HOW IS THE STUDY OF

BUDDHISM POSSIBLE?

ROGER CORLESS

In this essay I wish to address the general question "How is the

(academic) study of religion possible?" by investigating the special
problems which arise when we try to study Buddhism within the
context of the modern western university.' I I instance Buddhism not
only because I have special knowledge of it, but also because,
positing as it does (explicitly in Mahayana, implicitly in Theravada) a
therapeutic or pseudo-worldview which is intended to dispel all
worldviews (whether Buddhist or not) I believe it provides us with a
way out of our dilemma.

WAS THE BUDDHA A BUDDHA?

In our universities, we find Sakyamuni Buddha included in the

textbooks of what are called the Great World Religions. He is
granted a day in Auguste Comte's Positivist Calendar,2 and Hegel
thought enough of Buddhism to give it a brief (albeit ambiguous and
inaccurate) mention as he progressed towards "The Absolute Religion

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(Christianity)" in his Etic),c,lol)w(lia of the Philnsnphical Sciences.

?5kyamuni Buddha, then, is, for the western academic establishment,
a figure to be reckoned with. He is "the Buddha," and he founded
"Buddhism," which is a "religion," or, perhaps, a "philosophy," or
even a "religion-philosophy," or, might it be, a religion which
includes a philosophy and a psychology and maybe all sorts of other
things.'
What this seems to mean is that, for the western academic
establishment, "the" Buddha is on a par with philosophers like
Socrates: he came up with some jolly good ideas and they're
certainly worth thinking about. Or, perhaps he was like Muhammad
who (say the professors, although Muslims deny it) "founded" the
"religion" of Islam.
Followers of the Buddhadharma, however, do not see Sakyamuni
Tath5gata as a philosopher who came up with some ideas, or as a
founder of a Great World Religion. They see him as, simply
bii(ldha, that is, an Awoken One who was (either actually [Mah5y5nil
or potentially [Theravada]) omniscient.
To put it simply, Buddhas are for Buddhists those beings who
are "honored by (i.e., pre-eminent in) the world" (Chinese: shih tsu»)
while, for the western academic establishment, there is only one
Buddha and he is a "world figure" (i.e., he'll be on the quiz). Prima
facie, it does not seem possible for either side to take the other
seriously.
This essay will begin by examining some of the presuppositions
of each position. Since the learned reader will no doubt be familiar
with many of these presuppositions, but may have tried (as I have) to
half-ignore them by working around them, I wish to bring the issue
to a head by drawing a caricature, rather than a balanced
characterisation, of the positions. This technique owes something to
William James' observation that eccentric movements, by magnifying
some of the features of more central movements, allow us to see
what we might otherwise miss.4 Then, I will point out a few of the
difficulties which are beginning to be felt within each position, and,
finally, offer a way of resolving the conflict.

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THE EMIC ANSWER: YES

The two most distinctive features of the Buddhist worldview

which are relevant to our discussion are, first, that there are many
realities and, secondly, that none of these realities are really going
anywhere.

Plural Realities

The hunan, in the Buddhist universe, is fortunate but not very

prominent. Astronomically large numbers of sentient beings exist in
many realms both more pleasant and more unpleasant than ours, in
many different space-time continua throughout the six realms
and the three thousand major galaxy clusters
(trailokacllratavah),5 communicating with each other not only in many
languages unknown to, and never to be known by, humans but by
methods such as musical notes, perfumes, glances, or telepathy, which
humans can relate to either dimly or not at all. Some beings, such
as animals, are, like humans, grossly physical and therefore visible to
us, others live in subtle bodies, while others again are "pure
intelligences" like St Thomas Aquinas' angels.
It has to be squarely faced that all these which
mfny beings,
may seem to us to be more like science fiction than science fact, are
so unavoidably a part of the Dharma (or "Buddhism") wherever and
whenever we meet it that they cannot be extracted without leaving
behind something which is, simply, not the Dharma. The same is
true for the so-called "miracles" (manifestations of supernormal skills
or abhijíiä D. Thc painstaking attempt of E. J. Thomas to
separate scientific fact from superstitious fiction in The Life of the
Buddha as Legend and History (London: Routledge, 3rd. edition,
1949), with the subterranean suggestion in chapter XVII ("Buddhism
and Christianity") that the accounts of the lives of Buddha and of
Christ might be variations on a single delusion must strike us to-day
as saying more about Dr. Thomas' presuppositions than about his
material,.
Just when we might have thought it was safe to go back into
the library, a Buddhological "Jaws III" has appeared with serious and
(from the einic point of view) scholarly works on gter ma, the

