Pali vs. Sanskrit (Theravāda Buddhism in Academia)
28 October 2015 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
bias is a bit like gravity in that it's
everywhere it's powerful it's pervasive it's sheeps our daily actions what we do and we don't do what we can do and can't do but bias is also like gravity in that it's actually pretty easy to cope with if you're just aware of it if you're aware of your own bias if you admit it to yourself and if you have some kind of detached and self disciplined attitude you can work around it you can have a good-humoured attitude towards it you can be willing to laugh at your own shortcomings your own faults at your own biases um I got an email this morning from a professor of Sanskrit hi Eliza someone who's read my work on and off over the years and has correspond with me at different times inviting me to talk about the problems that arise basically because of the fissure between Sanskrit scholars and Pali scholars so Sanskrit is a language that's mostly associated with Hinduism it also has a special role for Tibetan Buddhism Mongolian Buddhism Mahayana Buddhism in general whereas Pali as a language is almost exclusively studied because of its significance for Terra battle Buddhism and for the most ancient most intact Canon of texts about Buddhist philosophy etc that we've got so Pali is also very important for places like Sri Lanka Thailand Cambodia Myanmar Laos etcetera but as you can imagine that is not an equal pairing Sanskrit gets more than 90 percent of the attention this fame and the money and pali is getting an incredibly small amount and I mean one of the advantages of doing this by YouTube instead of in the written word I'm not bitter about that I'm not resentful about that I'm really not and I also do not regard it as Western academia is fault or Western acting his problem if anyone would be spending the money to support scholarship of a language like Holley it should be a country like Thailand or like Sri Lanka what have you I don't think that a country like Canada has any mandate to spend a big budget and supporting scholarship of this language nor does support the scholarship on Buddhism of any kind in general why would we it's not our problem um meanwhile countries all around the world right now seem to be very easy eager to make the civil war in Syria into their own problem and to take responsibility for that well you know you you pick your friends and you pick you out of millions and then the last time Canada got involved in peacekeeping didn't work out very well remember a few decades ago we got involved in that civil war on the island of Cyprus did that how did that turn it oh but I digress you know these questions okay sanskrit and pali i was invited this morning to comment on the ways of which the predominance of Sanskrit scholars in this whole field distorts or reduces the quality of studies about Pali and tera vaada Buddhism what have and you know I do not see that problem in terms of a technical problem with language if you can read French then learning to read Spanish is a technical problem if you can read 18th century Italian reading 16th century Italian is a technical problem and when you go back to that period you know even reading Italian from one province of Italy versus other problems if it is going to be a problem etc etc there are technical problems in the study of languages ancient and modern but that's not the cell problem so the problem I want to talk about um fundamentally the problems are of bias and some of those biases are positively expressed biases but the the the bigger a part of a bias is in the questions that never get asked the problems that never get raised the things that never get problematized and pass unnoticed and scholarship crucially depends on Socratic method and scrutiny in the simplest sense of being able to ask and answer questions of how do you know that how did you come to that conclusion why do you assume that how did you construct that thesis where are the pieces you put together to make that puzzle whatever it is and questions of that kind that are so crucial to the progress of human knowledge and inquiry are actually profoundly unwelcome in western academia and are often regarded as threading so this comes back to Sanskrit in the following peculiar way if there's one lesson we learn from the history of the United States of America it's that separate-but-equal doesn't work you get people whose discipline and responsibility is to Sanskrit and then they're put in charge of something to do with Palli as the kind of footnote and they don't develop a robust familiarity with Pali as a Canon they don't become conversant with the political issues within the Terra battleworld they don't become familiar with the types of vendetta's even the types of racism that exists within scholarship tera vaada Buddhism and the politics that divide people so while they feel self-confident sophisticated because they they may be very sophisticated about Sanskrit and about all the politics that exist within say the Hindu study of Sanskrit or the Tibetan study of Sanskrit in relation to Tibet or some other Sanskrit field they're actually zoomed in reference to Pali which is also filled they're asked to exercise scrutiny over their expect to have expertise in and again the problem is rarely a technical problem to do with language or grammar or dictionaries of vocabulary those problems exist too but with that caveat me stated I spoke to Professor of Santa face to face within the last year and and several points in that conversation I did the thing that basic scrutiny entails he would make a statement as soon as he made this very high praise of the old-fashioned scholar Rees Davis TW rece Davis so this is