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Generated Two to Three Thousand Discussion Emails Between the Students and Myself H-Buddhism Harvey, Peter Page published by A. Charles Muller on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 An overview of and reflections on my career in Buddhist Studies Peter Harvey, May 2017 I was born in 1951 and brought up in Halifax, West Yorkshire, UK. From 11 to 19, I attended as a boarding student at Pocklington School East Yorkshire. This is a ‘public school’ – an odd English term for a private, fee-paying school. It is a school that was attended by William Wilberforce (1759–1833), who did much to end the slave trade. I was particularly interested in science, and ended up with ‘A-level’ qualifications in Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Pure Maths and Applied Maths. I first aimed to be a Chemical Engineer, and spent a year, 1969 to 1970, as a ‘student apprentice’ at the ICI chemical works at Billingham, Teesside, as I was going to do a Chemical Engineering BSc at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Engineering (UMIST). As my thinking was turning in a more theoretical direction, though, I decided to transfer to a Biochemistry BSc. After 6 weeks of the Biochemistry degree, at which I was doing well, I became bored and uninspired by the subject and decided, instead, to study Philosophy, transferring to a Philosophy BA at the nearby (Victoria) University of Manchester. I attained a first class degree in this in 1973. My lecturers included Raymond Plant (now a Labour Peer), John Harris (now Professor of Bioethics at Manchester University) and Wolfe Mays, with whom we read Jean-Paul Sartre’sBeing and Nothingness. I enjoyed studying Plato, Kant, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and R.D. Laing, and my most successful course was in Philosophy of Mind. This was at a time of the hippies, and great interest in Indian and more broadly Eastern culture, and I became happily drawn to this, including a phase of great interest in ‘Zen’-based macrobiotic food. I had the beginnings of an interest in environmental issues, though this then went off the boil until the rise of concern about global warming. Citation: A. Charles Muller. Harvey, Peter. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571856/harvey-peter Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism Most importantly, though, I did a subsidiary course in Comparative Religion, mainly taught by Lance Cousins (1942–2015;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._S._Cousins , https://oxford.academia.edu/LSCousins ). It is here I came across Buddhist thought. Lance also ran a Buddhist Society, with a good speakers from a range of Buddhist traditions. He also taught mindfulness of breathing meditation to cultivate samatha, deep calm. Together, the ideas, people and the practice inspired me and drew me towards Buddhism. In my final year Philosophy dissertation, on concepts of ‘self’, I drew on ideas from Buddhism, Kant and Jean-Paul Sartre. Having graduated, I had an offer of funding to do an MA in Existentialist Thought at McMaster University in Canada, and another offer of (British Council) funding to do an MA in Indian Philosophy at Visva Bharati University (founded by Tagore) in West Bengal, India. I chose the latter, as by this time, inspired by Lance Cousins, I had resolved to both study and practice Buddhism. While in India, my wife Anne and I (we had married just before I went to University, in the summer of 1970) visited Bodh Gayā, Sārnātha and Nālandā in India, and Kathmandu and local towns in Nepal. I found the teaching at the University rather slow going, so after three months we returned to the UK, as I also had an offer to do a PhD on Buddhism with Ninian Smart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninian_Smart) at Lancaster University. He of course had a great influence on the development of Religious Studies as a discipline with a different nature from Theology. He had a great interest in Buddhism, and my attention had been drawn to him when he gave a talk at the Manchester University Buddhist Society. I thus studied with Ninian Smart, for a doctorate on ‘The Concept of the Person in Pāli Buddhist Literature’. I was at Lancaster full time from 1973 to 1976, before getting a job as a Lecturer in World Religions at what was then called Sunderland Polytechnic (later University). I continued part-time on my thesis while there, and submitted it in 1980. The viva for this went OK, but I was referred in the thesis and had to resubmit it, which I did in 1981, when I was awarded a Ph.D. While at Lancaster, I attended MA classes in Buddhism and Indian thought, taught by Ninian Smart; I particularly remember his class based on theMahāparinibbāna Sutta. I was taught Mahāyāna Buddhism by Andrew Rawlinson, who published, for example, The Book of Enlightened Masters (Open Court, 1997), and the great Edward Conze also gave a series of lectures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Conze). I was also taught by doctoral student Martin Wiltshire, who I got to know well. He later published his theses, on Citation: A. Charles Muller. Harvey, Peter. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571856/harvey-peter Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Buddhism Pratyekabuddhas, as Ascetic Figures Before and in Early Buddhism: the emergence of Gautama as the Buddha (Mouton de Gruyter, 1990). Another noted student at the time was Peter Masefield, whose thesis was published as Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism (George Allen & Unwin, 1986; rpt. Routledge, 2008) and who has done several translations for the Pali Text Society. When visiting Lancaster between 1978 an 1979, I think I also crossed paths with Andrew Olenzki, who became very active at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, who was doing an MA at Lancaster at the time (http://www.andrewolendzki.org/about.html). At Lancaster, I learnt Pali with David Smith, and the key advice I remembered from Ninian Smart was ‘have a mull through the Pali Canon’. So I did, taking copious notes on key passages from the five nikāyas, especially, and the Visuddhimagga, in both English and Pali. This being a time before personal computers, my notes were on cards stored in seven shoe boxes. I still have these, containing around 6000 cards, arranged under a variety of topic categories. I later wrote up notes on each topic based on these cards, from which I assembled a first draft of my thesis. In this process, various new ideas and connecting threads occurred to me. While my initial focus was on anattā, I also had an interest in a wide range of potentially problematic, and philosophically interesting corners of early Buddhist thought. I found the footnotes to the translations particularly helpful, in that they referred to parallel passages. My probing of the meaning and implications of various passages was guided especially by the interconnected parallel passages in the nikāyas, rather than by the commentaries, for example. At Lancaster, I started a Buddhist Society, which invited speakers from a range of Buddhist traditions. They included a pair of Tibetan Buddhists who went on to buy the large property that became the Manjushri Institute, in Ulverston, a key Foundation for Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (Gelugpa) centre that later became a key centre for the New Kadampa Tradition. We also had a meditation class, run by Paul Burton, a meditation pupil of Lance Cousins. With Paul, I developed a regular samatha meditation practice (at Manchester, it had been somewhat sporadic), and visited Lance Cousins in Manchester for meditation ‘reports’ and personal advice. I continued to do this once I had started my job at Sunderland. On one visit, I attended, with Lance, a meeting at which a Kabbalah friend of his was also present. I believe it was at this that they both judged I was ready to become a teacher of samatha. In 1977, I invited Lance to give a talk on Buddhism in Durham (near Sunderland), where I then lived. When visiting the imposing Durham Cathedral, a World heritage Site, he told me that I could begin Citation: A. Charles Muller. Harvey, Peter. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571856/harvey-peter Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Buddhism teaching samatha meditation. We were standing at the back of the Cathedral, looking at the striking circular stained-glass window at the other end of the building. Lance said, ‘mmm – like a nimitta’ (i.e. like a light-image appearing in the mind in samatha meditation). I started taking a weekly meditation class in October 1977, and continued this over the years, later adding a weekly class in Sunderland, and a monthly class for more experienced meditators. Lance Cousins was a meditation pupil of Boonman Poonyathiro, a Thai who had been a monk for 15 years and who, while in India, disrobed to travel to the UK with a friend on a motorbike (1962–63). He was active at the Thai Embassy and came to teach samatha meditation at Hampstead Buddhist Vihāra to a small group of people from Cambridge, notably Lance Paul Dennison and Chris Gilchrist. In 1973 these formed the Samatha Trust (https://www.samatha.org/), which in time came to have a meditation centre in Chorlton, Manchester (1978; https://www.samatha.org/what-we-offer/classes/manchester) and a retreat centre in Wales (1987; https://www.samatha.org/what-we-offer/meditation-centres).
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