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Nyingma texts which, having been hidden by Padmasambhava as a

kind of "compressed file" in various natural phenomena, are later
activated and published as a way of refreshing the Teachings.' One
can perhaps, without too many qualms, dismiss as a pleasant
simpleton someone who lived a long time ago in a faraway place.
But, when one meets, for example (as a colleague says she did), a
lama who matter-of-factly states that his grandfather was a garuda,
but who is otherwise impressive for his great learning and basic
sanity, it is not so easy to be sure that one knows what's what.
And then, of course, there is the Buddha. A Buddha is, in all
Buddhist lineages, taught as not human, not animal, not divine, and
so forth: he is "deity beyond deities," "teacher of deities and
humans," escaping all categories.'

Nothing Goes Anywhere

What tends to be called, in everyday English, "the world" is, for

Buddhists, safl1sära, a constant movement ( si "run, flow, move, go"
[Monier-Williams] + intensifier sam), a going round and round. Birth
and death follow each other in endless succession: the Chinese
translation of samsara is "births and deaths" (shêng-ssu). This makes
it impossible to ask "What is the meaning, or purpose, of life?" The
Buddhist answer is not that life is meaningless, but that the quest for
meaning is meaningless.
A western disciple who asked S. N. Goenka "What is the
purpose of life?" was told "The purpose of life is to realize the
nature of suffering and how to escape it." The question and answer
came out of different worldviews. The disciple wanted to know
"What is the story of creation? To what grand conclusion is it
leading?" Goenka replied that, since he perceived that the questioner
had, fortunately, been born this time as a human, that particular being
now had the opportunity to escape the cycle.
A consequence of this sorry-go-round analysis of existence is
that philosophical views (di-sti) cannot be taken at their face value.
In many places (most notably, in the Pali texts, the Brahmajala
Suttanta') the belief in and attachment to philosophical and
metaphysical systems is ascribed to what we might call psychosocial
causes, both in the present life and former Philosophy is only
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a particular circularity of the circularity of samsara in general.

Truth, therefore, cannot, for Buddhism, be set up as an object to
be studied, a goal to be attained. There is, as Udana 80 tells us, a
something-or-another, or else no hope could be shown for those
trapped in samsara,'° but what it is cannot be directly stated. It is
indicated by negatives, alluded to by skilful means (llpäya), or
exposed by the "apagogic" logic of prasailga".
The Yogacara form of Buddhism goes even further: by teaching
that an object and that same object-in-consciousness are one entity
(not, of course, the same thing, but only hypothetically, never
actually, divisible from each other) we appear to be told that studying
Buddhism is impossible." 'I'he Dharma is not information (although
it manifests as if it were) but transformation. Right conduct and
tltoiiglit transformation is the teaching of the Buddhas, says
Dhammapada 183. We must, as the Tibetans put it, "mix our minds
with the Dharma." Studying Buddhism without practising it (without
allowing ourselves to be transformed by it) is, an undergraduate
complained, like learning about swimming without going in the water.
But, as we see next, iiot getting involved is a vitally important
part of the western academic enterprise known as "study."

THE ETIC ANSWER: NO

In direct contrast to the Buddhist worldview, classical western

scholarship, that is, Cartesianisrn-Newtonianism-Positivism, assumes
that the universe is a single reality, and that there is some sort of
meaningful forwards movement.

Oiie Reality

Humans, it seems clear to us, are center stage. We are the only
rational beings we know. Animals do not have language (they have
signs, but that is worlds apart") and they do not teach in universities.
As Dr Jacob Bronowski observed during his television series The
Ascent of Man, "It is we who are writing papers on ducks and rats;
ducks and rats are not writing papers on us." We divide ourselves
into categories by means of IQ tests and other examinations, and

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above or beyond us there is, as far as we are aware, no-one. SETI

(the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) may eventually discover
other physical beings, although there is not yet the slightest indication
of this," and certainly, if people report extra-terrestrials who are pure
intelligences, we shall know that they are in fact reporting paranoid
delusions. What we cannot measure, we say, does not exist." It is
certainly impossible, on this view, for there to exist an Omniscient
One, so, when we read about the Buddha, we can respond" "Pull the
other one, it's got bells on it!"