fully 100 years ago this scholarship and I said oh well I'm surprised to hear you say that he may be very flattering statements but a wonderful scholarship which David is so well you know what is your opinion based on what have you actually read and you know again he's a Sanskrit scholar he hasn't read much he's never looked at the problems of the actual patli translation and interpretation and he also hasn't read anything in terms of the politics the critique and so on and he also hasn't you know compared one source to another and so on now again I didn't do this in a hostile way but after he explains a little bit I told him a few jarring and disturbing facts about Rees David's and the type of bias he brought to the study of Buddhism now among other things about Reis demons he was anti-semitic and he constructed and put forward a theory that is known as Orion race theory that was part of the history and development of you know what became the Nazi Party in Germany but before that was actually a political justification for British imperialism in India that's a very strange interesting story it's covered briefly in an essay or what I can provide a link or not nobody wants to read this is YouTube come on reading how 1986 um you know I told some of these general facts about Rees David's his career or his political direction and so on these were not technical problems with translation they were being being profound issues that you'd encounter in you know the scholarly legacy of rece Davis and this is not to say that I regard Rhys David's work as worthless it's deeply flawed but it's also interesting I mean it's also worth studying in all kinds of ways but if I were teaching a course to under graduates on it I would start by laying out look this is who this guy was these were his biases this was his agenda this is what his work accomplished and let's also look at some of the potholes in the road um this is Professor exciting he was completely unaware of this he had in effect no skepticism towards a poly source an appalling scholar and he sort of said some further planning on saying oh well that's very interesting but you know restatements was still a tremendously important segoe on the field and i said to him yes but if you knew what i just told you in this conversation then you would not have said any of the things you said just ten minutes ago but you would have been embarrassed to say that because now already I've given you enough information that you realize skepticism and procedural rigor are required for you to develop some kind of sophisticated a reasonable evaluation or analysis of who this scholar is and what he has to say about Buddhism his contribution to Buddhist studies put his philosophy whatever you gonna say this came up again and again at the same conversation you know this professor referred to the work of Rupert Gethin tremendously positively and work of bhikkhu bodhi tremendous Boozman and both gives oh you know I've actually written some critiques I've written some articles that criticize pick up OD but like let's stick with rubric effin if you say to me that Rupert Gethin is a great translator of poly and you are a scholar of Sanskrit I would say you oh well have you sat down and compared the Pauline to the English and the answer is no oh well have you compared the English to the earlier English that it is based on and that it's trying to replace or perhaps challenged or perhaps that it's derivative of perhaps perhaps that's the sort of thing you learn through reading or through scholarship I would like to imagine that within their own field of expertise Sanskrit scholars do have this type of disciplined analytical interrogation of texts and sources and do have skepticism about materials written in English until they have looked at exactly these types of factors what's the earlier English translation maybe there's a German translation or an Italian translation not all of the precedents are in English and you know what is the asymmetry between the primary source and the secondary source what's the agenda of the author and what have you and what's amazing to me is that Sanskrit ists seem to just not ask any of these questions in relation to Pali in relation to fetes sources now look maybe like Hindu Sanskrit Studies is full of this same kind of guileless unsophisticated uncritical reading of an agile ation of received authorities I doubt it I think these are smart people who within their own field ask tough questions and have debates and do use Socratic method but when they look at pally which really should be a separate field and is instead subsumed into Sanskrit it said treated as a footnote within Sanskrit they just throw that aside because they don't want to deal with it to give a really quick comparison around life so I know a lot about or used to know a lot about the politics in Laos and Thailand and Cambodia and some other places um it would be ridiculous if I then turned my attention to Japan and just had a completely uncritical attitude like oh well oh well look political corruption isn't the problem in Japan oh no I know corruption in Laos and Thailand and I know about violence in civil war but Japan doesn't have any of these problems some people do that I mean we have this idiom in English the grass is greener on the other side of the hill in general people who work on Sanskrit if they work on Hindu Sanskrit they may really regard Sanskrit as the language of the gods and then they regard Pali as the sort of unfortunate digression in the history of India that they don't really want to deal with so that's an attitude of contempt towards pally and I can understand it if it's positively stated as a bias if we're aware of it would work around it maybe we can