One can always argue the details of this textual question in any given case. In Śāntideva’s case it’s not only a matter of arguing whether “his” two major works (the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Śikṣā Samuccaya) were written by the same person; it’s also the fact that these texts may themselves be the work of multiple writers, in that there’s an early version of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (the “Dunhuang recension”) which differs from the received version known to tradition. But there’s an issue here much bigger than the interpretation of any one thinker: should one even try to find the coherent views of an individual author?

Gyatso greatly admired the works of Jacques Derrida, who threw doubt on the idea of authorship, and often focused on the “margins” of texts in order to highlight inconsistencies and ways in which the texts break down. Her course on Buddhist philosophy highlighted parallels between the work of Derrida and of Nāgārjuna. In some respects it’s not hard to see why: Derrida questions the idea of the subject or self, as most Buddhist thinkers do. If the self is unreal, as so many Buddhist thinkers have said, then so is the author. Thus perhaps Śāntideva’s disavowal of his own originality and profundity at the beginning of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. (I have tended to insist that the difference between Derrida and Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy is that Madhyamaka has a point. But that’s a topic for another time.)

It does help, I think, to be careful with questions of authorship – to think carefully about what one means when one speaks of “Śāntideva” (or “Plato”), when the texts come to us from such questionable sources. But I also think it’s all too easy to take the point too far. When one discards the search for coherence entirely, one discards most of one’s ability to learn from the texts one reads.

From the first draft of my proposal to the final draft of my dissertation, my research was guided by this quote from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning. (from p. xii of his The Essential Tension)

Significant words here include “important thinker” and “sensible person.” You might find plenty of contradictions or other absurdities in the ramblings of an everyday, average person. But the writers of great works like the Bodhicaryāvatāra put a lot of thought into those works, and their value has repeatedly been discovered anew by thinkers in the generations that follow them. They’re not going to drop random inconsistencies into their work and just think “oh, that’s okay.” If there are contradictions, they’re going to be there for a good reason; at the very least, contradictions need to be explained.

It was this method of looking for coherence that allowed me to find what I think is the most innovative and important part of my dissertation’s interpretation of Śāntideva: the idea that gifts benefit the recipient through the gift encounter and not the gift object. I was looking at the combination of Śāntideva’s advice that material goods are harmful, and the fact that he urges one to give those gifts to others for their own benefit. Was there a way these two ideas could go together without contradicting each other? Sure enough, there was – you just had to get rid of the idea, which seems like common sense to us but not to Śāntideva, that the purpose of gift-giving is to ensure that the recipient possesses the gift. I could have shrugged my shoulders and said “well, this is a composite text, of course it contradicts itself.” But if I had, if I hadn’t taken contradiction in the important thinker as a problem, I wouldn’t have seen what I came to see.

As far as I know, it was just such an approach that led Kuhn to write his most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As a physicist, Kuhn was trying to read Aristotle’s Physics, and found it full of what appeared to be unpardonable errors in logic and observation. Just from looking at the world around him, Aristotle should have known better. Now Kuhn could easily have said “well, we all contradict ourselves and make dumb mistakes; why should we expect better of Aristotle?” But he didn’t. He did expect better from the thinker whose works had been taken as canonical for a thousand years, and rightly so. Once he did, it fell into place: Aristotle was asking entirely different questions, for different purposes, from the questions a Newtonian physicist would ask. Aristotle’s work would make perfect sense if one’s underlying assumptions changed.

More broadly, I think, it’s this search for coherence in the great and admired minds of the past that leads us to find genuinely new insights, ones that change our current perspective. In constructive study, where one seeks to learn from a tradition and not merely about it, there is always the danger that one will only find what one was already looking for – pick out the ideas one already agrees with, and not be challenged by them. One of the best ways to avoid this, to learn something genuinely new, is to focus on those “apparent absurdities,” the things that don’t make sense, and ask how somebody intelligent could have believed them. One might not come to believe in the thing one thought was absurd; but one will likely come to see the world in a new way that will challenge other ideas.

It’s a great question, and one I’ve asked myself a number of times. Being anti-political is a position I’ve flirted with a lot, especially over the course of writing my dissertation, and my personal views are closely entangled with the ideas I address there. In many respects I see the dissertation’s main contribution to Śāntideva scholarship as pointing out the strongly anti-political nature of Śāntideva’s thought, and the underlying reasons for his anti-politics. Śāntideva is, I think, often thought of as a great friend to the Engaged Buddhist program of Buddhist political activism, since he is probably best known as the favourite thinker of that noted activist Tenzin Gyatso, the present (fourteenth) Dalai Lama; I claimed in the dissertation that such a placing of Śāntideva is mistaken.

