Orzech, Charles D

H-Buddhism Orzech, Charles D.

Page published by A. Charles Muller on Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Teachers of an Accidental Buddhist Studies Scholar: on Good Friends 善知識kalyāṇa-mitra

Charles D. Orzech

When Chuck Prebish contacted me about this project it occurred to me that his aim was to capture a more fine-grained picture of the assimilation of Buddhism in North America during the second half of the twentieth century. It is also—in effect—a group portrait or an autobiography of a generation of Buddhist teachers, scholars, and practitioners. I hope that when complete these self-portraits might serve as data for a larger analysis.

Thinking about this assignment off and on for some time I also am reminded of one of John McRae’s rules of Zen Studies (I teach a course on Chan and Zen and use McRae). Rule number two reads, “Lineage assertions are as wrong as they are strong” (John R. McRae, Seeing Through Zen, xix). McRae then adds that if the lineage claims can be shown to be genuine they are probably insignificant. If we have learned anything in the last fifty years of Zen studies it is that Chan/Son/Zen traditions are under continual construction and reconstruction under the scaffolding of lineage. Almost every scholar of Buddhism or Buddhist practitioner I have met will at some point make a bow to their Buddhist ancestors. Should we be under any illusion that our ancestral invocations are fundamentally different that those of the eleventh century? The living construct the present out of the past. This is not in any way to call this effort into question. Rather, it is a reflection on the contingent and always situated nature of our knowledge. Will some future Buddhist construct lineages out of what were, for me, accidental and happenstance encounters?

I am taking this assignment in a personal direction, and not as a narrative CV. I grew up in a family of Catholic Polish and French Canadian mill workers in central Massachusetts. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. My father had been in Japan with the occupation. The family lore is that he was the sergeant in charge of the Yokohama liquor warehouse that supplied officer’s clubs in Tokyo. Perhaps the album of small faded black and white photos from his tour of duty in Japan made some kind of impression on me. Later in life I repeatedly offered to take

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Orzech, Charles D.. H-Buddhism. 11-17-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/6796127/orzech-charles-d Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism him to Japan, but he would not go. In high school I was a science geek, and though I went to college I had no clearly formulated goal other than having fun. Starting at the University of Massachusetts in 1970 I began to take classes toward an Astronomy and Astrophysics major only to discover my shortcomings, and those of my high school science curriculum. Without sufficient background in chemistry I would have flunked Planetary Atmospheres had I not decided to drop. Two things intervened that pushed me toward Buddhism. I had chosen to live in Project 10, a “Living-Learning” environment based in Pierpont House in U Mass’s Southwest complex. Teresina Rowell Havens—then in her sixties—was teachingTaiji . It was only many years later that I read her"The Background and Early Use of the Buddhakṣetra Concept” (Eastern Buddhist 6: 1933: 199–246, 379–431; and 7: 1936: 131–145). Also, a number of friends I had made in the dorm were deeply into various strains of the occult. One of them, my roommate Rick Taupier, would later go on to a career in geographic information systems and, more recently, a second Ph.D. in history with a focus on Mongolian Buddhism. The writings of Alice Bailey, Aleister Crowley, and Alfred Percy Sinnett (Esoteric Buddhism, London: Trubner, 1883) presented an enticing, but rather strange, introduction to Buddhism and Hinduism. However peculiar such an entrée might seem it is clear that various strains of the occult nurtured in colonial encounters were still helping to seed an interest in Buddhism across Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s.

By the next semester I had signed up for a philosophy course on “Metaphysics” (not at all what I had naively imagined!) and a comparative literature course titled “Mysticism East and West.” This course, taught by Lucien Miller, cemented my interest in religion. I asked him what professional opportunities might be available—he noted that I could become an academic, and if I was serious I should start Chinese immediately. It took another year but in the summer of 1973 I began Mandarin at Middlebury College’s intensive summer school. In the meantime I realized that I could not do a religious studies major at UMass because there was no such department. However, Smith College did have an excellent department, and the Five College Consortium would allow me to take courses there. As a result I proposed an independent major at UMass in the Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration program with a focus on East Asian Languages and Religion. My advisors were Lucien Miller at UMass and Denis Hudson, the Hinduism professor at Smith.