'
Everything Goes Somewhere

One of the largest departments at a modern university is History.

At my university, I note that nearly 50 of the 1,500 faculty members
are in the Department of History. Ever since the Renaissance we
have believed that, in order to understand something, we need to
know its origin and development." Its origins will give us, we feel,
its essence, on the basis of which its development can be judged to
have been proper or improper. Thus, practically every survey text on
Buddhism uses history as if it were the best and most obvious tool
for understanding it, and the more incautious authors" would even
have us believe that later forms of Buddhism, such as Tantra and
Pure Land, are corrupt (as they charge) because they arose so long
after the time of the Buddha that they could not possibly have known
what the Dharma was really all about.
In Biology, evolution is accepted as an axiom. In society
(though not, perhaps, after the fiasco of Social Darwinianism, in
Sociology) progress is expected as a matter of course.'9 Many of our
science fiction writers propose for us a future in which there will be
more machines, more speed, less dirt and less religion: our salvation
will be the exhilaration of whizzing about, always forwards and
purposefully, in our starships. The First Noble Truth will be voided
by a pill. On the basis of this view we can meaningfully ask
"Where are we going?" and receive the Christmassy answer "Into a
larger toy store."
Most importantly, from our perspective as academics, we have
come to subscribe to the view that truth is a conceptual statement
about an objective reality, independently obtainable by any observer

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who enters into the investigation vested in the mandatory Ph.D. Here
is Jacob Bronowski again:

The test of truth iiii science) is the known factual evidence,and no glib
expediencynor reason of state can justify the siiiallestsclf-deceptionin
that ... If we silenccone scrupleaboutour means,we infectourselvesand our
endstogether.="

The difference between this view of truth as an objective abstraction,

and the Buddhist context-sensitive, medicinal view of truth as skilful
means, is startling. If this is the only way we can legitimately study
Buddhism at a modern university, then we must not, under any
circumstances, mix our minds with it, or be transformed by it. We
are only allowed to put it in the library in the section reserved for
the Great World Religions.

THE POST-MODERN ANSWER: WHO KNOWS?

Many of us, however, see problems with the Etic Answer, and
wonder if it is breaking up. The certainty of linearity seems to be
giving way to the despair of circulal.ity.21 Sigmund Freud told us
(somewhat as the Buddha had, but more grimly) that a person's
worldview, particularly their religious worldview, was dependent on
the condition of their psyche. We no longer ask whether Luther was
inspired by God or the Devil, but how he felt about his colon. Then,
Karl Marx, at astonishing length, made us see how ideologies are
controlled, or at least conditioned, by a society's means of
production. More recently, Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated the
circularity of what philosophers had always thought of as "meaning,"
and Jacques Derrida convinced us that, when reading a text, we
become hopelessly lost in a mirrored hall of sub-text within sub-text.
Faced with all of this, we may sympathize with David Hume who,
having determined that nothing could be determined, returned to
backgammon.
A Buddhist might point out that nothing very interesting, in fact,
has happened: the incorrect view of Eternalism (nityaviida) has been
supplanted by the incorrect view of Nihilism and
suffering (duiikha) remains as before. But the Buddhist cannot afford
to be triumphalist. Despite ingenious attempts to defend Buddhism

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(often in thinly veiled contrast to Christianity) as scientific rather than

mythological or superstitious, it is clear that (for example) the
Abhidhamma system is not an early version of nuclear physics (a
clhamma is not, after all, a particle2' and the cosmology of world-
systems (cakl'aväla) and the three thousand major galaxy clusters
(trailokacll?atavah)z' has nothing to do with modern geography and
asti-otiomy.2'
And, more directly to our point, it is impossible to teach
Buddhism as a universal system (as required by the non-
denominational objectivism of academics) using any of the traditional
forms of Buddhism, since they are lineage-specific. One may indeed
teach a history of Theravada, or a survey of the tenet systems (girrh
mtha) of Tibetan Mahayana, or a seminar on a specific "canonical"
text, but how can one teach "Buddhism 101" without using the
lineage-neutral tool of history, a tool which, however, destroys (or at
least attacks) the very data it claims to expose?