The dissertation explains this point in great detail (mostly in its fourth, fifth and seventh chapters), but I haven’t yet said much about it on the blog, and I probably should. Briefly: Śāntideva says very little about political action, but what he does say (in the Śikṣā Samuccaya) indicates that he rejects it. He gives a list of genres of information that are not worth knowing or learning about, and includes law and political science (daṇḍanīti) on this list. When he gives advice to kings, it is that they give their kingdoms away.

Why is this? I argue that it’s because Śāntideva rejects or devalues most of what Martha Nussbaum (following Aristotle) would call “external goods”: things not under our control which we would normally want, including relationships, social status and (above all) material goods. For him these things are neutral at best, and most often actively harmful (as I discussed here.) Śāntideva does say that one should give these things to others – one of the reasons why Engaged Buddhists like Stephen Jenkins see him as arguing for political action on behalf of the poor. But Śāntideva’s reasoning for giving things to others, I argue, is not that they benefit from possessing the gift – indeed, they may be harmed. But such harm is worth it when they receive a gift from a bodhisattva, because it produces esteem (śraddhā) toward the bodhisattva – it makes the recipient more likely to listen to the bodhisattva’s dharma teaching. A crucial feature of this gift encounter, however, is that the gift come directly from a bodhisattva. Donations from a government or NGO will not do the trick. And this, I argue, is why Śāntideva does not care about governments; action to help others in politics has no genuinely beneficial effect.

I came to these ideas slowly. When I first presented on Śāntideva at a graduate student workshop, I was excited to talk about what Śāntideva could teach us in a contemporary context; a respondent claimed that if he urged political quietism, we could not be able to accept such a worldview in the present age. (I mentioned this response in this early post.) I was a little cowed by this response at first, and it took me a while to figure out an appropriate reply: but then I realized that that political quietism was, in many respects, itself one of the most important things that Śāntideva has to teach us. Whether we agree or disagree with it, his anti-politics is a profound and impeccably Buddhist idea, one that challenges us in a way we must think about and respond to.

For me, it was intoxicating to discover such an idea at a time when I needed to get away from politics, when caring about politics brought nothing but pain. I felt validated in my search for a better, happier life outside politics. The seventh chapter of the dissertation juxtaposed Śāntideva’s ideas against Nussbaum’s more politically charged philosophy, effectively defending Śāntideva against Nussbaum’s objections.

What the dissertation did not do was take up my own substantive, constructive position on the question at hand – for such constructive positions are largely frowned upon, if not scowled upon, in academic religious studies. But such a lack of attention to constructive views allowed me to get off the hook too easily, to defend Śāntideva’s anti-politics without thinking too hard about whether I really believed it.

For in the end I don’t reject external goods; on that basic question I do stand closer to Nussbaum than to Śāntideva. Again, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have got married; the logical practical conclusion from Śāntideva’s thought is the monasticism which he himself practised. Some external goods are genuinely good. They can indeed be negative, as in the case of the hedonic treadmill; and in some cases their absence can strengthen us, as Śāntideva also claims and as I noted in an earlier post. But I do not think that this negativity is the norm – especially at the lower end of the social ladder, where governments are most likely to direct their help. External goods are often genuine goods, especially when they are what we often call “basic needs.”

In short, Śāntideva’s position on external goods – and therefore on political action – cannot be mine. So where do I stand? Well, I haven’t settled that yet. This is part of the reason I’ve lately been trying to explore the concept of altruism: the value of politics depends a lot on who we are ultimately trying to benefit. Should we aim for an enlightened self-interest, for the good of those close to us or whom we identify with, or universally for the good of all? Śāntideva takes the latter, universal position, in no uncertain terms. But I suspect he may be only able to do this because he devalues external goods, because the good of all is identified as their spiritual liberation. To value external goods and still seek the good of all is basically to be a utilitarian, a terribly frustrating and perhaps ultimately counterproductive way of life.

