BACKGROUND

TO GO FORWARD RENEWED, FIRST CHECK BACK

A millennium ago, the classical learning of the West was nearly lost. Then humanists began to explore the available sources (mainly from Arab and Byzantine libraries). Painstaking and systematic textual scholarship gradually recovered the traditions of Greece and Rome. The West rediscovered where it had come from. A radical rethink ensued.
Politics, the arts, science and technology — all were transformed, irrevocably. The consequences have been incalculable, not only for the West.

Thus old texts stimulated new thinking. The humanist renaissance rationalized our intellectual processes and our ways of sharing knowledge, and ultimately issued into ever more powerful methods for controlling the natural world. This scholarly revolution ushered in the utilitarian, modern age.

It produced immeasurable benefits. By stages, it has also led to our present crises.

Now, we need another radical rethink. Otherwise, our science and technology stand to destroy us, through warfare or environmental devastation.

The outcomes of the humanist renaissance, which we have so enjoyed, threaten to consume us. To continue benefit from them, we must re-evaluate them.

How? What philosophies and strategies will serve? How will we find them?

As before, surely: to recast our civilisation, we can re-examine its roots. Only, in this case the civilisation in question is global. The roots we are looking for reach down deep into the common wisdom of humanity.

Where to look? Where shall we find a tradition which:

• has extended across many peoples, languages and territories, over centuries and millennia, drawing from each its own native wisdom and crystallising it, and
• has produced a literature that comprehensively records all this material and organises it clearly into a coherent whole?

The Buddhist tradition fits the bill. For the new renaissance that is now required, the rediscovery of this learning and this approach will stand us in good stead.

ASIA HAS RESOURCES TO MEET THE CHALLENGES

WMDs proliferate. Environmental degradation runs on apace. We have striven masterfully to suppress our awareness of these twin dangers. Now, they are coming to a head. Sooner rather than later we will have to deal with them. How?
We must revolutionise our approach to technical knowledge. To revalidate science we must set it in context — in a wider understanding of our human context.

Where can we look for leadership in this endeavour? It seems clear that the mantle of economic and technical preponderance is gradually passing from Europe and America to Asia. So, it is presumably from Asian culture that the new approach will come.

And where in Asian culture will people find the inspiration to effect such a global transformation? For many years now, Asians have turned to the West as a model for emulation. Will they still? Or will they rather rediscover their own heritage — the common classical heritage of the entire continent, which is Buddhist?

Buddhism has many guises. The basis is always the same. It is a clearly reasoned programme of self-understanding. By clarifying what really brings contentment, this helps us to avoid dangerous extremes; it is the Middle Way. Effective at both individual and collective levels, it seems to match quite well with what is needed in an age of extreme wealth and poverty, extreme technical achievement and industrial despoliation, extreme intellectual attainment and psychological distortion, et cetera.

A practical programme of analysis and action that enables us to understand who we are, what we want, and what is unambiguously of benefit to both self and others — this can recast our currently skewed sense of human reason and purposes. And the road towards this goal runs through textual scholarship.

We gained undreamed-of control over the external world via the early-modern rediscovery of Classical Greek and Roman thought. Similarly, a late-modern rediscovery of Classical Buddhist thought will lead us to as yet unimagined control and good management of our own selves and of our dangerously powerful technologies.

APPROACH

REDISCOVER LOST KNOWLEDGE

In each Buddhist tradition, the key texts were continually supplemented by commentaries. Over the years, as new masters taught fresh students, layer upon layer of commentary was produced. At the same time, the original ‘canonical’ material was copied and recopied, and in the process became progressively corrupted.

So now, many Buddhist traditions present a picture a little like an inverted pyramid. The point on which the structure rests is tiny, barely discernible; that is, the canonical scriptures have for many centuries survived only in highly corrupted textual forms. For centuries, this material has not been directly studied; that has been more or less impossible. Instead, traditional scholarship and practice has necessarily been based on the immense accumulation of commentarial materials.
CEBOP takes this extraordinary fact as its point of departure. The commentaries and text books are often excellent; but it is clear that profound benefits will accrue from making their original basis, the scriptural canons, readable once more. The huge Tibetan rNying ma’i rgyud ‘bum is a good example.

We believe that the return of such inspirational and seminal ancient texts to public availability in reliable forms and on a large scale will exert a powerful positive influence on our global imagination and thinking. That is CEBOP’s mission.

FIND THE TOOLS FOR THE JOB

We seek to edit critically canonical Buddhist texts, drawn impartially from all traditions. To that end, we shall combine the best of traditional and modern scholarship:

• We shall first apply established Asian Buddhist systems of textual criticism, where they survive or can be revived.
• We shall also:
  • review the full range of methodology that has developed over centuries of Western Classical, Biblical and Medievalist textual editing;
  • assess all the processes and techniques involved for their relevance to the task of editing the variety of Buddhist texts;
  • apply the very best of this expertise to serve our purpose.

We shall further establish stable and easy-to-use electronic systems to:

• enable collaborative editing between distant groups of scholars;
• create output that:
  • is open to continual updating and improvement over the years; and
  • preserves and makes completely transparent a full record of editorial and scholarly decisions.

MAKE THE RESULTS ACCESSIBLE

Our ultimate goal is to diffuse the understanding that emerges from close study of the Buddhist tradition. It is vital that as many people as possible should be able to get as close as possible to the letter and the spirit of the texts we uncover. We shall apply all the resources of advanced information and communication technology to that end.

This is how the wisdom of Buddhist canonical texts will resume its place in the global culture. This is how CEBOP will indirectly inspire imaginative and effective new approaches to the management and control of our selves, of our new technologies, and of our economic and political activities.