Buddhism: lost in translation

I've been listening, often repeatedly, to some talks by the teacher/scholar Stephen Batchelor, and I've decided to eventually learn Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts. It's kind of a spoken form of Sanskrit, and in fact the word Pali just means "text," so someone in the early days saw the words "Pali language" and didn't get that it's just "the language of the texts".

Pretty much all of Batchelor's talks are awesome, but I recommend "The Life and Death of Siddartha Gotama" and the ones on "secular Buddhism" to get a sense of what struck me. Essentially, he's looking at the earliest Buddhist texts with the rule of thumb that anything in the canon that could have been said by anyone in 5th-century B.C. India probably isn't a part of what made the Buddha's teaching special even at the time, and has enabled it to continue to the present day.

Why bother with Pali when I'm not interested in learning Japanese or Chinese--Japanese especially being the liturgical language of Soto Zen? (I'll learn some eventually.)

For one thing, I think Pali will be easier. It's Indo-European and written with an accented Roman alphabet. I should say "can be written": Pali, as a spoken language, doesn't have a native alphabet, and everyone has always written it using their own native alphabet, like Brahmi, Sinhalese, Thai, and now Roman. Unlike Chinese and (literary) Japanese, though, it does have an alphabet, which is already a big step in comprehensibility.

The other thing, and the root reason for learning it at all, is that Chinese and Japanese are often additional layers of translation, and learning Pali will let me look behind the curtain of translation a bit and judge for myself what a passage means. Here's an example:

In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the "Discourse on the Noble Quest," the Buddha gives a little backstory of his awakening experience. After his realization, he hangs out for a bit, then thinks

This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment. For a generation delighting in attachment, excited by attachment, enjoying attachment, this conditionality & dependent co-arising are hard to see.

From Stephen Batchelor I learn that instead of "delights in attachment," he actually says "people love their place," where "place" is "alaya," as in "Himalaya": "place of the snows". Thanissaro's translation isn't wrong, but it takes the Buddha's metaphor and substitutes the more direct Buddhist terminology that everyone has standardized on in English (which I deeply dislike, and being able to write about that more clearly is another reason to learn Pali). There's a lot of flavor lost there, like how the buddha views home and place, and why they thought of "going forth from home into homelessness" as being such an unusual and good thing. That context matters, if, as Batchelor suggests, we want to identify what parts of the Buddhist canon are timeless and speak to our situation now, and what is just a sort of hangover from ancient India.

The older the English translation, the more rewarding to look closely at the original. The final words of the Buddha, according to Rhys-Davids (late 1800s):

"Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!"

In researching this I found it quoted a fair bit by Christians explaining why every other religion's idea of "salvation" is wrong (in this case, that salvation can be achieved by works). Except that line is actually based on Philippians 2:12 (Revised Standard Version, my emphasis):

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling...

And the word "salvation" doesn't appear in the Pali. Vajira and Story's version:

"Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!"

The Christian apologists quoting the Rhys-Davids translation don't look too hard to see that they're using a translation benighted in 19th-century colonialist projection. (Although they might not notice: most conservative Christians themselves seem quite comfortable benighted in 19th-century colonialist projection.) That's sort of an egregious example, but we're stuck with many longstanding bad translations made by people who didn't understand the material: any time you see the words "Void," "suffering," and "enlightenment," you're looking at a bad translation that barely scratches the surface. (Those are shunyata, dukkha, and either nirvana or bodhi.) The very name "Buddhism" comes from that old Western worldview: Buddhism isn't an "-ism" in the sense of a system of beliefs, but that's all those scholars could imagine. We have to be somewhat cautious about taking the translators' word for it.

It seems well worth the effort to read past that.

heresy, history, and doctrine: a ramble.

Having finished the heresy-centric book Out of the Flames, about Michael Servetus and his book Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), I decided to ask Google about ["Episcopal Church" heresy], wondering if they bothered any more, and having a vague memory that the Church had run a heresy trial some years back. They did, in 1996, against a bishop who ordained a gay deacon in 1990; the Church eventually punted on the trial, and in any case the deacon is now a priest serving in New Hampshire.

What a thing, though. 1996.