So far, it’s pretty much the usual story of 19th-century reform. But Hacker takes his critique much further than the basic historical point, and this is where it gets interesting to me. Hacker’s special ire, beyond his general disdain for modern Hinduism, is reserved for the “tat tvam asi ethic”, the idea that because we are all ultimately one infinite spirit (“you are that,” as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad supposedly claims), we should help each other because we are really helping ourselves. For Hacker, it is not merely the case that classical Advaita Vedānta thinkers never adopted an altruistic or activistic ethics based on the tat tvam asi of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, but that they could not have. For, Hacker claims, “From the philosophical point of view, to base the tat tvam asi ethic on the foundation of the Vedāntic monism of consciousness is a logical impossibility.” (“Schopenhauer and Hindu ethics,” p. 305) On the next page he goes on to describe the tat tvam asi ethic not merely as a “logical impossibility” but as a “logical monstrosity.” (p. 305, my emphasis) Hacker wants to show the tat tvam asi ethic is a modern invention because, in his mind, the great Vedāntic sages of old were way too wise to ever have fallen for such a load of garbage.

What is it about Vivekānanda’s tat tvam asi ethic, in Hacker’s mind, that makes it logically impossible and even monstrous? For Hacker, genuinely ethical behaviour – by which he means altruistic behaviour – depends on the existence of separate persons, whose differences are irreducible:

Ethical behavior presupposes an interpersonal relationship, which loses its metaphysical justification if individual personhood has no ultimate reality…. Neither the monism of will nor the monism of consciousness or spirit has a real place for the concept of person. But when this concept is not taken seriously, ethics remains on a naturalistic level; that is, there is no true ethics, good and evil have no truly metaphysical relevance, and ultimately there are only ways of realizing or veiling the impersonal universal One…. There is no sense in which an identification of a “that” with a “thou,” such as we have in tat tvam asi, can explain why good and bad behavior exist. Interpersonal relationship is not identity, and it is certainly not identity of a person with an impersonal being.

As philosophical argument I do not think this goes very far, not by itself anyway. Much of it depends on the semi-tautological identification of “ethics” with altruism. If one acknowledges that an ethics can be based on self-interest and that other-interest can be grounded in self-interest, then there seems little logical problem here: the tat tvam asi ethic might not really or ultimately be altruistic, but so what? Even in historical terms, Hacker seems to be on poor ground in believing that such a monistic ethic is purely modern. Hugh van Skyhawk, replying to Hacker in the 74th (1993) volume of the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, argued that a similar view was found in the sixteenth-century Marathi poet-saint Eknath (also spelled Ekanāth or Ekanātha). Eknath told his listeners (in Skyhawk’s translation) that the true yogī “immediately gives up his own interests and ventures into difficulties for the sake of others”; and argues for such altruism on strongly nondualist grounds:

He, for whom there is no more “I” and “mine” and “thee” and “thine” by virtue of the contact with the worship of the divine non-duality and the Self is called the highest bhakta. If he gives his fortune (nijavitta) to another, no misgivings arise in his citta. He does not even sense a trace of alienation. No feelings of doubt arise. The object in the right hand is given to the left hand. Who is the giver here? Who is the receiver?

Overall, then, Hacker’s arguments against monist ethics aren’t particularly persuasive. What excites me about Hacker’s arguments is his reasons for making them. Wilhelm Halbfass’s introduction to his collection of Hacker’s writings stresses the increasing importance in Hacker’s work of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. And Catholicism, it seems to me, stresses encounter over ātmanism: it is all about one’s relationship to a God with whom one is not identical.

The point is highlighted in the much more powerful arguments of another Catholic Paul, Paul Williams. Williams, to my knowledge, says nothing about Hacker in his work; since Williams is a Buddhologist, he may well be entirely unaware of Hacker. And yet Williams’s criticism of Śāntideva (in the final chapters of his Altruism and Reality parallels Hacker’s criticism of Vivekānanda in remarkable ways. Among Śāntideva’s most famous passages (now even excerpted in an introductory ethics text) is his “equalization of self and other” in verses VIII.90-119 of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, in which he argues that, since the self is an illusion (a standard Buddhist view), egoistic action does not make logical sense and we should be altruistic (an innovation of his). Śāntideva is not a monist like Vivekānanda; he is strongly opposed to the Vedāntic idea of a universal cosmic self. Nevertheless, there is a close parallel in that both Śāntideva and Vivekānanda try to deconstruct our ideas of self in order to deconstruct ethical egoism and urge altruistic action. And so Williams’s criticisms of Śāntideva turn out on similar lines to Hacker’s criticisms of Vivekānanda.