I started Classical Chinese with Alvin P. Cohen (a student of Peter Alexis Boodberg at Berkeley) aiming to be able to read Chinese Buddhist texts. I had the privilege to

During the next two years Thurman’s fledgling American Institute of Buddhist Studies began more ambitious programing, and invited Dodrupchen Rinpoche, a Nyingma lama then living in Sikkhim to help establish The Mahasiddha Nyingmapa Center in Western Massachusetts. It was a crash course in the reality of practice--- seemingly endless chanting of the praises of Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava)!

Still following Lucien Miller’s advice, I applied to graduate schools. I became more interested in the History of Religions program at the University of Chicago and in the program at the University of Wisconsin, and I went for a visit in late 1973, staying with a friend from UMass, Dan Brown, who would go on to write a dissertation on Tibetan meditative texts. I talked to faculty at Chicago including Dean Joseph Kitagawa and Edward Dimock, and I also made a side trip to sit in on Stephen Beyer’s Buddhism class in Madison.

Chicago admitted me to the master of divinity program, and gave me a partial scholarship so, in the Fall of 1974, I was in Chicago. Chicago at the time was stocked with luminaries: Mircea Eliade, Robert Grant, David Tracy, Joseph Kitagawa, Jonathan Z. Smith, etc. The Masters program was designed to replicate the sort of training that students used to get with a Bachelor of Divinity degree, and was structured around a series of qualifying exams, mostly focused on the history of Christianity and theory in the study of religion. This training was excellent preparation for working in a small department where one is called on to teach courses such as Introduction to Religion, as well as Non-Western Religions and Buddhism. While pursuing the MA I enrolled in Frank Reynold’s Buddhism course during which I wrote a research paper arguing that Dignāga’s poetic preface to his treatise on perception (Hattori’sDignāga, on perception; being the

Pratyakṣapariccheda of Dignāga's Pramāṇasamuccaya from the Sanskrit fragments and the Tibetan versions, HUP 1968) should be taken as more than a perfunctory bow to religious sensibilities, and seen as a serious piece of religious argumentation. I also continued classical Chinese with David Roy in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and took a course on Scripture with Jonathan Z. Smith that was to be influential in my approach to Buddhism.

The following year I completed the Masters (December 1975) and applied for and was accepted into the Ph.D. Program in the History of Religions. At this point I decided to return to UMass to begin studying Japanese. On my return to Chicago I enrolled T. H. Tsien’s Chinese Bibliography course, Michael Dalby’s course on Six Dynasties Religion, and Joseph Kitagawa’s course on Patterns of Worship.

Professor Kitagawa’s course played an unexpected role in my future research. The first meeting of the seminar took place in one of Swift Hall’s seminar rooms. Swift Hall, the home of the Divinity School, is a neo-gothic edifice and the seminar room was framed by large perpendicular style windows and dominated by a long massive library style table around which the class was seated. Kitagawa, seated at the end of the table, began the class by turning to the student to his left and asking the poor fellow what he planned to do his final paper on. The panic in the room was palpable! I was seated all the way around the other side of the table two persons from the end and frantically set about thinking of something plausible to say before my turn came. I had recently been reading Holmes Welch’s The Practice of Chinese Buddhism: 1900-1950, and in it the section on “Rites for the Dead” and the ‘Ghost Festival.’ I would do a paper on these rites and the texts behind them.

This happenstance led me to an interest in what might broadly be called cultural translation—and the question of what happens to a deity, a text, or a practice when it is transplanted from one culture to another, quite different cultural context. Investigating these rites led me into late Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna ritual, and under the direction of Joseph Kitagawa I wrote a dissertation on the Tantric monk Amoghavajra in eighth-century Tang China. Kitagawa had written a dissertation on Amoghavajra’s spiritual grandson, Kūkai, titled “Kōbō-daishi and Shingon Buddhism” (University of Chicago, 1951). In the process I also worked with Edward Chien, Anthony Yu, and Wendy Doniger.

