Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies (I)

(Photo: Lee Fan 李東陽)

Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies (I)

In an Era of Rapid Change, Where Is Buddhist Studies Heading?
At the roundtable forum of the the 6th Chung-Hwa International Conference on Buddhism, two keynote speakers—Professor Robert Gimello and Professor Paul Harrison—were invited to reflect on their lifelong academic journeys. Drawing on perspectives from technology, tradition, lineage, and fieldwork, they guided participants in contemplating the possible futures of Buddhist studies.

Speakers:
Robert Gimello (Research Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Theology, University of Notre Dame, USA)
Paul Harrison (Professor, Dept. of Religious Studies, Stanford University, USA)

Moderator:
Lin Chen-kuo 林鎮國 (Chair Professor, Department of Philosophy, National Chengchi University; Distinguished Chair Professor, Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts)

Organizers:
Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, Center for Chinese Chan Studies, Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts

Compiled and Edited by:
Editorial Office of Humanity Magazine

Venue:
GIS NTU Convention Center

Date:
November 1, 2025

Content source:
Humanity Magazine, Issue 509


Opening Remarks — Prof. Lin Chen-Kuo: 

I am Lin Zheng-Guo — I am from National Chengchi University. Welcome back to this special round-table discussion. It is my great pleasure and honor to moderate this event. I believe that many of us have witnessed how Professor Gimello and Professor Harrison demonstrate scholarly excellency in their presentation. And personally I learned a lot from their presentations. Also I not only learned but I also enjoyed very much the insight and very rich comment in their presentation.
 
So on this special occasion we are very delighted again to invite both of them here to share with us their life long experience of research of Buddhism from India through Korea, Japan and China to Taiwan. So, especially if you look at the conference theme, namely "Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies", I just mentioned that envisioning the future of Buddhism. We can translate it as inspiring the future through inheriting the past.
 
So as a matter of fact, this theme is adopted from Master Sheng Yen's opening speech in the first Chung-Hwa Conference of Buddhist Studies (Zhonghua Foxuehui, in Chinese) held in Taipei in 1990, 35 years ago. So when the organizers of this conference decided to take up and continue the legacy of this conference, Chung-Hwa Conference of Buddhist Studies, they found that Master Sheng Yen's great vow, the great mission in his opening speech is still very relevant to us even in 35 years later.
 
So before the talk, let me summarize the key points in Master Sheng Yen's speech.

The first point is to maintain the balance between Buddhism as a religion, and Buddhist studies as an academic discipline.

The second point is to internationalize Buddhist studies. So Master Sheng Yen referred to the annual conference of Indogaku Bukkyogaku Kenkyu. We know that Professor Sheng Yen earned his doctorate degree in Japan. So he particularly referred to that conference of Japanese association. As well as the IABS (International Association of Buddhist Studies), he also mentioned that 35 years ago as the benchmarks for our conference.
 
The third point is to cultivate a new generation of Buddhist scholars. Though he fully realized that, I just quote, "Achieving this will take another ten or twenty years." So when I read this point, I feel a little bit embarrassed because personally, I also spent more than 35 years in Taiwan in this field. So now after 35 years, we reflect on Master Sheng Yen's great speech. I think we should think about that seriously.
 
The forth point is to establish Buddhist tradition and modern society as the permanent theme of the conference. So that is exactly in this conference. We focus on Buddhist culture and modern society. So that's what we try to connect to the original Master Sheng Yen's idea. So we realize that there are many changes in the social, political, even academic changes since 1990. We should think more about how the future Buddhist studies can be envisioned again.

So we'd like to learn more from our two keynote speakers on this subject.

Prof. Robert Gimello:
Buddhist studies can see itself as it is seen in the eyes of others and note not only the differences—of which there are many—but also the similarities or analogies.

Remembering Master Sheng Yen and His Years Teaching in Beitou

Prof. Robert Gimello:

I was at one of the earlier conferences in this series. And before that, I had the privilege of teaching for one semester at the Chung-Hwa Institute in Beitou, which was for me a very important phase of my career for many reasons. Not the least of them is that I had students in the course I taught at Beitou who later came to the United States to do doctoral work with me.

The description of this morning's session suggests that we should say something about the future of Buddhism. I'm always hesitant to do that, to predict things. Often when one speaks about the future, one is really speaking about what one hopes the future will be. My hope for the future rests with the students I've had the privilege to teach. They will take care of the future. And if I've done my job, they'll do well.
 