Unlike Hacker, Williams makes no attempt at historical criticism; Williams has no doubt that Śāntideva actually believed all this. He simply thinks that Śāntideva is dead wrong. In thinking and arguing this, he has provoked a strong reaction among Buddhologists, no less than five of whom (Barbra Clayton, John Pettit, Jon Wetlesen, Mark Siderits and José Cabezón) have tried to refute him in print. I’m not going to examine today whether Williams is right or wrong (it is a complex question); but I want to explore important points in his arguments.

What Williams claims, against Śāntideva, is that there can be no compassion unless there are persons feeling the compassion for other persons. Compassion requires the existence of persons feeling suffering; without sufferers, there is no suffering and no compassion. (T.R. (Thill) Raghunath made a similar argument in a recent comment.) If the self is deconstructed, so too is suffering, and indeed perhaps all reasons for action.

Both Paul Hacker and Paul Williams, then, are trying to tell us: you cannot have it both ways. Either you can have a nondual view (monist or otherwise) that deconstructs our everyday selves, or you can have the commitment to altruistic alleviation of others’ suffering. The two don’t make sense together; and the first certainly isn’t an argument for the second.

Such a view seems to me to have profound roots in the Abrahamic monotheisms; while the Pauls in question are Catholic, one could surely also imagine it being made by a Jew. For indeed the criticism reminds me strongly of Emmanuel Lévinas and his insistence on the irreducible otherness of other people – with God as the ultimate other. (For breaking down the distinction between himself and God, al-Hallāj was tortured and killed.) The ethical deconstruction of self seems important to a nondual view of the world; but to refute such nonduality seems central to theism. (But not only Abrahamic theism: the nineteenth-century Bengali devotional poet Ramprasad Sen criticized nondualism by saying “I want to taste sugar, not to become sugar.”)

Perhaps the boldest statement of this point was the 1962 article “Schopenhauer and Hindu ethics,” by the late German Indologist Paul Hacker (now translated in a collection of Hacker’s writings by Hacker’s student Wilhelm Halbfass). Hacker is reacting against what was until that point a commonplace in the presentation of Indian philosophy – an interpretation presented as uncomplicated fact, for example, in Hajime Nakamura’s A Comparative History of Ideas – which turns out to have a far more modern provenance.

The commonplace in question is what Hacker calls the tat tvam asi ethic, an idea found above all in the works of Swami Vivekānanda. This ethic is Vivekānanda’s influential attempt to use Advaita Vedānta to support an altruistically engaged politics, closely parallel to what would come to be called Engaged Buddhism; it would later be picked up enthusiastically by other modern Hindu thinkers like Radhakrishnan. Tat tvam asi is the Chāndogya Upaniṣad’s famous teaching that “you are that,” that each of us individual people is ultimately identical to the supreme principle of the universe, brahman. This idea of personal identity with brahman is standard in the Advaita Vedānta tradition of Śaṅkara and others. (Joel Brereton argued, in an article helpfully reproduced here, that tat tvam asi’s original meaning in the Chāndogya is actually quite different, but that’s another story.) But Vivekānanda adds something else: an ethics of altruism. Because each of us is identical with brahman, we are therefore also all each identical with everyone else. And therefore if we really understood how things were, we would help out everyone else:

There are moments when every man feels that he is one with the universe, and he rushes forth to express it, whether he knows it or not. This expression of oneness is what we call love and sympathy, and it is the basis of all our ethics and morality. This is summed up in the Vedånta philosophy by the celebrated aphorism, Tat Tvam Asi, “Thou art That.” To every man, this is taught: Thou art one with this Universal Being, and, as such, every soul that exists, is your soul; and every body that exists, is your body; and in hurting any one, you hurt yourself, in loving any one, you love yourself. (Collected Works of Swami Vivekānanda, Mayavati Memorial Edition, I.388-9)

Against this “tat tvam asi ethic,” Hacker thinks he has found a smoking gun of sorts. A scholar with a background in Engaged Buddhism and similar movements might expect that such political engagement is a modern Indian invention; but Hacker goes a step further. For him this ethic is not even Indian at all, but an invention of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In his 1841 work On the Basis of Morality, which identified compassion as the fundamental basis for morality, Schopenhauer claimed:

In Sanskrit tat tvam asi (this art thou) is the formula, the standing expression, for this knowledge. It is this that bursts forth as compassion on which all genuine, i.e. disinterested, virtue therefore depends, and whose real expression is every good deed. In the last resort, it is this knowledge to which every appeal to gentleness, leniency, loving-kindness, and mercy instead of justice, is directed. For such an appeal is a reminder of that respect in which we are all one and the same entity. (Schopenhauer, E.F.J. Payne translation, p. 210)

And according to Hacker, Vivekānanda only believed in the tat tvam asi ethic because he got it from Schopenhauer! It happened indirectly, through the well connected Indologist Paul Deussen – a mutual friend of Schopenhauer and Vivekānanda (and Nietzsche), who believed that tat tvam asi could be a strong support for compassion and activism (though it had not actually been such in Indian history). Looking through Vivekānanda’s writings, Hacker finds that before Vivekānanda met Deussen in September 1896, he lamented that Vedānta (specifically meaning Advaita) was an impediment to altruism and social service. Based on the journals of others present at the 1896 meeting, Deussen and Vivekānanda almost certainly discussed the tat tvam asi ethic there; and after that meeting, Vivekānanda began giving a great number of enthusiastic speeches proclaiming that Advaita Vedānta offered the highest support for compassion and social activism. (Both Hacker and Vivekānanda tend to use the concepts of morality, compassion, activism and social service almost interchangeably; I think my dissertation demonstrates that this is a great conflation, but that too is another story.) Hacker concludes that the link between Vedānta and compassion was effectively conjured up by Schopenhauer, and adopted by modern Indians only because Schopenhauer’s idea passed to Vivekānanda through Deussen.

Is Hacker’s account right? Dermot Killingley’s “Vivekānanda’s Western message from the East” (in William Radice’s unfortunately OOP Swami Vivekānanda and the Modernization of Hinduism) has demonstrated that it is likely overstated. Killingley shows that Vivekānanda had started making some claims similar to the tat tvam asi ethic before he had met Deussen. The encounter with Deussen probably crystallized the idea of the tat tvam asi ethic in Vivekānanda’s mind, but he had had most of the basic idea already. Like the Engaged Buddhists, Vivekānanda had already been searching for ways to bring together his ancient tradition with the modern Western idea of political engagement; his encounter with a Westerner helped him develop the idea, but the Westerner doesn’t deserve all the credit. And as with Yavanayāna Buddhism, the idea’s modern provenance should not necessarily discredit it.

The story Hacker tells is an interesting one. But from the point of view of my current philosophical interests, still more interesting are the reasons why he tells it. I will turn to that point next time.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mah?y?na Adhy??ayasa?codana S?tra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” This was a justification used for the newly emerging Mah?y?na s?tras. It’s pretty clear from any historical standpoint that no such texts existed during the Buddha’s lifetime; the Mah?y?na was a new phenomenon, and many of its creators seemed to know it. They justified the composition of new s?tras by arguing: the Buddha knows everything, so anything that is correct is therefore effectively spoken by the Buddha. Surely this is what Marcion was up to: because Jesus was God, he could only have spoken the truth. So since the content of the revised Marcionite Gospels were true, as we could presumably ascertain on scripture-independent grounds, it must therefore have been what Jesus really said.

Which brings us back to the previous post’s discussion of authenticity. It’s strange to me that today we put such a high value on things being what they have always been, unchosen by contemporary people. But the premodern view of authenticity is curious in its own way. If you are already so convinced that your new scripture is true, why do you need to attribute it to the Buddha or to Jesus? Why not just admit that you found the truth yourself?

I guess I can start to see an answer when I look at what people do try to come up with from scratch, without connection to the past. Modernist attempts to rebuild society from the ground up didn’t work very well. And individually, when we avoid submitting to the guidance of a tradition, we run the risk of merely believing what we want to believe, being guided by our persistent and troublesome unconscious desires rather than by the truth. That’s why I have myself argued that in some cases it is important to argue that some people and practices are not really Buddhist. The example that comes to my mind here is Gary Snyder’s horrifying Smokey the Bear Sutra: a “Buddhist” text advocating ecologically motivated violence and wrath. I try to avoid feelings of offence, but that text felt like a slap in the face toward Buddhist critiques of anger.

