Some Notes on Being a Scholar of Buddhism Geoffrey Samuel

H-Buddhism Samuel, Geoffrey

Page published by A. Charles Muller on Friday, August 2, 2019 Some Notes on Being a Scholar of Buddhism Geoffrey Samuel My first official Buddhist meditation practice was some fifty years ago, when I was a British university student. Meditation, whether Buddhist, Hindu, or of other varieties, was hardly a new thing in Britain, even in those days, but it was still an abnormal pursuit, undertaken by young people who had not yet encountered the real world, or by a few eccentrics involved in exotic cults. The massive popularity of “mindfulness” was many years in the future. At the time, I was beginning postgraduate study in social anthropology, having shifted from my initial specialization in physics a year after my first degree. Anthropology was to become my career, but it also provided the professional cover for a lifelong exploration of the meaning and significance of the practices - mainly Buddhist practices – which I was beginning to encounter at the very end of the 1960s. Not that I want to minimize how much I learned from anthropology. I learned a great deal, and readers who are attuned to the discipline will see plenty of signs of its influence on me in my writings over the years, alongside traces of my earlier involvement with the natural sciences. As an academic, in many ways, I remain an anthropologist first and foremost. But like many other young people of the time, including other young anthropologists, I was embarking on a journey that would involve a complicated dance between my involvement in the Western academy and my personal engagements with other, mainly non-Western, traditions of scholarship and practice. At some periods of my life one side has been more important, at other times the other. At best, they have been mutually illuminating. At other times it has felt more like a situation of mutual destruction or at least mutual deconstruction. I have tried to ground myself seriously in both, and to give each its due, so far

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism as I have been able. I had plenty of opportunity in those days to encounter Asian meditation practices. On advice from two Buddhist friends, Lance and Barbara Cousins, I began with a five-day retreat at a Buddhist centre at Hindhead, not far from London, under the guidance of a Thai teacher now known as Dhiravamsa, who taught a form of Vipassanā [1] meditation. Over the next year I went to regular classes, and later a retreat, with another Thai teacher, Nai Boonman, who worked in those days at the Thai Embassy, and taught a Samatha practice. Along with Lance, Barbara and others, I belonged to an eclectic Kabbalah group, the Society of the Common Life, whose senior member was Glyn Davies. In this we explored the relationships between different esoteric traditions, Western and Asian, in a manner that was both serious and at time quite playful. I also started to learn Tai-ch’i chüan with Gerda Geddes, one of the first Westerners to teach that lovely practice combining movement, breath and intention which is itself often considered a form of meditation. Around the same time I also had my first contacts with Tibetan teachers, Chögyam Trungpa, Chime Rinpoche and Ato Rinpoche, and a short but intense retreat with the English Zen teacher Jiyu Kennett Roshi. This was the beginning of a journey of exploration, which entered a new phase a few months later when I began field research for my doctoral thesis in Nepal and then in India. In the rest of this introduction I want to say something about some of the incidents and influences that, at the time or in retrospect, shaped how I approached my studies and my practice. I begin with a kind of tangled knot of potential insight that took me years to begin to unravel and then go on to talk a little about a project which was seems to me a continuation to or perhaps return to that process of disentangling. Disentangling is perhaps not quite the right word. Each stage reveals new tangles, but also new glimmers of potential understanding. I could choose others,

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Buddhism and there are certainly parts of the story I am not talking about here, but I think that these two help to explain some of what has driven me over the years as an academic and as a human being. I begin some years before that encounter with Asian spiritual traditions. This is an incident that took place when I was about twelve or thirteen, and walking in the garden of my family home in Leeds, in the north of England. I suddenly entered into a different space, a different realm of experience. There was no process of transition; I was just there. I was in a world where everything was connected, everything was secure, everything was as it should be, in which there was an unmistakable, perhaps infinite, depth of warmth and benevolence and positivity about the way things were. It was overwhelming, but entirely unthreatening. I am deliberately trying to find words to describe it that are as neutral as possible in relation to the spiritual. In later years I would realize that such experiences were not at all uncommon, and indeed that this could be termed a classic spiritual experience of the nature-mystical variety. In Mahāyāna Buddhist terms, I could perhaps describe it as some sort of intuition of the Buddha-nature underlying all apparent phenomena, the Dharmakāya, the compassionate ground of the universe. At the time, though, I had no real concepts to deal with the spiritual at all. It was just something that happened. I have no idea how long it lasted. In some ways it seemed, and perhaps was, quite outside time. I had two or three further such experiences during my college years, though none as strong as that initial occurrence. I said that I had no real concepts to deal with the spiritual at all. It wouldn’t be true to say that I had had no experiences of the spiritual. I grew up in a secular Jewish household, and while my parents were more overtly and explicitly antagonistic to religion than many of their friends and relatives, I had no sense from any of the people I knew in the Leeds Jewish community that religion might be a serious life-option, at any rate for people in my generation. It was taken for granted that it was a

