There Is No Gap - Reflections Following A Panel Honoring Luis Gomez at The Academy of American Religion

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There is no gap. -
Dogen Zenji
A blog by Karl Pohrt, an Independent Bookseller, about books, the world of books and other things.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Reflections following a panel honoring Luis Gomez at the Academy of American Religion
In 1978, during the winter term, I signed up for a graduate course in Comparative Religion at the University of Michigan. Seminar 404: Language and Religious Expl"ession was team taught by the anthropologist Skip Rappaport, New Testament professor Jack Bailey, and Luis
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Gomez, a Buddhologist. Each week a scholar representing a different religion would speak about the relationship of that tradition to the Word (linguistic behavior, language). Maybe ten students and as many professors attended the class meetings, and the speakers pitched their lectures to the other faculty members. As I recall, the students felt at sea most of the time, but if you found this sort of thing engaging, it was an extraordinary seminar. That class was the most exciting intellectual experience I had in higher education. What we were talking about seemed extremely important to me at the time, and there were moments when I felt as if I was getting close to answering something existential and very personal. I was especially fascinated by Two Buddhist Approaches to Language, a lecture Professor Gomez gave on February 22, 1978. In precise, slightly accented English, he calmly described religious ideas different from anything I had heard before. I kept the following notes, which I reread every few years: The Mayan creation myth in the Popo/
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Vuh states that before names were invented, everything was motionless, like the sky. There was something before the Word that was not necessarily chaotic, which is very Buddhist
Buddhism developed in India during an era in which Indians were becoming self critical-the Axial Age of humanity. There was a shift from ritual purity to morality of the heart. The cult of the Word implies magic and power, which runs counter to Buddhism. To analyze the world in terms of language is not Buddhist Buddhism is concerned with the limitations of language. Buddhism is analytical and critical. It is a philosophy ofsuspicion and criticism that mistrusts conventional ways of thinking. Meditation is its primary toof.-not conceptual thought Meditation is a kind of contemplative analysis whose ultimate purpose is integration. Buddhism is primarily religious-not theoretical. It attempts to dismantle the ego, which is not the same as proposing the annihilation of the substantial self. It proposes the elimination of a language concept-''me'; ''mine''-which humans reify with words. The notion that there is a substance called ''myself'' leads to
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suffering. Buddhists argue that existence is characterized by three things: Impermanence, Sorrow and No Self. Buddhists believe that language is a primary force in the formation of illusory ideas because words give a non-existent permanence to things. Language is a symptom and a tool of our desire for permanence. Without words there would be no fancy (imagination). The coordination of imagination with words creates desire and is the root of our attachment to the illusion ofpermanence. The tension between our desire for permanence and the non-permanent nature of reality causes sorrow (duhka). Language is an instrument that increases sorrow. It is a snare that binds people to human suffering. How is liberation possible? 1. Get calm: Stop the process of concept formation, stop the chatter of the mind. 2. Insight: Discover the true nature of things. Scholastic Buddhism creates a surrogate language-a metalanguage-in an attempt to allow us to speak while avoiding the pitfalls of language. The self
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is referred to in a diachronic context (in time) as a series. The self is seen synchronically, as an aggregate. Instead ofsaying ''/ want'; you would say ''series
wants'~
According to the Madhyamika school (and its founder Nagarjuna), this surrogate language just creates new illusiory concepts. The Mahayana (Great Vehicle) tradition emphasizes silence: "The Buddha has gone beyond all paths ofspeech. " Words are all tools of delusion because they imply permanence and definiteness. All words are empty. They contain nothing. Nagarjuna applies the traditional Buddhist distrust of conventional language to Buddhist doctrine itself. The word "empty" is a metalinguistic term Nagarjuna uses to refer to the realm of language. Language results in reification and grasping. True nature is the absence of true nature. The only acceptable view is silence. Other schools of Buddhism are fond of constructing complex religious languages. The most ritualistic form of Buddhism is Tantra, a movement or complex of closely associated phenomena based on the mechanistic principle that ritual effects order and control within man. It doesn't,
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however, lead to communication with a deity. Tantric ritual leads to control over or identification with spiritual forces and ultimately to an identity with emptiness. The final defeat ofgrasping and conceptualization is silence. We are in the presence of a paradox because the Tantric path is a magician's path. It is a path of the Word. Tantra identifies Three Mysteries -Thought, Speech and Bodily Action. These are manifested through iconsVisions for Thought, Spells for Speech ana Symbolic Gestures for Bodily Action. So silence has a language, a symbolic structure. There are three kinds ofspells: 1. Mantra: This is a process spell It gives visualization movement It is constructed independently of natural language. 2. Bfja: A one syllable spell used in visualizations. 3. Dharani: Strings of meaningless words used to induce a certain mental state before meditation. These spells stand for the absolute reality of emptiness. To know and use them is to know and use emptiness.
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Nagarjuna asked what sort of human attitudes and behaviors would result from this view of emptiness. Emptiness is a critique of conventional reality. Reality is the class ofall our conceptions about the world. The conventional realm is essential as a means of manifesting. Emptiness is a way ofseeing, using, speaking. The Buddha is a magician. Only he knows illusion for what it is. Although all words are lies and all conceptions are illusions, some words point to the Absolute. In the Zen tradition, Buddhism is congenial with Daoism. The Daoist style is characterized by four things, all of which are related: 1. Paradox: The dialectical nature of religious language. Religious language is dynamic. It dashes back and forth between affirmation and denial. 2. Metaphor: The transcendent nature of religious language. 3. Shock: The transformative nature of religious language. 4. Silence. The koan method in Zen uses language
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as a means ofrevelation. Vimalakirti was asked, "What is non-duality (Emptiness)?" He remained silent, implying that all words distort reality. To use meditation as an imitation of silence is a false practice because you are imitating the static model of a corpse. Although the Mumonkan (The Gate/ess Gate, a koan collection) implies that both speech and silence transgress, there is a need for words in a methodology of liberation. This is a problem for Zen Buddhists. If words are lies and silence is a lie, what then should we say? Are koans capricious denials of discursive thought that force the mind to a standstill? No. They are specific words ofsilence. The goal is to stop reification and grasping. To sum up, Buddhism develops a philosophical critique of everyday language and then develops religious metalanguages. It uses some of these metalanguages to induce a vision of ultimate reality. The encounter with the Ultimate stands outside of language, outside of image and analogy. Buddhism is a leap into the inconceivable.
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My notes end with some questions posed by the audience: What is meant by the Buddhist notion of illusion? How can we operate in a world 01 illusion? How can compassion be compatible with emptiness? And a final sentence, which I think was Luis' response to the last question: To bow before emptiness has meaning and is morally transforming.