When I came here for the first time to the Beitou Institute, I came particularly because that was an institute established by Master Sheng Yen. I had read some of Master Sheng Yen's writings, particularly his study of Ming Dynasty Buddhism, before I came here.
 
And I had particular respect for him for the way in which he combined his career as a scholar with his career as a religious leader. And since I am, as I think I may have mentioned to some of you before, not myself a Buddhist, but an admiring scholar of Buddhism, I was particularly interested in working in an institute whose leader and founder was also a scholar.
 
Focusing on the Continuities Between East Asia and South Asia

My own training in graduate school at Columbia University was not, strictly speaking, in Buddhist studies. I had wanted to concentrate on Buddhism, but at Columbia, the program I was in was not a program in Buddhist studies. It was a program in East Asian studies. I was sometimes annoyed by the amount of time I was expected to study things not directly related to Buddhism—Chinese and Japanese literature, Chinese and Japanese history, and of course, language.

But this circumstance raised—early on in my own career when I was still student—an issue that has continued to concern me throughout my career. Studying Buddhism, we study a religious tradition that originated in India. Studying East Asian Buddhism, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhism, we are studying something that came from India and managed to flourish in East Asia.
 
When people discuss that transition, they often invoke the term Sinification or Sinicization. I myself used that term in the subtitle of my dissertation on the origin of Huayan Buddhism and was tempted to present Huayan Buddhism as an especially Chinese development within the Pan-Asian Buddhist tradition, emphasizing its Chineseness rather than its Buddhist character. In the course of my career, I came to change my views on these matters and later became insistent in the work I do that what we find of Buddhism in China is more Buddhist than Chinese.

Not all of my colleagues agree with me on this subject. But I came to realize when I studied a bit of what Professor Harrison has studied in great detail, the Buddhism of India and even of Tibet and the languages of Sanskrit and Tibetan, and then began working on Chinese Buddhist texts, I was more impressed than I had expected to be by the continuities between Buddhist thought and practice in South Asia and Buddhist thought and practice in East Asia. Buddhism came to China, underwent some changes under the influence of Chinese civilization, which it is necessary to appreciate. But Buddhism also changed the China to which it came. So when I think of the future of Buddhist studies, particularly in East Asia, here in Taiwan and elsewhere, I'm hoping that that future will develop in such a way as to emphasize the continuities between the East Asian Buddhist traditions and those from South Asia where Buddhism originated. And I'm pleased to see that some of the students I've had the privilege of teaching, including students here from Taiwan, seem to be tending in their own way in that direction.

So I think if I were to make suggestions about, and this is very presumptuous of me, but if I were to make suggestions about how the study of Buddhism should develop in the future, that's one of the suggestions I would make, that students of Chinese Buddhism, aware of the rich Chinese context in which their tradition has developed, will nonetheless be especially concerned to preserve the Buddhism in China as part of the Pan-Asian Buddhist tradition.

A Christian Buddhist Scholar’s Perspective

Another concern that affects what I hope the future will be for Buddhist studies has to do with my own personal circumstance. As I've mentioned on a couple of occasions, although I'm a scholar of Buddhism and a great admirer of the tradition, I am not myself a Buddhist. I am a Christian. Most of my career has been spent teaching Buddhism in secular institutions at the University of California, the University of Arizona, at Harvard University. But my final position, the one from which I retired, was at Notre Dame University, which is, as you know, a Catholic university. And my position was not in a Buddhist studies department. There is no such thing at any Catholic university I know of. It was not even in an East Asian studies department. It was in a theology department.

So, although this has been a concern of mine throughout my career, it was only in the last 12 to 15 years that I was able to incorporate into my teaching and further into my scholarship a concern to compare Buddhism with Christianity and Christianity with Buddhism. Not in the hope of settling disputes between the two traditions about the nature of reality or the nature of salvation, but in the belief which I have happily confirmed several times in my own work, I think, that each tradition will find in the other something analogous to its own views and values.

And when I say analogous, I mean similar and yet also different. And this has been my preoccupation for the last decade and a half, to explore ways in which a Christian scholar can learn from, profit from the study of Buddhism, introduce his own tradition to Buddhism without compromising his own Christian faith and in the process maybe show something to the Buddhist scholars who may read his work, something of what they might find useful in the Christian tradition. So, one of the things I'm hoping will be part of the future of the development of Buddhist studies in Taiwan and elsewhere is the incorporation into the curricula of study in Buddhist institutions of some emphasis on comparison.

