Grand Entretien : Stephen F. Teiser

Becoming a Researcher on Buddhism, From an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Hou Xiaoming: How would you refer to yourself as a researcher? Do you call yourself a Buddhologist, historian, sinologist, or another? And why?

Stephen F. Teiser: Because academic disciplines all have a history, a time and a place, how I describe myself largely depends on the audience and context. If the context is the United States, for instance, I teach in a department of Religious studies, but I also work in a program of East Asian studies. My university does not have a particular track of Buddhist studies; instead, it is included under Religious studies. The situation is quite different in China, which lacks a tradition of religious studies per se, nor does it have a long tradition of Buddhist studies. Therefore, my closest colleagues in China are historians or scholars of literature. The French tradition is quite close to that of the United States. The French tradition, crystallized here in the Cinquième section, was begun before the American tradition. In many ways, the academic study of religion was born in Europe (Germany, England, France), and we Americans are essentially its “younger cousin.” Hence, I don’t experience cognitive dissonance when moving from one European or Western setting to another, but it is quite different when I speak to colleagues in China. The situation is also different in Japan, where Buddhist studies is part of Indogaku bukkyōgaku (印度学仏教学, Indian studies and Buddhist studies). Most of my training was in sinology and history, but I also have great appreciation for the grand tradition of Buddhist studies, which focuses on the translation of texts and ideas from Indic languages to other languages. I don’t pursue that tradition myself (my Indic language abilities are not that strong), but I do venerate that tradition because I think it’s very important.

HX: As we know the establishment of CEIB stresses interdisciplinary research. We also talked about the subject divisions in different countries, so how do you think the interdisciplinary study is doing at the moment in the field of Buddhist studies? Do you think it is interdisciplinary enough? How do you think these division of subjects and traditions of scholarship in these different countries have influenced Buddhist Studies that we have now?

ST: I am a little bit old fashioned and a little bit avant garde at the same time. On one hand, I believe very strongly that everyone needs a foundation in a discipline. It takes a long time to be trained to develop research habits, research abilities, and writing skills in one discipline or another: a historical one, a literary one, a philosophical one, a sociological one, and so on. Those are all different disciplines with different histories, literatures, theoretical concepts, vocabularies that need to be mastered, and no one could learn all of them at once. Everyone needs to learn one discipline in order to write a dissertation and earn a Ph.D. At the same time, while learning one discipline, everyone also needs to be in conversation with people in other disciplines. Eventually, our goal should be to become interdisciplinary, combining more than one discipline, but based on the mastery of one discipline first.

About the Centre d’études interdisciplinaire sur le Bouddhisme, I believe that France is the ideal place for such a center because so many different disciplines are available here to be brought to bear on Buddhist studies. For instance, Professor Ji Zhe 汲喆 is a sociologist and an anthropologist and Professor Jean-Noël Robert works in Buddhist studies and literature. That’s just an example of some of the disciplines. The center here in Paris is situated ideally to bring together all these disciplines for discussions, joint projects, and exposure to different disciplinary approaches. One more thing: it is really great that the center here is being launched by professor Ji, as a specialist in contemporary Buddhism, because the methods we use to study Buddhism are diverse and the Buddhisms that we study are also quite different. It is important for historians who look at Buddhism in the past to talk to scholars working on modern and contemporary Buddhism, and vice versa. It is also important for people who work on modern and contemporary topics to understand something about history. For me, CEIB is an ideal mechanism to further these kinds of conversation in the future.

HX: You talked about how scholars who work on Buddhism in the past and scholars who work on contemporary Buddhism need to have more conversation. How do you think the study of contemporary Buddhism can contribute to our understanding of Buddhism in the past and vice versa?