Between the time I finished class work and the time I graduated I had gotten married, moved to North Carolina, and went to spend a year in Hong Kong at the

Chinese University in the International Asian Studies Program (which had previously been the Yale in China Program on the mainland). This provided an opportunity for travel on the mainland (to Beijing, Hangzhou, Datong, etc.) and to Thailand and Indonesia (with a memorable trip to visit Borobudur). Toward the end of graduate school I had done a rough translation of Amoghavajra’s version of the apocryphal perfect wisdom scripture, the Scripture for Humane Kings Who Wish to Protect Their States (仁王經 T246), but laid it aside while working on my dissertation.

Back in North Carolina I started teaching part time in the Religious Studies department at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and began to conceive of a book on the Humane Kings and the various ‘tantric’ commentaries attributed to Amoghavajra. I also was employed at UNC Chapel Hill teaching Daoism. There I met Jim Sanford, a specialist on Zen with a strong interest in tantric traditions and their transformation in China and Japan. This began a long collaboration, which lasted until his death in 2013. In 1984 Jim and I founded the Society for Tantric Studies in an effort to bring together scholars studying the Tantras in South, Central, and East Asia.

We were soon joined in our efforts by Glen Hayes a contemporary of mine at the University of Chicago who worked on Bengali Sahajiyās, and Glen has contributed a history of the Society, its interests, meetings, and publications (“Tantric Studies: Issues, Methods, and Scholarly Collaborations,” in The Journal of Hindu Studies, Volume 4, Issue 3, October 2011, Pages 221–230, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hir031 and on its meetings, “Tantric Studies, Part 2: The Flagstaff Meetings: Issues, Methods, and Scholarly Collaborations,” The Journal of Hindu Studies, Volume 5, Issue 2, August 2012, Pages 137–144, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/his030).

We held our first conference at the Quail’s Roost Conference Center in North Carolina. Over the years the STS has held a string of stand-alone conferences in Syracuse, and Flagstaff with the most recent conference in 2019. As members of the American Academy of Religion Jim Sanford and I proposed a consultation on Tantric Studies, which has since become a regular ‘group.’ Along with Richard K. Payne of the Institute of Buddhist Studies we organized a five year AAR Seminar on Tantric Studies.

I continued to work part time and year-by-year during the 1980s at Chapel Hill and at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and other local colleges and universities. When Paul Courtright (then head of Religious Studies at UNCG) moved

Then, sometime around 2006 at an AAR conference, Jim Sanford and I were approached by Albert Hoffstadt at Brill who proposed that we produce a Brill Handbook on Esoteric Buddhism in East Asia. We pointed out that no single person was capable of taking this on, and it had to be a group effort. The project languished for a couple of years and then finally proceeded with me as the ‘General Editor’ and China area editor, Henrik Sørensen as the Korea area editor, and Richard K. Payne as the Japan area editor. Richard Payne’s addition to the project was instrumental. His organizational skills got the project moving, and he was also able to bring us—through his position at The Institute of Buddhist Studies—resources and copy editors with extensive Asian Language backgrounds such as Natalie Quili. An AAR panel was devoted to the project in 2010 (with John McRae as respondent), and the volume finally appeared at the end of 2011 as Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia with contributions by forty scholars comprising 1200 pages https://brill.com/view/title/14740?language=en( ). The bibliography in multiple languages ran over 100 pages.

I was fortunate to teach at UNCG for three decades, with a regular round of teaching including courses on Buddhism and Chan and Zen, as well as lectures at local Zendos and churches. My colleagues in Religious Studies—Derek Krueger,

Gene Rogers, Ellen Haskell, and Greg Grieve provided an engaged and critical forum, and UNCG allowed us to teach jointly in some cases. Derek Krueger and I once taught a comparative monasticism seminar and Greg Grieve and I taught Religion and Film. With support of the College of Arts and Sciences I was able to live in Taipei (1991) and Calcutta (2004), and to make repeated visits over the years to Beijing, Dunhuang, Sichuan, Yunnan, Taipei, and various sites in India including Ellora and Ajanta.