still do research together maybe we can still make progress as scholars but the problem is that contempt tends to be matched with this kind of just this lack of scrutiny of just regarding uncritically I mean I've had people say to me so many times much oh but all the scholarship on Pelle has already been done all the patients are been done I don't think these Sanskrit scholars would ever say that about the Mahabharata that's a Sanskrit epic poem drama whatever you want to say even though textually I mean the Mahabharata is much simpler than looking at dense Buddhist philosophy in the Pali cannon or a lot of this stuff in pali has real questions of translation interpretation understanding I mean these seem Sanskrit scholars so they may be a Mahayana Buddhist they may be primarily engaged in Hinduism you know this attitude doesn't hinge on linguistic technicalities several times I have talked to again these these types of scholars and you raise a simple issue like slavery and they have no idea they have no skepticism and no no sense of scrutiny of what they've been told in the past that actually the material about slavery in the Pala Canon is nuanced is complicated the Pali Canon is not like Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto it contains some kind of ironical and interesting statements about human rotation and slavery and we can talk about that and teach you all course on it and so on it's interesting but like you know someone who's a Sanskrit scholar and is already familiar with the type of political propaganda that exists within Hinduism and trying to misrepresent or selectively quote from Sanskrit text to serve some modern nationalist interest in India those same people will look with no scrutiny whatsoever at a cynical Buddhist ploy to try to misrepresent the Pali Canon as if it were a radical socialist diatribe calling for great human equality and to tear down the system of oppression of the poor by the wrench or something and again that attitude and the part of Sanskrit says to me in other ways be sophisticated people it's not based on looking at the English next to the pally and it's not even based on looking at one English source next to another English source so yeah that is not the answer this professor of Sanskrit wasn't expecting at all but what I see as the the main ghost haunting the field is precisely that people who are experts in Sanskrit are in positions of authority of executive power over pally and terawatt of studies and that they are guileless they do not have any their their dial us both in dealing with the lies that Buddhists tell them and in dealing with the the rifts that exist within Buddhist scholarship because I mean Buddhist scholars heat other Buddhist scholars and so on Buddhist scholars have their own agendas some of them religious some of them not so much I think that's enough to cover in this one video I have a lot more say but for the moment at least it'll remain unsaid
everywhere it's powerful it's pervasive it's sheeps our daily actions what we do and we don't do what we can do and can't do but bias is also like gravity in that it's actually pretty easy to cope with if you're just aware of it if you're aware of your own bias if you admit it to yourself and if you have some kind of detached and self disciplined attitude you can work around it you can have a good-humoured attitude towards it you can be willing to laugh at your own shortcomings your own faults at your own biases um I got an email this morning from a professor of Sanskrit hi Eliza someone who's read my work on and off over the years and has correspond with me at different times inviting me to talk about the problems that arise basically because of the fissure between Sanskrit scholars and Pali scholars so Sanskrit is a language that's mostly associated with Hinduism it also has a special role for Tibetan Buddhism Mongolian Buddhism Mahayana Buddhism in general whereas Pali as a language is almost exclusively studied because of its significance for Terra battle Buddhism and for the most ancient most intact Canon of texts about Buddhist philosophy etc that we've got so Pali is also very important for places like Sri Lanka Thailand Cambodia Myanmar Laos etcetera but as you can imagine that is not an equal pairing Sanskrit gets more than 90 percent of the attention this fame and the money and pali is getting an incredibly small amount and I mean one of the advantages of doing this by YouTube instead of in the written word I'm not bitter about that I'm not resentful about that I'm really not and I also do not regard it as Western academia is fault or Western acting his problem if anyone would be spending the money to support scholarship of a language like Holley it should be a country like Thailand or like Sri Lanka what have you I don't think that a country like Canada has any mandate to spend a big budget and supporting scholarship of this language nor does support the scholarship on Buddhism of any kind in general why would we it's not our problem um meanwhile countries all around the world right now seem to be very easy eager to make the civil war in Syria into their own problem and to take responsibility for that well you know you you pick your friends and you pick you out of millions and then the last time Canada got involved in peacekeeping didn't work out very well remember a few decades ago we got involved in that civil war on the island of Cyprus did that how did that turn it oh but I digress you know these questions okay sanskrit and pali i was invited this morning to comment on the ways of which the predominance of Sanskrit scholars in this whole field distorts or reduces the quality of studies about Pali and tera vaada Buddhism what have and you know I do