Prebish, Charles S

H-Buddhism Prebish, Charles S.

Page published by A. Charles Muller on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 BAT OUT OF HELL Charles S. Prebish Professor Emeritus, Pennsylvania State University & Utah State University

And you know something is happening, But you don't know what it is, Do you, Mr. Jones

Bob Dylan

Introduction

More than two decades ago, a former Penn State colleague wrote a playful book called The Accidental Buddhist. Many, if not most people who read it thought the title was silly at best and inappropriate at the worst. I, however, was not one of them as his title came utterly close to being the very best description of how I began my more than fifty year career in Buddhist Studies and equally long commitment to private Buddhist practice. In the Fall of 1965, I walked into my very first class in Buddhism at what was then called Western Reserve University. "Reserve," as almost everyone referred to it, was known for its amazing Medical School and its vast majority of Pre-Medical and Pre- Dental students. No doubt that's why I was there. But the week before classes began in that eventful semester, along with a bevy of my college fraternity brothers, we stumbled across a class in the university roster of classes called "Buddha and Buddhism," to be taught by a new, young, Harvard-educated Hindu specialist named David McGregor Miller. About a dozen of us immediately enrolled, despite not having a clue what to anticipate. Most assuredly, I did not know that in 1965 the United States had just changed its outdated immigration laws, finally making it easier for immigrants from war-torn Asia to gain entrance to the United States. The incredibly racist Chinese Immigration Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Japanese Immigration Exclusion Act of 1924 were things I wouldn't discover till much later. Up until the moment of course registration, I had clearly done all the proper things a Pre-Dent student was supposed to do. I had completed my Chemistry major, taken all the requisite science and math courses needed for a successful Dental School

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism application, registered for the "Dent Boards" examination, and sent off about a half- dozen initial applications to various Dental Schools. Now, in my senior year, I could indulge both my intellectual passions and academic curiosities. Sure, I'd done that a bit previously, having weaseled my way into an upper level poetry class populated mostly by graduate students during my sophomore year. I even submitted what I thought was a great paper on Bob Dylan's lyrics as poetry. I'd had a brief romantic fling with a much older but not so popular touring folksinger named Penny McIntyre, and become a fair guitar and harmonica player as well. But I'd never imagined taking a course in Buddhism. I didn't even know what Buddhism was. On the first day of class, David Miller strolled into class wearing a blue and white carefully pressed seersucker suit with an accompanying dark bow tie which augmented his curly hair and spectacles. He sat on the desk in the front of the class, and began to read his lecture from what appeared to be newly prepared 4x6 index cards. It was his first tenure track academic position, and he was clearly nervous. Unlike my college cronies, I was mesmerized. As soon as Professor Miller began talking about the life of Siddhārtha Gautama—the historical Buddha—and his discovery of the "Four Noble Truths," I was hooked. When I heard that Buddha claimed that the first basic truth of reality was that "all life is suffering," my life changed forever. One wouldn't think that a privileged kid from the wealthy suburbs of Chicago would know much about suffering, but I did. Shortly before my thirteenth birthday, as I continued to prepare for my impending Bar Mitzvah, my father began to experience strange headaches, usually accompanied by brief losses of balance. As my father's illness progressed, we eventually found out that he had a brain tumor the size of a small orange, situated in his cerebellum. In a horrifying irony, he was alert, clearly aware that he was trapped inside a dying body. Every possible treatment was considered and tried, and when it became clear that death was imminent, we turned our family room into a hospital so my father's wish to die at home could be honored. Needless to say, I had no adolescence. Every member of my family became a nurse and caregiver. On December 4, 1961, my father's nurse apparently inserted a suction tube somewhat too far into his tracheotomy apparatus, causing my father enormous pain. Five minutes later he was dead. And I was no longer a Jew. From the vantage point of my seventeen year old immaturity, I could simply not understand how a benevolent, forgiving God could take a brilliant, compassionate man from his family at age forty-eight. As I said, I was no longer a Jew. However, what I was just

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Buddhism wasn't clear. I began college in Fall 1962 with an enormous chip on my shoulder, hating virtually everyone and everything, and with huge uncertainty as to just what the point of life might be. David Miller's course, and Buddha's teaching, changed all that. While my college pals continually made fun of the Buddha and Buddhism course, I devoured all the reading. I scoured Cleveland's bookshops for more, visited the John G. White Collection at the Cleveland Public Library, and pestered Professor Miller for more and more information. To his credit, he was as supportive and encouraging as a young undergraduate student could have ever hoped to find. Better still, he invited me to his home regularly, where I got to know his wife, children and dog. He understood my interest and my pain. Along the way, he even pointed me to the Washington Buddhist Vihara, one of the very few Buddhist organizations in the United States at that time, and it was there that I formally converted to Buddhism under the guidance of the Venerable Bope Vinita. In the Fall of 1966, I enrolled in the Dental School at the newly renamed Case Western Reserve University. By this time I was doing four hours a day of sitting meditation, with occasional day-long sessions, and even a couple of month- long retreats alone in the woods. From day one, I hated Dental School. Just before the end of the Fall Semester, I knew I had to leave . . . and I did. I withdrew. This was a tricky decision because the United States was squarely embroiled in the Vietnam War, and the loss of my student deferment would make me clearly eligible to be drafted into the military. David Miller immediately came to my rescue and got me admitted to the M.A. Program in Religion at Case Western Reserve University, thus allowing me to retain my student deferment and short circuit a quick trip to Saigon. While doing my Master's degree, I was able to apply to the prestigious Buddhist Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin. I was initially accepted into the Master's Program in Buddhist Studies, but after one semester, my status was changed, and I formally became a Ph.D. candidate under the guidance of the eminent, transplanted Canadian Buddhist scholar Richard H. Robinson. Prior to arriving at the University of Wisconsin, I didn't know much about Richard Robinson, relying on David Miller's high praise for his work. Yet Robinson's first letter to me, in the Spring of 1967, scared me to death. He noted that my transcript indicated excellent grades in Humanities courses, and genuine acumen in German. Yet he doubted that I'd be able to master Sanskrit, which was required of all Ph.D. students in Buddhist Studies, and snidely remarked that he didn't think I'd be much good at other languages like Pāli or Chinese or Tibetan. He made it sound like it was a miracle that I'd be accepted at all . . . but I was. In the 1960s there were really only two North American universities offering

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Buddhism sophisticated graduate education in Buddhist Studies: Harvard and the University of Wisconsin. Sure, there were a few highly trained Buddhist Studies specialists in other universities—like Alex Wayman at Columbia and Stanley Weinstein at Yale—but Wisconsin and Harvard were the places for young would-be scholars like myself. On first glance, there was certainly a huge disconnect between the overall ambience of an Ivy League university and that of a mostly rural Big Ten school, but in Buddhist Studies Harvard and Wisconsin were a lot more alike than one might imagine. Each featured the presence of an utterly brilliant scholar at the helm. As mentioned above, Richard Robinson dominated the Wisconsin scene, while at Harvard a young professor named Masatoshi Nagatomi was in charge. Each would produce a majestic legacy in the students who worked under their direction. However, what most people never knew was that the connection between Robinson and Nagatomi went far beyond their students. Both had a deep association with Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism in Southern Alberta, Canada. Masatoshi Nagatomi's father, Shinjo Nagatomi had been the first resident minister of the Raymond Buddhist Church, arriving on 4 June 1930. The church was housed in a former Mormon meeting hall. Shinjo Nagatomi was succeeded by Yutetsu Kawamura in 1934, and Richard Robinson learned some of his very first Buddhist lessons from Reverend Kawamura. I've always thought it karmically interesting that Robinson became my academic mentor, while Reverend Kawamura's son Leslie—perhaps the best known Buddhist Studies scholar in Canada—became and remained one of my very best academic and personal friends until his passing in 2011. In addition, I would eventually spend a number of weeks reading SanskritVinaya texts with Professor Nagatomi during the 1970s, and eventually find myself ensconced in a Mormon environment. Upon arriving in Madison, I quickly learned that Wisconsin's fledgling Buddhist Studies Ph.D. Program had already produced some notable scholars. Among its early graduates were: Lew Lancaster, who went on to a long and productive career at the University of California at Berkeley and later as president of University of the West (formerly called Hsi Lai University); Frank Cook, who had a productive career as a Hua-yen scholar and was a long-time disciple of Taizan Maezumi Rōshi; Nancy Lethcoe, a former Olympic Silver Medal winning swimmer; Doug Daye, one of the best known scholars of Buddhist logic worldwide; and Stefan Anacker, a rather eclectic Yogācāra scholar. Robinson was assisted by Professor Minoru Kiyota, an East Asian Buddhist specialist, anthropologist Robert Miller, and Sanskritists David Knipe and Frances Wilson. The faculty also was privileged to include Geshe Lhundub Sopa, one of the most eminent Tibetan scholars of Buddhism. The program had also benefited from past associations with well known

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4 H-Buddhism scholars such as Edward Conze, Alex Wayman, and others. It didn't take long for me to figure out that we were an odd crew, a ragtag group of young folks who had migrated to Buddhist Studies from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from Library Science to Chemistry. More importantly, the nearly two dozen graduate students in Buddhist Studies all genuinely liked and enjoyed each other, and spared no expense in helping each other in the overall learning process. As we proceeded through the program and went on to our individual careers, a strong Richard Robinson legacy gradually began to appear both in and out of academe. Jeffrey Hopkins went on to the University of Virginia and produced nearly two dozen Buddhist Studies students earning doctorates prior to his retirement. Roger Corless taught at nearby Duke University, doing landmark work in Chinese Buddhism, but also breaking new ground in the study of "Queer Buddhism." Steve Young, who knew more than a dozen languages, became a Shingon monk near Mt. Koya in Japan, taking the Buddhist name Shinzen, and coming back to the United States to develop one of the most successful community meditation centers, in Los Angeles. Harvey Aronson left academe to found Dawn Mountain Tibetan Temple in 1996, along with his wife Anne Klein, herself a Buddhist Ph.D. scholar. Perhaps the most brilliant one of our group was Stephen Beyer, whose bookThe Cult of Tara remains a classic in Buddhist Studies, and who eventually left Buddhist Studies for a distinguished career in law. Yet even the other individuals not mentioned above—Leonard Zwilling, Michael Sweet, Joe Wilson, Elvin Jones, James Reddington, Kathryn Cissell, and others were all brilliant in their own right. Needless to say, it was an environment long on compassion and without the usual toxicity seen in circumstances where colleagues were competing for pieces of a shrinking pie of financial support. As the 1968 Spring Semester began, things became very exciting for me. I learned that I had been awarded a National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Fellowship to study Hindi. To be sure, I wasn't excited about learning Hindi, as it had little benefit for my anticipated scholarly research, but with my impending marriage, fellowship money would be a huge asset to my finances. On the very day I learned of the fellowship decision—a Friday—my telephone rang about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. When I picked up the receiver and said "Hello," the voice on the other end said, "Richard Robinson here." Immediately I thought, "Oh crap, what did I do to get Robinson to call me at home?" He was calling to congratulate me on my fellowship award, but after all the polite gibberish, he said, "Don't take the fellowship. I want you to be my Research Assistant. It's a bit less money, but you won't waste your time learning a language you don't need. Take the weekend to think it over and get back to me Monday." I was flabbergasted. There were so many