***
I'm certain my vivid memories of that class are also connected to an event that occurred late in the semester. Early that spring, as I was about to enter our classroom building, I came on a small group of people standing over the body of a medical student who had jumped from a high tower on central campus moments earlier. This happened during one of the busiest moments on central campus, just as many students were changing class. They didn't seem to notice what had happened, and just walked past us. Someone had thrown a jacket over the
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man's head and upper body. A police car screeched to a halt and four officers jumped out. One of them asked us to step back and a police photographer began snapping pictures of the dead man. I was horrified by the objectification of the dead man by the photographer, and I had the overwhelming sense that this man's passage from life to death should be honored by some sort of action-a prayer or a chant of some kind. I felt the gift of life itself was compromised here, and I imagined that one might say something that would mitigate the vulgarity of this moment. But I didn't know what to do. I was mute. So I walked into the class room to hear a lecture on language and religious expression. Over the next few months, I told various clergy I knew about what had happened and how I'd reacted. I asked them what they would have done. I think my question embarrassed them. Maybe they just didn't know what to say. These were all good people, but they had been trained in seminaries that stressed social justice issues. I started a meditation practice under the guidance of a Zen teacher shortly after these conversations.
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***
According to many scholars Luis Gomez created the best academic program in Buddhist Studies in the country over the past forty years. In 1980 I started a bookshop near the central campus of the University of Michigan. Luis was one of my good customers and he became my friend. Fifteen years ago he got interested in psychoanalysis. He earned another doctorate degree, becoming a licensed clinical psychologist, while at the same time continuing to direct the Buddhist Studies program. He retired from the University of Michigan a year ago and moved to Mexico City, where he now mentors graduate students at the University of Mexico, sees clients as a therapist and teaches in a Dharma Center there. He occasionally leads groups on tours of Tibet. On Saturday, November 1, Luis Gomez was honored for his contribution to the field of Buddhist Studies at the annual conference of the Academy of American Religion in Chicago. I took the train from Ann Arbor to attend the program, which was entitled From San Juan to
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Sukhavati: Reflections on Buddhist Studies and the Career of Luis O. Gomez. It was held at 9:00 a.m. in a conference room at the Chicago Hilton that seated around two hundred people by my count. It was filled.
Luis' former student Reiko Ohnuma (Dartmouth College) moderated a panel that included two other former students, Sandy Huntington (Hartwick College) and Bob Sharf (University of california, Berkley), along with Roger lackson (Carleton College), who was a Visiting Professor in the Buddhist Studies Program at Michigan in 1984. Charles Hallisey (Harvard University), a colleague of Luis', and Donald Lopez, the current director of the program at Michigan, also spoke.
Reiko Ohnuma began with a short recap of Luis' career. He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico in 1963, completed his PhD at Yale in 1967 and joined the U of M faculty in 1973. He founded the PhD program in Buddhist Studies there, which is grounded in language studies. Graduate Students are expected to master the four canonical languages of Buddhism-Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Tibetan-and also have a working knowledge of Japanese. Roger lackson spoke about coming to
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the U of M as a visiting professor from the University of Wisconsin in 1984, shortly after receiving his degree. He told us he had been taught in graduate school that Buddhist Studies was not a seminary program, but Luis reminded him shortly after he arrived in Ann Arbor that the attempt to compartmentalize is foolish. "Buddhism is the active and compassionate manifestation of No Self, and it has the most to say, is most useful, about the subject of self deception," he said. "Luis understands that Buddhist Studies must take post modernity seriously and acknowledge the fragility of theological reflection, that truth is based in the local and has a foundation that isn't absolute, is eternally ambiguous."
Sandy Huntington began by saying he was going to talk about talking about talking about the practice of Buddhism. He told us he is suspicious of the way Buddhist scholars use their tools and methods. All too often these methods function as a kind of posture to elevate the position of the scholar (whose actual role should be that of the custodian of a cultural artifact) and to undermine the authority of the traditions he or she examines.
"We want the power to speak
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authoritatively about the Buddhist tradition, but we don't want to take responsibility for undermining the authority of the tradition," he said. He ended by posing two questions to his former teacher: "What responsibility do Buddhist scholars have to the Buddhist tradition? How can Buddhist scholars honor these obligations?"
Bob Sharf used the way scholars approached the Sudden and Gradual debate in Chinese Buddhism to offer a critical analysis of postmodern theory and its influence on Buddhist Studies, and he discussed the tension between the historicist/genealogical critique and religious/existential concerns. Charles Hallisey commented that Gomez's work challenged scholars of Buddhism to read Buddhist scriptures more carefully. Scholars should be more self-conscious about their reading practices, he said.
"We need to get better at reading Buddhist texts. We should be constantly alert to the culturally authorized way we receive texts," he told the audience. "How should we read texts that are many dimensioned?"
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Donald Lopez ended the panelists' session by describing the history of Buddhist Studies in America. He charted the changes in the field over the past four decades, citing Luis' influence in shaping those changes, and he complemented him on training "a remarkable group of graduate students," the next generation of scholars. He announced that Gomez' translations of Buddhist texts will appear next year in the Norton Anthology of World Religion. Luis Gomez closed the meeting by thanking the panelists for their thoughtful remarks and responded to their comments:
"A scholar who thinks he is a Buddhist is a Buddhist. After all, an identity is something you take. How does a person imagine himself to be a Buddhist and a scholar, or a priest and an anti-priest, to quote Sandy? Why are you doing what you're doing? What is the purpose of doing what you're doing? What does it mean to be a Buddhist who is looking critically at the Buddhist tradition?" "Human behavior is all about roles. If we can understand what this means on a deeper level, our work will be more valuable. When we imagine another person, we have to construct a view of
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what it is to be human." "Perhaps methodology reinforces the impulse that scholars shouldn't be too kind, that we need to be suspicious. There may be an eagerness to find fault." He suggested that scholars should commit to describing two opposing intelligent positions different from their own every time they propose an explanation. "The reason for doing this is not so much about intelligence as it is about being human." In terms of debates about the local/partial vs. general/universal principles, he reminded us that we are always working with the local and the fragmentary. "Each passage of a Buddhist text could be a complete Buddhism in itself. What we have before us with all the various texts is a constellation with lots of overlap." Gomez mentioned Buddhologist Gregory Schopen, who invites scholars to look at what is puzzling in texts. Gomez reminded everyone not to forget that we ourselves are also puzzling. Regarding the subject of open readings and rereadings, Gomez mentioned recently listening to a tape of Don
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Quixote as he drove to work across Mexico City.

