Gregory Schopen Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother
A few days ago, over at Barbara’s Buddhism Blog, author Barbara O’Brien offered a provocative post entitled “More Adventures in Mis-Education”. It was primarily a response to an article in UCLA Today about the 106th Faculty Research Lecture delivered by Gregory Schopen, chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the university. In that lecture, Schopen presented on some of his findings from studying Indian Buddhist epigraphy which suggest that “the predominant ideology [in early monasteries] was not…particularly ascetic, and certainly not averse to the accumulation of wealth.” Barbara took issue with this, referring to Schopen’s findings as “mis-education” and possibly “the dumbest explanation of Buddhism [she has] ever seen.” She went on to say:
- I take it that Schopen is something of a renegade scholar whose ideas are widely out of step with other Buddhist scholarship. That in itself doesn’t make him wrong. But when Schopen discusses the historical Buddha’s tax evasion strategies … well, the word crackpot does come to mind.
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- Historians put all of these things together and make educated guesses about the life of the Buddha and the original order of monks. There certainly is room for disagreement on many points. However, the only way Schopen could have come to his conclusion is to have cherry-picked evidence in a way so intellectually dishonest that it borders on pathology. Scratch that; it wades into pathology quite a distance.
I was a bit concerned about Barbara’s post for a couple of reasons. It must be said first, though, that I think Barbara is one of the very, very best Buddhist bloggers out there, and it’s my sincerest hope that this response will be constructive rather than critical. My intention in responding at length here is to be helpful, and what I don’t want to do is embarrass, offend, or be snarky. If, in spite of my aims, I do any of those latter things, it’s due to a lack of skill on my part.
First things first: though pretty much all of the content of the UCLA Today article jives with what I know about Schopen and his work, it’s important to acknowledge that we’re getting only pieces of a lecture through a journalistic lens here. Due respect to the author of the piece, an article about a lecture is not the lecture itself. It’s reasonable to assume, therefore, that there’s more nuance and information in the lecture itself.
The next thing to say is this: it is incorrect to characterize Schopen’s work as “widely out of step with other Buddhist scholarship.” In fact, the opposite is true. While Schopen’s extensive work (anthologized in the books Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India, and Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India: More Collected Papers) uses new data and offers fresh perspectives, it is being widely incorporated by his fellow scholars. It’s actually getting hard to find a current, respectable book about Buddhist history and culture that is not at least somewhat informed by Schopen’s work. (For example, Buddhist Religions: A Historical Introduction, the latest edition of the field’s “gold standard,” is very much post-Schopen–just take a look at the bibliography.)
Why has Schopen been so influential? For one thing, he has produced and continues to produce invaluable research about the “donative inscriptions” from excavation sites in formerly Buddhist India. This research comes after years of study and erudition: as the University of Chicago’s Dan Arnold noted in his review of Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks for Philosophy East and West, Schopen’s efforts have required, “among other things, a rare expertise across the range of Middle Indic dialects.” Such intense, well-informed analysis of early epigraphical data is unprecedented in modern Buddhist Studies. Furthermore, the findings, based on scrutinizing all this hard archaeological evidence, have had incredibly important implications: as Arnold points out, Schopen’s work has prompted “significant revision in thought regarding the development of Mahāyāna and regarding the role of the monastic religious in Buddhist cultic life.” He continues:
- Schopen has presented compelling evidence, for example, that it was in fact monks and nuns who sponsored the kinds of practices typically associated with the rise of Mahāyāna — a conclusion that counters the long-unchallenged view that it was Buddhist laypeople who initiated this movement. It would be good indeed if such conclusions, as well as the exemplary scholarship that warrants them, were to have influence in proportion to their originality and importance.
In addition to offering vital new facts to the field, Schopen has underscored the importance of including findings from archaeologists, art historians, and others in a discipline that has been heavily text-oriented. His work has also forced Buddhologists to ask important questions about the history drawn from the texts they have leaned on. As Australian National University’s John Powers said in his review of Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks for the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies:
- …Schopen’s [central] contention [is] that much of the received knowledge in Buddhist Studies derives from textual sources composed by small and unrepresentative groups of scholar-monks, whose works may have had little or no impact on early Buddhist communities.
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- Schopen argues that archaeological remains and inscriptions provide much clearer evidence of the sort of practices in which early Buddhist communities actually engaged, and he shows how these sources often directly contravene many of the core assumptions that scholars of Buddhism have derived from texts. But Schopen’s conclusion is even stronger than this; he argues that “there appears to be…no actual evidence that the textual ideal was ever fully or even partially implemented in actual practice,” and so attempts to discern the actual practices of early Indian Buddhist communities that rely exclusively on textual sources are fundamentally flawed.
All of this is really just a long way of saying that I think we need to have a healthy humility before the work of Buddhist scholars. Sure, they’re going to discover things that burst our idealistic bubbles, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It strikes me that we as modern Buddhist pracitioners can listen to and learn from findings like those of Schopen’s, and then proceed with a better sense of what in our traditions can be changed and what we should take great care to preserve. It’s a matter of perspective: to borrow some terms from Lama John Makransky, the academic study of Buddhism doesn’t have to present us with just problematics, but it can offer possibilites as well.
All of that said, it must be acknowledged that there are still limits to what we can know for sure about the character of early Buddhism. Scholars can and do overreach, and sometimes put too cynical a spin on their findings. And I also think that whenever scholars or practitioners put things in “either/or” terms, they’re probably on the wrong track. Like all great religions, Buddhism has been made up of a pretty fascinating collection of individuals and communities. (Which is one reason why I think my old prof Reggie Ray is quite right indeed, for example, to advocate in his book Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations that we speak of early Buddhism as being comprised of at least three groups: the laity, the monastics involved in local politics and economics, and the forest renunciants devoted to practice. We can’t say all early Buddhists were moguls and power-brokers, and we can’t say they were all pure practitioners either.)
So, let’s listen to and learn from Schopen, who has put in a mind-boggling amount of hard work so that we all might better understand the history of Buddhism. Let’s find the possibilities. As the great Rita M. Gross says in the latest issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly:
- All forms of Buddhism can welcome historical study as relevant and useful. Buddhist teachings have always told us that impermanence is a great, unalterable fact of our experience and that it is crucial for us to become comfortable with that fact. History is simply the study of how things change and develop, which is to say that history studies changing institutions and ideas. History studies impermanence, including the impermanent characteristic of Buddhist institutions, practices, philosophical systems, and sacred narratives.
- Some practitioners claim that historical knowledge is irrelevant to them because they only want to meditate. But without knowledge of Buddhism’s rich and diverse history, practitioners and communities are vulnerable to fundamentalism and sectarianism. They assume that sacred narratives and legends are composed of historical facts and that the familiar stories found in their specific Buddhist tradition should be taken literally. Those accounts often contain a sectarian edge. They claim special relevance—based on tales of miraculous accomplishments—for the texts and teachers associated with a specific Buddhist tradition. While asserting superiority for their favorite form of Buddhism, these tales denigrate other forms of Buddhism.
