Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies (II)

(Photo: Lee Fan 李東陽)

Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies (II)

Professor Robert Gimello and Professor Paul Harrison responded to questions from the audience and reminded those interested in Buddhist studies to relearn how to read Buddhist scriptures slowly. Through close reading and careful reflection on texts, one may encounter unexpected and intriguing insights, which can in turn open new directions for research.

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 510


Prof. Robert Gimello:
We must learn to read Buddhist texts slowly rather than rush through them in the way in which technology now allows us to rush through them. We should do what the scholars of yesteryear did and spend a whole year, if necessary, on one text, reading it very slowly, pondering it page by page.

Prof. Robert Gimello: 
I'm glad that Professor Harrison mentioned the great advantages that are now available to us through the use of computers, through accomplishments like CBETA. It has made life for scholars of Buddhism, at least for scholars of East Asian Buddhism, much easier, but it has also placed great responsibility on our shoulders. It is so easy now to navigate through the Tripitaka that, in a sense, we are expected to know everything.
 
In the past, when we had to page laboriously through printed editions of the canon, there would be, for example, passages in other texts related to the text we were studying that we simply did not know about. Now we're expected to know about all of them. That's a boon, a gift, but it is also a somewhat heavier responsibility than those responsibilities we had to shoulder when I was younger.  
 
But I must confess, I'm grateful to it. When I was here teaching in Beitou, I purchased my own copy of the Tripitaka and the Supplement to the Tripitaka and had them shipped back to the United States. They now sit in my library. Occasionally I take them off the shelf and page through them, but most often I rely on CBETA and other advantages that technology has gifted us with. I'm sure technological advancement will be an important part of the future of Buddhism, and I, in a sense, welcome that, but there's something about sitting down with a book in the quiet of one's study and reading it page by page, the way scholars did in olden days, that we may miss.

So I hope that will not be lost in the future of Buddhist studies, this careful page by page attention to the text we read before, as so often happens, at least in the United States, before jumping off into theoretical ranges of interpretation that take us away from what the texts actually say to us. We're so busy to interpret texts sometimes, in the light of modern, often Western categories, that we don't tether ourselves to the text itself often enough. That means in part that I hope philology, the field of Buddhist studies in which Professor Harrison excels, will always be a very important part of Buddhist studies.
Prof. Paul Harrison:
I'd like to add something to that. If you look in the program, you'll see a photograph of me, and behind me is obviously a copy of the Taisho. Unlike Professor Gimello, I'm referring to the volumes practically every day because I'm, as I said, old-fashioned and I love paper. I do not like to read texts on the screen, if I can help it. That copy of the Taisho that you see in the photograph was gifted to me by an anonymous Taiwanese donor, whose name I do not know. I'm immensely grateful for that gift, which has supported my scholarship all these years. I do not know who that person is, but perhaps they might be watching, so I would like to thank you very much for that amazing act of generosity, which has supported my work.

The problem, and just to add to what Professor Gimello just said, with searchable canons is that, and I can see this in some of my students, it can accentuate a kind of tunnel vision. That is to say, you look for a particular term, and you find all the occurrences, and then you focus on them. And that is fine, but you lose something in the process. And I see this with some graduate students.

In the old days, and I think particularly of the greats in our field, they read the whole text. They didn't just look for the occurrences of a single word or term. And so when you think of the encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition, it was because they could not search for terms. They had to read the whole text. And so there's a great deal to be said for reading things that you're not looking for and finding all kinds of interesting material that you then might look into more deeply.

So all these technological innovations make our work so much easier, but they also present challenges to what we're doing. And I think we should keep that in mind when we're training future students in the field. Yes, Buddhism is lofty and deep, but also very broad. And people need to study widely as well as deeply.
  Prof. Robert Gimello: 
I thank you especially for that. Perhaps I can just add a small codicil to what Professor Harrison said. I think we ought to encourage, and this I think is part of what he was implying, we must learn to read Buddhist texts slowly rather than rush through them in the way in which technology now allows us to rush through them. We should do what the scholars of yesteryear did and spend a whole year, if necessary, on one text, reading it very slowly, pondering it page by page.