THE BUCK ROGERS ANSWER: THROUGH THE STARGATE

The Buddhist and the Post-modern approaches at least agree on

one point: no worldview exists, as Descartes had assumed,
independently of the causes and conditions in whose matrix it arose.
That is, it has neither Buddhist inherent existence (svablnrva) nor
Aristotelian substance (ousia). And, lacking an eternal essence, it can
be changed. There is, then, a solution to our dilemma of how to
study and teach Buddhism emically as well as etically.

The Western Academic Crisis ,

The pickle we have got ourselves into is, I believe, largely due
to our having taken Plato and Aristotle too seriously. Both were,
from the Buddhist point of view, Eternalists (Nityavadins), regarding
only what does not change as real. Plato located reality in the realm
of Mind, and Aristotle situated it in the hidden innerness, or essence,
of objects.25 Plato, then (if I might be allowed another caricature)
falls before Asanga and Aristotle is laid low by Nagarjuna. Western
philosophy, however, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, agreed
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with Plato and Aristotle and solemnly wrote footnotes on them for
fifteen hundred years. Picked up by the Christian Church
(enthusiastically by the Latins; reluctantly, to their credit, by the
Greeks, who could read them better) they became the pedagogical
vehicle for the Biblical God, so much so that Exodus 3:14, where the
Hebrew means something like "I will always be present" (ehyeh
asher ehyeh) was interpreted as "I AM WHO I AM" (ego siini qiii
sum), i.e., "I am the Uncaused Cause," the bloodless God of the
philosophers so roundly denounced by Pascal. Dropped again by the
Church as it retired into its sacred fortress before the advance of
empirical observation, it was rescued by the academicians to become
the Truth after which Doctors of Science and of Humane Letters
alike selflessly searched as if courting la belle dame sails merci. This
is the point at which History of Religions and Buddhology, as
disciplines, are frozen: our standard methodology, if we will but
admit it, is crypto-Christian. But, other doctors (in high-energy
physics, philosophy, and literary criticism for example) discovered
that the Goddess had feet of clay, and down she came with nothing
to replace her. Camus and Sartre had material for their novels.
We are at a point of crisis, I suggest, similar to that which
occurred in the period which we now identify as the close of the
Middle Ages and the rise of the Renaissance. If we are honest, we
must admit that the western academic establishment now lies again in
ruins. Although many of our modern universities are, architecturally,
Medieval kitsch, their curricula owe nothing to the Trivia and
Quadrivia, and everything to the EI/cydopédistes. Somewhere
between the twelfth and the sixteenth century, "godliness and the
study of great learning" (as the Collect of King's College,
Cambridge, has it) ceased to be credible as mutual supports. The
world no longer presented itself as the expression of the Plan of God,
it began to look more like a giant clock.
The mechanical model of the universe was at first genuinely
mythological: it helped to reclaim the magic in things, and it gave
humans the power to take responsibility for their destiny, rather than
being the sheep of an omnipotent and capricious Shepherd. To-day,
however, the myth has died. Having purged our water of germs, we
now pollute it with chemicals. We have tried to analyze the physical
universe down to its smallest units, and it has vaporized into

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mathematical formulx. Philosophy and religion have melted into

psychology, psychology has been absorbed by sociology and
sociology has disintegrated into statistics. The most salient feature of
a university department to-day is its inability to say what it is, why it
is, and what it does. Innovative deans therefore energetically paper
over the cracks with interdisciplinary courses, where so much is
going on no-one has the time to ponder the awful suspicion that
western academics may have become reduced to a juggling act.