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Buddhism left-over from a past age, from the people in my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generation who had come over from Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and other such places. It was something that could not be given any serious meaning except perhaps as a mode of communal attachment. Equally, my school, which was nominally Anglican, gave me no sense that Christianity might be a serious intellectual or personal option. If anything the opposite, since the evident disdain and disinterest (perhaps contempt would be a more accurate word), with which the School chaplain regarded the School’s hundred or so Jewish students, led me to assume that there whatever lay behind this man was not worth knowing more about. Leeds Grammar School was what was known in those days as a direct-grant grammar school, meaning that it originated historically as a private foundation, and had some of the pretensions associated with the public school system, but received State funding and had a proportion of State students. I had an unpleasant time there, on the whole, and was glad to leave when I eventually did. But neither my school nor the community in which I lived did anything much to encourage taking religion seriously. It was only after I got to university that I met anyone who made me think of either religion, Judaism or Christianity, as something that might have potential meaning for someone like myself. My father was a doctor, a thorough-going materialist and a committed member of the Socialist Medical Association. However, for all of his secular, left-wing attitudes, and his systematic dismissal in general of anything to do with religion, my father was committed enough to his parents, and to the community in which he grew up, to arrange for me to have a bar-mitzvah. This, as many readers will know, is the ceremony in which a thirteen-year old boy is called up to take part for the first time in the public reading of the scriptures in the synagogue, so taking on the religious obligations associated with being an adult man. It involved learning to read Hebrew, and learning at least

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4 H-Buddhism a little about Jewish religious practice, and in my case too it involved going along fairly regularly for a while to the services in the local synagogue. I had no conscious commitment to the rational meaning of what was happening in the synagogue services, but I was undoubtedly caught up in the experience, and particularly in the music of the liturgy, which in the Orthodox Ashkenazi practice of our tradition was often of a quasi- operatic intensity, especially on the great festivals. I already loved music. In fact, in those days I loved opera in particular, since it was my father’s favorite music. Verdi, Puccini and the great Russian composers were the sound-track to much of my childhood. In my last years at school, and first years at college, I also became involved in choral singing, and found myself caught in the paradox of the intense beauty of Bach’s cantatas and motets, and what I found the unbearably oppressive Lutheranism of the texts. I particularly remember singing Bach’s Church cantata, ‘Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben?” – ‘Dearest God, when will I die?’ – an exquisite work which begins with an orchestral and choral depiction of the funeral bells of Leipzig, and moves on to a cheerful bass aria which insists on how wonderful it will be to die and be with Jesus. I was perhaps eighteen by then, and I could hardly refuse the beauty of the music, but the message was another matter. I will say one thing in relation to music, though. I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time, but I can sense now that the state offlow , or trance, I would enter when listening to music, and particularly when singing, had more than a little in common with my mystical experience in our garden in Leeds. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that when I finally extricated myself from the beginning stages of that academic career in physics, my planned doctoral research project in anthropology was on Tibetan religious music. Yet religion was never, and I think never could have been, a simply positive term for me. Being Jewish, and born not long after the end of

