H-Buddhism Jackson, Roger R. Page published by A. Charles Muller on Thursday, March 19, 2020 PLAYING BOTH ENDS AGAINST THE MIDDLE: BUDDHADHARMA, BUDDHIST STUDIES, AND ME ROGER R. JACKSON PREFACE The editor of this collection assured potential contributors that writing our “Buddhist Studies memoirs” would be a simple and enjoyable task, easily completed in a few days. In fact, it is far more difficult than writing a scholarly article—perhaps even a book—because it requires so much reflection and synthesis, not to mention the ability to weave personal recollections together with historical, methodological, cultural, and even theological observations. Memory, of course, is notoriously unreliable, selective, and self-serving, so both memoirist and audience have reason to be wary of any purportedly accurate account of “my life and times as a Buddhist scholar.” Furthermore, the Buddhologist has the added anxiety of sensing overhead the sword of Mañjuśrī, with its incisive questions about personal identity, and consequent doubts as to whether an ontologically vacuous and protean self can cohere sufficiently to produce a memoir that is anything but a deluded and fantastical concoction. In the end, this process has been neither quick nor easy, and I fear that the result is a lot of verbiage that adds up not to very much. I suggest that readers who want to skip my autobiographical musings and “cut to the chase” go straight to the section where I talk about publications in which was involved during my time at Carleton, and to the section where by way of conclusion, I reflect broadly (but still personally) on the changes I have lived through in the fields of Buddhist studies in general and Tibetan studies in particular over the course of my career. These caveats notwithstanding, away we Citation: A. Charles Muller. Jackson, Roger R.. H-Buddhism. 03-24-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/6031574/jackson-roger-r Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism go. CHILDHOOD THROUGH COLLEGE: 1950–72 By the time I entered Wesleyan University in the fall of 1968, I had lived half my life in Europe and half in the New York suburbs. My father was a journalist, first with United Press International and then withTime magazine, and his work led him and my mother to a four-year stint in London (where I was born, in 1950), and two multi-year sojourns in Rome, in the mid-fifties and early sixties, respectively. This somewhat peripatetic upbringing instilled in me an early love of travel and an appreciation for cultural and ideological differences. In Italy in particular, where I spent my middle-school years, I had friends from Hong Kong, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Iceland, and Somalia, as well as Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. I reveled in the complexities of Italian politics, which included a whole range of left-wing parties, and at thirteen I fancied myself a sort of junior Marxist, and aspired one day to be a Kremlinologist – or at least a journalist covering the Kremlin. In most other respects, though, I was a typical upper-middle-class American kid of the era, with a love of baseball and football, movies, rock ‘n roll, roast beef, dark humor, and politics. None of these passions, I should note, has ever abated – with the exception of roast beef, since I turned vegetarian almost three decades ago. My religious upbringing was minimal: my mother was an atheist from childhood, and my father a lapsed Southern Baptist; so far as I could tell, the only really devout member of my extended family was my paternal grandmother, who was a Baptist – but also happened to believe in Atlantis and reincarnation. Because of this, my younger brother and I were free on Sundays, and generally free to follow wherever our interests took us. Back in America in 1965 for my final years of high school, in Pelham, New York, I went through a variety of intellectual phases, from heroic existentialist, to Romantic poet, to political activist, Citation: A. Charles Muller. Jackson, Roger R.. H-Buddhism. 03-24-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/6031574/jackson-roger-r Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Buddhism to enthusiast of Oriental mysticism. I loved reading and writing of all kinds, and edited my high school newspaper, assuming that, like my father, I would become a journalist. With unabashed nepotism, he got me summer jobs working as a copy boy at Time headquarters in New York; in 1968, just before I left for college, this allowed me to travel to the two national political conventions, including the infamous Democratic conclave in Chicago, where I stayed in the same hotel as Allen Ginsberg and Jean Genet, and, in the course of my messenger duties, nearly had my head cracked open by out-of-control Chicago cops. My passion for Asian thought had been sparked in my early teens by reading three books: James Hilton’s novel of Shangri-La, Lost Horizon; Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye; and Morris L. West’s novelThe Ambassador, about an American diplomat who finds brief refuge from the political turmoil of Diem-era Vietnam in a Buddhist monastery. It was lost on me at the time that these were all equally fictional, and all infected by what I would later learn was Orientalism – but in the midst of what seemed like a breakdown of American culture (not to mention the anxieties and awkwardness of a dateless adolescent), they held out the promise of personal and social serenity that seemed lost in the West but somehow preserved in the East. During my senior year of high school, I took a world literature class that included readings from Lin Yutang’s Modern Library classicThe Wisdom of China and India, including translations of theDaodejing , the Dhammapada, and the Ramayana. Living close to New York City, I took advantage of the political and cultural ferment there, attending peace rallies (including the one where Martin Luther King, Jr. came out against the Vietnam War), and visiting Greenwich Village, where I bought a small, gold- painted metal statue of the Kamakura Buddha and a slim volume of Zen koans – both of which I still have. Wesleyan in the late 1960s was a hotbed of political, cultural, and chemical experimentation, but I was slow to enter into the ferment. My Citation: A. Charles Muller. Jackson, Roger R.. H-Buddhism. 03-24-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/6031574/jackson-roger-r Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Buddhism freshman year was largely consumed with exploration of history, literature, and philosophy of the West, competing on Wesleyan’s General Electric College Bowl team (we managed the most-likely never-equaled feat of losing twice in the same season), and hitchhiking back and forth to Northampton, Mass., to visit my high school girlfriend, who was attending Smith. I also wrote for the campus newspaper, the Argus, and served (as I would for all four years) asTime magazine’s Wesleyan stringer. My one frosh foray into Asian religion was an evening-long mini-sesshin led on campus by Philip Kapleau Roshi. It was my first real attempt at meditation, and while I found it in equal measure intriguing and boring, I did not feel transformed. As a sophomore, now enrolled in Wesleyan’s residential, ungraded, Western-humanities-centered College of Letters, I began to read in my spare time about Zen and Daoism (especially through the works of Alan Watts), listen to the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Pink Floyd, and experiment with mescaline and LSD, which I’d first read about in Life magazine while still in high school. Any drug that could promise a vision of God (whatever that word meant) seemed worth trying, and so I did. Accounts of other people’s psychedelic experiences aren’t usually much more interesting than other people’s descriptions of their dreams, so I’ll spare readers the details. Suffice it to say, though, that I had a set of experiences on LSD that convinced me I was enlightened, that I had experienced pure being and seen that it was the everyday world – but suffused with ineffable radiance and joy. Indeed, I was assured the next day by a veteran trip-master that I had attained “the clear light” – a term whose significance I could not appreciate at the time, but which sounded as profound as I felt. My conviction that I was enlightened lasted an inordinate amount of time, not only through the end of the fall semester, but well into a spring 1970 stay in Paris – where I studied French philosophy and literature, but also took up yoga and attended a variety of meetings with Hindu and Citation: A. Charles Muller. Jackson, Roger R.. H-Buddhism. 03-24-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/6031574/jackson-roger-r Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4 H-Buddhism Buddhist themes. On an extended spring-break trip through southern Europe (which included hearing Pope Paul VI’s Easter homily in St. Peter’s square and staying next door to Joni Mitchell in a cave on Crete), I eventually found myself in Istanbul, where I met wide-eyed travelers returning from overland travels to India. I was tempted to hop a bus east myself, but out of time and money, and fearful it might mean the end of the college education my father was financing, I returned to Paris.