Here there seems to be a justified continuity between premodern and modern authenticity: our individual choice leads us too easily to the wrong places. This idea is at the heart of a chastened intellectualist view of human nature, a view shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Xunzi and Freud. If we just do what we choose and believe what we discover for ourselves, we will be led astray: to sin (Augustine), to chaos and disharmony (Xunzi), to repression, neurosis and pathology (Freud). Rather, we need to be humble, to submit ourselves to others with greater vision than ours. I wonder if the contemporary search for authenticity is an aestheticization of this view: there’s something objectively better that happens when a North American discovers the pleasures of Chinese food developed over generations in China, as opposed to the Chinese food designed to conform to his North American sweet tooth at the Panda Hut around the corner. Rather than having one’s existing tastes pandered to, one educates one’s palate, becomes a connoisseur.

Then again, I’m not sure this answers the question of why people write or edit new scriptures and claim their authenticity. One might rightly want to aim at humility, seeking to prevent the arrogance of believing oneself in charge of the whole truth. But isn’t it just as arrogant to believe that one’s own discovery is not only the truth, but the word of the Buddha or Jesus himself?

He’s surely right, in the sense that Tibetans thought Sanskrit s?tras more likely to be the real word of the historical Buddha. But the wording intrigued me. For we use “authentic” as a term of praise all the time now, but in a strikingly different way.

The Tibetans cared that texts were authentically Indian because the Buddha was Indian, so such texts were more likely to have been the authentic word of the Buddha. They wouldn’t have given a toss whether texts were authentically Mongolian or authentically Persian, because the Buddha didn’t come from those places.

For us, by contrast, authenticity is a good in itself. Other things being equal, we treat blues music performed by an authentic Mississippi blues performer as better than the same music performed by some guy from Vancouver; authentic Mexican food made by Mexicans is better than Mexican food made by Bostonians. I once spoke to a friend’s relatives in Cambridge, UK, who were going to be visiting the US and were excited about going to Disneyland. I asked “Why go all the way – why not just go to Euro Disney?” They replied “No, no – we want to see the real Disneyland!” A startling response at the time to my urban geographer’s ears, to which nothing could be more fake than Disneyland – but even there, the original was valued much more highly than the imitation.

Some of this valuing of authenticity per se creeps into religious studies as well. I’ve spoken of the point before in the context of Yavanay?na Buddhism: it’s a recent creation involving Westerners and therefore seems less “authentically Buddhist,” and “less authentic” is equated in our minds with “bad.” I think this is why the “Protestant presuppositions” charge is bandied about so frequently and comes across as such a slur: the Yavanay?na emphasis on texts, on what seems to be the authentic word of the Buddha, is considered “less authentically Buddhist.”

But the Yavanay?na attitude, ironically, seems to me much closer to traditional attitudes than does this scholarly romanticism of authenticity. Scholars or otherwise, we today value a more generalized authenticity, in which everything should “be what it is.” Whereas for most premodern cultures, as I understand it, authenticity was merely a means to an end. The authentic word of the Buddha was better than an imitation because of the value of the Buddha’s word itself, not because of the value of authenticity per se.

So why this change? It seems above all an aesthetic phenomenon. We see beauty in things that are what they are, that don’t imitate. Why is this? I suggested before that it’s because authenticity is scarce under capitalism. Is that it? Is it because, as I added in the comments, so many of us want to take an oppositional posture against society at large, and so much of that society is satisfied with imitations? Or is there more to it still?

Anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere took methodological anti-Protestantism a step further, effectively labelling not merely scholars of Buddhism but Buddhists themselves as regrettably Protestant. Obeyesekere coined the unfortunately widespread term “Protestant Buddhism” to describe what I have called Yavanay?na, the new modernist and rationalist form of Western-influenced Buddhism whose roots go back to nineteenth-century Sri Lanka and the reformers Henry Steel Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala.

What’s wrong with calling this modernized Buddhism Protestant? First of all, neither Olcott nor Dharmapala were Protestants themselves. Dharmapala was born and raised a Sri Lankan Buddhist. While born and raised a Protestant family, Olcott had converted away from Protestantism to “spiritualism” well before calling himself a Buddhist. Moreover, as Stephen Prothero has rightly argued, Protestantism was only one influence on Olcott’s thought; secular modernism was at least as important. For example, Olcott was a firm believer in the theory of evolution, rejected roundly by the Protestants of his time, and was enthusiastic about Buddhism partially because he took it – unlike Protestantism – to be compatible with evolutionary theory.