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 5 H-Buddhism other graduate students who were smarter than me. I just couldn't imagine why he selected me for this position. All I could think of to say was, "I don't have to think it over. I'll take it. I feel like perhaps I should pay you for this opportunity." He laughed and said "Goodbye and congratulations. Soon we can plan what you should do." Not long thereafter,n ao delightful spring day in 1968, I was sitting in a restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin with Professor Robinson. He was munching his way through his third bratwurst sandwich, as he outlined the work he expected me to do as his newly appointed Research Assistant. In the midst of outlining what seemed like a huge and unmanageable list of duties, he abruptly stopped, and leaned across the table with a broad grin on his face. Knowing his reputation for ferocity and even rudeness with students, I imagined the worst and found myself almost instinctively sliding back from the table. "Chuck," he said with a little laugh, "I am now going to tell you how to have a long and prosperous career in Buddhist Studies." His advice seemed bizarre at the time, reminding me of the one-word careerkōan uttered to Dustin Hoffman's character Benjamin in the 1967 filmThe Graduate: "Plastics!" Robinson said, simply: "Sangha!" Stunned and clueless, I beseeched him to explain his presumably sage but seemingly impenetrable advice. Noticing my discomfort, he went on as he finished his third beer, "Choose a specialty that nobody is interested in and you will essentially be guaranteed safe and continuous employment by virtue of being the world's only authority on the topic." Robinson was relentless in his passion for me to learn everything about thesangha , and, fueled by frequent doses of his ferocity, I tried. I learned all I could about the historical aspects of the sangha's foundation, the textual tradition associated with its disciplinary regulations, its expansion and development throughout India and beyond, and its eventual separation into sectarian divisions. His peculiar advice, offered over bratwurst and beer, has continued to be the skillful means guiding my work. Investigating the sangha, in all its manifestations, remains the thread which knits together the various themes of my research into one hopefully harmonious fabric. But Robinson was wrong: far from being a topic of no interest to scholars and practitioners, the sangha has become one of the most exciting and intriguing topics of research and investigation. Perhaps the most consequential impact of the aggressive spread of Buddhism into cyberspace, along with the creation of a new kind of American Buddhist sangha never imagined by the Buddha, is the uniting of all the Buddhist communities or sanghas described above into one universal sangha that can communicate effectively in an attempt to eliminate the suffering of individuals throughout the world. I never understood Robinson's commitment to my education and training.

With everyone else he was mostly mean-spirited, rude, confrontational, and difficult. With me he was gentle, warm, and kind. Moreover, with me, he also talked continuously about my Buddhist practice as well as my academic training. I don't believe in my years with him that I ever heard him confess to being a Buddhist, but he was utterly committed to my training as a Buddhist. Better still, he never treated my wife Susan like a graduate student's wife. He treated her as a friend, constantly trading his Indian recipes for her Jewish favorites. By the end of our time together, we had him eating gefilte fish and chopped liver. Not long before my comprehensive exams were scheduled, Robinson was blown up in a house explosion. Although he survived the blast, he emerged with second and third degree burns on three-quarters of his body. At the outset, it wasn't clear if he would survive the night; but he did. He survived for a month, encountering all the potential problems burn victims experience in the period following their accident. Just when the doctors were beginning to become modestly optimistic about the possibility of using cadaver skin for transplants, he simply stopped living. Where this left all the in-progress graduate students was uncertain. Some were passed on to Minoru Kiyota, who inherited the immediate leadership of the Buddhist Studies Program, and I was handed over to Stephen Beyer, who had recently been hired as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. This was somewhat problematic for me, as Steve and I were friends, and our families had become friends as well. Nonetheless, I was allowed to take my comprehensives, as planned, and I passed easily. Beginning my dissertation was another matter. My agreement with Robinson had been that I would do an annotated comparative translation of the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravādin and Mūlasarvāstivādin Prātimokṣa Sūtras from Buddhist Sanskrit and provide an introductory discourse. We expected this would take about three hundred pages of manuscript. I assumed this would remain acceptable to Beyer. WRONG! Each time I submitted what I thought was the complete work, Beyer would say, "You know, nobody's going to work on this stuff for a long time, so why don't you add a chapter on ……?" I'd try to beg off, and he'd insist. Then when I did the newly required chapter, it would happen all over again. By the time we finally agreed I was done, my dissertation had grown to five chapters, three appendices, and 736 pages. In hindsight, Beyer's prodding was both wise and helpful. By the time I finished mining all the publications I could possible glean from my work, I had two monographs and several articles . . . enough to provide a safe expectation of tenure anywhere at that time. My dissertation defense was a breeze. Beyer walked in with a large brown paper bag twisted up at the top. It was obviously a bottle of some sort, and he placed it in the corner, saying only, "This

Finding Career and Research Directions

Prior to Fall 1970, the only thing I knew about Penn State University was that it had a first-rate and improving football team that was thriving under the guidance of its new young coach Joe Paterno, later to be known simply as JoePa. I wouldn't have known State College—Penn State's home—from College Park, College Station, or College Anything. I didn't even know where in Pennsylvania it was. However, in the Fall of 1970 I stumbled on an advertisement for a position in Buddhist Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.Within a short time, I sent off several applications to major universities with Religious Studies openings, including Penn State. I was a bit surprised at the quickness with which I received telephone call from Luther H. Harshbarger, Head of the Religious Studies Department at Penn State, inviting me to campus for a three-day interview. Harshbarger indicated that Professor Garma Chen-chi Chang had been particularly impressed by my record. I knew Chang by reputation, but I didn't know he had spent time at Wisconsin and that his wife Helena—affectionately called "Chang Tai Tai" by all her Chinese language students—had taught many of Wisconsin's early Ph.D. students their first lessons in Chinese. Over the next three days, I met every faculty member in the recently formed Religious Studies Department. Harshbarger came to Penn State shortly after the end of World War II as campus chaplain, but by the mid- 1960s had convinced the university administration to create a new department, and to endow it with both an M.A. and Ph.D. program focusing on religion in American culture . . . the first graduate program of its kind in an American university. Little by little Harshbarger began building what he routinely called his "Religious Studies Zoo"—at least one of everything for the major religious traditions and lots of faculty members in more exotic topics. With visionary zeal, Harshbarger would soon make me the fourteenth member of this young department. Almost from my very beginning at Penn State, I was continually plagued by two questions from students that I never encountered in graduate school. Do you meditate? Are you Buddhist? Of course these were fair questions, and I probably should have expected them. Buddhism was becoming a presence on college campuses, both in the various Area Studies Programs that began to develop after the Korean War and in the fallout from the 1965 change in U.S. immigration law that permitted more immigrants

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 8 H-Buddhism from war-torn Southeast Asia to settle here. In any case, to the former question I always answered "certainly" while to the latter I offered an emphatic "no.” Coincident with questions about my meditation practice were an equal number of inquiries from my students about whether I was willing to teachthem meditation? To be sure, I consistently declined these requests for training despite my empathy for my students' search. The issue of whether or not I was Buddhist was quite another matter. Although a significant number of my colleagues were ordained in one or another Protestant denomination, in addition to holding a Ph.D. which provided their teaching credential, my being a self-professed Buddhist was quite another matter. In the ancient Theravāda tradition, of course, two things were generally required for status as a Buddhist. The first of these was to "take refuge," and the second was to follow the five vows of the laity. Clearly, I had taken refuge many times during my visits to the Washington, D.C. Buddhist center, and followed the five vows as best I could, but still I refused to identify myself as a Buddhist. More than anything else, I was afraid of the fallout, or backlash, such an admission might have on my career and standing in the university. The above isn't meant to suggest that I wasn't aware of, or willing to confront, my largely private status as a Buddhist. My immediate predecessor at Penn State was obviously and openly Buddhist. Garma Chang was born in China in 1920, and entered a Buddhist monastery in Nanking when he was fifteen. He stayed two years and then spent eight additional years training as a monk in Tibetan monasteries. Although he had no formal academic degree in Buddhist Studies, Chang did attain the rank of khen- po, which was like a monastic Ph.D. He first came to the U.S. in 1948, and returned in 1951 as a permanent resident. He taught in a variety of places, but eventually wound up at Penn State, beginning in 1966. He was largely supported in his work at Penn State and elsewhere by Dr. C.T. Shen, a wonderful old Chinese industrialist who had come to America in 1952 and founded the Buddhist Association of the United States twelve years later. Shen wanted North American Buddhists to have locations for Dharma assemblies, and devoted a large portion of his fortune to making that dream a reality. He also supported the development of Buddhist Studies in universities, and through publications, and it was to Chang's good fortune—and mine—that Penn State became one of the beneficiaries of his kindness. I saw meeting with Chang on a regular basis as an opportunity to fill in some genuinely glaring gaps in my academic training. In fact, nothing of the kind ever happened. On our first meeting, at Chang's house, he greeted me in his pajamas. As we sat on the floor of Chang's living room, drinking green Chinese tea, I immediately started asking about Chang's research. Chang, or simply "Garma," as he preferred to be called, apparently had other plans for our discussion. No matter what I asked or how I tried to direct the discussion, Garma wanted to talk about the four noble truths, or Buddha's cornerstone doctrine as