I remember that when I was in graduate school, I had the opportunity for a couple of years to do that. And it made all the difference to me. To sit down with a senior scholar and just read the text together from cover to cover. Scholarship in the modern technologically advanced university does not always encourage or even allow that. Prof. Lin Chen-Kuo:
Before we come to the dialogue with our audience, I would like to have some response to Professors' talk. When we start to talk about the future, Professor Gimello is overwhelmed. It's very difficult to predict the future. Then Professor Gimello tried to bring back the past, the experience, the visit in Beitou, etc. That reminds me, in the beginning of your presentation, you cite from T.S. Eliot. One of the citations is that Eliot said that "the future is in the past." I think that's a good footnote. I bring up the citation again in this conversation. In order to envision the possible future, it's very important to come back to our past.

Then we move to the topic of technology because that is related to the future. Then we talk about Taisho and CBETA. That reminds me of one experience. In 2000, I visited Leiden. I organized a small conference, a workshop, on Yogacara Buddhism in China. One of our participants from Dharma Drum Mountain brought CBETA and demonstrated the function of CBETA for the first time in Europe. I still can remember vividly the scholars in the conference, like Tilmann Vetter and Lambert Schmithausen. They were so surprised. They tried to figure out how to use that technology.

Of course, if we want to come to the philosophical part of technology, I think last year there was a new book. The title was "I, Yantra." I don't know whether you have come across that title. Yantra means a robot in India. In Chinese, it's translated as "機關木人", meaning ancient robot. It's very interesting because when we read, for example, Nagarjuna, in his Vigrahavyāvartanī, the short treatise, at the end of the text, he said, "what is the meaning of emptiness? If everything and everyone is empty, how can communication be possible?" Nagarjuna said, well, it's just like the interaction, the talk between robot and another robot. He used that idea of Yantra—robot, to demonstrate the Buddhist, the Mahayana philosophy.

Back to the issue of technology, after that conference, since I supervised a research team, I visited Europe, particularly when we visited Hamburg, to see Professor Schmithausen. As you know, Professor Schmithausen is a very solid philologist, particularly in his masterpiece, Ālayavijñāna, two volumes. He does handmade research to pick out all kinds of textual evidence. One of our young team members asked him: "Perhaps in your research you miss one piece of textual evidence." I still remember Professor Schmithausen, how he answered: "Oh, well, young man, when I start my research, I use my hand to put all kinds of notes, pile them up, in order to work on one project.”

So unlike nowadays, young scholars use CBETA, or DharmaMitra—so convenient, just one second. It's very different.

In Indian tradition, technology is one of five vidyā, five sciences, five kinds of sciences. So in terms of the future, I think we as a senior generation, of course we will be very hesitant toward this new situation. But, as I just mentioned, it could be also enlightening, just like Nagarjuna used the idea of a robot. Audience Q&A Session

Audience Question 1: Have your academic work and research ever had a tangible impact on the religious lives of any individuals or communities?
  I'm not sure if my work is, I don't know, I'm blanking on examples of how my work has impacted the lived religion of practitioners. I've certainly appreciated very much living and working alongside practitioners. And one experience that I treasure very much is when I worked in Tabo for two consecutive years, living at the monastery and working on the manuscript collection there, side by side with the monks. So that had a certain effect on them insofar as they were trying to preserve a collection of manuscripts, which if I remember rightly, totaled about 35,000 pages, completely randomized. There had been several attempts to destroy the collection by outside forces, and then after the invaders had left, the monks retrieved what they could from the bonfire and brought them back in and just piled them up in the dukhang (assembly hall) of that monastery.

So our work was to sort of put all that back in order, and that was a very interesting experience. I don't have time to go into the details, but just living in the monastery, no electricity, just the opening in the ceiling so that we could work by day, surrounded by amazing, wonderful 16th century wall paintings of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. That was one of the most intense experiences of my life, and actually seeing the life of the monastery going on around us, and the life of the laity in that village.