But beyond that historical point, one must also ask: what’s wrong with Protestantism? The term “Protestant Buddhism” carries the whiff of an accusation that there’s something wrong with this Buddhism, that these Buddhists are not really Buddhists but Protestants in Buddhist disguise. In a class I took from him, Robert Gimello once criticized Yavanay?na Buddhists who would make claims like “??kyamuni and I have got it right, and 2500 years of Buddhist tradition has got it wrong.” The class laughed, and Gimello added “I think that’s extremely arrogant.” Looking back on that experience, I sorely wish I had raised my and and asked the following question: “So may I clarify, Prof. Gimello? You are, in fact, telling us that the Protestant Reformation should never have happened?”

For after all, what was Martin Luther doing except to say “Jesus, Paul and I have got it right, and 1500 years of Catholic tradition has got it wrong”? To make a claim like Gimello’s is effectively to claim that Protestantism is a tradition founded on illegitimate arrogance. And one can reasonably make that claim – as a matter of anti-Protestant apologetics. Indeed Gimello – always a devout Catholic – has since moved to the University of Notre Dame to help develop “robustly Catholic” theological views of Buddhism. I believe in the value of apologetics, of theological or sectarian claims aimed at persuading members of one tradition to move to another. I only have a problem with apologetics when it poses as neutral, disinterested scholarship, as Gimello had once claimed his class to be. It may well be that a “robustly Catholic” sectarian apologetic helps us understand Buddhism better – but only if we acknowledge that that is what it is.

I said this because the trendy scholars in religious studies (especially performance theory) tended to view “nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism” as the root of all evils in the field. Religious studies, I heard over and over, had been too dominated by the study of texts and scriptures and ideas, all the pernicious influence of nineteenth-century liberal Protestants like Friedrich Schleiermacher. We needed to be exploring “lived” religion (with the implication, it was admitted in more candid moments, that the study of texts amounted to “dead” religion). For most people in history, they said, religion is not about texts but about ritual, performance, history, society, supernatural beings. Colleagues cited Vasudha Narayanan’s JAAR article entitled “Liberation and lentils,” in which she recounted how Indian traditions like her family’s, involving rituals like picking the most auspicious lentils to eat at particular holidays, had been marginalized in favour of philosophical claims about liberation, or the myths in the Vedas. Religious studies, it was said, needed to focus more on lentils and less on liberation, more on ritual and less on philosophy.

I didn’t and don’t buy a word of this argument. To begin with, it relies almost entirely on the obscuring and pernicious concept of “religion,” a highly unfortunate term that leads us to emphasize the wrong differences, to give some beliefs a legal privilege they don’t deserve, to underplay similarities between “religious” and “secular” phenomena. The assumption is that what we had in common in religious studies was that we intended to study “religion.” Which, in my case, was completely false. I had no interest in “religion”; I was there to study Asian philosophy, which is marginalized if present at all in the vast majority of philosophy departments. But because the departments where one could study Asian thought were called “religious studies,” we were told that the concept of “religion” should have a normative value in deciding what we consider worthy of study.

Beyond the word, there’s an unspoken populist criterion of value underlying the anti-textual argument: the fact that more people do ritual than texts is taken as implying that ritual is therefore more worthy of study than texts. Such a view, I think, is one of the factors behind the current tendency to study other people’s ethics and act as if one is doing ethics oneself. But why, again, should this be so? More Americans, at least, believe in creationism than in evolution. By the populist criterion, it would seem that the sociology of creationism is more worthy of study than is evolutionary biology.

What I didn’t learn from that course, though, was ethics. Monius referred to the course as a course in ethics, and much work that now bills itself as “religious ethics” or “Indian ethics” takes a similar approach to hers. In my view, however, such “ethics” is anything but. Monius’s course discussed plenty of material that was related to ethics. We read a great deal of secondary literature about what might be called ways of moral knowing in India – studies of the ways in which people in various settings come to form their beliefs about what is good and bad, right and wrong. And such studies of others’ normative views are certainly relevant to ethics proper; we need enough humility to learn from other people’s philosophies, to realize that how other people think about good and bad bears a relevance to how we do so.

Such studies are not themselves ethics, however. Consider a parallel case. Suppose an anthropologist, herself an avowed atheist, spends a few years in the American Deep South studying a group of young-earth creationists and their views – especially their views of biology. Our anthropologist is particularly interested in the way these creationists make sense of organisms’ functioning, how they explain it without reference to evolution, how they fit it into a larger worldview. And she writes up a study exploring this creationist biology and explaining it to a secular academic audience which finds it largely alien.