ST: I think there are many ways; I will focus on two that come to mind. One, I saw very early in my career the importance of looking beyond texts and beyond the canon even when we are limited to the canon and the texts. If we follow canonical Buddhist sources and we examine, for instance, annual celebrations and festivals, we would think that Buddhists, following canonical teachings, are calm, staid, and strictly “Buddhists”. But if we focus on the practice of Buddhism and take our cue from contemporary Buddhism, we see a much livelier, messier picture where Buddhism is fully engaged in temple ritual life, cycles of season festivals, and so forth. We also find many people visiting Buddhist temples who are not strictly Buddhists. This point is brought home to anyone who spends time in Buddhist cultures, whether in mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, or Tibetan diaspora communities. Across the globe, you see vibrant, less exclusive forms of practice. If we only followed what we read in Zhiyi 智顗’s meditation manuals or if we only considered Buddhism as portrayed in the Gaoseng zhuan 高僧傳 (Biographies of Eminent Monks), we would have only a partial view. So, looking at religion as its practiced nowadays is a helpful reminder to be suspicious. Several generations of scholars have been alert to the need to be at least in conversation between past models and contemporary historians and anthropologists. At the same time, we can’t simply take the present and read it entirely into the past. However, there is at least a disciplined way of doing that.

HX: In terms of your own research experience, what are your most frustrating moments?

ST: Gaining access to manuscripts and to certain field sites is very challenging. But I have been fortunate to work with kind and generous colleagues across the world, beginning in France with “l’équipe de Dunhuang”: Professor Soymié and his successor Jean-Pierre Drège always shared their resources and welcomed me into their team. The first time I read the Menshikov catalogue of Dunhuang manuscripts, not yet translated into Chinese, was when I was in Paris, and Professor Zhang Guangda 張廣達 came to my rescue. He was a visiting scholar at that point, and he translated from the Russian into French for me. Scholars all over the world have always been kind and helpful; but still, getting access to manuscripts is not easy. It can be particularly difficult in Japan, where many manuscripts are held in temples and treated as treasure (with good reason, of course).

There are also field sites in China where local scholars who were the pioneers in documenting and protecting the sites have been extremely helpful. One story in particular: Beginning in 1999, I joined a research team composed of six American and six Chinese scholars. The three-year project, organized by Professor Sarah Fraser (now at Heidelberg University), was funded by the Luce Foundation. We worked together in different sites in western China, mostly in Gansu and Sichuan provinces. The first year we conducted research in Chongqing and Sichuan, where I was interested in representations of Dizang and the underworld at Dazu, Baoding shan. One of my colleagues, Ding Mingyi丁明夷, a professor at Shijie Zongjiao Yanjiusuo世界宗教研究所, part of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, told me that in Kizil (Xinjiang) there was another representation of the wheel of rebirth. The painting had never been published before, but he had seen it ten years earlier in the course of an archeological expedition. It was a very small painting, less than one square meter. If not for Professor Ding, I might never have known about the painting. It took me another two years to get to that part of Xinjiang, and it took me a couple of days to gain access to that particular cave. But when I did, I found exactly what he had described: a small, faint painting, less than one square meter, depicting two wheels of rebirth. So, those are some of the most challenging moments—but also some of the most enjoyable and rewarding.

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Although writing academic prose is surely different than creating fiction, each chapter still needs to have a plot. Each essay and book we write has to use a limited number of concepts. We shape our work through a master narrative. Good academic writing is much bigger, stronger and more interesting than simply presenting a report on what the text says or how our sources use language and construct images.

Stephen F. Teiser

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HX: You have shared of some of the challenges you faced when collecting materials, what are some of the challenges you faced when analyzing materials that you can share with us?

ST: I often remind my students that it’s not enough to simply read the materials and translate them; that’s just the first step. The process of interpretation is quite complex and has to move forward from there. It takes time, creativity, and the willingness to think like the author of a novel. Although writing academic prose is surely different than creating fiction, each chapter still needs to have a plot. Each essay and book we write has to use a limited number of concepts. We shape our work through a master narrative. Good academic writing is much bigger, stronger and more interesting than simply presenting a report on what the text says or how our sources use language and construct images. So, I emphasize the importance of writing and revising one’s prose, keeping our readers in mind.

HX: What do you think is the biggest methodological change between the time when you were a student till now?