not see that problem in terms of a technical problem with language if you can read French then learning to read Spanish is a technical problem if you can read 18th century Italian reading 16th century Italian is a technical problem and when you go back to that period you know even reading Italian from one province of Italy versus other problems if it is going to be a problem etc etc there are technical problems in the study of languages ancient and modern but that's not the cell problem so the problem I want to talk about um fundamentally the problems are of bias and some of those biases are positively expressed biases but the the the bigger a part of a bias is in the questions that never get asked the problems that never get raised the things that never get problematized and pass unnoticed and scholarship crucially depends on Socratic method and scrutiny in the simplest sense of being able to ask and answer questions of how do you know that how did you come to that conclusion why do you assume that how did you construct that thesis where are the pieces you put together to make that puzzle whatever it is and questions of that kind that are so crucial to the progress of human knowledge and inquiry are actually profoundly unwelcome in western academia and are often regarded as threading so this comes back to Sanskrit in the following peculiar way if there's one lesson we learn from the history of the United States of America it's that separate-but-equal doesn't work you get people whose discipline and responsibility is to Sanskrit and then they're put in charge of something to do with Palli as the kind of footnote and they don't develop a robust familiarity with Pali as a Canon they don't become conversant with the political issues within the Terra battleworld they don't become familiar with the types of vendetta's even the types of racism that exists within scholarship tera vaada Buddhism and the politics that divide people so while they feel self-confident sophisticated because they they may be very sophisticated about Sanskrit and about all the politics that exist within say the Hindu study of Sanskrit or the Tibetan study of Sanskrit in relation to Tibet or some other Sanskrit field they're actually zoomed in reference to Pali which is also filled they're asked to exercise scrutiny over their expect to have expertise in and again the problem is rarely a technical problem to do with language or grammar or dictionaries of vocabulary those problems exist too but with that caveat me stated I spoke to Professor of Santa face to face within the last year and and several points in that conversation I did the thing that basic scrutiny entails he would make a statement as soon as he made this very high praise of the old-fashioned scholar Rees Davis TW rece Davis so this is fully 100 years ago this scholarship and I said oh well I'm surprised to hear you say that he may be very flattering statements but a wonderful scholarship which David is so well you know what is your opinion based on what have you actually read and you know again he's a Sanskrit scholar he hasn't read much he's never looked at the problems of the actual patli translation and interpretation and he also hasn't read anything in terms of the politics the critique and so on and he also hasn't you know compared one source to another and so on now again I didn't do this in a hostile way but after he explains a little bit I told him a few jarring and disturbing facts about Rees David's and the type of bias he brought to the study of Buddhism now among other things about Reis demons he was anti-semitic and he constructed and put forward a theory that is known as Orion race theory that was part of the history and development of you know what became the Nazi Party in Germany but before that was actually a political justification for British imperialism in India that's a very strange interesting story it's covered briefly in an essay or what I can provide a link or not nobody wants to read this is YouTube come on reading how 1986 um you know I told some of these general facts about Rees David's his career or his political direction and so on these were not technical problems with translation they were being being profound issues that you'd encounter in you know the scholarly legacy of rece Davis and this is not to say that I regard Rhys David's work as worthless it's deeply flawed but it's also interesting I mean it's also worth studying in all kinds of ways but if I were teaching a course to under graduates on it I would start by laying out look this is who this guy was these were his biases this was his agenda this is what his work accomplished and let's also look at some of the potholes in the road um this is Professor exciting he was completely unaware of this he had in effect no skepticism towards a poly source an appalling scholar and he sort of said some further planning on saying oh well that's very interesting but you know restatements was still a tremendously important segoe on the field and i said to him yes but if you knew what i just told you in this conversation then you would not have said any of the things you said just ten minutes ago but you would have been embarrassed to say that because now already I've given you enough information that you realize skepticism and procedural rigor are required for you to develop some kind of sophisticated a reasonable evaluation or analysis of who this scholar is and what he has to say about Buddhism his contribution to Buddhist studies put his philosophy whatever you gonna say this came up again and again at the same conversation you know this professor referred to the work of Rupert Gethin tremendously positively and work of bhikkhu bodhi tremendous Boozman and both gives oh