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 9 H-Buddhism expressed in his very first sermon following his enlightenment experience. At the beginning of the 1972-73 academic year, I got an internal grant at Penn State that allowed me to travel in association with a book I was editing called Buddhism: A Modern Perspective. One of the places I went was Riverside, California, where I spent several days with Francis Cook, a professor who was contributing to my book. I didn't think it odd that my old friend Frank was a vegetarian, as that was all in the vogue at the time, but Frank said something at the end of our first day together that was startling and revealing. He offered me a martini, chiding that, "This is the only indulgence that I permit myself which runs contrary to my commitment to Buddhism." I declined the martini, but spent hours asking questions about Cook's involvement with, and commitment to, Buddhism. It seems that Cook was a follower of someone named Taizan Maezumi Rōshi, a Zen master who ran the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Frank even got a Buddhist name: Dojun. On the trip back to Pennsylvania, all I could think about was how natural being Buddhist seemed to Frank Cook, and how at ease he was in his commitment to try and combine wisdom and compassion in a fashion that helped other people; evenall other beings. Upon my return to the office the next day, the topic of Buddhism came up in a lunchtime conversation, and before I knew it, I blurted out: "Yes, I'm Buddhist.” From that day forward, none present in that lunchtime conversation ever took my scholarly, academic work seriously again. I'm sure it never occurred to any of them present in that lunchtime conversation that the very same argument could have been made about their own Christian commitments in relationship to the courses they taught. It was a classic double-standard that permeated most of higher education at the time. Two decades later, when I coined the term "scholar-practitioner," to describe individuals like myself, the full implications of that issue finally became properly debated in both scholarly and religious communities. Not long before my "coming out" as a Buddhist, another incident occurred which proved equally telling in shaping what was to eventually become the major component of my life's work. One day, in an introductory class on Buddhism, one of my students asked me what I thought of an American Zen master named Philip Kapleau. Kapleau's book The Three Pillars of Zenwas hugely popular on the American scene. Without any hesitation at all, I started to prattle off my scholarly estimate of the book. You can imagine my shock, and maybe even outrage, when the student cut me off in mid-sentence and said, "That's not what I meant! I've read the book and can make up my own mind about its merits and shortcomings. I want to know what you think of Kapleau as a rōshi." Stunned by the impertinence of this student, I just stood there, silent. Truth is, I simply didn't think anything of Kapleau. I'd never considered Kapleau as anything other than a faceless force that had written a pretty reasonable book. It

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 10 H-Buddhism seems that the student had just returned from Kapleau's Buddhist center, the Zen Center of Rochester, and wanted some feedback about this captivating teacher who was becoming known for his efforts to "Americanize" Zen. To that point, I hadn't ever had a single thought about any American forms of Buddhism. I knew there were a few Buddhist teachers in America, like my own teacher Bope Vinita, or the Japanese Jōdo Shinshū Bishop who had attended the funeral of my mentor, and some expatriate Tibetan who had a center in Vermont, but this never gestated into any consideration of what all these Buddhist teachers in Americameant ? I didn't even have any ideahow many Buddhists there might be in America. So I set about finding out. I started writings letters. Any time I could get a lead on some Buddhist group, or teacher, I'd write a letter, telephone, or both. And little by little, I started getting responses. Every time I got some mail, or made some note about this group or that group, I threw it into a five-drawer file cabinet. Within a couple of years, the file cabinet was full. I also began to realize that if I was ever going to contribute to the graduate component of Penn State's Religious Studies Department, this was it. Nobody had ever touched on Buddhism as a "Western" phenomenon in any classroom in North America, and this could be an enormous "first" in the field of Religious Studies. Eventually, a letter arrived from Chögyam Trungpa, a former Tibetan lama who had settled in the United States, inviting me to come and teach Sanskrit during the summer of 1974 at the first session of a new institution he was founding called Naropa Institute, in Boulder, designed to be a non-sectarian Buddhist university that would combine traditional studies with the practice of a "non-verbal humanity," whatever that was. The offer was enticing: a free place to live, some additional salary, and a chance to hobnob with some of the heavies of the counterculture: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Baba Ram Dass, Gregory Bateson. Nobody could turn that down. Besides, it also created the occasion to make some sense of all the stuff in that file cabinet, and plans were immediately made to write a book on "American Buddhism." At that time it never occurred to me to consider whether there even was such a thing as American Buddhism. I intuitively knew there was. When the summer rolled around, I packed up our 1972 Pinto, and headed off for Boulder to discover, or create, American Buddhism. Apart from the obvious professional benefits of the experience, the visit to Naropa provided another enticing feature: the opportunity to be around Buddhists, and that was something that was sorely lacking in my background. While my colleagues in graduate school went off to Dharamsala, Bangkok and Tokyo to do their doctoral dissertation research, I sat in an office in Van Hise Building at the University of Wisconsin and translated two Sanskrit monastic texts for mine. One day while at the local Dairy Queen, slurping my way through a raspberry

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 11 H-Buddhism sunday, my creamy lust was interrupted when a tall, attractive young woman came up to me and said, "Excuse me; aren't you Professor Prebish?" "Why yes;" I replied, "do I know you?" She went on: "No. My name is Jan Nattier (pronounced NATT-EE-ER in those days), and I'm a graduate student at Harvard. I'm here teaching Introductory Tibetan." At that time I had no way of knowing that this brash young woman was soon going to become my very best friend, and begin a friendship that endured for almost twenty years. We also conspired to write a groundbreaking article on the beginnings of Indian Buddhist sectarianism . . . a topic we were both passionate about. I also met Rick Fields that summer. Rick was a journalist by profession, and what underscored our meeting and conversations was the plan of each of us to write a book about American Buddhism. I kept thinking about that pile of files I had brought with me, and I thought my discussions with Rick Fields might motivate me actually start to plow through the incredible diversity of stuff I'd accumulated since that chance encounter with a student, years before. Obviously, we intended very different kinds of books. Fields wanted to write a popular narrative about the rise and development of Buddhism in America, focusing almost exclusively on those Buddhist groups that nourished the meditative tradition, while I wanted to write an inclusive scholarly survey . . . one that would also include a consideration the many ethnic Buddhist groups, and non-meditative communities currently present on American soil. It was also obvious that each of us wanted to be thefirst to get their book into print. As it turned out, neither of us was the first to publish a major book on American Buddhism. We were beaten to the punch by Emma McCloy Layman, a retired psychology professor, who published Buddhism in America in 1976. My own book didn't appear until 1979, with Fields's following two years later, in 1981. Trungpa invited me back to Naropa for the summer of 1975, and Nattier too. We conspired that, if we were indeed to write our hopefully groundbreaking article on Buddhist sectarianism, it would make much more sense if we shared living space, so we coaxed Naropa Institute into pooling the housing money allotted for each of us, and renting a house large enough to house the Prebish familyand Nattier. Such a place was found on Spruce Street, just a short walk from Trungpa's office. With Nattier, things were utterly productive. We worked diligently throughout the summer on an article that would be titled, "Mahāsāṃghika Origins: The Beginnings of Buddhist Sectarianism." That our article became the new, standard theory for the beginnings of Indian Buddhist sectarianism was far less important to me than my growing friendship with Jan. I loved Jan as part of our family. When she eventually finished her Ph.D. and married, I was delighted and thrilled. The American Buddhism book thrived as well. All my efforts went into my article with Nattier and my book. By then I had published my doctoral dissertation, on Indian Buddhist monasticism, as well as an edited

Creating American Buddhism and More

Upon returning to Penn State after the Summer of 1975, I spent almost all my time preoccupied with finishing my book on American Buddhism, and designing what turned out to be the first full academic course on the topic in a North American college or university. My academic course mirrored the structure of the book. It built its foundation on an old saying attributed to the Tibetan saint Padmasambhava, who was supposed to have said:

When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, The Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the World, And the Dharma will come to the land of the Red Man.

In other words, Part One, "The Iron Bird Flies," dealt with the history of the American Buddhist movement. Part Two, "Horses Run on Wheels," treated what I called "The Flowering of Buddhism in America," in which I presented eight case studies of American Buddhist communities. And Part Three, "Dharma Comes to the Land of the Red Man," considered the future of American Buddhism, perhaps too optimistically dubbed "New Heaven and Earth" in honor of D. H. Lawrence's not very well known 1917 poem. Although the book was not to appear until 1979, the course was exceeding well received as an undergraduate seminar. In between my first course on American Buddhism and my tenure/promotion evaluation, I participated in an extraordinary event for Buddhist Studies, in America and worldwide: the foundation of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. This organization, which gradually became the flagship society for the discipline, held an international conference at the University of Wisconsin in 1976. More than sixty scholars, from every nook and cranny of the globe, congregated in Madison to present

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 13 H-Buddhism papers and discuss the future direction of this new professional organization scripted by Professor A.K. Narain of Wisconsin's Buddhist Studies program. None of the papers presented at the conference, and none of the twenty-seven that found their way into the conference volume called Studies in the History of Buddhism, mentioned Buddhism in any western context. The most interesting tidbit of conversation that emerged from the conference was a fanciful lunchtime discussion, in the basement of the Student Union, in which a number of conference participants talked about how exciting it would be if a computer could be programmed with all the grammatical rules of Sanskrit, Pāli, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese, as well as all the best dictionaries of those languages . . . and then scholars could simply sit back while the computer spit out multilingual, cross-referenced translations of all the important Buddhist texts. None of those lunchtime conspirators had ever touched a computer, and they all laughed at the absurdity of their wishes. Later, I would come to recognize that computers and the Internet would become one of the most valuable contributions of, and allies to, American Buddhism. The conference was not all fun, though, for me. My own presentation was designed to share my findings on the beginnings of Buddhist sectarianism that Jan Nattier and I had collected in 1975, and I was more than a little uneasy about criticizing the standard theory of André Bareau who, apart from being one of the great superstars of Buddhist Studies, was my own scholarly hero. I occasionally told my dog Buddha the beagle on our walks that André Bareau was even more important than Ernie Banks, whose autograph and baseball card were my most prized possessions. The article on which the paper was based was to appear in the February 1977 issue of the prestigious journal History of Religions, so this was to be an advance hint of how our new hypothesis for the beginnings of Buddhist sectarianism would be received. I was especially worried because Alex Wayman and Leon Hurvitz would both be in the audience, and these two curmudgeons often asked rude, impolite questions more designed to bring embarrassment than intellectual enlightenment to the presenter. Sure enough, the very moment I finished reading his paper, two hands in the audience popped up: Wayman and Hurvitz. I first called on Wayman, who made one simple, and gentle, correction to a text name cited by me in the paper. And Hurvitz asked only for a minor clarification. At the time, the only scholar of Buddhist Studies meaner than Wayman or Hurvitz was Jan W. de Jong, a brilliant Dutch scholar who edited theIndo-Iranian Journal and a monograph series of the same name. De Jong was famous for his book reviews, which regularly tore apart the research publications of even the greatest scholars of the discipline, while rarely publishing anything original of his own. Unfortunately, I had history with de Jong. Early in my career, I sent a portion of my doctoral dissertation to

