an imaginary and tacit contrast between what is "imanent" and what is "transcendent" in the unstated implications of the text?  A better question might be "natural" vs. "supernatural", or even "human" vs. "superhuman".  Better questions, in general, might be addressed to things explicitly stated in the texts, and not things merely imagined to be indirectly entailed by them.

In the decadent West, people often convert to Buddhism first, and only find out what the religion is later --sometimes many years later.  I continue to meet people who are shocked that "there is a hell" in the Pali canon; some of them converted because they specifically rejected the doctrine of hell that they knew in Christianity.  It is difficult to imagine how these people have been studying Buddhism for so many years without knowing this; there seem to be aspects of both deception and self-deception involved.

[Either a depiction of hell, or else hell itself, at Wat Rong Khun. Photo by Mithun Divakaran.]

There is open "strategizing" amongst Western monks as to which aspects of the religion they should reveal, and which conceal, in drawing outsiders into the religion.  I have encountered (many times) a reasonable but utterly false assumption that Buddhist philosophy could increase its appeal by increasing its resemblance to European philosophies.  Among other flaws in this assumption is the incongruous fact that names like Kant and Schopenhauer actually have less significance in western culture than Buddhism.  Outside of academia, these "big names" in philosophy have neither influence nor renown for new religious movements to siphon.  Considered on the social scale of even the most minor religions, all of Europe's philosophies are failures in the present century: although I've pointed out what extremely small percentages of westerners subscribe to Buddhism (in the U.S. and Canada), there is absolutely no percentage subscribing to (e.g.) the religion established by Auguste Comte, let alone Spinozism.

There is only one reliable result from these "false resemblances" used to entice people into Buddhism: the very same people who respond to such enticements will feel that they have been lied to when they discover how the contents of the canon have been misrepresented to them.  In short, religious authorities discredit themselves, and secular scholars show their lack of reliability, objectivity, or even sanity in the exchange.  Does anyone in the study of ancient Greece try to pretend that the Greeks were perfectly rational and scientific?  Does anyone try to "cover up" the significance of hades, or the supernatural aspects of Heracles?  This is a game that only ends by discrediting all the players.

The article by B.B. was published in 1996, in what was then a moderately-obscure journal called the Buddhist Studies Review.  If you've seen copies of this "old" publication in their original form, you would know that it looks and feels much older than the 1990s: it was produced (in the U.K.) under the patronage of the Franco-Vietnamese Lin-Sơn temple.  It was actually distributed in North America by Charles Prebish himself: on the last page, there's a mailing address to send him the subscription fees at Penn State University.  The journal has the look and feel of a religious pamphlet handed out on street-corners --and the quality of printing and binding is much worse than many of its antecedents circa 1896.

However, the journal was a sort of crossroads where many scholars of the time made defiant statements, perhaps knowing that it was read by their colleagues and contemporaries.  Recently, Prebish has been complaining that he has been too much criticized for an article in the same publication that nobody has actually read (i.e., because the thing is too hard to find a copy of).

The journal's very first issue (1983/4) identifies it as the joint publication of Lin-Sơn and the Pali Buddhist Union, to "further our mutual aims".  The journal eventually became the dominion of a for-profit company ("Equinox Publishing, U.K.") --and it still exists as such today, with no resemblance to its founding format and mandate.  If you look around the internet, you'll find that (aside from citations to this same journal) there is not much of a trace that the Pali Buddhist Union ever existed; I do not know if they're still a registered charity today.

As marginal and poorly-printed as such a publication may have been, it is dismaying to see that we have nothing like it in 2012.  There should now be more debate of the kind that sparked between B.B. and Tilakaratne --not less.  There should be more publications willing to deal with controversy, and to provide editorial oversight and standards for it.

One of the lessons to be drawn from this example is that Bhikkhu Bodhi (like the vast majority of mere mortals) does need an editor.  This article was in dire need of an independent mind checking the citations, and questioning the author as to whether or not he is really stating his case in a way that the reader could understand.  The role of the editor is not the same as the peer-reviewer: professional editors check facts, question the salience of citations, and ask authors to explain themselves more clearly (or propose clearer ways to state the case), in a sort of Socratic dialogue.  That process was missing from the Buddhist Studies Review in the 1990s --and, it deserves to be said, it is missing from this website today.  The absence of the editorial process is more significant than the absence of paper in the new (and increasingly digital) production of knowledge.


Endnotes.
¹ [See, e.g., the Pāthika-suttanta (24th in the DN, first page of vol. 3 for both PTS and BJT).  Here, the Buddha is defending his legitimacy against aspersions from an ex-devotee (who had since converted to a rival religion/philosophy) and provides a very long list of his miracles and super-powers in his own defense.  This has resulted in some discomfort amongst modern commentators (and not westerners only) who would prefer to sweep anything supernatural under the rug; note that the summary provided by Malalasekera's Dictionary of Pali Proper Names (under Pātika [sic?], rather than Pāthika) is evasive in the extreme.]

² [I am thinking of the story as told in the Mhv chapter 3.]

³ [This is the Aparādiṭṭhi-suttanta, found in the SN's Kokālikavaggo starting PTS vol. 1, p. 136 (i.e., found several pages after that), BJT vol. 1, p. 260.]

A Bibliography of Just One Entry:
Bhikkhu Bodhi.  1996.  "Nibbāna, Transcendence and Language".  Buddhist Studies Review, Vol. 13, No. 2.  London (?), U.K. ISSN 0265-2897