ST: On the one hand, I think there are a lot of changes, but on the other I will also point to some of my heroes in my field who published work 50 years ago that still inspires readers. Just to take two examples, Professor Gernet’s first work was on Shenhui 神會, and his second book was Les aspects économiques du Bouddhisme. The latter work took Dunhuang materials and looked at temple economy, placing it against the background of traditional sources for Chinese history and Buddhist studies, which provided a much fuller picture. The book looked outside of the sectarian lens / sectarian framework that we’ve inherited from Japanese Buddhist studies and from modern Protestantism. Another great inspiration for me was work of scholars like Kenneth Ch’en (a native of Hawaii) as well as Chinese scholars who first worked first on Dunhuang materials. They all appreciated very early on the importance of genres like bianwen 變文 and texts that afforded a much better view of popular religion. Finally, there were Japanese scholars like Sawada Mizuho 沢田瑞穂 who wrote on literature about hell (Diyu bian地獄變, Jigoku hen) and other such topics. Those are topics with a certain integrity in themselves, but which did not grow out of the traditional disciplines of literary studies or the standard political history of China. Those were some of the inspirations, all writing in the 1950s and 1960s.

As for changes, there was the retreat of sectarian history, that is, the construal of Buddhism solely through the lens of sectarianism. Of course, schools or sects of Buddhism are very important and many Buddhist philosophers have thought in terms of lineage and followed particular schools of thought. But at the same time, they have engaged in practices that spanned sectarian divides and even non-Buddhist affiliations. It has taken the field a while to figure out how a sectarian approach can be combined with a broader understanding of Buddhism in its cultural context. Interests in popular religion and its relations with Buddhism is another big change. Such topics come naturally for people who work in the modern period and for people focusing on Dunhuang materials because once we get outside of the transmitted and canonical materials, we find sources that are less “censored,” whether by a Buddhist establishment, state officials, or Confucian interests.

The inclusion of art history and visual materials as part of the data of Buddhist studies has also been a great development. It’s not entirely new, either. Scholars like Matsumoto Eichi 松本栄一 and other art historians were always able to deal with Buddhist texts. But the reverse is not always true. It’s taken a long time for those of us trained in reading texts to learn the disciplines of art history and the methods of visual analysis. That is an important development.

Many studies are now focused on ritual. This is one of the nice things about the conferences being held in Paris today and tomorrow; scholars of Taoism are adept at studying ritual because the Daozang 道藏 is more than one-half liturgical texts. Following their lead, I believe that Buddhologists should look more at rituals. So, ritual is a another new and important trend.

HX: We have talked about using more varieties of materials to benefit the development of Buddhist studies, such as iconographic materials, inscriptions, objects, etc. Do you have a type of material in mind that shows strong potential for the future of Buddhist studies, but that we haven’t figured out how to efficiently use yet?

ST: I think there are so many possible materials. I think some of the most exciting and untapped fields are in later Chinese Buddhist Studies after the Tang Dynasty. It is interesting to think of why that’s so. Through the Tang, the Buddhist canon in its traditional form (the Kaiyuan canon, defined in the early 8^th century) was undoubtedly influential. On the other hand, all around the canon, and later, with the printing and expansion of canon, something interesting was also happening. Buddhism itself achieved much greater dispersion throughout China. In order to study Buddhism after the Tang, we have many more places to look. So, that is an exciting new area.

I am not an expert myself in digital methods, but now that we are digitizing the texts that we have been reading for centuries, new styles of analysis and new insights are possible. I think every generation needs to go through the materials from the ground up. That is certainly happening, and I think that it is going to generate a lot of new ideas. Meanwhile, as China continues to develop, new texts, new artifacts, and archaeological finds are being dug up constantly, just as new Japanese archives and temples are being opened up. All are providing new kinds of material, with no end in sight. And after new materials have been uncovered, the hard work of interpretation begins.

HX: In the context of the increasing variety of materials and our visions that turn more to popular religion and how Buddhism was actually practiced, what do you think is the place for traditional canonical studies; do we have new ways of interpreting them under the angle of these new discoveries?

ST: I am a pluralist about that. I see no inherent contradiction between a “traditional” Buddhist studies point of view, attitude, or research project focused on canonical material and a project based upon a broader approach. I think they both inform each other. There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy.

HX: In East Asian studies, what do you think: will putting Chinese Buddhism studies in the perspective of East Asian Studies yield a new understanding of Chinese Buddhism?