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 5 H-Buddhism the second world war, made me all too aware of the devastating human consequences of Christian dogma, for the Jews and for other peoples. Bach’s beloved Luther, after all, was notoriously anti-Semitic. The reason why my ancestors went to Lithuania, Latvia and Rumania in the 17th and 18th centuries was because they were escaping from the religious wars, persecutions, and mass expulsions of Jewish populations in Western and Central Europe. I was very aware of as a child of the role of Christianity in that historical experience. I remember visiting York Minster, one of the great cathedrals of mediaeval England, and a place of vast and undeniable majesty and beauty, for the first time in late childhood, and experiencing it as a huge and horrific machine of torture and oppression. It was indeed a dark and gloomy building in those days, and the atmosphere of Victorian Anglicanism was still very much alive. These days, like most such places, it has been taken over by tourism, and it feels more like a museum, or a shopping centre. And while Judaism didn’t have the same negative associations for me, I also knew that I was on the outside, and that taking on the life of an orthodox Jew [2] was not and never would be a serious option for me. So here, perhaps, was an initial tangle – perhaps one might use William Blake’s term, and call it a vortex – which held me fascinated, and also a little caught. The religious, the spiritual, call it what one might, held something that I could not help but recognise as uniquely valuable, but which was also tied up with other things that were almost as uniquely destructive. What I could feel, and what I knew, did not fit together. I could describe a pendulum swinging back and forth over the following years between the seductions of mysticism and of science. The engagement in meditation with which I began this chapter, my growing community of Buddhist friends, and the doctoral fieldwork with Tibetans in Nepal and India, marked a period of immersion in a magical fantasy- land of collective endeavour towards Buddhahood and human

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 6 H-Buddhism betterment. Returning to England, and working on my doctoral thesis, which I eventually finished in New Zealand, was a coming back to a reality in which lamas and academics were competitive, self-interested and often mutually destructive, and in which the best one could hope for, whether pre-modern Tibetan or contemporary Westerner, was to construct as tolerable as possible a life, for a while, for yourself and those for whom you cared. But Western knowledge, of course, has its own seductions, and those are not just those of a moderately comfortable academic career. I moved from New Zealand and on to Australia, for more of the same, but in the 1980s I had nearly a year of study leave in Berkeley, California, and found myself back in the Buddhist magic land, in a community of Buddhists, Hindus, and New Age seekers of all kinds. That gave me the energy and inspiration to create my first book, an ambitious mélange of anthropology, philosophy of science, Buddhist philosophy, Indian music, and many other things. By the time it was published, it had split into two slightly more restrained volumes,Mind, Body and Culture and Civilized Shamans, which came out in 1990 and 1993. The pendulum continued to move back and forth over the following years, though perhaps the swings became less violent. Meanwhile I became involved in a series of other areas of research. These included work on the Tibetan epic of Gesar of Ling, work on the history of Tantra in India, which led to a book calledThe Origins of Yoga and Tantra, work on Tibetan ritual dance, work on subtle-body concepts in Tibet and elsewhere in Asia and the West, which led to an edited collection called Religion and the Subtle Body, work with my wife Santi Rozario, who is also an anthropologist, on Bangladesh and on Bangladeshis in the UK, and much else. Perhaps most importantly, I gradually became involved in research on Tibetan medicine. As with much that happened during my career, this was initially something that was at least as much to do with one of my students as myself, in this case my first PhD student, Elise Stutchbury, who had by that time become a good friend as well as an

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 7 H-Buddhism academic colleague. Over time, more and more of my work became directed to Tibetan medicine, Tibetan healing, and medical anthropology, and this in turn led to me co-editing a journal on Asian medicine for some years and becoming involved in the International Association for traditional Asian medicine. But rather than trace those years in detail, I’ll move on to a research project which dominated the last few years of my formal academic career, from 2006, a year or so after I moved back to the UK for the second time, up to and past my official retirement at the end of 2013. This was a research project onts’edrup , on Tibetan Buddhist practice for realizing the siddhi or Tantric accomplishment of power over the duration of life; long-life practice, as it is mostly known in English. At this time I was supervising one of my later PhD students, Barbara Gerke, and my initial involvement in this project had a lot to do with Barbara’s interest in and doctoral research on long life practice. My own work though took off in a somewhat different direction, from Barbara’s, which was primarily an anthropological study of long-life practices among contemporary Tibetans in North-east India. My research project was focused on a detailed study of one specific cycle of long-life practices, the Chimé Sogtig or ‘Seed of Immortal Life,’ revealed in Bhutan in the early 20th century, and later taught to his followers by one of the most distinguished of recent Tibetan lamas, Dudjom Rinpoche, who also wrote much of the textual material associated with the practice. The research project initially involved four people, three Western scholars and a Tibetan lama, Ogyan Tandzin Rinpoche. A second lama, Lama Kunzang Dorjee, head of a religious community in Kalimpong whom I had got to know through Barbara, was included later on. Both lamas belonged to the Dudjom lineage and were already very familiar with the practice. Barbara herself wasn’t an official project member because she was still completing her doctorate, and the funding body, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, would not include doctoral students. However Barbara was also actively involved