The Net of Iiidi-a

Buddhism, I believe, can show us a way out of our pickle. Not

the Buddhism of the past, however, but, since Buddhism has known
all along that every viewpoint (di-sti) is empty (.fünya), that is, that
every ideology, when subjected to analysis, falls apart and becomes
untenable because indiscoverable, it can adapt, and help us to help
both it and ourselves. The impasse we are in is caused by a conflict
of drstis (specifically, and in western terms, Objectivism and
Absolutism verSllS Subjectivism and Relativism) and it cannot be
solved by another dr.sti. If Buddhism offers itself as a philosophy or
as a Great World Religion, the cure may be worse than the disease.
In the Avatamsaka Sutra, however, we may have the ,viewless view
whose time has come. 26
The Avatamsaka Sutra teaches a universe of separate yet
intertwined realities. Each entity, in this perspective, retains its own
individuality, autonomy and absoluteness, yet it is at the same time
inseparably involved with, interconnected with, and fully
interpenetrated by, each and every other entity. The interpenetration
or co-inherence occurs dynamically and in every imaginable way.
This perspective is symbolised by the Net of Indra, a net of jewels in
which each jewel reflects every other jewel and its own reflection in
every other jewel and is called (in Japanese) jijimllge, "the
unhinderedness of phenomena with phenomena." In it, no bounds are
placed on the number of possible universes or absolute realities.27
There are some signs of the times that may be, as it were, the
thin end of the Avatamsaka wedge. Biologists are telling us that, the
more different life forms there are, the greater the chance that all of
us will survive. They are pulling back from the mono-species

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approach to giga-bushels of grain and rejoicing in variety. The

monotony of imperialistic languages and cultures (such as English) is
being protested. Welsh, for example, has come back to the hills of
its birth. From my home village in England I can see the River Dee.
But from the other bank it is, once again, the Afon Dyfrydwy. In
the new physics particularly, we are required to accept multiple
realities, for even if a Grand Unified Field Theory is eventually
proposed which intelligibly relates the four forces (strong, weak,
electromagnetic and gravitational) it will, one might suppose, be no
help in explaining how it can be that Buddhism and Christianity can
co-exist on a single planet, or what we should do to bring peace to
the Middle East.
I would like to predict that, in the relatively not too distant
future, when Buck Rogers meets Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and
warping through Stargates is all in a day's play, human children will
be taught that the twentieth century of the Terran Common Era was
the watershed during which their ancestors' quaint notion that there
was only one Reality and one Absolute, with its corollaries of linear
time and specific etiology, were finally given up. Beings will then
live in the Net of Indra, a polyrnorphically coinherent reality-matrix,
passing in and out of authentically integral mutuall; absolute
universes of languages, logics, cultures and religions for reasons that
we cannot, in our present immature state of consciousness, even
imagine.

The Possible Study of Bucldlti.sm

But, while we close in on this watershed, can we study

Buddhism authentically, and teach "Buddhism 101?" I think we can,
if we allow the niatei-ial itself to provide us with the appropriate
metliodology.2' This is somewhat like asking a person, in their own
language, "What would you like me to know about you?" rather than
sitting them down with a standard questionnaire which we have
prepared in our own language and according to our own preconceived
opinions of what one human should want another to know about
themselves.
If we were to apply this approach to Buddhism, it would mean
that, first of all, we would accept the Buddhist worldview. That is,

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we would accept that reality is multiform and cyclic; that history,

although a reality, is only one of many self-sufficient realities (not
sub- or meta-realities) interdependently woven into the total reality-
matrix ; and that everything is ontologically transparent
because (as N5garjuna said) everything is relational
samutpäda). The goal and the focus of the Dharma is, we would
then say, to bring beings to see reality as .Ç¡"inyatâ(or, as T'heravadins
might prefer to put it, al1attäflJ.
So far so good. If, however, we then go on to spell out what
this means, we run the risk of falling into the trap of selecting the
views of only one Buddhist lineage as "the" Buddhist view. Yet if
we do not go on, we have not said very much, and the course is
only a day or so old.. Therefore, we need a lineage-neutral Stargate
through which to enter into the multiple universes of the Dharma
itself. This, surely, is provided by Sakyamuni Buddha himself.
Sakyamuni Buddha is recognized by all Buddhist lineages as the
most recent re-discoverer of prutityasamutpdda, seeing it fully, and
then teaching it to others. He is, therefore, taken as the primary
manifestation of ,Wl1yatä, that is, of the Dharma. By observing his
acts of body, speech and mind, we see Dharma."' By centering our
teaching on slÏl1yatå, and using the life (or legend, it does not matter
which we call it) of Sakyamuni as the primary manifestation of
Dharma, we could then select significant incidents in the transmission
of the Dharma (that is, in "Buddhism"), expand them synchronically
and diachronically, and subject them to any kind of critical analysis
that does not destroy our declared Buddhist axia." If we chose the
twelvefold division of the Life of §5kyamuni Buddha offered by the
Lalitavistara Sura" (that is, the so-called Twelve Acts of Buddha), a
division commonly accepted by Mahayana and consonant with
Therav5da tradition, we would have twelve Buddhist, but lineage-free,
topics by means of which we could critically but respectfully present
Buddhism as a universal system.
Slowly and painfully, often not knowing where I was going, and
thus testing mightily the patience of my students, I have developed
"Buddha and Buddhism," a course which proceeds as I have
described. And now, at long last, I have written a book for it: The
Vision of Buddhism: The Space liticlel- the Tiee (New York: Paragon
House, 1989). Comnents from colleagues on my success or failure

