An Academic Autobiographical Essay (For the “Generations of Buddhist Studies” Project) Paul L

H-Buddhism Swanson, Paul L.

Page published by A. Charles Muller on Monday, February 3, 2020 An Academic Autobiographical Essay (for the “Generations of Buddhist Studies” Project) Paul L. Swanson Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture 04/02/2020 My connection with Japan and Japanese religions began with my birth in Tokyo (1951) of American Baptist missionaries who had arrived in Japan in 1949 soon after the war. Before my first birthday our family moved to the Kumano area along the Pacific coast of the Kii Peninsula, where my parents began their “church planting” ministry. A well-established Protestant church already existed in Shingū, the main city at the mouth of the Kumano River that is the border of Mie and Wakayama Prefectures, so my parents set up home in the small village of Narukawa across the river, and began small church gatherings there, as well as further up the coast in Atawa and Kumano cities. Thus I grew up in the Kumano area, blissfully ignorant of the significant historical and religious role of this area. In the summer we swam in the ocean at Nachi beach, within hailing distance of the famous (and highest in Japan) Nachi Falls. With my neighborhood friends we fished and chased frogs in the tributaries of the Kumano River, and built tree houses (and played ninja) in the surrounding hills, only vaguely aware of traditional events such as the fire festival of Kannokura Shrine in the hills behind Shingū or of the occasional visit of yamabushi-like mendicants. From Junior through High School I attended a mission school—Christian Academy in Japan—in Tokyo, but vacations (especially the long summer) were spent at home, and Kumano was always considered “home.” Some of my best memories are of hiking in the hills surrounding our home (close to what is now known as the ancient Kumano Kodo mountain paths), and also to the second and third Nachi falls deep in the woods and camping

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Swanson, Paul L.. H-Buddhism. 04-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/5814182/swanson-paul-l Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism overnight, now officially inaccessible because the area is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site. After graduating from High School I matriculated to spend four years at Bethel College, an evangelical Christian Baptist college in Minnesota. I was not unhappy there (despite the quite provincial and nativistic atmosphere) and received a good education, but two experiences stand out as inspiring the direction I was to follow next. First, I was taking a course on “World Religions” that I found to be a fair and informative introduction to the subject. One day, riding on the campus bus to my apartment, the two men in the seat in front of me were discussing their dissatisfaction with this course, concluding with the statement, “Why do we have to take this course when we already have the truth?” This statement hit me as so wrong on so many levels—who are the “we” that have “the truth”—that I was dumbstruck, and this experience confirmed in me a yearning to know more about “other religions.” Second, I was browsing in the library one day when I ran across a magazine article about the Kumano area. Fascinated by the details and the pictures (many of them sites familiar from my childhood) and feeling ashamed that I knew so little about the area in which I grew up, I determined to return to Japan and learn more about it. I was a philosophy major at the time, but already inclined to inquire after the more messy field of religion, and so I applied to the graduate program at Sophia University in Tokyo with the intent to pursue an MA on the religious history of the Kumano area. I also started on a personal regimen of learning the Japanese kanji, of which (despite my many years in Japan) was limited to elementary reading knowledge. Finding myself back in Japan and taking courses at the international section of Sophia University, I also enrolled for an intensive language course at the Japanese language school for missionaries at Ochanomizu to buff up my still childish language abilities. There I encountered again—among some but of course not all—a narrow and condescending

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Swanson, Paul L.. H-Buddhism. 04-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/5814182/swanson-paul-l Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Buddhism attitude toward Japanese religions, which strengthened my resolve to know more and attain better understanding. At Sophia I drank in courses on Japanese literature (memorizing poems from the Man’yōshū) and Buddhism (though my first class on Buddhism was a short inter- semester course at Calvin College in Michigan), including classes and later private “meditation and mass” encounters with Fr. William Johnston. One of the most memorable courses was on Nichiren with Fr. Pier P. Del Campana, which began with reading Leon Hurvitz’s book on Chih-i, an experience that was to have great import for my future direction. But my main academic and personal interest lay in direct experience with the yamabushi of Kumano. I was fortunate to have a direct acquaintance with Niko Ryōei, a member of the Baptist church of Ichinono (near Nachi Falls), also a civil servant who was a well- respected local expert on Shugendo practices and history, and who provided valuable advice and further contacts. I made my way to Dorogawa at the foot of Mount Ōmine, and eventually to Shōgo’in in Kyoto to meet Miyagi Tainen and arrange for a series of “entering the mountains” (nyūbu) of the Yoshino-Kumano Okugake route with the yamabushi. I also joined numerous “lay” excursions into these mountains, with private groups such as the Okugake Hagoromokai led by Maeda Yūichi. Eventually I covered the entire route (some sections numerous times) from Yoshino in the north to the three Kumano sites (of Hongū, Shingū, and Nachi) in the south, and the seventy-five places of worship (nabiki) in between. One of thenyūbu (in 1976 or 1977) consisted of the first official use of the route between Tamaki-san and Hongū in a hundred years. This span had lain dormant ever since the abolition of Shugendo as an independent tradition in the Meiji period, and the event was filmed by NHK for a special television program. Another memorable experience was accompanying Victor Turner to Shingū to witness the annual fire festival at Kannokura. I also visited other sacred mountain sites—Hiko-san in Kyushu, Togakushi in Nagano, Ontake on the Gifu/Nagano border, Hakusan in Gifu, and so forth, but