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 14 H-Buddhism de Jong for publication consideration in the "Indo Iranian Monograph Series." It was a bibliographic reference work calledA Survey of Vinaya Literature, which organized and cited all publications in Vinaya Studies since 1800, and in all the various Buddhist research languages. De Jong's response was polite, but frustrating. He very much liked the work, but sketched out a series of alterations that would be necessary before which he would consider it for publication. The changes were so extensive, and contrary to my initial plan, that I declined de Jong's suggestion, and indicated that I would publish the work elsewhere. I didn't; or at least not immediately. Instead, I became occupied with other projects, and it remained clearly on the back-burner. I was shocked when one of de Jong's students, Akira Yuyama, a very fine scholar and gentleman, published a book titledSystematische Übersicht über die Buddhistische Sanskrit-Literatur (Erster Teil: Vinaya-Texte), in 1979. The book covered exactly the same territory as my own not-yet-published volume and used an almost identical organizational schema. Since Yuyama had never previously published anything onVinaya , and never since, it was very unsettling to me. An exciting conference was held in 1977 that had real impact on the development of American Buddhism, and on my career. It was held at Syracuse University in April 1977. It was organized primarily by a Zen practitioner and faculty member named Louis Nordstrom, who had recently edited a book calledNamu Dai Bosa: A Transmission of Zen Buddhism to America, which examined the histories of some early Zen patriarchs in America. Although the title of the conference—"The Flowering of Buddhism in America"—was overly ambitious and inaccurate, it was great fun. With the exception of me, and one or two others, the presenters were all practitioners rather than scholars . . . and their enthusiasm had all the uncritical abandon that one might expect from such a congregation. At the conference, I was most impressed by the quiet yet elegant contribution by Joanna Macy. But I was also impressed by what I perceived as a gross superficiality on the part of most participants. The majority of those in attendance knew very little about Buddhism, and tended to equate Buddhism only with the meditation practice publicized in the popular press. There was no concern whatsoever with ethnic Buddhists nor was there any attempt to examine some of the non-meditative practices within the Buddhist tradition. Discussion of the precepts, or ethical maxims in the various Buddhist sects, was wholly absent. Throughout the decade of the 1970s, Buddhism continued to grow in America like a wildfire. People joined Buddhist groups in a mad dash for enlightenment, and dropped out equally as fast. This "Dharma-hopping," as it was called, made it very difficult to get a handle on just what was happening, despite being located in the veritable heart of Buddhist America. Moreover, it continued to be difficult to persuade

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 15 H-Buddhism anyone that studying this phenomenon was a valid enterprise, academic or otherwise. Academic researchers invariably faced the frequently voiced query: "Well, if you're not Buddhist, how can you possibly understand what's going on here?" On the other hand, if a researcher "outted" and confessed to being Buddhist, they got an equally distressing comeback: "Well, since you're Buddhist, how can you possibly have any objectivity your investigation." It was the proverbial "Catch-22," and the situation wasn't going to improve for over a decade. One young Harvard faculty member even said that studying American Buddhism wasn't "real Buddhist Studies." Prior to around 1980, the leading North American scholarly venue for scholars of Buddhism was the Association of Asian Studies. Every year at its annual meeting, these so-called "Buddhologists," would gather, present academic papers, and socialize. By the mid-1970s, though, it seemed as if the association was growing so large and cumbersome that it became harder and harder for these scholars to maneuver their way onto the large, formal program. As a result, more and more scholars of Buddhism became involved in the American Academy of Religion (AAR), an association which was far friendlier to their pursuits in the study of one of the world's great religions. As the decade of the 1980s opened, at least one unit in the American Academy of Religion was explicitly devoted to the study of Buddhism. Called the "Indian Buddhism Consultation," it was headed by a young and aggressive individual named Arvind Sharma. During the 1981 annual meeting of the AAR, I was enjoying a pleasant conversation with my friend and colleague George Bond, from Northwestern University, when we were approached by two individuals with lots of political clout in the "History of Religions" section of the parent organization. They proposed that AAR was seeking to expand the role of the study of Buddhism in the organization, and wanted to create a "Buddhism Group." This was big news because the difference between a "consultation" and a "group" was significant. Consultations were allotted one panel session per year while groups got two; and the life span of groups was five years, which was far longer than consultations. But there was a "catch" to the deal. George Bond and I would have to depose the current chairman of the Indian Buddhism Consultation and we would be installed as Co-Chairs of the new unit that would be established in its place. At the business meeting of the Indian Buddhism Consultation, Arvind Sharma inadvertently solved our problem by saying that he'd been giving much thought as of late to resigning his position as chair, and moving on to new projects. In a flash, the new Buddhism Group of AAR was formed with George Bond and me as the Co-Chairs. In the new unit, the two Co-Chairs and the five-person Steering Committee made all administrative decisions for the unit; and these ranged from who was allowed to present papers at the annual meeting to facilitating new enterprises in the study of Buddhism

By the decade of the 1980s, there was a powerful downturn in the proliferation of American Buddhist communities. The rush to rōshis seemed to be over, and incessant Dharma-hopping gave way to a more controlled, and probably saner, growth in American Buddhism. Groups like Nichiren ōShshū of America stopped overstating their membership numbers, Zen groups struggled to make sense of teachings of their first generation American Zen masters, Tibetan groups began initiating their students into the formal practices of Tantric Buddhism, and Buddhism was losing it "exotic" label. Words likenirv āṇa and karma were becoming part of mainstream American vocablulary. The slowdown in the growth of American Buddhism allowed me to focus my professional efforts on my work as the newly elected Co-Chair of the Buddhism Group of the American Academy of Religion. Although I didn't discuss my notions with the other Co-Chair George Bond, I was convinced that Buddhist Studies, as it was developing in North America, was misguided. In the first place, most of the role models for this blooming discipline: Edward Conze, Leon Hurvitz, Alex Wayman, and a few others, were amongst the meanest individuals in academe. While they were utterly brilliant scholars, they seemed to take real delight in humiliating students rather than encouraging them. I believed then, as I do now, that Buddhist Studies needed to become a kinder and gentler discipline if it was to thrive in North America. I felt this would happen because, in the second place, Buddhist Studies was beginning to show a presence of what I had begun calling "scholar-practitioners," or scholars who actually considered themselves Buddhists, even if they didn't reveal their affiliation, and tried to create a mutually reciprocal relationship between Buddhist study and Buddhist practice. Because so many of these individuals remained hushed about their secret lives as Buddhists, I began to privately call them, the "silent sangha." I tried to utilize my new position in AAR to facilitate my vision for the discipline. In the October 1983 issue of the important journalReligious Studies Review, I wrote an article called "Buddhist Studies American Style: A Shot in Dark." In my AAR work with George Bond, we both tried diligently to set an example for the discipline. In each panel we planned, we tried to be sure that junior scholars (and sometimes even graduate students) were included alongside senior, well-established researchers, and that all areas of the discipline were represented. In other words, we tried to be fair, and balanced, and forward-looking in our promotion of Buddhist Studies as an academic discipline. This was the very first opportunity for Buddhist Studies to play a major role in a distinctly American professional society, and we weren't about to blow that chance. I also wanted to "break the ice," so to speak, on the usefulness and validity of academic, scholarly studies devoted to the study of "Western Buddhism." I remained convinced that one day soon, studies in Western Buddhism would become a

The Two Buddhisms Legacy

In December 1992, my old pal Rick Fields, who was then on the editorial staff of a slick new Buddhist popular-style magazine calledTricycle , called me and asked if I'd be willing to write a feature story on the conflict between Asian American or "ethnic" Buddhists, and mostly white (or "Euro-American") converts to Buddhism. It seems that the magazine's editor, Helen Tworkov, had written an editorial in the Winter 1991 issue in which she said, "If we are to affirm true pluralism we must accept that one person's practice is another's poison." But then she went on to say: "The spokespeople for Buddhism in America have been almost exclusively, educated members of the white middle class." She even went further, noting, "Meanwhile, even with varying statistics, Asian-American Buddhists number at least one million, but so far they have not figured very prominently in the development of something called American Buddhism." Her editorial provoked a letter of response from a fellow named Ryo Imamura, who was not only a university psychology professor, but also an eighteenth-generation Jōdo Shinshū priest. The letter to the editor was rejected for publication by Tricycle. Nonetheless, Imamura's concern struck a nerve with Tworkov and the editorial staff. Fields remembered that I had coined the term "two Buddhisms" in my 1979 book, although in a slightly different context, and wondered if I would now

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 18 H-Buddhism be willing to write on this new application of the ethnic-convert split. At the time, I never imagined that the "two Buddhisms" theory, which was simply intended to describe what researchers were seeing, on the ground, during their visits to American Buddhist centers between the early 1970s and early 1990s, was going to turn into a typology, and even "legacy," that scholars are still arguing about today. To be sure, the theory is now outdated, having given way to notions such as hybridity, regionalism, and denominationalism—to name but a few alternatives—but many scholars are still hacking away at it, with most offering only their critique but no complete new typologies that better describe the American Buddhist scene in North America. Then, however, the two Buddhisms of Asian immigrant Buddhists and American convert Buddhists was soon to become all the rage. I eventually published my article not in Tricycle, but rather in the 1993 issue of the London-based journalBuddhist Studies Review, as "Two Buddhisms Reconsidered." I had become North American representative of the journal, and a member of the editorial staff, the previous year, and as such, the Editor-in-Chief Russell Webb was eager to publish some of my work on this important new topic. The article was well received and prompted me to present a paper called "Asian American and Euro-American Buddhism: An Increasingly Unfriendly Partnership" at the 1994 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, held in Chicago in November. As soon as I had finished reading his paper, and asked for questions from the large audience, one immediate and highly recognizable hand went up: that of my good friend Jan Nattier. I called on her first, and unwittingly set in motion one of the most aggressive, enduring, and unpleasant debates that has appeared in Buddhist Studies over the last quarter-century. Nattier's objection was that the "two Buddhisms" theory of ethnic and convert Buddhism was trivial and inadequate. She found the terms "white Buddhist" and "Euro-American Buddhist" inadequate despite the fact that the former term was used only in quotations and the latter didn't even occur in Buddhistthe Studies Review article or the AAR paper. Moreover, it seemed that she really wanted to use the question-and-answer period as a forum for promoting her own theory, in which she divided American Buddhism into a threefold typology of import religion (called "Elite Buddhism"), export religion (called "Evangelical Buddhism") and Baggage Religion (called "Ethnic Religion"). Apart from the fact that this typology was almost identical to the one I published in my 1993 article (in which I identified ethnic religions, export religions, and new religions), almost every Asian American face in the audience cringed when they found their own forms of Buddhism referred to as "baggage religion." Starting the following year with an article inTricycle , Nattier published a series of articles advancing her position, while continuing to critique my position