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are invited.
And then, moving bravely on into the darkness, I have
wondered aloud whether the method could not be made to work for
other religions. I am now developing, with the same publisher, a
series of volumes by various authors under the general title "Visions
of Reality," which will attempt to treat each religion within a
worldview that will be, I hope, at once conformable to its reality and
open to critical investigation.

Roger Corless
Department of Religion
Duke University

NOTES

I. This essayis a revisedversionof a paperoriginallydeliveredbeforethe BuddhismGroup

of the AmericanAcademyof Religionat Anaheim,California, on November19, 1989.
2. On the secondSundayof "Moscs"(the firstmonlh).
3. 1 am not makingthis up! I own two copiesof ChristmasHumphrey'sfamousPenguin
Buddhism.In August,1956,I purchased,in England,the revised(1955)edition,for the then
princelysum of 2s. 6d. < 12.5p in modernnotation). Its plainfrontcovercalledBuddhisma
"rcligion-philosophy."This mysteriousphrasehas survivedthreedecadesinto the third (1962)
edition,whichI obtainedin June, 1985(its pricchavingrisento £3.50or $5.95). It is now
printedon the back cover(the frontcoverelegantlybut unaccountably showinga paintingof
Tsongkha pa) and is precededby a ctescription of Buddhismas a "religion"which"includes
... philosophy... psychology.. , self-(Icvclopiiieiit ... self-enlightenment ... spiritual
science,mysticismand religiousart." In 1956,1 assumcdthat I was too young10knowwhat
a "rcligion-philosophy"was. In 1989,I believeit is thc westernacademicestablishment which
does not know what Buddhismis, and that it has, with the passageof time, becomemore
rathcrthanlessconfused.
4. See LectureII "Circumscribing the Topic"of TheVarietiesof Religious < 19Ul -2,
hvl)et-ieti(-e
variouspublishcrs).On pagc 62 of my copy (London:CollinslFoHlana, 1960)I read:"I[ is a
goodrule in physiology, whenwe are studyingthe meaningof an organ,to ask after its most
peculiarand characteristicsort of performance,and to seek its office in that one of its
functionswhichno otherorgancan possiblyexert. Surelythe samemaximholdsgoodin our
presentquest." Jamesthus proceeds,I suggest,froma rrricntureof religiousexperienceto a
characterisation
of it.
5. The translation"galaxy cluster" is suggestedby K. N. Jaya(illeke:"The Buddhist
Conceptionof the Universe"in The Me.uageof r'heBii(l(lh(i, a postlrutnous work by K. N.
editedby NinianSmart(London:Allcnand Unwin,1975),pages90-103.
Jayatillekc,
6. See, for cxample,HiddellTeti(-Ititigs
of Tihet:AllE.vplnnminn of the
of the Tel'maTi-aditioit
NyillgmaSchoolnJ' arrclclhi.snr
by TulkuThondupRinpoche;editedby HaroldTalbott(London:
WisdomPublications, 1986).
7. This is obviouslytrue for Mahayana,and Buddhologists have got a lot of milcagcout of

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the supposed"divinisation" of the Buddhain the Mahayanatradition.But it is no lesstrue for