The latest news, though, involves a striking comment from the Presiding Bishop, at the 2009 General Convention, no less. I think I know what she meant, but she said

"The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy - that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It's caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention." [emphasis mine]

This is mind-bogglingly inarticulate, and the conservatives had a field day, because

1. as far as I can tell, they already hate her for being the female head of the modern gay-and-women-ordaining Episcopal Church, who furthermore referred to a feminist-theology "Mother Jesus" in her inaugural sermon, and
2. individual salvation by way of Jesus is kind of...the whole Christian thing.

The Buddhist Thing is the fundamental lack of separation between the seemingly different entities in the world of our lived experience.

The Jewish Thing is about God's relationship with his Chosen People in the world.

The Muslim Thing is submission to and worship of God according to the Qur'an.

The Christian Thing is individual salvation through Jesus Christ. If you're a Christian and you're not doing that, it's worth asking yourself what you are doing. (And tell me, if you're willing: we all work out our religion and spirituality in different ways and I am typically really interested in hearing about it, especially if I get to ask questions.)

I'm inclined to go with her clarification that she intended to talk about how Christianity also intends for people to live and function in community, and that's what the General Convention was part of. I don't know if her bad phrasing reflects her deeper thinking, or if she's just determined to stick her foot in her mouth. But come on, you're the head of a major national church. Surely you can avoid even the appearance of declaring your religion's central tenet to be heresy. I can do that, and I've only been a seriously practicing Buddhist for 4 years.

Conservatives are funny, though. I liked this guy, for his honesty. The Episcopal Church

has resoundingly declared its intention to stay on its revisionist course, and damn the torpedoes. It has now officially given its approval and encouragement to men who have an irresistible urge to have sex with men, and women with women. It is only a very short step away from giving the same approval to men who want to have sex with boys, and women with girls. If man/man sex is good and to be encouraged, what's wrong with man/boy sex? Or man/child sex? Or man/beast sex? Essentially anything goes in the sex department, and the prime responsibility of the church is to make sure that everyone is happy and comfortable with their sexuality.

Right, that's not a classic homophobia argument at all. I'm never sure what kind of failed sexual maturity leads people to draw comparisons of gay sex to pedophilia and bestiality. The typical conservative approach seems to be that WE MUST HAVE RULES, and it doesn't matter if those rules are arbitrary or harmful, we must have them and we must be strict, because otherwise, chaos! Our author continues:

We are merrily slithering down a long slippery slope at the bottom of which we will be greeted by the complete collapse of our Western way of life, just in time to submit to the gathering energy and suicidal passion of the radical Muslim alternative. Like the ancient Romans, we are sitting ducks for a new generation of Barbarians.

The Africans have had the guts to call a spade a spade. They are in the frontline trenches of the great Christian/Muslim divide, while we sit in our comfortable living rooms watching a daily torrent of news stories of men abusing and murdering women and children, and the filth glorifying sex and violence billed as entertainment by Hollywood and the media. We pretend to be horrified by the Muslim mistreatment of women, and soak up a daily dose of American-style abuse of women. Sooner or later we will get what we deserve - probably sooner.

Ah, yes, the decadent-society-in-decline thing. It's a core Christian idea that the world is inherently flawed, that God made it perfect and then humans sinned and screwed it up. Far outside Christianity in space and time, though, complaining about the decline of one's society is so universal that I think it's just an expression of fundamental human discontent. It seems like kind of a downer to see the force of theology behind something that seems to encourage the perception of conflict: between God and humans, between heaven and earth, between Christians and non-Christians. (And between humans and devils, if that's how you roll.)

The author could stand to read The Inheritance of Rome. Rome didn't "fall" as we usually think of it: it faded, and for centuries afterward the victorious Germanic tribes (especially the Franks) viewed themselves as the continuation of the Roman Empire. They didn't think they were its conquerors. They thought they were its descendants and preservers. While we now remember Coffee Talk's repeat of Voltaire's "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire," they didn't call it the Holy Roman Empire to be funny.

The Byzantine Empire also thought it was the continuation of Rome, to which it did have more of a claim than the Franks, since it actually started as the Eastern Roman Empire. They were also fading, but hanging in there, until the Fourth Crusade, not the Muslim empires, sacked Constantinople in 1204, and they never really recovered. Reality is always so much messier than our stories about it.