Nattier's critique was also disconcerting because it came at a time when things had taken a profound professional upturn for me. In October of 1992, I had begun to take the initial steps toward launching the first empirical investigation of the Buddhist Studies community in North America. Somewhat modeled on a study undertaken by Ray Hart, the former editor of theJournal of the American Academy of Religion (and published in the Winter 1991 issue of that journal), I solicited data and narrative statements from 125 carefully selected scholars. The preliminary results were presented in a paper at the 1993 AAR annual meeting in Washington, D.C., and published in the fledgling electronic journalGassho , with the full results appearing slightly later in a journal calledReligion , published in England and the United States. In 1995, two years after my initial results appeared, I repeated the survey, enlarging my sample to 140 requests. I got a whopping 75.7 percent return, and was thus able to offer important data on the gender, educational background, language facility, and the like for those polled. In addition, I tracked the academic rank of the respondents, type of university in which they teach, and the department that employed each. I also collected data on memberships in professional organizations, editorships held, areas of specializations, grants and fellowships received, professional papers presented, honors awarded, and publication records. Eventually, the full results of both surveys were published in my 1999 book Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America. The surveys allowed scholars in the discipline to begin the important task of critical self reflection. The Birth of the Journal of Buddhist Ethics

By the mid-1990s, I had recently read a brilliant new book on Buddhist ethics—the first really fine book on this topic ever to appear in print—calledThe Nature of Buddhist Ethics, by Damien Keown, a British scholar I had never met or even heard of previously. Quickly, I decided to write a review article on Keown's book, which was published as "Buddhist Ethics Comes of Age: Damien KeownThe and Nature of Buddhist Ethics" in the 1993 issue ofBuddhist Studies Review. It was to be perhaps the most fortuitous publication of my career, but not so much because of its content. Not long after the article appeared, I got a letter from Damien Keown thanking me for my gracious appraisal of the book. Truth is, the article wasn't gracious at all, but rather simply honest! The book was utterly brilliant, and clearly, Keown remains the world’s foremost authority on Buddhist ethics. Since e-mail communication had become the norm in the early 1990s, Keown and I began an electronic correspondence that was soon to change our respective careers and establish us as fast friends. As our e-mail correspondence became a daily event, we began conspiring to

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 20 H-Buddhism begin a journal devoted to the study of Buddhist ethics. Previously unknown to me, Keown had lots of computer experience and technical knowledge, and somewhat unexpectedly, Keown popped up with the electronic question: "Why don't we create an electronic journal?" I responded in the affirmative. Soon we were engaged in a month‑long plan to launch the very first online peer-reviewed journal in the overall discipline of Religious Studies, aptly named the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. We decided that an academic, peer‑reviewed, journal should have a proper editorial board of outstanding scholars in the subject area of the journal, so we began identifying and contacting potential editorial board members, hoping to reinforce our own initial notion about the efficacy of the proposed journal as well as solicit the participation of these renowned scholars. Within a month, we had lined up twelve highly respected members of the Buddhist Studies establishment to serve on the editorial board. On 1 July 1994, theJournal of Buddhist Ethics announced its presence on a number of electronic newsgroups, most notably, Buddha‑L, Buddhist, and Indology. Within a week, despite having no articles online, the journal had approximately 100 subscribers from several countries. After 1 September 1994, the journal issued its first "Call for Papers" on the same networks. By the end of November (1994), the journal counted over 300 subscribers from 25 countries. Gradually, articles began to emerge, buoyed by notices that appeared inThe (London) Times Higher Education Supplement (on 14 October 1994) andThe Chronicle of Higher Education (on 26 October 1994). Within a short period the journal posted its first "Research Papers:" James Whitehill's "Buddhist Ethics in Western Context: The 'Virtues' Approach," and Winston King's "A Buddhist Ethic Without Karmic Rebirth?" and its first "Discussion Article," Paul Numrich's "Vinaya in Theravda Temples in the United States." In each of these cases, the article took no more than one week from initial receipt until posting in the journal. It also posted "Bulletins" inviting applications for the (visiting) Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies at the University of Calgary, announcing the Numata Lecture Series at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California on "Buddhisms in America: An Expanding Frontier," and a bibliography listing scholarly books on Buddhist ethics published in the 1990s. With the appearance of the above titles, many inquiries began to arrive from scholars interested in contributing to the journal. Within a year, theJournal of Buddhist Ethics had grown to more than 700 subscribers in 30 countries By far the most ambitious project of the journal undertaken in 1995 was the planning and execution of the first online conference in the history of the Religious Studies discipline. The conference was entitled "Buddhism and Human Rights," and consisted of 10 papers posted on JBEthe site, along with the United Nations "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," and the Dalai Lama's statement on "Human

Rights and Universal Responsibility." Between October 1st and 13th, discussion was entertained on the journal's JBE-L listserv. During the two weeks of the conference, the JBE home page was accessed 1,350 times, and more than 400 messages were posted on JBE-L. From a modest initial year of publication, in which four total articles were posted online, the second year yielded 11 articles and the first book review. In April 2000, the JBE sponsored its second online conference, devoted to the topic of "Socially Engaged Buddhism," with Christopher Queen of Harvard University as Honorary Chairman and Convener. Thirteen papers were posted with more than 200 discussion responses posted to the specially designed conference listserv during the week-long event. As the Journal of Buddhist Ethics moved ahead into the new century, it did so with a subscriber base of more than 3300 individuals. It also won a significant number of awards, further attesting to its place in the scholarly world. Although I was thoroughly immersed in my work with the JBE, and on American Buddhism, it would be wrong to presume that during this productive period I had neglected my more traditional work in Buddhist Studies. In 1996 I was afforded a rare opportunity for scholars: the occasion to edit my own book series for a major publisher. In mid-year I was contacted by Malcolm Campbell, the director of Curzon Press in England, which was readily acknowledged as one of the world's leading publishers of books on Asian Studies. Campbell was hoping to launch a book series devoted solely to Buddhism, and he needed someone to spearhead the effort. After a couple of weeks of daily e-mails in which a flurry of questions and concerns flew back and forth across the Atlantic, I agreed, but with the condition that my friend andJBE Co-Editor Damien Keown be allowed to function as Co-Editor in this venture as well. Campbell concurred, and by the 1996 AAR annual meeting, we began to solicit possible manuscripts. The series became an immediate success, and continues to be a vehicle that reflects my vision for the general progression of work in Buddhist Studies. Called "Critical Studies in Buddhism," and now published by Routledge (which absorbed Curzon Press) the series balances publication by senior, well established scholars of Buddhist Studies with those of newer, fledgling scholars. It publishes studies of Buddhist texts, books highlighting Buddhism's globalization, and explorations of topical issues in the discipline. Within six years, the series boasted 25 books in print, with more in the works. Keown and I resigned as Co-Editors in 2006, after publishing more than 60 books during our decade with the series.

The Journal of Global Buddhism, Westward Dharma & More

Pumped up by the continuing success of theJBE , within a few years I believed the time was right to begin another online journal, this one focusing on Buddhism's

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 22 H-Buddhism burgeoning globalization. During the last half of the decade of the 1990s, I had become good friends with Martin Baumann, who then lived in Bielefeld, Germany and was a specialist in Hindu and Buddhist diaspora traditions. Baumann was meticulous in his research, and knew more about Buddhism's diffusion throughout the Western world than anyone. During one of our dinners together in Lausanne in 1999, I suggested to Baumann that we create an online journal called theJournal of Global Buddhism, modeled on the JBE. Baumann and I did not limit our association to starting theJGB . We had each contributed much to the developing literature on Buddhism in a Western context, and we lamented the fact that no one book on modern Buddhism really did very much on Buddhism's diffusion into the Western world. Heinrich Dumoulin's old edited volume The Cultural, Political, and Religious Significance of Buddhism in the Modern World barely mentioned Buddhism outside of Asia. In a short chapter by Ernst Benz called "Buddhism in the Western World," he mentioned Buddhism in England, Germany, and the United States, but barely so in each case. The only other book we could think of that mentioned Buddhism in the West was another volume edited by Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich. This one was called The World of Buddhism, published in 1984. The chapter on Western Buddhism was written by Bechert, and it was utterly laughable. Clearly, Bechert knew almost nothing about Western Buddhism. In any case, Baumann and I decided to edit a book to fill the gap, and it was eventually called Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, and was published in 2002. For several years, I had been trying to schedule a trip to London. It was one of the few places I hadn't seen, so my wife and I went in the Summer of 2002, and stayed with Damien Keown, who owned a townhouse not far from the Westminster Bridge. For ten days we toured everywhere, enjoyed long walks along the Thames, and even attended the one-day meeting of the United Kingdom Association for Buddhist Studies. It gave us an additional chance to meet British colleagues we rarely saw in the States. More importantly, Keown and I met with the representatives of the newly named Routledge Curzon Press, which published our book series. Curzon Press had recently been purchased by the Taylor and Francis Group, and was now aligned with Routledge. The press wanted Keown and I to edit a massive "Encyclopedia of Buddhism," planned for 500,000 words in a single, 1,000 page volume. The offer was interesting, as was the timing, because a similar project, edited by Robert Buswell for Macmillan Reference was currently in the works in America. The two volumes would clearly compete, and my love of competition made me favorably disposed to the project