But then something unexpected occurred. My wife, Professor Mary Ellis Gibson a Victorian literature specialist, had just published a monograph and companion anthology examining the emergence of Anglophone literary culture in Bengal. The University of Glasgow advertised a position in her field. We had been going to the UK for research and for hiking for decades, and this seemed like a great opportunity. She applied and was hired, and, as it happens Theology and Religious Studies at Glasgow advertised for a position in Asian religions which had just been vacated by Richard King’s move to Kent. I applied and they hired me. My duties in Theology and Religious Studies at Glasgow were to ‘convene’ and teach on the team taught Asian Religions survey, to teach ‘on’ the Mysticism course, to design, convene, and teach on a new team taught undergraduate theory course—“Religion, Conflict, and Controversy,” to teach Buddhism at the honours level, and to jointly teach the year long course on theory for the MA with George Pattison. I also directed a small number of MA dissertations and Ph.D. theses. This was both an intellectually exhilarating and an exhausting workload.

At the time of my move to Glasgow I had a book in progress on liturgy and the creation of public subjects in Chinese Esoteric Buddhism. To make a long story short, the pressures of the REF (Research Excellence Framework—the every five year UK government evaluation of departments and universities) and the nature of funding in the UK meant that there was little chance of gaining funding for the project, and it was put on the back burner. Funding agencies and the University wanted to see ‘impact’ and so I turned my attention to an old interest in the role of religious objects in museums. Having done some work in Glasgow with the Saint Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, and with the Burrell Collection I decided to develop a project on the rise of museums of religion and their entanglement with empire and imperialism. The project covered the rise of comparative religion and focused on five museums, the museum in Glasgow, the Religionskundliche Sammlung at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg, the State Museum of the History of Religions (Gosudarstvennyy Muzey Istorii Religii) in St. Petersburg, Russia, Le

Musée des Religions du Monde in Nicolet, Quebec, andthe Museum of World Religions in Taipei (世界宗教博物館). The project initially garnered a Research Incentive grant from the Carnegie Trust, and then a Leverhulme Research Fellowship that bought me out of all teaching and administration (except for Ph.D. supervision) for the 2016-2017 year. Museums of World Religions was published in May 2020 (Bloomsbury Academic’s Material Religions series).

Despite having great colleagues in Theology and Religious Studies at Glasgow it was clear that the University administration had little interest in premodern Asian history, and that the universities in the UK were under extreme duress after ten years of austerity. I had been approached by a number of students wanting to write dissertations with me on esoteric or tantric Buddhism, but thought it irresponsible to take most of them on without anyone else at Glasgow for them to work with. In two cases I recommended they go to Leiden, and doing so they were successful. We reluctantly decided to move back to the States where Mary Ellis became chair of the English Department at Colby College. I was fortunate to be hired part time in Religious Studies at Colby, and am now serving a three year stint as chair of the Art Department. I will soon step down as chair, and I am looking forward to returning to the esoteric liturgy project.

Much of my career has involved probing what became of late Mahāyāna and tantric texts, practices, and deities when they were transplanted to East Asia. Studying what might be loosely labelled as Buddhist tantras in 6th through 10th century China was not easy in the early 1980s, as there were few resources focussed on the topic. This was in large part because Japanese Shingon scholarship tended to view developments in China in terms of Shingon telelology, with Chinese developments being seen as a temporary bridge between South Asia and Japan. Among the few resources found in English was Chou Yi-liang’s “Tantrism in China” (1945), Raffaello Orlando’s 1981 dissertation, “A Study of Chinese Documents Concerning the Life of the Tantric Buddhist Patriarch Amoghavajra (A.D. 705–774),”Charles Willemen’s The Chinese Hevajratantra (1983), and Raoul Birnbaum’s studies of Bhaiṣajyarāja (1979) and Mañjuśrī (1983). But other approaches were emerging in Japanese scholarship. Osabe Kazuo’s work in the 1960s-1980s had begun to explore Chinese developments in their own contexts (for example Tōdai mikkyōshi zakkō 唐代密教史雑考of 1971 and Tō Sō mikkyōshi ronkō 唐宋密敎史論考). By the 1990s Chinese scholars such as Lü Jianfu 呂建福(Zhongguo mijiao shi 中国密教史) were turning out substantial scholarship on the area. In the 2000s a range of new work had transformed the field. For instance, Chen Jinhua’s Crossfire: Shingon-Tendai Strife as Seen in Two Twelfth-