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Swanson, Paul L.. H-Buddhism. 04-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/5814182/swanson-paul-l Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Buddhism most significant, the week-long Aki-no-mine retreat at Dewa Sanzan in Yamagata with some Keio University graduate students of Miyake Hitoshi. The resulting MA thesis, which focused on the Yoshino-Kumano tradition, through the good graces of my advisor Fr. M. Bairy was revised and edited by Michael Cooper and resulted in my first academic publication in Monumenta Nipponica (1981). After finishing at Sophia University and a hiatus of two years as a “research student” at the University of Tokyo—studying under Yanagawa Kei’ichi in the Religious Studies department and Tamura Yoshirō in the Indian and Buddhist Studies department—and failing to pass the University of Tokyo graduate school entrance exam (yes, I too was an academic rōnin), I realized that in order to make a career of it, it was imperative to get an advanced academic degree from outside Japan. As a result of a search for a suitable program, I ended up at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Buddhist Studies—textual studies rather than field work—not least because my Minnesota residence allowed me to pay in-state tuition. By that time (1979) Richard Robinson had already passed away and Minoru Kiyota agreed to serve as my advisor. The intense program (including Sanskrit, classical Japanese, and Buddhist Chinese) was bracing but fruitful. Among the advantages of the program was the visit by Hakamaya Noriaki of Komazawa University on his sabbatical, which provided the opportunity for an ad hoc group (including John Keenan, Paul Griffiths, Jamie Hubbard, and Heng-ching Shih) to read and compare all extant (Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese) versions of theMahāyānasaņgraha ; more significantly, the intense post-seminar discussions over tacos and beer led to our involvement in the “Critical Buddhism” debates and eventually the publication of Pruning the Bodhi Tree (1997). I was also blessed with the visit of Fukushima Kōsai of Otani University, who suggested that (instead of Saichō and Japanese Tendai) I focus on reading the works of Tiantai Zhiyi and the theme of the threefold truth. This proved to be invaluable advice, and was crucial in setting the main focus of my

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Swanson, Paul L.. H-Buddhism. 04-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/5814182/swanson-paul-l Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4 H-Buddhism academic career. Thanks to the good arrangements of my advisor Minoru Kiyota, after passing my doctoral pre-lim exams I was able to receive a scholarship from Otani University to conduct research for writing my thesis. Thus my wife and I, along with our 3-year-old daughter and newborn twins, moved to Kyoto into a small apartment designed for a single graduate student. (This was a tight situation that, though we survived, I would not recommend for graduate students.) Fortunately, Otani also provided a research room on campus where I could focus on reading Chinese texts and secondary Japanese studies. Fukushima-sensei kindly took the time to read with me (and explain) the sections of theFahuaxuanyi that I translated and annotated for my dissertation, and which eventually became the core of Foundations of T’ien-t’ai Philosophy (1989). These years also provided the opportunity to get to know and study with fellow Tendai and Buddhism students such as Robert Rhodes, Yamano Toshirō, and Yamabe Nobuyoshi, along with the constantly shifting community of scholars that resided for varying spans in Kyoto. I’ve already written too much, and perhaps I should make short shrift of the rest of my academic career, such as it is. After successfully submitting my dissertation and passing the oral defense in 1985, I found myself and my family in Kyoto with little clue about what to do next. Fortuitously a position (as copy editor for Japanese Journal of Religious Studies and Asian Folklore Studies) at the recently-established Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya became available and I was luckily in the right place at the right time—one of the blessings of my life is that I have never had to pursue or experience a job interview for an academic position. Soon I became a “Senior Fellow” (along with cherished colleagues Jan Van Bragt, Jan Swyngedouw, and James Heisig) and enjoyed a thirty-three year career editing theJJRS , producing many volumes of books on Asian religions, taking part in inter-religious dialogues, mixing with a variety of scholars from around

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Swanson, Paul L.. H-Buddhism. 04-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/5814182/swanson-paul-l Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 5 H-Buddhism the world, teaching a few classes (my last class, in the fall of 2019, was on the lyrics of Bob Dylan) and making some progress on my own research. My dissertation was revised and published as Foundations of T’ien-t’ai Philosophy (1989) which I am happy to say is still in print thirty years later. A significant event occurred in 1990 when I received a phone call from Paris from a Mr. Sudoh of the publishing arm of Rissho Koseikai, inquiring after the possibility of taking part in a “ten-year project” to translate the Mohezhiguan into English (as well as into modern Japanese, French, and German). I delightfully agreed, and my English edition of this project finally appeared almost thirty years later as Clear Serenity, Quiet Insight (2018)—after years of intermittent research, a decade of intense administrative duties, and two productive sabbaticals at Indiana University (the first with Jan Nattier and John McRae). Now I prepare to retire from Nanzan, and am looking forward to a quiet yet challenging retirement during which I can concentrate on translating and annotating some more Tiantai texts, such as the Fahuaxuanyi. In rereading this “academic biography,” I cannot help but feel that it is like a cut-and-dry Curriculum Vitae in that it mostly ignores much of the more important aspects of life (such as family and friends, or the spiritual aspects of my experiences with the yamabushi and other religious, or not so religious, figures), but I have focused on what was required for the task. What seemed worthy of comment now may not be so next year, or if this had been written last year. In closing may I add that it is indicative of my sojourns that I have reserved a burial spot at the Baptist church graveyard on Mt. Myōhōzan overlooking Nachi Falls for my final resting place. My spot is next to the memorial grave of Jitsukaga (where his remains were transferred in 1885), the Meiji period yamabushi who committed ritual suicide by leaping (lit. “throwing his body”) off the top of Nachi Falls. This interreligious alignment of graveyards was the result of efforts in part by members of the local Christian church in honor of the remains of Jitsukaga, whose