This anthropological study would be a valuable one, interesting and informative in many ways. It would be a valuable work of anthropology, of sociology, of religious studies, even of science studies. But there is one thing such a study would not be – and that is a work of biology.

Many would argue that biology, because it is a scientific discipline, requires all the rigorous standards of evidence and hypothesis testing that are associated with the work of natural science; and so therefore what the creationists do is not itself biology. I’m not going to take a position on that view here. Rather, for the sake of argument, let us assume a much broader, methodologically neutral definition of “biology,” according to which young-earth creationists’ untested or falsified claims still count as biology because of their subject matter – because they are claims about organisms and cells, about life. Even so, even if the creationists are doing biology, the anthropologist isn’t. She’s doing a study of other people’s biology.

Why? For a work to be part of a given field of knowledge, the work must argue for claims in that field. The sociology of biology is a noble enterprise, but to call it “biology” effectively seems to dispense with the notion of biology at all, to make “biology” cover so much that it ends up covering nothing. And to return to our present topic, the same holds of the anthropology of ethics. To study other people’s ethics is not to do ethics oneself. It is to do something one could perhaps call “ethics studies” or “ethicology,” something that is to ethics what science studies is to science.

To do ethics, one must actually make ethical claims – about what really is good or right, not merely about what other people think is good or right. Even to do “Indian ethics,” it seems to me, one must engage oneself with Indian ethical claims, one must consider them seriously as candidates for truth, even if one ultimately rejects them. Such an approach is, alas, still dangerous territory in contemporary religious studies, where an unholy alliance of scientism and postmodernism leads to a skepticism about all normative claims. But if one believes it illegitimate to make claims about what really is good and bad (as opposed to what other people think about good and bad), then one has ruled out ethics as a legitimate field of inquiry – as Christopher Hitchens would rule out theology. Hitchens, however, would be unlikely to claim his own book as a work of theology; he is ready to call it as he sees it, and say that right-thinking people would dispense with the theology he studies. Religionists would do well to follow this example. If you don’t believe in doing ethics, then don’t say that you’re doing it, even when you’re studying other people’s ways of doing it.

I don’t know enough about Judaism to say how pervasive Soloveichik’s approach is in the tradition, or enough about the Tanakh to know how much it pervades there. But I find his view intriguing for a number of reasons, even if it is little more than Soloveichik’s own idiosyncrasy. First among these is the afterlife; for when I read Soloveichik’s article on this subject, I found it made me consider myself significantly more Buddhist.

Soloveichik believes a Christian is committed to saying that Hitler or Pol Pot, if they sincerely repented their evil deeds moments before death, they would then end up in heaven. Richard John Neuhaus, creator of First Things, suggested that perhaps “Hitler in heaven will be forever a little dog to whom we will benignly condescend. But he will be grateful for being there, and for not having received what he deserved,” just as “we will all be grateful for being there and for not having received what we deserve.” Such a view is unacceptable in Soloveichik’s Judaism. He instead presents a view from Maimonides, according to which “souls are never eternally punished in hell: the presence of the truly wicked is so intolerable to the Almighty that they never even experience an afterlife. Rather, they are, in the words of the Bible, ‘cut off’: after death, they just… disappear.” [ellipses are Soloveichik's]

The point got me thinking: what would I like to think about the afterlife of the wicked? What would seem to be a fair view, if I were designing the cosmos? And I thought: neither the Christian instant forgiveness, nor the (presumed) Jewish elimination, seemed right to me – and eternal damnation for those who don’t repent seemed even worse. Rather, I thought, I would want to see something more like the Buddhist view: they would get punishment for a long time, but eventually get a clean slate. I realized that said something about my own ethical views on the treatment of evildoers in this world: forgiveness is a worthwhile goal, but it has to be to some extent earned; a moment of repentance isn’t good enough.

The point helped me learn to pay more attention to the supernatural dimensions of the traditions I study. I have generally Yavanay?na sympathies myself – I don’t generally believe in the supernatural and tend to think most traditions would be better off without it. But it’s worth paying attention to any thinker’s view of the supernatural – whether the afterlife, God, or karma – because it will wind up telling you a lot about that thinker’s view of everything else.