My ultimate takeaway from all this is how grateful I am that I get to study it academically. I don't really care about doctrinal disputes. Yes, it would be nice if religious leaders would stop advocating the execution of gays and telling people that condoms cause AIDS, but those are cultural issues, and that's ultimately what we're seeing here. To me, it's all angels dancing on the head of a pin: arguments between Buddhists, too. What matters is practicing meditation, practicing listening and speaking skillfully in relationships, practicing practicing practicing. One of the old Buddhist debates, still unresolved to my knowledge, was whether Buddha attained such a state that negative impulses/feelings/desires never even arose in his mind (rare to nonexistent in post-Buddha people), as opposed to having them arise and being able to let go of them immediately (which plenty of people learn to do).

I realize that the participants in doctrinal arguments, especially in a salvationist religion, often feel like there's more at stake than just whether they're right or not: it's the eternal fate of other people's souls. That's why they burned heretics, you see: heretics were worse than murderers because they imperiled other people's souls instead of just their own. It's hard to wrap my head around that kind of severity and urgency, but it still survives in a lot of modern debates even in the West, largely subjugated to the standards of liberal democracy. Abortion in America would be the choice example.

I feel like this history and emotion and doctrine is nothing but a distraction. In the end, who cares exactly how perfect Buddha's mind was or wasn't? My question is: what's my mind like? What happens when things arise for me? When I go looking for the supposed permanent thing that I think is me, what do I really find? Buddha is long, long dead. It's my experience I have to deal with, not his.

Why are humans so concerned that everyone else should think and believe the same thing we do?

the priest at the Pyramid of the Sun

In October 2001,my girlfriend Mona and I crewed on a sailboat down to Mexico. This was The Bad Relationship, and the boat's owner was a selfish, passive-aggressive loon who eventually tried to kick everyone off the boat in the middle of nowhere, so the trip was a mixed bag. I did enjoy Mexico, though, and I came back with a raft of stories, including the time the four of us--me, Mona, the skipper, and his girlfriend--rented an old-school VW Beetle and did a road trip from Puerto Vallarta out to Teotihuacán and back.

Teotihuacán is hard to describe. It's an ancient Mesoamerican worship site, obviously, but it's...enormous. Huge. The Pyramid of the Sun, the largest structure, is 246 feet (75 meters) tall, which is at least 16 stories high. It has a lot of steps and takes a while to climb, and it's made of these tiny stones, 8-20 inches. And there are other buildings comparably sized, and then you realize that it's 2000 years old and we don't actually know who built it, and the mind reels.

Then you have to fend off the obnoxious guys pushing little stone statues to the tourists. Luckily they're either too lazy or not allowed to sell on the pyramids themselves, so if you gain some altitude you escape them.

We arrived there on December 11th, the day before the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's protector. Being godless heathens living on a sailboat, we hadn't noticed, and it took us a bit to figure out why there were all these Catholic pilgrimage tourist groups. This was their last stop before the gigantic festival in Mexico City the next day.

The first thing I noticed was a group of American Catholics standing in a circle, chanting some ritual I'd never heard before. There was the obligatory endless response of "Lord, hear our prayer," but the (non-priest) leader's lines were unfamiliar, and...unusually esoteric, somehow. It felt like it came out of the same dusty book as exorcism, and lived there, largely unused, for similar reasons.

The next thing we encountered was a Mexican guy who was pretty angry that a bunch of Americans had the temerity to come to a foreign culture's ancient religious sites and do some random ritual there. Mexican Catholicism has a strong streak of the original pagan in it, more than in many Latin American countries: this guy was there to do a solemn greeting to the four directions, and the next day he was going to dress up and perform in a giant traditional Indian dance in a plaza in Mexico City. So he was pretty miffed about pilgrims feeling they had the right to do some random thing on top of the pyramid.

There were a couple of priests with the group, and on the way down I caught up with one of them, a doughy heartland American in his mid-30s, from Wisconsin. We had a nice chat: it turns out there was a particularly zealous guy in the tour group, who asked the priests if they could do an obscure Catholic rite for purifying a space. Basically, they were asking God to forgive humanity for all the evil things (which I guess meant human sacrifices) that had happened on that spot. The priest thought it was a little odd, but wouldn't harm anything to humor the guy. Inasfar as you think Religion A coming and purifying Religion B's "defiled" ritual spaces might be a little arrogant, the Mexican guy's anger was right on target.

I saved several gems into my journal from the conversation with the priest, and someday I'll type them up, but it included one of my favorite lines ever, said without a hint of irony:

"Are you Catholic?"
"I was raised Episcopalian."

"Well, that's almost as good."