New scholarship by Megan Bryson (Goddess on the Frontier and articles such as “Between China and Tibet: Mahākāla Worship and Esoteric Buddhism in the Dali Kingdom”); Jeffrey Kotyk (“Buddhist astrology and astral magic in the Tang Dynasty,” Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden, 2017); Michele C. Wang Mandalas( in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang, Brill, 2018); Zeng Yang (A biographical study on Bukong 不空 (aka. Amoghavajra, 705-774): networks, institutions, and identities,” dissertation, UBC, 2018);Harriet Hunter (“A Transmission and its Transformation: The Liqujing shibahui mantuuo in Daigoji,” dissertation, Leiden, 2018); Yang Zhaohua (“Devouring Impurities: Myth, Ritual and Talisman in Tang China,” dissertation Stanford 2013); andAmanda K. Goodman (“The Ritual Instructions for Altar Methods (Tanfa yize): Prolegomenon to the Study of a Chinese Esoteric Buddhist Ritual Compendium From Late-Medieval Dunhuang,” dissertation, Berkeley, 2013) demonstrate thatthe study of late Mahāyāna and tantric texts is flourishing.

Looking back I would like to take a deep bow to my teachers—both those who taught me directly, and those who contributed to my understanding by reading my work over the years. I can’t mention you all here. I am now, in the Fall of 2020, teaching Buddhism remotely during the pandemic. Some of my students are writing on gender. In my path into Buddhism I have been fortunate to meet some wonderful female ‘good companions’ Wendy Doniger, and Mary Ellis Gibson warrant particular mention. But it is also clear how gendered my path into Buddhist Studies has been. This is changing, but on reflection, it is no less shocking.

I will end with a few anecdotes. My undergraduate Classical Chinese teacher, Alvin P. Cohen, told us that his aim was that we, his students, should be better than he was. I only wish I could have lived up to that sentiment. Bob Thurman was inspiring and terrifying. His prosthetic eye complicated classroom interaction for this a poorly prepared student hoping to avoid being called on. Joe Kitagawa, on his way to the mainland in 1981 stopped off in Hong Kong to see me and a former student now

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Orzech, Charles D.. H-Buddhism. 11-17-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/6796127/orzech-charles-d Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 9 H-Buddhism teaching at the Chinese University. I had been reading Henri Frankfort’sBefore Philosophy, and when he asked me about it I launched into a blistering critique. But he gently stopped me and said, “Yes, I know, but there is a good idea in that book.” I never forgot that lesson—one can be critical, and yet be appreciative and compassionate. Frank Reynolds was a remarkably effective and supportive teacher. Sometimes, however, papers came back not only with perceptive comments, but also with smears of peanut butter. I took a reading course on esoteric texts with Tony Yu—I am still in awe of how fluidly he read these difficult materials and translated into English. Wendy Doniger stepped in at the end of my Ph.D. when Joe’s illness incapacitated him. To her I am immensely grateful. Ron Davidson—one of the few scholars who moves fluidly between Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhism—is a fantastic and very funny story teller. Several times at conference dinners I have been brought to tears laughing at Ron’s tales! Jim Sanford and I worked together for almost 30 years, often rooming together at the AAR. The first time I met Jim it must have been 1983 or so, when I was commuting to Chapel Hill to use UNC’s copy of the Taisho. Jim’s office was the last one on the first floor of the then named Saunders Hall. I peeked in through the partially opened door and tried to walk in to introduce myself. This was not as easy as it sounds as the room was overstuffed with piles of books and papers. Indeed, the top of Jim’s desk was literally a mound of books and papers. I never did understand how he could find anything. Over the years I would come to Jim’s office and find birds, guinea pigs, or other creatures in cages. Pat Sanford raised shelties, and later ran the Orange County Animal Shelter. Abandoned animals often lodged temporarily in Jim’s office on their way to the Sanford compound in rural Orange County. At one point they had an emu, several peacocks, a Vietnamese pot bellied pig, a silver fox, a variety of indoor birds, and of course, the shelties. Jim and Pat also worked in animal rescue, and in exposing puppy mills and dog fighting rings. This was the work of bodhisattvas.