Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What made you first become interested in Buddhism?
I was a philosophy major in college, and out of vulgar curiosity I took a course called ‘Intellectual History of China to 618 AD’. That was where I first learned something about Buddhism. The Vietnam War was going on at the time and we were all looking for esoteric knowledge from the ‘Oriental religions’ as they used to be called. It was that admittedly naive interest that got me started.
And all these years later what do you think will be the effect of the Dalai Lama stepping down as the political leader of the Tibetan government in exile?
It is important politically, as a transition to the political structure that will be required after his death. However, he is held in such high esteem that his counsel will still be sought on all matters of importance. He will remain the central figure for the Tibetan people, both in exile and in Tibet.
But presumably he’s looking to retire more into study and prayer?
He already spends many hours each day in study and meditation. As far as I know, he will continue to travel around the world to give Buddhist teachings and promote the cause of Tibetan autonomy. Thus, I don’t think that his diminished political role will decrease his visibility.
Let’s move on to your five books. Your first choice is one of the most important texts in East Asian Buddhism, The Lotus Sutra.
That’s correct. It is particularly famous in East Asia, but it was very important in India (where it was composed) and Tibet as well. We sometimes think of a religion as having a single sacred text, whether it is the Bible or the Torah or the Koran. And for those traditions that don’t have a single text, we sometimes think of a signature text such as the Bhagavad-Gitafor Hinduism or the Tao Te Ching for Taoism. Buddhism doesn’t really have such a text. There are thousands of texts that are considered canonical by one or another of the Buddhist traditions of Asia. But if I had to choose one sutra it would be The Lotus Sutra.
A sutra is a discourse attributed to the Buddha himself, something that he is supposed to have taught. Yet The Lotus Sutra appeared four or five hundred years after the death of the Buddha. He probably died around 400 BC and nothing was written down until four centuries after his death. Then, for reasons that are not entirely clear, in the first and second centuries of the Common Era texts started to be written that claimed to be the teachings of the Buddha.
And why do you think that was?
It is generally believed that tensions developed between a more conservative monastic element and groups that had a different view of the person of the Buddha and the nature of the path that he taught. This latter group, which came to be called the Mahayana or ‘Great Vehicle’, also included monks and nuns, as well as members of the laity. The Lotus Sutra is the most famous of the Mahayana sutras, proclaiming that all beings will eventually achieve buddhahood and declaring that the Buddha did not pass into nirvana at the age of 80 but has a lifespan that is immeasurable.
What do you personally take from it?
Despite the fact that it is teaching something that does not appear in the earlier tradition, it has ingenious ways of presenting itself as the Buddha’s highest teaching. It does this through the use of a number of famous and often moving parables. It also contains a rather strange and charming self-referential quality, constantly proclaiming itself to be the supreme of all the Buddha’s teachings. Many Buddhists across Asia over the subsequent centuries would come to see it as just that.
Your next choice was the most influential work on Buddhism to be published in the 19th century – Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism by Eugène Burnouf.
Much of what we understand Buddhism to be today is a direct result of how Buddhism was portrayed in Europe in the 19th century. By the time that the Portuguese arrived in India in the late 15th century – eventually followed by the Dutch, the French, and the British – Buddhism had effectively disappeared from the Subcontinent.
Why?
There are a number of reasons. We know from the reports of Chinese pilgrims that Buddhism had been in decline for some time, its fortunes waxing and waning based on royal patronage. It also seems that Hindu priests, more than Buddhist monks, were performing important life cycle rituals for much of the Indian population. In addition, in the 11th century Muslim armies carried out a series of incursions into northern India during which a number of Buddhist monasteries were looted. Perhaps the greatest of the monasteries, Nalanda, was sacked in 1193: the Muslim troops apparently mistook it for a fortress.
As a result of these various factors, when Europeans arrived in India, the birthplace of Buddhism, it was active all around India, in places like Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, China and Tibet, but it was dead in India. What Europeans found were the remnants of Buddhism – texts, monuments, statues, inscriptions – and from these they built Indian Buddhism as we understand it.
So there has been a massive Western influence on Buddhism.
‘Influence’ may be too strong: it might be more accurate to say that the academic study of Buddhism in the West, often by scholars who never travelled to Asia, played a key role in defining what we understand Buddhism to be.
Donald S Lopez Jr is the Arthur E Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, where he serves as chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows. His most recent book is The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography, one of the inaugural volumes in the new series ‘Lives of Great Religious Books’ published by Princeton University Press.
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