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 8 H-Buddhism in various ways, particularly in the early stages. Since we were aiming to understand the practice from the inside as well as the outside, the Western scholars, myself, Cathy Cantwell and Rob Mayer, all received the Tantric empowerments associated with the practice and took part at various times in some of the associated ritual activities. We studied the textual material and the way in which it was used in practice in considerable detail, and also traced the historical evolution of the tradition, which goes back in some respects to a 12th century lama, Nyangrel Nyiuma Ozer, and to various Indian antecedents. We also studied the community of practitioners in Kalimpong and the participation of the local Tibetan population in the annual major practice ritual, which we documented at length and in considerable detail. For me, though, the research brought up other issues that went back to many of the tangled themes I outlined in the earlier part of this chapter. This was a practice that was understood to improve the health, vitality and long life of the people who did it, and also of the lay population on whose behalf it was done. Did it work? Was it even possible that it might? How could one understand such an effect in Western scientific and medical terms? How might that understanding relate to Tibetan ways of conceiving of health, including the complex anatomy of the so- called channels and cakras of the subtle body? This led in turn to further questions. How does ritual work? We have a body of anthropological ways of understanding ritual efficacy, and some of them seem to hint at least at ways in which the effects of ritual can flow over to the physiological level, but how plausible are they? We also have a whole other body of anthropological literature, after all, including much of the recent work in cognitive anthropology and cognitive science of religion, which denies that anything like this can have any real meaning. The literature on what used to be called the placebo effect, but is being increasingly rethought in other ways, suggests that a large part of the healing process in any case has little to

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Samuel, Geoffrey. H-Buddhism. 08-02-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/4390872/samuel-geoffrey Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 9 H-Buddhism do with any material intervention by the physician. Is this part of healing inaccessible, or are there ways in which we can promote it – or for that matter interfere with it? Could we see the Tibetan long life practice as somehow operating on these components of the healing process which biomedicine could not reach? It was an interesting time to become involved with such questions because the relationship between ‘Buddhism’ and ‘science’ was being raised more generally within Western societies. The new popularity of Buddhism was associated with a sense that Buddhism was somehow a more rational tradition than Western religions, more compatible with scientific thought. Public dialogues such as those conducted by the Mind and Life Institute under the auspices and direction of His Holiness the Dalai Lama encouraged and contributed to this feeling of a potential harmony between Buddhism and science. The seemingly unstoppable advance of new, secularized forms of Buddhist meditation, in the form of the various mindfulness-based classes and interventions, has meant that many millions of people in contemporary Western societies have been undertaking something that at least claims origins in Buddhist meditation. Some of this has been encouraged and promoted by parts of the biomedical establishment. A recent paper by a group of leading researchers warned of the need to ‘mind the hype’ about mindfulness. But what sense can we make of these developments? Are Buddhism and similar traditions just becoming technologies through which the ruling classes of our world can become better at exploiting their subjects, while passing on to their victims the responsibility for dealing with the toxic and damaging environment within which the work and live? Or can they provide us with tools that might help counter some of the very evident and disturbing social, political and ecological developments and conflicts in contemporary global society? A book on which I am working at present offers some partial answers to some of these questions, and suggests some of the lines

[1] In those days he was still a Buddhist monk, and was known as Chao Khun Sobhana Dhammasudi. [2] The moral and philosophical dimension of the Jewish tradition was another matter. I discovered Martin Buber’s work in my early years at university, and Emanuel Lévinas’s much more recently. Both have had a significant impact on my own thinking. So, in a different mode, did the Kabbalah, which as I mentioned I also encountered in my student years.