Buddhist Studies Ebooks

Not long thereafter, I was off to London again to give one of two keynote addresses at the United Kingdom Association of Buddhist Studies (UKABS) annual meeting. I've always loved London, and I always enjoy the time spent with Damien Keown. As always, I stayed in Keown's London residence, shared in his wonderful hospitality, and had lots of time to spend seemingly countless hours plotting and planning new projects. The conference went smoothly, allowing me to reconnect with many old friends like Peter Harvey, Lance Cousins, Russell Webb, and Richard Gombrich. In addition, we had another meeting with the editorial staff at Routledge Curzon to discuss the progress on our Encyclopedia of Buddhism project, and to squabble about the way in which our "Critical Studies in Buddhism" series was being promoted by the press. But the most important part of the London trip was a long conversation between Keown and I in which we began to fantasize about, tentatively at first and then aggressively later, an entirely new and different kind of Buddhist Studies project: eTexbooks for students of religion. Our decade of success with theJournal of Buddhist Ethics had convinced us of the efficacy of electronic products, and now we were brainstorming about how we could create a product that would be a boon to student learning and provide them a financial respite from the burgeoning prices of print textbooks. We hatched a plan to co-author an introductory eBook called Buddhism-The eBook that would have links to the best websites on the Internet. That way students could click back and forth between the eText and the web seamlessly. We knew that most students used the Internet far more than textbooks, so why not utilize that knowledge in a positive way? We would save students searching around, and save professors the worry that their students would find the worst sites rather than the best sites. By using an eText format, we would also not be reliant on traditional bound books. Students could download the eBook as a file or order it on CD-ROM, so it would always be on their computer and, with the new wireless technology in computers, it could go anywhere with them . . . even on planes, or to the beach. Because we would publish the book via a company we would create, no rip-off publishers or bookstores would even be involved; and because of the format, we could revise the text easily, as often as necessary to reflect new developments in the field and new websites. All we had to do was write the book and find someone to handle the technology. By the time we left London, I was so energized that I had my half of the eBook finished in a month. It didn't take Keown much longer to complete his half. We were an ideal working partnership: both crazed in our one-pointedness and passion. Our goal was to be up and running by the first day of 2004. We didn't make it, but only missed by a couple of months. By late February 2004, the eBook project was ready to launch. For months prior to actually announcing its debut, I had been gathering lists of people to whom I would write e-mails announcing the new product. These lists included Buddhist

Limping Toward Nirvāṇa in American Buddhism

In the not very distant future, Buddhism will celebrate two full centuries on American soil. I have been tracking and studying its history and impact here for about five decades, which is likely longer than any living person on the planet. Yet the two issues that fueled my initial inquiries still remain. First, is there a truly American form of Buddhism; and second, how do we study and understand the Buddhism that is now thriving in America? Certainly these two issues have been the main thrust of my investigation of “American Buddhism.” Nevertheless, it is appropriate to now ask what new issues and features might well impact the ongoing development of Buddhism on the North American continent. Further, it is important to also recognize that the Buddhism that is developing in the United States should not blindly be assumed to be identical to Canadian or Mexican Buddhism. Some of this becomes apparent in Victor Hori's inspiring chapter called "How Do We Study Buddhism in Canada?" in the recently edited volume Wild Geese: Buddhism in Canada. In addition to what I have already presented above, I think we can add two additional developments that will significantly impact both the practice and study of Buddhism in North America. On the one hand, there has been a huge development of Buddhist educational institutions on the continent. Here I don't mean only the Buddhist institutions of higher learning, like Naropa University, Nyingma Institute, University of the West, and Soka University of America, but also Buddhist high schools and elementary schools, such as the Developing Virtue Secondary School, founded by the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association in 1981 and the Pacific Buddhist Academy in Honolulu, founded in 2003. These educational institutions, and others, will not only contribute to the next generation of Buddhist Studies scholars, but will also promote the ongoing development of Buddhist literacy in America, hopefully providing an abiding legacy for the Buddhist children of today and the future. On the other hand, just as with the Buddhist Studies academic community, the influence of technology will be monumental; and to some degree it already has been. Social networking sites make it infinitely easier for Buddhist individuals and

1. Dharma without dogma. 2. A lay-oriented sangha. 3. A Meditation based and experiential tradition. 4. Gender equality. 5. A nonsectarian tradition. 6. An essentialized and simplified tradition. 7. An egalitarian, democratic, and nonhierarchical tradition. 8. A psychologically astute and rational tradition. 9. An experimental, innovating, inquiry-based tradition. 10. A socially informed and engaged tradition.

Of course I'd alter point No. 3 so as to include non-meditative traditions like ōJdo Shinshū and Sōka Gakkai; and point No. 5 so as to allow for the integrity of all existing Buddhist sectarian traditions, but I still think this presents the most workable eye to the future we've seen so far. And what better way to end this area of reflection than to cite a small fragment of Diana Eck's comment from the "On Common Ground" CD-ROM: "It is not enough to preserve a religious or cultural heritage; that heritage must also nourish a new generation in a new environment."

BUDDHIST STUDIES AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

No narrative memoir of my nearly half-century in Buddhist Studies would be complete without some final reflections on the academic discipline in which I have labored throughout my professional career, and which I love dearly. As I pondered how to start this final statement on the development of Buddhist Studies in North America, and its ongoing future, curiosity got the best of me, and I typed "Buddhist Studies as an Academic Discipline" into the Google search engine. Not surprisingly, the very first entry it led me to was a Wikipedia entry (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_Studies) simply called "Buddhist Studies." I was absolutely surprised to find that almost the entirety of the slightly more than four page article was filled with excerpts from my publications. So I guess my efforts to help my colleagues reflect on our discipline really have found a voice. Despite the work of early American educators like Paul Carus, Henry Clarke Warren, William Dwight Whitney, and Charles Rockwell Lanman, it was not until after 1960 that Buddhist Studies began to emerge as a significant discipline in the American university system and publishing industry. During the Vietnam War years and immediately thereafter, Buddhist Studies was to enjoy a so-called "boom," largely through the efforts of such leading professors as Richard Hugh Robinson of the University of Wisconsin, Masatoshi Nagatomi of Harvard University, and Alex Wayman of Columbia University. No doubt there were many reasons for the increased development of Buddhist Studies, not the least of which were the increase in Area Studies Programs in American universities; growing government interest in things Asian; the immense social anomie that permeated American culture in the 1960s; and the growing dissatisfaction with (and perhaps rejection of) traditional religion. During the 1960s, a formal graduate program was instituted at the University of Wisconsin, offering both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies. Interdisciplinary programs emphasizing the study of Buddhism were soon available at Berkeley and Columbia as well. As other programs arose, such as the program at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, and the history of religions program at the University of Chicago, it became possible to gain sophisticated training in all aspects of the Buddhist tradition, and in all Buddhist canonical languages as well. As a result, a new generation of young Buddhologists was born, appearing rapidly on the campuses of many American universities, and rivaling their overseas peers in both training and insight. In 1959 and 1960, Edward Conze wrote three segmented articles, published in the Middle Way, entitled "Recent Progress in Buddhist Studies." These were collected and eventually published in his volume Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected

Essays by Edward Conze. By that time two geographic "schools" of Buddhology had been identified: the so-called Anglo-German and Franco-Belgian schools. To these, Conze added a third: the Leningrad school. Each school was essentially defined not only by location, but also by emphasis. Conze was not the only scholar to research the nature of the Buddhist Studies discipline. Jan de Jong published two articles, in the 1974 and 1984 issues of the Eastern Buddhist, which were eventually collected into his book A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in Europe and America. While offering much interesting data, a consideration of Buddhist Studies in North America was virtually absent from the volume, despite its title. More recently, though, North American scholars have begun to investigate the discipline of Buddhist Studies.In 1980, I organized a panel at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, in Dallas, titled "Buddhist Studies for the 1980s." To my knowledge, this was the first panel ever presented at a scholarly meeting which attempted to reflect on the nature of Buddhist Studies as an academic discipline. By the turn of the decade of the 1990s, I realized that what my work, and that of others, lacked was a statistical component. As such, I solicited data and responses from a list of 125 scholars, and was astounded that I got almost a 70 percent response rate. I presented the results at the above mentioned meeting, and got a very appreciative response from those attending my paper, although quite a number of Buddhism Section members were very surprised by my findings. As noted earlier, I eventually published the results in Volume 24 (1994) of the journal Religion as well as in the electronic journal Gasshō. That same year Malcolm David Eckel published "The Ghost at the Table: On the Study of Buddhism and the Study of Religion" in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Coupled with the success of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion, the rapid growth of the number of Buddhist Studies scholars on the North American continent, and the large number of venues for Buddhist Studies publication in North America, it was becoming clear that a "North American School of Buddhist Studies" was developing which rivaled, and perhaps even surpassed, the earlier schools noted above. This rapid growth and development literally begged for additional analysis and evaluation, and in 1995 I conducted another survey, this time gleaning a response rate of over 75 percent from my 140 invitations. By 1995 the International Association of Buddhist Studies was ready to jump on the proverbial bandwagon, and devoted that year's Winter 1995 issue of theJournal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies to the topic entitled "On Method," providing the occasion for scholars to reflect on various aspects of the discipline. Among others, it included brilliant and insightful articles by David Seyfort Ruegg, José Cabezón, and Luis Gómez. Cabezón was quick to point out that the homogeneity a

"common pattern of institutional support provides" is simply lacking in Buddhist studies, as Buddhologists invariably find their academic homes in Religious Studies departments, Area Studies Centers, language institutes, schools of theology, and even other, less harmonious sorts of settings. Thus, when he went on to identify Buddhist Studies as a "hodge-podge," signaling its heterogeneity, it was no surprise. Equally, he suggested that what would guarantee the stability and longevity of the discipline was not the insistence on homogeneity, which in any case could only be achieved through force, but instead by embracing heterogeneity. Gómez, on the other hand, was quick to point out that there is a vast chasm between Buddhist Studies and other disciplinary studies in religion, such as Christian Studies. He noted that "The difference between Christian and Buddhist Studies is perhaps in part explained by the fact that Buddhist Studies continues to be a Western enterprise about a non-Western cultural product, a discourse about Buddhism taking place in a non-Buddhist context for a non-Buddhist audience of super-specialists, whose intellectual work persists in isolation from the mainstream of Western literature, art, and philosophy, and occasionally even from the mainstream of contemporary Buddhist doctrinal reflection." In other words, these new voices were spearheading the beginnings of a creative new debate about our discipline. Undoubtedly, the academic discipline of Buddhist Studies in North America was changing. What can we learn from the above, and from the more recent statistical and theoretical studies? What are the demographics of Buddhist Studies? What new areas and sub-disciplines have emerged in Buddhist Studies? How do we study Buddhist texts, and which texts do we study? What methodological approaches impact Buddhist Studies? How has technology impacted Buddhist Studies? How have new religious movements and crossing boundaries impact Buddhist Studies? How have inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies influenced Buddhist Studies? And perhaps most importantly of all, how has the growing number of "scholar-practitioners" influenced the entire field of North American Buddhist Studies? There is little doubt that my 2006 survey of Buddhist Studies scholars in North America showed some obvious and expected statistical deviance from the earlier samples, since each was conducted more than a decade before. The new study showed a significant change in gender status with almost one-fourth of the field occupied by women. Additionally, the sample was almost one full decade younger with respect to the date at which the terminal degree was earned. Despite the decreasing age of the new sample, the rank of Buddhist Studies scholars continued to be somewhat top heavy, with almost 40 percent of those surveyed holding the rank of Full Professor. On the other hand, the sample seemed quite