ST: I think there are many things to be gained by both sides. I think that it is helpful to our colleagues who study Chinese, Japanese, or Korean literature to think about Buddhist materials, as well as for Buddhologists to consider literary materials. From the perspective of Chinese literature, looking at Buddhist materials expands the view of how language changes, how words are imported from the translational lexicon into vernacular speech. On the other side, considering performance literature helps Buddhologists understand how Buddhism was articulated and developed in the Sinosphere. Many Chinese genres were carried into Japan and Korea, pronounced and understood in new ways, and developed in new directions. Some of the liturgical materials that I am currently working on were turned into elegant and subtly theorized forms in the high literature of Korea and Japan. This is an example in which Buddhologists have to take account of what is going on in the broader East Asian sphere as well as realms outside of Buddhism.

HX: In your book, about the wheel of rebirth, you mentioned that you want to let go the paradigm of transmission and focus more on the interplay between the local and the trans-regional, between the pan-Buddhist and the local culture. What do you think is the prospect for trans-regional studies in Buddhist studies?

ST: I think the local goes together with the trans-regional, and they have to be kept together. One of the nice things about looking at the local version is that you can understand individual artists, such as in the case of the painting of the wheel of rebirth. We can understand the local artist as making choices; this is because what they inherited was huge and complex and they could not simply draw a picture of it based on knowledge of a canon. And what was in the canon was already quite complex. So, instead, we have to know the broader tradition that they inherited in a trans-regional sense; we also have to understand why they chose to put together the paintings the way they did. For that, we have to look at local painting traditions, local Buddhist practices, local patronage patterns, etc. I think we need to keep both sides in view. One of the great cultural anthropologists of the last century, Clifford Geertz, talked about this as an interplay between local knowledge and forms of transmitted knowledge.

HX: In your research experience, who has been the biggest influence in the development of your methods and the way you approach Buddhist studies?

ST: We have to tailor our research methods to our material and to our specific interpretive goals. Therefore, there is no universal method, and each method should be crafted and adjusted. The answer is: it depends on the research project. So, I will answer that question by talking about specific goals I had with my different book projects. One of the interests of my first book was to carry forward the insights of cultural anthropology, applying it in a historically rigorous manner to understand medieval Chinese religious life. For the ghost festival, rather than defining my topic as a Buddhist subject as the Yulan pen Sutra 盂蘭盆經, which is a canonical definition, and rather than defining my interest as the story of Mulian 目連 (Mahāmaudgalyāyana), which is just a biographical focus, I defined it as a religious festival and I tried intentionally to use my own term as a historian looking at cultural practices. Rather than calling it the Yulan pen festival or the zhongyuan jie 中元節 , which is the Daoist version, I tried to use my own expression, the “ghost festival,” to group together these sorts of actions. It was a fairly aggressive analytical ploy, but I think it was important. I consciously chose a word that was not my informants’. Their terminology would have distinguished between Buddhist Yulan pen hui and Daoist Zhongyuan jie, whereas I wanted a concept that would embrace both of those categories.

For my book on the Ten Kings, I found the work of Jacques le Goff, La Naissance du purgatoire, very important. It helped me historicize concepts of the afterlife and position them in relation to mortuary practices.

Some of my book on the wheel of rebirth was born out of my research experience in India. For one month I took a class from the American art historian Walter Spink, a scholar of Ajanta and Indian art. Professor Spink taught a site seminar at Ajanta every summer for more than 40 years. That approach, I think, is now standard in art history: to focus on a multi-media site as a nexus of cultural artistic production, religious life, architectural production, and craftsmanship. The methods of study were multidisiplinary and immersive. The pedagogical and research model didn’t begin with Professor Spink, but he certainly was a master of it. One of the things it taught me was to think about the situatedness of each painting that I studied. We need to look at each painting, each image, or each representation in its local context. We need to consider the painting’s location on the wall, its relation to other paintings around it, its relation to the temple’s iconographical and ritual program. We need to understand how the viewer interacts with the paintings and how the implied pilgrim encountered the site as a whole.

HX: What do you think in the field of Buddhist studies deserves more scholarly attention that we are not paying enough attention to?

ST: I think certainly ritual, certainly the interplay between Buddhism and Daoism. Buddhism and Chinese literature, especially in Chinese poetry, but we can also make advances in the study of fiction and drama. Buddhism in the modern world, last half of the 19^th and all the way through the 20^th century, when the Buddhist world is again interconnected in a new way. The field of Silk Road studies, or what I would consider the “global Buddhist network” in the medieval period. The flows between Buddhist cultures and sites throughout the medieval period. I look forward to the development of the field in other new ways as well.

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