Unfortunately, not all scholars agree with us. Academics have worked hard for little reward, so it is understandable if they feel inclined to stress the high level of expertise they have attained. In the end, they sometimes seem to prefer keeping people out to letting people in.

Of course, it is perfectly true that the Buddhist texts preserved from ancient times are in languages which westerners may find difficult - though the difficulty of Pali, for example, is often exaggerated. And it is no less true that to do original research on these texts one must study them in their original languages. But why assume that anyone who lacks expertise in the languages cannot contribute anything to the subject?

It is even more self-defeating to think that only those who can advance the subject are worth teaching at all. Who thinks that no one should study English literature unless they are capable of saying something completely new (and valid) about it? Yet that seems to be the attitude of some of the few university departments in the world where Buddhism can be seriously studied. In our view, the more people study Buddhism the better, and then the more people study the languages of Buddhist texts the better still!

Our position is based on an attitude which we take to conform to the spirit of Buddhism, and also on a fundamental intellectual tenet. All advances in knowledge are tentative and hypothetical. This is by no means to say that advances in knowledge do not occur. Newtonian physics was a great advance on what went before; but whoever thought for the two centuries after Newton that some of his discoveries would be superseded by those of Einstein? Certainly we can eliminate error. When we examine a Buddhist text there is a vast number of meanings which we know it cannot bear. But our decision about what it does mean must always remain a hypothesis, not finally proven for all time. We all do well to remember this. Moreover - a separate point - it may serve to diminish arrogance if we frequently remind ourselves that however learned a scholar may be, the number of things that he or she does not know or understand remains infinite.

It has to be admitted that the study of Buddhism suffers from some serious, though perhaps not unique, problems. It is well over a century since Christians began to study the Bible and other sources of their tradition in a critical spirit, applying to their scriptures the same historical and philological methods that were being applied to other ancient texts. If Buddhism lags far behind, this is largely due to the fact that their texts are so many and in such a variety of languages. That may make the field seem daunting; anyhow, for whatever reasons, it is attracting far too few serious students.

A field of academic study is somewhat like a pyramid: given that all pyramids rise at a similar angle, the broader the base of a pyramid, the greater the height that can be attained. Individual geniuses are rare, and even they require institutional support. In any well established academic field, whether it be in the humanities, social sciences or natural sciences, the vast majority of the participants are not doing important new work, but nevertheless are furthering the field, both by carrying out the programmes set by the original thinkers and by teaching the young from among whom the next generation of scholars and researchers will be recruited.

There are other ways too in which sheer numbers are an asset: they promote the communication amongst scholars which ensures that everyone gets to hear about advances in the field and learns to discard those hypotheses which have been disproved; and as part of this process they provide the necessary market for publishers and specialised conferences. Even at the conferences of the International Association for Buddhist Studies, which take place only once in three years, some of the papers find little or no critical response for lack of a qualified audience. While this is true of the whole field, it is most strikingly true of the study of early Buddhism: at the latest IABS conference, held in Bangkok in December 2002, there was no panel devoted to early Buddhism.

In many fields, notably in the natural sciences, it is commonplace for researchers with different specialisms to collaborate on problems. Deplorably, in Buddhist studies this hardly happens at all. For the century or so since the study of Buddhism entered academia, it has been in awe of those who demonstrate the rigour of their own standards by declaring that one cannot contribute anything useful to Buddhist studies unless one is fluent in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and classical Chinese, the main languages of the primary sources. Then, in order to read the secondary sources, one needs English, German, French - and Japanese! No wonder that so little creative work gets done, if each aspiring Buddhist scholar somehow has to finance 20 or 30 years of language learning before feeling entitled to publish. While we admire the few giants who can reach these heights, such arguments of perfection amount to little better than an intellectual terrorism which stunts all growth.

In the first place, it is of course ludicrous to claim that one cannot say anything useful about a Pali text which has a Chinese parallel unless one has also studied the Chinese version; it all depends on the problem one is grappling with. Beyond that, the obvious solution is for the Pali scholar to collaborate with the Sinologist. One of the main aims of our enterprise is to promote such collaboration. In the past it was not easy for scholars to collaborate if they lived far apart, but the internet has changed all that.

It is all too easy to think of things that we want to do, both research programmes and programmes to diffuse the results of that research. Again and again, however, one finds the same obstacle: there are just too few people in the field. The work is there to be done, but who is to do it? We have to build the Buddhist studies pyramid. Certainly we hope to gain new knowledge and insights; but unless we can multiply many times over the number of people who study Buddhism seriously enough to busy themselves with the original sources - whether these be ancient or modern, written or oral -- Buddhist studies will remain seriously underdeveloped and the world, for lack of access to Buddhist tradition, will remain a far poorer place than it needs to be.

Richard Gombrich
July 2003