There was one old gentleman who was doing circumambulation of the monastery precincts every day, and so we would actually watch Buddhism in action as we were embedded in the middle of it, doing our scholarly work. But I can't say that that had an effect on their devotions or on their practice, but it was certainly a very powerful experience, and I think that you were gesturing in this direction. It's very important that students of Buddhism actually do not just study in libraries, but they get out into the field and live with Buddhist practitioners and see how the religion works in real life. That's what I would say. Prof. Robert Gimello:
I would add to that that there are many monastics in the Taiwanese-Chinese Buddhist community who have traveled, for example, to Europe to study and even earn advanced degrees under people like Professor Schmithausen. They have not left the Sangha. They return to Taiwan and continue living not only as scholars, lecturing in universities, but also as monks and nuns.

I do not have privileged access to the personal lives of those people, but I think that they have somehow found a way to study in an academic environment while also continuing and advancing their religious lives as monks. They must see some connection between scholarship and their own religious lives. Audience Question 2: What is it, ultimately, that makes Buddhism so compelling that it has inspired you to continue devoting yourselves to this long journey up to the present day? Prof. Paul Harrison:
Where I come from, the Maori, who are the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand, have a proverb which goes, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata." It's the people, it's the people, it's the people.

So, one of the points that I forgot to make about my path through Buddhist studies is that this field is sufficiently small that you can know practically everybody in it, often on a first-name basis. And so one of the reasons that I've found the study of Buddhism so satisfying is that it has resulted in many friendships, both with members of the Sangha and also with other scholars, some of whom are Buddhist and some of whom are not. And so that's one of the things that has lifted me up, so to speak.
 
But in terms of Buddhism itself, which I think is the nub of your question, I think it must differ for all of us, but I love to solve problems. And I think when I was very small, I used to love doing jigsaw puzzles. And as I said, Buddhist tradition is so vast, and it generates so many interesting problems that demand a solution, particularly with philological work, which is what I do mostly, there are many questions that still need to be answered. And I just find it enormously satisfying to grapple with those questions, to try to answer them.
 
And given that the tradition is so broad and so complicated in certain parts of itself, there's no end of problems to solve and, of course, I will probably not be able to solve even the ones I've picked out for myself, to look at. So, that that for me is part of its endless fascination. And also its, as I said before, its profundity is really deeply inspiring as well to engage with these questions.

Although I was intending to be a classical scholar, I realized that the problem the classics addresses have been gone over again and again by previous generations. That's not true for Buddhist studies. There is still a great deal of material out there which has not been addressed properly. So, that's partly what makes it so interesting to me. Prof. Robert Gimello:
If part of what you were asking was, how did we come to take up the study of Buddhism? What attract it does to us? In my case, it had something to do with my admiration for people who were studying Buddhism, whom I regarded as intellectually profound scholars, also devoutly religious persons, who somehow found in their own lives a value in their study of Buddhism. These were Christians—my teachers when I was an undergraduate. One was a priest, one was a Chinese convert to Buddhism became a very devout Catholic. They told me they exemplified for me a kind of model of combining one's own religious life with the respectful, serious, responsible study of Buddhism. They found it valuable for themselves. I admire them, and I was led by their example to venture into that kind of academic career. Prof. Lin Chen-Kuo:
As a moderator of this section, I think the most painful job is to say time is up. Although according to Buddhism, time is not real. But still, you know, time is up.
By concluding, I think all of us work on Buddhism texts, doctrinal texts. I spent lots of time on that. I would like to say that, in addition to those very difficult and very complicated doctrinal texts, we should also read "Biographies of Eminent Monks". And that can bring us to experience in everyday.

So we are very happy to learn from your biographical experience, and some of that related to this conference, particularly, both professors attended the early Chung-Hwa Conference of Buddhist Studies in the early nineties. So I think that's mysterious to come back and to gather together and to have a talk. So I really appreciate it. I enjoyed our talk. Thank you.



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Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies (I)

Envisioning the Future of Buddhist Studies (II)