Not only perhaps comparison with Christianity, but also comparison, and this is more obvious, with Hinduism, comparison also with Judaism and Islam. Venturing in that direction should not be seen as a dilution of a commitment to Buddhist studies or as a threat to Buddhist studies, but as an opportunity for Buddhist studies to develop in such a way that it can see itself as it is seen in the eyes of others and note not only the differences, and there are many, but also the similarities or analogies. So, I was particularly delighted when I came to the Beitou Institute in 1992, that's a long time ago, and had the opportunity to engage in conversations with Master Sheng Yen, who was residing at the institute in those days, because he seemed at that time to be quite open to these concerns.

An Additional Source of Joy

I had the special privilege a few years after I was here at Taipei to invite Master Sheng Yen to the University of Arizona, where I was then teaching. He gave a lecture with the aid of a translator. And one of the interesting features of the lecture was, not only the content of the lecture, but also the audience. There were students from the University of Arizona, some who were taking my classes, and some who had general interest in these things, but there were also many people from the local Chinese community and even the more widely spread Chinese community. People from California, for example, came to Tucson, Arizona to attend Master Sheng Yen's teaching lectures.
 
The further pleasure was available to me because when he finished his lecture the next day, I wanted to show him some gratitude for his journey to Tucson, Arizona. I took him to northern Arizona to view the Grand Canyon. I tried in my very poor spoken Chinese to speak to Master Sheng Yen about whether one might find in the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, something reminiscent of the grandeur of Buddhism. I'm not sure that my Chinese — actually, I'm pretty sure that my spoken Chinese — was not good enough to convey that thought to him, but he was very gracious and listened patiently to me.
 
I was always grateful to have had the opportunity to come to Taiwan and to live in a Buddhist culture. I had been to Japan before, not quite a Buddhist culture. To come to Taiwan and to work in an institution he had established, that was a particularly valuable experience for me. It gave me the opportunity to see Chinese Buddhism as a living tradition, as well as the opportunity to continue my study of the intellectual traditions of Buddhism from the past in an institution that welcomed that kind of scholarship. 
 
  Prof. Paul Harrison: 

I used to think that I was an accidental Buddhologist, although according to the law of karma there are no accidents. But it all hinges on one split-second decision I made when I was about 15 years old. My French teacher at the boys' high school I attended put his head around the corner of the lunchroom and said, "Harrison, do you want to learn Japanese?" Without thinking, I said, "Yes." So my entry into this field was through language. I studied Japanese at high school. That was the first time anybody did that in my home country of New Zealand.
 
Then I went to Japan on an exchange scheme as a high school student and lived there for a year with a Japanese family. From that point on, everything turned around. Although I had intended to go to university and do classics, that is, Western classics, I ended up doing Eastern classics and doing Chinese and Japanese.

So my intro into this field was through the study of language and then the study of philosophy and religion. And then I went on to do a PhD in Buddhist studies which I finished in 1979. So I've been in this field for over 45 years now and I might look back rather than forward, at least to begin with, and reflect on the enormous changes that I've seen during my career.

But one thing hasn't changed before I get on to them and that is the feeling that I'd picked the right field. To return to the Grand Canyon, Buddhism is Udāra and Gambhīra, it is lofty and profound at the same time. And it was my impression when I started that there was plenty to do, that even the Tripitaka, was an ocean incredibly deep and difficult to cross and that there was so much to work on. In fact, my impression at this point in my career is that there is now even more to work on than there was then. So there is plenty to do and plenty of fascinating things to study.
 
So when I think back on how my career has gone, of course technology has been enormously influential in all kinds of ways. When I completed my Master's thesis, I typed it on a manual typewriter using carbon paper. Now, probably many people in this room do not even know what carbon paper is. You have to put multiple sheets in the typewriter with carbon paper between them to get multiple copies. So of course we've had the advent of computers, we've had the internet, and the interesting thing about this in terms of the development of our field is that it has not only made many things easier such as searchable databases and so on, and here I should mention the CBETA project and then SAT Daizōkyō, etc. in Japan.