Buddhist Theology Perhaps it might be an oversimplification of the process that developed "Buddhist Theology" as a sub-discipline of the discipline of Buddhist Studies, but it seems that the genesis of this topic area was a 1996 American Academy of Religion panel on this subject which included Roger Jackson, John Makransky, José Cabezón, Anne Klein, John Dunne, and Rita Gross. Eventually Jackson and Makransky published an edited volume with the same title (i.e., Buddhist Theology) in 2000. In the "Preface" the editors contrasted the role of Religious Studies scholars and theologians, noting that Religious Studies scholars "analyze the data of religion at a distance from tradition," while theologians are those who stand within a tradition and "use the same tools for a different purpose: to draw critically upon the resources of tradition to help it communicate in a new and authentic voice to the contemporary

Feminist Buddhist Studies

Almost at the beginning of my own training in Buddhist Studies I encountered the brilliant work of Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids (the former student and eventual wife of Thomas W. Rhys Davids) and Isaline Blew Horner, the most influential early Vinaya scholar. At that time, and for at least half a century thereafter, there were very few women Buddhologists. More interesting still, women's issues in Buddhism were rarely discussed or researched. Miss Horner's Women Under Primitive Buddhism, published in 1930, was unusual both for its title and topic. Unfortunately, there were but a few exceptions. The Ph.D. Programs in Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Virginia, coupled with appropriate programs at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Yale University, and Princeton University changed all that. Soon a bevy of brilliant young female Buddhologists began to appear on the academic scene,

Western Buddhist Studies

Here we can simply mention that prior to the publication of Emma Layman's important book Buddhism in America in 1976, there was virtually no literature on the topic on Buddhism in any western country. When I began my own studies in the early 1970s, books like Hal Bridges' American Mysticism: From William James to Zen, Peter Rowly's New Gods in America, and Glock and Bellah's The New Religious Consciousness barely even noticed Buddhism. Irving Zaretsky and Mark Leone published over 800 pages in their volumeReligious Movements in Contemporary America, but hardly mentioned Buddhism. Sure there were some exceptions, like Robert Ellwood's Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America and his The Eagle and the Rising Sun, or Jacob Needleman's The New Religions, but apart from Louise Hunter's 1971 book Buddhism in Hawaii or Van Meter Ames' 1962 volume Zen and American Thought, each of which had some serious shortcomings, there was nothing to read. Layman's book, and all the volumes that have followed over the next forty years, have helped to create a vibrant, growing sub-discipline that has attracted some of the foremost minds in both Buddhist Studies and American Religions. And it has even fostered the notion that perhaps English should be considered the newest canonical language.

Buddhism and Technology

In an exciting conference paper presented to the 2007 annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Laura Busch noted that, "One of the developing needs for many Buddhists living in an increasingly globally-aware world is the construction of a global conceptualization of Buddhist community, or sangha: one that transcends boundaries between the variety of Buddhist traditions, sects, and their distinctive cultural varieties." The earliest interest in the application of computer technology to Buddhism occurred when the International Association of Buddhist Studies formed a "Committee on Buddhist Studies and Computers" at its 1983 meeting in Tokyo. Jamie Hubbard, in his highly significant article "Upping the Ante: [email protected]," (published in the 1995 issue of theJIABS ) pointed out: "The three major aspects of computer technology that most visibly have taken over older technologies are word processing, electronic communication, and the development of large scale archives of both text and visual materials." Early in the 1990s, a profusion of online discussion forums began to proliferate and thrive on the Internet. Although these forums were global in scope, the vast majority of subscribers and participants were from North America. By 1996, electronic developments and the use of technology had become so prevalent in relation to Buddhist resources that an international meeting of the "Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative" was held in Taipei with the support of the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist community. Crammed into a tight daily schedule that ran from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m., the conference included multiple session devoted to (1) Dictionary Projects, (2) Library Resources and Services, (3) Online and Network Data, (4) Canonic and Text Databases, (5) Teaching and Research, and (6) Coding and Markup. It was clear that electronic Buddhist learning was rapidly becoming a tool for spiritual, academic, and religious development. Irrespective of which World Wide Web search engine or resource file one uses, the possibility exists for any Internet-linked Buddhist to connect with the enormous richness of the Buddhist tradition throughout the world. Equally important, any scholar of Buddhism can access indispensable research materials on the other side of the globe without ever leaving the computer keyboard. Thus, the Internet literally revolutionizes the ways Buddhist Studies now carry out their research and communication.

Scholar Practitioners

Virtually everyone who begins an academic career in Buddhist Studies eventually pours through Étienne Lamotte's exciting volumeHistoire de Bouddhisme Indien des origines à l'ère śaka, either in the original French or in Sara Webb-Boin's admirable English translation. That Lamotte was a Catholic priest seems not to have

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 33 H-Buddhism influenced either his understanding of, or respect for, the Buddhist tradition, although he did worry a bit from time to time about the reaction of the Vatican to his work. Edward Conze, arguably one of the most colorful Buddhist scholars of this century, once remarked: "When I last saw him, he had risen to the rank of Monseigneur and worried about how his 'Histoire' had been received at the Vatican. Mon' professeur, do you think they will regard the book as hérétique?' They obviously did not. His religious views showed the delightful mixture of absurdity and rationality which is one of the hallmarks of a true believer." Until quite recently, the issue of the religious affiliation of the researcher has not been part of the mix in Buddhist Studies. Almost exclusively, the founding mothers and founding fathers of Buddhist Studies in the West have had personal religious commitments entirely separate from Buddhism. As a novice graduate student in the "Buddhist Studies Program" at the University of Wisconsin in the Fall of 1967, the very first "in-group" story I heard from the senior students was about the recent visit of Edward Conze, conclusively acknowledged as the world's foremost scholar of that complicated form of Mahāyāna literature known as prajñāpāramitā. The narrative, however, had nothing whatsoever to do with Professor Conze's great scholarly passion. Instead, it concerned a question, playfully put to the rather blunt and outspoken scholar during a seminar session: "Dr. Conze, do you actually meditate?" Conze's simple reply: "Yes." But the student pressed on: "Ever get anywhere?" The brusque response: "First trance state." The dialogue abruptly ceased and the issue was never broached again. Upon hearing that story as a naïve fledgling Buddhologist, I was utterly and absolutely astounded to learn thatany scholar of Buddhism actually did anything Buddhist. Now, only forty or so years later, it is rather ordinary for individuals teaching Buddhist Studies in universities throughout the world to be "scholar-practitioners," involved in the practice of trainings associated with various Buddhist traditions and sects. Nonetheless, it has not always been easy for these academics to reveal their religious orientation in an environment that is not uniformly supportive of such choices. Thus, what follows will serve the dual purpose of describing not only part of thedevelopment of the academic study of Buddhism in America, but also some of the ways in which that development has affected the personal lives of those scholars who have made formal religious commitments to the Buddhist tradition. It is now very common for university courses on Buddhism in North American universities to be taught by professors who, in addition to having sophisticated academic credentials in Buddhist Studies, also happen to be practicing Buddhists in one of the many rich and varied Buddhist traditions that have proliferated in the West as part of Buddhism's profound globalization. Since 1990, I have been referring to these individuals as "scholar- practitioners." Yet throughout much of Buddhism's history, Buddhist scholarship and

Buddhist practice have been two very distinct vocations in a highly polarized tradition. After surveying many of the issues impacting Buddhist Studies in North America, José Cabezón, a scholar-practitioner and former Tibetan monk, concluded in a 1995 article, "All of these factors have contributed to what we might call the diversification of the buddhologist: a movement away from classical Buddhist Studies based on the philological study of written texts, and toward the more general comparative and often theoretical issues that have implications (and audiences) outside of Buddhist Studies." More recently, this sentiment was echoed by Georges Dreyfus: "As I'm sure you are aware, there is very little normative Buddhist discourse going on in the academy. This is not the result of outside pressures, but the way the field has moved away from texts and doctrines and toward the study of socially located practices and institutions." What Cabezón and Dreyfus are suggesting is that modern Buddhology has largely abandoned the classical philological approach in favor of a greater emphasis on social issues, Buddhist practices, and the social institutions that support them. Four years after the publication Cabezón's 1995 article, University of Chicago scholar Frank Reynolds similarly asserted that American Buddhist scholarship had turned away from matters of origin and essence, and that it increasingly emphasized other matters such as beliefs, practices, modes of communal life, and current Buddhist histories. Such an approach is far more consistent with the professional and personal interests of Buddhological scholars who are also practitioners. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, some estimates placed the number of Buddhists in the United States as high as six million. There are more academic courses in the study of Buddhism than ever before, and with the huge explosion of well written and informative trade volumes published on virtually all aspects of Buddhism, a genuine "Buddhist literacy" is developing in North America . . . one that made it increasingly easier for scholar-practitioners to finally appear publicly and vocally. Yet was there a "Scholar-Practitioner Friendly" category of universities developing? José Cabezón, among others, suspects not. Not long ago, he suggested that one of the prevailing views in the study of religions is that, "Critical distance from the object of intellectual analysis is necessary. Buddhists, by virtue of their religious commitment, lack such critical distance from Buddhism. Hence, Buddhists are never good buddhologists." He believes that stereotypes such as these are indeed falsehoods, but that they exist nonetheless. Duncan Ryūken Williams, who is also a Sōtō priest who teaches at the University of Southern California, finds that his status as a scholar-practitioner affords a unique relationship with his students. He reports that as a scholar-

