BUDDHIST STUDIES

RELEVANCE

For over two millennia, the unifying thread of Buddhist learning and practice has woven together the largest and most influential block of humanity in world history. This tradition exists in many cultural shadings. The literature likewise: vast bodies of text were translated into many languages; then indigenous literatures grew up.

The material covers an immense range. It embraces social behaviour, personal ethics, psychology and philosophy. It combines refined analysis with concern for practical relevance. It reflects and has shaped patterns of thought and behaviour which remain deeply embedded in important societies.

The academic field of Buddhist Studies exists to explore and illuminate:

1. this literature and its historical context and impact, and
2. the dynamics of Buddhist and Buddhist-influenced groups and institutions.

This work is vital for understanding the world we live in.

Buddhist patterns of thought and behaviour reflect a distinctively rational world view. Since rationality is one and indivisible, and western ways of thinking are often self-consciously rational, many assume that Buddhists must think and live according to categories more or less the same as the average European’s or American’s. Alternatively, if they do not, they must be ‘inscrutable’. That is a misperception. In today’s Asia-centred world, it is vital that everyone understand how. Buddhist Studies offer a good way in to such understanding — possibly the best.

ORIGINS

The Buddhist tradition has always been scholarly. From the first, careful records were kept. Analysis of them began soon after. Buddhist Studies go back a good 2,000 years.

In the mid-19th century, the modern academy began to converge with and add to this scholarly base. In India, the British deciphered the Brahmi script and translated the Emperor Asoka’s inscriptions. In Vietnam, the French started to work on later Buddhism. The Germans applied their philological skills to Buddhist texts.

Buddhism was soon a quite popular topic in the West. Oxford men played a major role:

• Friedrich Max Mueller produced the ‘Sacred Books of the East’ series from 1875. Key Buddhist works appeared for the first time in the West. Nirvana had commonly been understood as a doctrine of annihilation; Mueller offered evidence for a positive interpretation.
• Edwin Arnold’s bestselling ‘Light of Asia’ brought Buddhism into Victorian households. Monks pressed manuscripts upon him. He left them to the Bodleian Library.

DEVELOPMENTS

TW Rhys Davis studied Sanskrit in Germany, then was a colonial civil servant in Sri Lanka. Scholarly and personal contact with Buddhist monks drew him to their texts. He found a vast, coherent literature and a rational system of thought that addressed continuing concerns. With funds from Europeans and Asians (basically himself and some Sri Lankan friends), he set out in 1881 to publish texts, translations and ancillary material.

Thus was formed the Pali Text Society (PTS), still active from its Oxford base. The PTS did not spend too long collecting and collating; they found something that worked and went with that. When Rhys Davis died in 1922, 64 texts were in publication, (in 94 volumes, with 26,000 pages), as well a range of scholarly articles.

From the 1930s:

• Japanese contributions to Buddhist Studies grew.
• French-language scholarship produced many brilliant students of the Mahayana.

The 1960s saw significant developments:

• Tibetan scholars came to teach in Western universities.
• The study of living Buddhist societies took off. Scholars did fieldwork. They located what they found in Buddhist countries within the continuum of cultures across the globe.

Since then, Buddhist Studies have been affected by shifting intellectual fashions.

• Once, scholars tried to define:
  • the correct text and the correct meaning for all people, for all time; and
  • the essential and unchanging nature of each system of thought and belief.
• The results were mixed:
• Buddhist traditions became better known in the West. People from Buddhist cultures gained a resource for use in adapting to modernity.
• But scholars often lent authority to interpretations that took little account of much that was relevant, including the experience of Buddhists.
• Now there has been a reaction. Some say that only material and first-hand evidence is reliable, so for instance:
  • Since manuscripts do not survive in the Indian climate, we must base our understanding of early Buddhism on archaeology and inscriptions alone.
  • The way to understand Buddhism generally is by anthropological fieldwork among Buddhist laity.
    So close study of texts has often fallen out of favour

OXFORD

Oxford University has long been at the heart of Buddhist Studies. The OCBS exists to ensure it remains so.

This is necessary. The Bodleian Library’s Sanskrit and Pali collections are of historic importance. This material must be available to scholars from around the world. That requires a permanent Buddhist Studies faculty in Oxford.
Until now, there has been no such faculty. Individual scholars have pursued interests in this area.