It's not only made things easier, but it has changed the way we work on a human level and that I think is one of the most interesting developments in our field, that when we started, the paradigm, the standard way of working was the single scholar working by himself or herself on their projects. And now when I look around, there are people working groups and they publish jointly, so in a way the mode of operation of our field has moved in the direction of the hard sciences with group projects and I think that's been enormously productive for this field and I also think it's made it less lonely.

It's much more interesting and enjoyable to work with other people and of course with technological innovations and communication with email and now more recently with Zoom, this kind of collaborative project is so much easier to do. So for example, and there are many examples I'm sure, but every week for two hours I read Gāndhārī texts with colleagues all over the world and so we can pursue our research objectives in collaboration with each other, with senior scholars joining with PhD students and sometimes even undergraduates in this endeavor. So this has been enormously productive I think.
 
Another thing I've noticed is that when I began, in terms of East Asia, and I think this is what Master Sheng Yen was referring to in his opening address to the 1990 conference—I was actually at the third one, so that was in 1997—but he lamented the insufficient attention given to academic Buddhist studies in Taiwan.

In those days, Japan was very much the epicenter of Buddhist studies in East Asia and it was regarded as a sort of standard career move for scholars in America and in Europe to go to Japan for additional training. So what I've seen in my own career is that Japan has moved away from the center of things and now with the development of academic Buddhist studies in Taiwan, more recently in the People's Republic of China and certainly Korea, which really was hardly known in those early days, Buddhist studies has become strong in all parts of East Asia and so that's been a very noticeable change and so Japan is no longer the destination of choice for people who want to work with their Asian colleagues.

So those are two of the things I've noticed in my own career, this sort of increasing internationalization of the field, the increasing reliance on technological innovation to support our work. I remember in 1991, I attended a conference at Hsi Lai Temple in Los Angeles, and at that conference I presented a paper in collaboration with a sinologist called W. South Coblin on an early translation of a Mahāyāna sutra by Lokakṣema, and this was a big deal because South and I had never met each other. We'd just written the paper together using letters and then email was just starting up then.
 
And so people thought this was a wonderful and novel thing that we should turn up to a conference having never seen each other face to face. Now of course this is quite standard, it's natural. Nobody would even comment on it.
 
So when I think about the future, I should mention one aspect of the more recent past, which is very important. As you probably know, in the United States we worry very much about the crisis in the humanities and support for the kind of things we do in a world which is becoming increasingly focused on material advantage, should we say, and the economic benefits of our study.
 
And so one of the things I've noticed, which is a significant change in our field, is how much the field has been supported by Asian foundations. The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, the Khyentse Foundation, even Dharma Drum Mountain has been part of this, and the Numata Foundation in Japan, the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai. So we in Buddhist studies have been extremely fortunate to have this financial support and encouragement, which has enabled our field to weather the increasing strains of academic fashion and government policy in the field of tertiary education. And I hope that continues and that our field will not shrink, but in fact continue to grow.
 
So that's been an extremely important development. As Professor Gimello said, it's very difficult to predict the future. Speaking of technology, one wonders where generative AI is going to take us. One already sees some of the effects of this on some of our students, who no longer want to put in the work on learning how to translate because AI could do it just as well, or so they think. So I am myself, being rather old-fashioned, concerned about this.
 
Another thing I've noticed in the past, and this is no doubt going to continue, is the move away from the almost exclusive focus on doctrine and philosophy and the study of texts. So this has been hugely consequential. The broadening of our scope of interest to study things like ritual, institutional economy, and all kinds of aspects of Buddhism as a lived religion, rather than focusing, as we used to, on the study of texts, on the study of ideas. And so I expect that to continue.
 
Am I worried about where Buddhist studies is going? I'd have to say no, because I look at the students, some of whom I've had the privilege to train myself, and some of whom have been trained by others, and often I am very impressed by the depth of their scholarship and by their commitment to the field. We have in our field some very clever, brilliant young people working on Buddhist studies, so I'm very much encouraged to see them and to hear them present at conferences. I'm happy to say that one or two of them are my own students, and that's great.

So I'm quite hopeful, but I think, again, the future is very difficult to predict, and we face a number of challenges, perhaps in the United States at the moment more than elsewhere, and we would be hard put to it, it would be difficult, to predict where those things would leave us, but I'm quite hopeful. 



Related articles: 

Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies (I)

Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies (II)