"I didn't understand Don Quixote, a book I've reread many times, until now," he told us. Luis ended by proposing four aspirational principles of scholarship
1. The rule of Translation: I haven't

adequately translated a text until I can say in my own words what it means. 2. The rule of Communication: I should be able to explain something in words that are moderately transparent. 3. The rule of Empathy: I should cultivate a loving quality regarding alternate interpretations. The other person has reasons and motivations just like mine, as human as mine, but different preferences, preferences that may be completely different from mine. 4. The rule of Uncertainty: I should review and revise my work constantly. Certainty is a kind of arrogance. After the panel Luis invited me to join him, his wife Lulu, Sandy Huntington, Bob Sharf, Roger Jackson and Reiko Ohmuna for lunch in the hotel restaurant. This was a chance for me to meet Lulu and to catch up with Bob and Sandy, both of whom I hadn't seen in a while.
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That evening I attended a reception honoring Luis at the Palmer House. I left early because the room was too crowded and I was tired.
***
Before I left for Chicago, I pulled out my final exam paper for the 1978 Seminar in Comparative Religion. I had written an essay critical of theories of religious language, citing Kierkegaard's argument in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript that religious truth is located in the realm of subjective experience. I feel distant now from thinking about these things. It's been a long time since I've read Kierkegaard, but over the years I've moved farther along this logical trajectory or continuum. These days I care less about abstract ideas. Instead, I find myself moved by a vivid turn of phrase in a book or certain kinds of weather or certain people I see in the street. Facing into the dazzle of daily experience is enough. Luis Gomez was one of a small number of people who pOinted me in this direction and broke open a new world for me. Nine deep bows in his direction.
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Posted by Karl at 11:18 AM
1 COMMENTS:
Douglas said.
thanks for that, Karl. Gomez is a hero of mine, but I wasn't able to make it to the AAR last november. Now I feel like I've had the next best thing. Doug Osto
January 3, 2009 11:35 AM Post a Comment Newer Post Home Older Post
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There Is No Gap - Reflections Following A Panel Honoring Luis Gomez at The Academy of American Religion

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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

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