you know I've actually written some critiques I've written some articles that criticize pick up OD but like let's stick with rubric effin if you say to me that Rupert Gethin is a great translator of poly and you are a scholar of Sanskrit I would say you oh well have you sat down and compared the Pauline to the English and the answer is no oh well have you compared the English to the earlier English that it is based on and that it's trying to replace or perhaps challenged or perhaps that it's derivative of perhaps perhaps that's the sort of thing you learn through reading or through scholarship I would like to imagine that within their own field of expertise Sanskrit scholars do have this type of disciplined analytical interrogation of texts and sources and do have skepticism about materials written in English until they have looked at exactly these types of factors what's the earlier English translation maybe there's a German translation or an Italian translation not all of the precedents are in English and you know what is the asymmetry between the primary source and the secondary source what's the agenda of the author and what have you and what's amazing to me is that Sanskrit ists seem to just not ask any of these questions in relation to Pali in relation to fetes sources now look maybe like Hindu Sanskrit Studies is full of this same kind of guileless unsophisticated uncritical reading of an agile ation of received authorities I doubt it I think these are smart people who within their own field ask tough questions and have debates and do use Socratic method but when they look at pally which really should be a separate field and is instead subsumed into Sanskrit it said treated as a footnote within Sanskrit they just throw that aside because they don't want to deal with it to give a really quick comparison around life so I know a lot about or used to know a lot about the politics in Laos and Thailand and Cambodia and some other places um it would be ridiculous if I then turned my attention to Japan and just had a completely uncritical attitude like oh well oh well look political corruption isn't the problem in Japan oh no I know corruption in Laos and Thailand and I know about violence in civil war but Japan doesn't have any of these problems some people do that I mean we have this idiom in English the grass is greener on the other side of the hill in general people who work on Sanskrit if they work on Hindu Sanskrit they may really regard Sanskrit as the language of the gods and then they regard Pali as the sort of unfortunate digression in the history of India that they don't really want to deal with so that's an attitude of contempt towards pally and I can understand it if it's positively stated as a bias if we're aware of it would work around it maybe we can still do research together maybe we can still make progress as scholars but the problem is that contempt tends to be matched with this kind of just this lack of scrutiny of just regarding uncritically I mean I've had people say to me so many times much oh but all the scholarship on Pelle has already been done all the patients are been done I don't think these Sanskrit scholars would ever say that about the Mahabharata that's a Sanskrit epic poem drama whatever you want to say even though textually I mean the Mahabharata is much simpler than looking at dense Buddhist philosophy in the Pali cannon or a lot of this stuff in pali has real questions of translation interpretation understanding I mean these seem Sanskrit scholars so they may be a Mahayana Buddhist they may be primarily engaged in Hinduism you know this attitude doesn't hinge on linguistic technicalities several times I have talked to again these these types of scholars and you raise a simple issue like slavery and they have no idea they have no skepticism and no no sense of scrutiny of what they've been told in the past that actually the material about slavery in the Pala Canon is nuanced is complicated the Pali Canon is not like Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto it contains some kind of ironical and interesting statements about human rotation and slavery and we can talk about that and teach you all course on it and so on it's interesting but like you know someone who's a Sanskrit scholar and is already familiar with the type of political propaganda that exists within Hinduism and trying to misrepresent or selectively quote from Sanskrit text to serve some modern nationalist interest in India those same people will look with no scrutiny whatsoever at a cynical Buddhist ploy to try to misrepresent the Pali Canon as if it were a radical socialist diatribe calling for great human equality and to tear down the system of oppression of the poor by the wrench or something and again that attitude and the part of Sanskrit says to me in other ways be sophisticated people it's not based on looking at the English next to the pally and it's not even based on looking at one English source next to another English source so yeah that is not the answer this professor of Sanskrit wasn't expecting at all but what I see as the the main ghost haunting the field is precisely that people who are experts in Sanskrit are in positions of authority of executive power over pally and terawatt of studies and that they are guileless they do not have any their their dial us both in dealing with the lies that Buddhists tell them and in dealing with the the rifts that exist within Buddhist scholarship because I mean Buddhist scholars heat other Buddhist scholars and so on Buddhist scholars have their own agendas some of them religious some of them not so much I think that's enough to cover in this one video I have a lot more say but for the moment at least it'll remain unsaid