Theravada:thcyjust do not makesucha fuss of it. (See,for example,K. N. Jayalilleke "The
BuddhistAttitudeto Revelation" in TheMessageof the Bii(l(lltalol).c-it.1,especiallypage59.)
SomeEnglish-speaking bhikkhusdo indeedmake the "merelyhuman"claim. I assumethat
(unlesstheyarc simplyblindedby westernscholarship) theyarc usinga skilfulmcans.
8. For a translation,see Dialogllesof the Buddha,translatedby T. W. RhysDavids,part 1,
sectionI (SacredBooksof the Bllddhists, editedby F. Max Mii[Icr)London:Luzac,1899and
subscquently.
9. See NathanKatz,Brnlcllrist of llifi?t(iii
Inrrr?e,c (Delhi:MotilalBanarsidass,
Pmfoctinrr 1982),
for a discussionof the significance of the ohipassikunatureof the Buddha'steaching(e.,S·.,
pages101-106,mostof chapterVI). AlthoughI think Katzsometimesgoestoo far, his main
pointis welltaken:"it was nevera qucstionper se to whichthe Buddharesponded;it wasthe
matrixgivenwhicha questioncouldbe raised"(page204).
spiritual-psychological
10. See "A Discussionof U 80,"chapter 12 of 7'hePsychology of Nit-t,aitaby RuneE. A.
Johansson(London:Allenand Unwin,1969).
I I. The term is thatof T. R. V. Murtiin TheCelltralPhilosophy of Buddhism (London:Allen
and Unwin,1960),pages131-2.
12. A good introduction to the Yogaclraviewpointis On Krunr·irr,? Re(ilit3, by JaniccDean
Willis(NewYork:ColumbiaUniversity Press,1979).
13. An uproarious, yet insightfuland infonnative,collectionof essayson this is The
ill tlrnBottle:HowQlleerMalll,s,HnwQiieei-LatigitageIs, atid WhatOnelI«.sto Do withtlre
Otherby WalkerPercy(NewYork:Farrar,Strausand Giroux,1975).
14. ArthurClarkc'snovel,TheSongsof Distal/tEarth (NcwYork:BallantincBooks,1986)
imaginesspacetravelat a timewhenit had beendefinitelyconcludedthat we are aloncin the
universe. (It is a surprisingthesisfor Clarkc,whoseheavensare so ofteninhabitedby benign
super-intelligences,but perhapshe is just experimenting with Nietzsche'sniglnmare that, if God
is an illusion,humansarc cosmicorphans.)
15. HustonSmithrhetorically asks if anyonecan reallybelievein the irrrleyencle·nt existence
(notjust as an epiphenomenon) of somethingwhichis totallyinuneasurable in physicalterms.
"The InescapableValueContentof 'Objective'Knowlcdge,"addressat the Conferenceon
IntegratedInterdisciplinaryEducation, San DiegoStateUniversity, June 19-23,1989.
16. (Moreformally,of course,and witha real footnote.)
17. For selectionsfromsomeof the classicalphilosophers of historysee part I "Philosophies
of History:Vicoto Collingwood" of Theoriesof llistoryeditedby PatrickGardiner(Glencoe
IL: The FreePress,and London:Allenand Unwin,1959).
18. EdwardConze,to whomin otherwayswe owe so nmch,had a particularly severeblind
spot in this respect. A carefulstudyof the axia controllinghis Bl/ddhisl1I: Its F.ssence?alld
Del'clolmlellt(Oxford:BrunoCassirer,19Sl) wouldbe a valuablccontributionto "Buddhism
and its academicinterpreters" (to paraphrase Guy Welbon).
19. For thc progressof the idea of progressitself,scc J. B. Bury,TheIdca of Pmgress:All
lnyuiryirrtuits Origirr<7w/Gnrnntlr (NewYork:Dover,1955;originallyMacmillan, 1932).
20. J. Bronowski,Sciellcca»d Ht(ttiatiVallles,RevisedF:<lition with a new dialogue"The
Abacusand the Rose"(NewYork:Harperand Row,1965),page66.
21. Part II of Theoriesof /Iistory(op. £'it.)presentssome"Critiquesof ClassicalTheoriesof
History."
22. One of the more conservative, and thcreforemore helpful,studiesof this questionis
AppendixD "ScientificPhilosophy"of The Psychologyalld Philosophyof Bliddllisill: An
to the Abhitlliti?pii?ia
IlItrodllctioll by Dr. W. F. Jayasuriya(Brickfields, KualaLumpur:Buddhist
Missionary Society,1963).
23. RandyKloetzli,BllddhistCosmology (Delhi:Banarsidass,1983).
24. That this can be a real problemis illuslratedby the reactionof a youngTibetanmonk
whomI tnet,to a satellitephotograph of the earth. "Whereis MountSumeru?"he askedin
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41