Since the 1960s, the key figure has been Richard Gombrich. As Professor of Sanskrit, he created a solid academic base for Buddhist Studies at Oxford:

• Building on the best Buddhist Studies scholarship, both pre-modern and modern, his and his collaborators’ research has made striking advances. It has set the Buddhist tradition in context, revealing new dimensions of early Buddhist discourse, (e.g. how it responded to the Brahmanical background), and relating contemporary Buddhist sociology to the historical record.
  • On the philological side:
    • it has revitalised the practice of close textual study of early Buddhist materials and
    • in this way has validated the authenticity and antiquity of the Pali material (which had been questioned elsewhere in the academic world)
  • On the sociological side:
    • it has shown traditional Theravada Buddhism to preserve much that goes back millennia and
    • has analysed how some modernising tendencies diverge from Buddhist tradition.
      The Times Literary Supplement has characterised Gombrich’s contribution here as ‘pioneering’.
  • He has supervised some 50 research students, who have produced more than half the UK’s post-war doctorates in Buddhist Studies. Many brilliant theses have come from Asian students, including Buddhist monks and nuns. Students from countries with a Mahayana tradition have often come to study early Buddhism, principally through the Pali.

In 2004, however, Richard Gombrich retired. This could have been the end of Buddhist Studies at Oxford.

A group of volunteers decided that it should instead signal the opening of a new era. The Society for the Wider Understanding of the Buddhist Tradition was formed to raise money for the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. Great progress has already been made.

The Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (BDK) has given strong support:

• Since 1989, the BDK has financed a fund held at Balliol College that has enabled many distinguished Numata Visitors in Buddhist Studies to lecture at the University.
• Last year, the OCBS came to a new and fuller understanding with the BDK. Now that UK volunteers and donors are working to establish Buddhist Studies at Oxford on a substantial and permanent footing, the BDK has undertaken to endow a Chair. A Numata Professor of Buddhist Studies will be in place in October 2007. This will be the first endowed chair in Buddhist studies in the UK. The Professor will be ex-officio a senior academic member of the OCBS.
• For 2005-7, the BDK are funding a Temporary Lectureship. Ulrike Roesler, Assistant Professor at Marburg University, was appointed from a strong field.

Meanwhile, the OCBS has been providing numerous lectures and tutorials to the University:

• In Oriental Studies:
  • Alex Wynne has taught Pali for the undergraduate course in Sanskrit and Pali.
  • Richard Gombrich continues to supervise research students.
• In Theology:
  • Lectures in Buddhist Studies are open to all members of the University. The 6-8 lectures a term provided by the OCBS draw audiences of up to 50.
  • In addition the OCBS provides tutorial teaching in Buddhism.

The OCBS also works in the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. Here it runs a 10-lectures-a-term programme called “Introduction to Buddhism”.

Under the aegis of The Society for the Wider Understanding of the Buddhist Tradition, the OCBS offers beginners’ and intermediate Summer Schools in Pali. The 10-day intensive beginners’ programme aims to equip people who have no Pali at all to read the Canon for themselves with the aid of dictionary and grammar; it has been run twice, for groups of 8 or 9 participants, with striking success.

Richard Gombrich also gives invited lectures in the UK and across the world. Finally, the OCBS monograph series is part of RoutledgeCurzon’s Critical Studies in Buddhism.

PALI STUDIES

Pali Studies is a relatively well established but neglected academic discipline. It grew out of Sanskrit Studies.
Oxford’s undergraduate course in Sanskrit included a Pali option as long ago as the 1880s. We believe that this was the first undergraduate curriculum to feature Pali in the West. It has continued ever since. This fostered the continuing tradition of Pali scholarship in Britain, supporting the work of the PTS over many years.

The great period of Pali Studies was in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. At that time, it was assumed that only the Pali Canon reflected faithfully and in detail the thinking and practice of early Buddhists. Accordingly other studies, e.g. of the Chinese translations of the early texts, were neglected.

This prompted an exaggerated reaction. People noted that other forms of Buddhism had more adherents, often from larger countries with more political weight and a broader cultural footprint. Those who focused on early Buddhism switched their attention to the increasing body of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit material that was becoming available. Some saw the earlier image of Pali Buddhism as a product of British colonialism. The Theravada tradition was quite often understood as a construct dating from the time of Buddhaghosa at the earliest. The subject of Pali Studies was reduced to a philological backwater.

Gradually, however, Pali Studies have been rehabilitated in international academic circles. British scholars have been at the forefront. KR Norman revived the practice of close textual study of early Buddhist materials. Richard Gombrich revitalised it by relating detailed philological findings to broader issues — historical, sociological, cultural and doctrinal.