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 35 H-Buddhism practitioner at a public university with a significant Asian/Asian-American student body, "I find that students regularly look to me to mentor them as young people struggling to come to terms with Buddhism either as newly adopted religion or more frequently, their family's heritage." This sentiment is mirrored by Victor Sōgen Hori, a Canadian scholar-practitioner. He remarks that, "The one area where being a monk makes a difference is in the classroom. Students are fascinated at the fact that I spent years in a Buddhist monastery." Despite the mostly supportive university attitudes cited above, Cabezón still has doubts. He says, "I wonder whether some scholars who started out as (or still are) committed Buddhists end up going out of their way to conceal their identity. And I wonder the extent to which the academy has 'secularized' us, forcing us to write in modes (and using forms of rhetoric) that are not completely honest. In more extreme cases, I think some scholars have gone out of their way to create a distance from the traditions that they study/practice (or once practiced), as if to say, 'See, I can be as critical as anyone.'" Two Zen scholar-practitioners, Victor Sōgen Hori and Duncan Ryūkan Williams, have found that their Buddhist status has had little effect on personnel matters within the university. Hori says, "I teach in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University. Because the Christian teaching faculty are obviously practicing Christians, this has made it easier for me, an obvious Buddhist. So there have been no difficulties regarding tenure, promotion, salary, etc." The only impact on employment issues that Williams notes involves his choices of publication venues. He points out that, "Being the only faculty member in the field of Buddhist Studies, the tenure and promotion process tilts toward publishing in the 'name' journals and university presses that seem to prove that one's scholarship has a 'secular' stamp of approval." My own experience suggests that the scholarship versus practice dichotomy still persists to some degree. In Asia the monastic renunciants were almost exclusively responsible for the religious education of the lay-sangha. Here, in the absence of the traditional "scholar-monks" so prevalent in Asia, it really does appear that the "scholar- practitioners" of today's North American universities are indeed beginning to fulfill the role of "quasi-monastics," or serve at least as treasure-troves of Buddhist literacy and information, functioning as guides through whom one's understanding of theDharma may be sharpened, irrespective of whether it occurs in the university or practice center. In this way, individual practice might once again be balanced with individual study so that Buddhist study deepens one's practice, while Buddhist practice informs one's study. Obviously, such a suggestion spawns two further questions: (1) Are there sufficient scholar-practitioners currently active in Buddhism to make such an impact?

(2) Are they actually making that impact? With regard to the former question, much of the information reported is necessarily anecdotal. By simply making mental notes at the various conferences attended by North American Buddhologists, one could easily develop a roster of scholar-practitioners who are openly Buddhist; and while such a roster is certainly not publishable, the number is quite clearly at least 25 percent, but more likely well in excess of 50 percent of the Buddhologists in North America. The second question is perhaps not so difficult to assess as the first. As one surveys the vast corpus of literature that surrounds the academic programs sponsored by numerous North American Buddhist groups, the names of academic scholars of Buddhism have begun to dominate the roster of invited presenters, and these individuals are almost exclusively Buddhist practitioners as well. In other words, many Western Buddhist masters have come to acknowledge and incorporate the professional contributions of these American Buddhist scholar-practitioners into the religious life of their communities, recognizing the unique and vital role they fulfill. These institutional heads of both Western Buddhist communities and North American universities are beginning to identify those individuals who are best trained to serve the educational needs of their communities, irrespective of whether they come from within the community itself or from outside the parent community. Cooperative efforts like these establish an important symbiosis between Buddhist communities and Buddhist academics. When one factors in the accredited Buddhist Institutions of Higher Learning in North America: the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Naropa University, Soka University, and the University of the West; and those in the process of acquiring accreditation: Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, Won Institute, and Maitripa Institute, and others, this cooperation appears even more important. My suspicion is that a significant number of scholar-practitioners are logging at least as many miles in that role as they are in their more traditional occupations as academic researchers and faculty members of North American universities, and this serves as a remarkable foreshadowing of the genuine and growing interpenetration of study and practice in North American Buddhism.

My Buddhist Studies: Looking Back and Looking Forward

As I look back over my more than fifty year career in Buddhist Studies, it seems as if it is best described by two “bookends.” The first bookend focused on my early training and my publications on the history of early Indian Buddhism in general, with specific emphasis on the Vinaya and early sectarian movement. Perhaps, in the most general sense, one could say that my work focused on the sangha, just as my mentor Richard Robinson advised me to do. My translations of the Sanskrit versions

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 37 H-Buddhism of the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravādin and Mūlasarvāstivādin Prātimokṣa Sūtras were the first thorough studies of those texts, and my general publications on the Vinaya sparked a kind of renaissance of interest in that subject. Soon, many new researches began examining these and similar texts, with scholars like Gregory Schopen and Shayne Clarke leading the way. My publications on the Buddhist councils, and my breakthrough article on the beginnings of Indian Buddhist sectarianism, co-authored with the brilliant scholar Jan Nattier, helped to solve one of the most difficult problems in Indian Buddhist history. Many decades later, my article on “Cooking the Buddhist Books,” published in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, helped to open new questions about the actual and accurate dating of the historical Buddha. Yet because my teaching career began in a Department of Religious Studies whose Ph.D. Program focused on religion in American culture, my second bookend involved interest in the Buddhism that was beginning to appear in North America which was kindled quickly, and developed into a lifelong enquiry. Although not all scholars of Western forms of Buddhism agree with my suppositions and conclusions about Buddhism’s expansion in North America, they nonetheless—perhaps grudgingly—acknowledge me as the pioneer of studies of Western forms of Buddhism. My many books, articles, and chapters were composed over more than four decades. So what items constitute the major list of my contributions to the Buddhist Studies discipline that I love so dearly? Undoubtedly, my books on the Vinaya, Buddhist Monastic Discipline and A Survey of Vinaya Literature, stand out for me as a significant contribution, as do my articles on the Buddhist councils, Prātikmokṣa, and sectarianism. Being in the very first group of officers in the International Association of Buddhist Studies, begun by A.K. Narain in 1976, gave me the opportunity, as a young scholar, to help shape the direction of our discipline as it moved beyond the leadership of Richard Robinson, Masatoshi Nagatomi, Alex Wayman, Leon Hurvitz, and other senior scholars. That role was expanded when George Bond and I began what eventually became the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion. That unit has become one of the most successful aspects of AAR, and remains the most influential organization in North America for the study of Buddhism. Remaining on the Steering Committee of that unit for a term following our stint as Co-Chairs enabled our leadership and vision to continue. When technology began to find its way into Religious Studies, I was fortunate enough to be able to team up with Damien Keown in 1994, soon to be the world’s foremost authority on Buddhist ethics, to begin the first online peer-reviewed journal in the entire field of Religious Studies: the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. Now, almost a quarter-century later, the journal thrives, having sponsored several online

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 38 H-Buddhism international conferences, and is being managed by its new and astoundingly effective editor Daniel Cozort. A half-decade later, I was able to build support for my focus on Buddhism as an emerging world religion by starting the Journal of Global Buddhism, inviting a brilliant German scholar named Martin Baumann to be my co- editor. Martin now edits the journal on his own following my retirement. In between the formation of the two online journals mentioned above, Damien Keown and I began the “Critical Studies in Buddhism” book series, now published by Routledge. In our ten year tenure, from 1996 until 2006, we published over sixty titles. Many of these book publications, quite apart from and in addition to their scholarly excellence, paved the way for their authors to gain tenure, or promotion, or new positions. The series continues today. Not wanting to overlook the difficulty students began to face in midst of rising book prices, early in the first decade of our new century, Keown and I began a project called the “Journal of Buddhist Online Books.” This project has published over a dozen Etextbooks, on major religious traditions, but at prices that are affordable for students in difficult economic times. We contributed to the series by writing the Buddhism Etextbook, which is now in its fourth edition. To our knowledge, this was the first project of its type in Religious Studies. We both continue to manage the project in our retirement, and I am delighted that in 2006 I was honored with the publication of a “festschrift” volume entitled Buddhist Studies from India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish. Now, having been retired for nearly a decade, I’m happy that my overall publication record includes over two dozen books, one hundred articles and chapters, more than fifty book reviews, and more conference presentations than I can count. But I am happiest that my work within the context of my two “bookends” have moved the discipline forward; that I have offered scholarly publications which have enabled newer, younger scholars to create wonderful research publications that go far beyond my own and give us a greater, more accurate, and complete understanding of Buddhism as a magnificent world religion. That being said, there are still some issues in the discipline of Buddhist Studies that are not so rosy. At the foundational meeting of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, referred to previously, I explained our first wonderings about computers. At the same lunch in which that discussion occurred, we also talked openly about the nastiness of many of the leading Buddhist Studies scholars . . . my own mentor Richard Robinson included. At one point, one of my young cohort colleagues said something like, “Why can’t we, as the new ‘young stars’ of Buddhist Studies, change all that? Certainly we can strive for scholarly excellence just as great as that of our older colleagues, but infuse that wisdom with the compassion emphasized by the Buddhism tradition!” Everyone at our lunch table

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Prebish, Charles S.. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571853/prebish-charles-s Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 39 H-Buddhism smiled and chimed in with an overwhelming expression of agreement. Now, more than forty years later, it is my personal feeling that we’ve failed. Of course the scholarship in our discipline is truly brilliant. And of course many of us now elderly Buddhist Studies scholars have passed on our training to a younger generation of scholars. Yet we also seem to have passed on the very same nastiness of our own teachers. It seems that the newest generation of Buddhist Studies scholars has many many members who believe that the way to success is to simply climb over the proverbial backs of previous scholars. Rather than suggesting that these previous researchers were brilliant in their own right, and provided them with the information and research tools to move their own inquiries beyond those of their predecessors, too many newcomers feel the need to undermine, and even abuse the work of those who preceded them. Such an approach is hardly consistent with the emphasis on karuṇā exemplified by all the Buddhist communities, and especially so considering that many of these researchers are proverbial “scholar practitioners.” I have recently experienced some of the above myself with respect to my decades old “two Buddhisms” theory. Clearly, that theory was accurate until the early 1990s, but is no longer up to date. It has been replaced by notions such as “hybridity” or “denominationalism” or a host of other choices; and I have even indicated this in my own publications. Nevertheless, virtually no conference or publication on American Buddhism takes place without significant attacks on my theory. In some cases, it appears that my critics haven’t actually read my publications on this topic. Unquestionably, many other scholars have experienced the same mean-spirited and heartless attacks. In light of the above, my advice for moving Buddhist Studies forward in a constructive way in the next decades is to simply recognize and reaffirm that our goals as scholars, and in some cases as practitioners, is to advance our collective knowledge and promote learning. We can easily help each other secure safe, stable employment by functioning truly as “colleagues” and professional friends. We can share our wisdom and compassion, to the benefit of all Buddhist Studies scholars, and look forward to enjoying our time together at conferences and meetings and research journeys. I honestly hope I will live long enough to see Lama Surya Das’ old lament that the “Three Jewels” of our time are “I go for refuge to ME, MYSELF, and I” with pronouns like “WE,” “OURSELVES,” and “US.”