evidentconcern.Sincethe Buddhawas omniscient,and taughtthat Sunteruexisted,it must

exist. Yct,immediatesensccxpcricnccis also a "validcognizcr,"and this showsthat Sumcru
does not exist. ProfessorJeffrcyHopkinsof the Universityof Virginiareports(in a pcrsonal
communication) that the problemhas now been rcsolved,after an extensivesearchof the texts
uncoveredan obscureTantrawhichstatedthat the earth was a sphere. But we cannotafford
to smile:ever sincethc Scopes"MonkeyTrial"mostof us are too embarrassed to take sucha
questionseriously, aiidwe simplyfail to addrcssthc issuc.
25. It is importantto noticethat neitherPlato's"Mind"nor Aristotle'sessenceswereclcarly
distinguished from what we mightto-daycall "our mind," For the ancients,there was a
continuumbetween"sontethings" that wereat once"inside"and "outside"the perceiver'smind.
Sinceabout1 100C.E.,we havelivedin a worldwhichseesa dichotomybetween"things"and
"meanings"such that it is almoslimpossible,using modernlanguage,to speak within the
ancientworldview. F. EdwardCranz, "The Reorientation of WesternThoughtcirca 1100
A.D."(fourunpublished talks)especially"The Emergenceof WesternLanguagein its Modern
Fornt,"talk givenat the Societyof Fellowsin the Humanities, ColumbiaUniversity, April 10,
1984.
26. For an overviewof this sutrasee ThomasCleary, inin IheIrroonceinublo(lionolulu:
Universityof HawaiiPress, 1983,"Appendix:Highlightsof the Hua-yenScripture."Thomas
Clcaryhas translatedthe cntiresutraas T'heFlmrerOrnnmemScv-ihlnre (Boulder:Shambhala,
1984-1987), 3 vols.
27. Sce GarntaC. C. Chang,TheBuddhist/f?</t</f?of Totalily:ThePhilosophyof Ilrru Yell
Bii(l(lhisipi
(Univcrsity Park PA:Thc Pcnnsylvania StateUnivcrsityPress, 1971)and Francisf-t.
Cook, Bti(klliistit:
TheJewelNetof Itidi-a(University ParkPA:Thc Pennsylvania Statc
UniversityPrcss,1977).
28. This approachis used by, for example,AgehanandaBharatiin The Lightat tlu?Ceiitet-:
Cantoxtund Pr-elc·.rl rrf Mo(It,i-ii
Mysticism(SantaBarbara:Ross-Erickson, 1976),who calls it
ctlmoscience (see esp. chapterI ) and by HolgerKalweitin Drocorrlime atid InnerSpace:The
wo,.ldof thc· .Sluuuarr (Bostonand London:Shambhala,1988;translatedby WernerWiinsche
from Tiwunmcit rrnr!iunorerRatitit,Munich:Otto WilhelmBarthVerlag,1984)who tenus it
'I'ranspersonalScience(seeesp. pagexv).
29. sabbedliaiiii?id mraltv'ti, Dhanunapada 279.
30. Theravadahas prescrvcda sayingthat one who sees the Buddhasees Dhamma(Swla
Nipliaiii. 120). Tibetansreadthe livesof Dharmateachers(rnum as livingteachingsof
Dharma.
31. Sincethe Dharmais meantto dispelignorance and encouragewisdom
the criticalanalysisof Buddhismupon Buddhistprincipleshas, whereverand wheneverit has
beentricd,strengthened Ihc Dharmaratherthanweakenedit.
32. For an Englishtranslationof this sutra, scc The l%iceof the Btid(lita,EmeryvillcCA:
DharntaPublishing, 1983, 3 vols.

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