Text Blindness
How to read Buddhist history without a book
The late David Graeber, anthropologist, anarchist, and activist, wrote:
Historians, who tend to rely almost exclusively on texts and pride themselves on exacting standards of evidence, therefore often end up, as they did with the Iroquois influence theory, feeling it is their professional responsibility to act as if new ideas do emerge from within textual traditions.1
His observation is compelling and should be heeded by all “modern” Buddhists who like to spend some of their free time digging about in studies of medieval Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese texts, feeding on speculations and opinions of historians of Buddhism—that is, when they are not practicing mindfulness, zazen, or chanting mantras for world peace.
Textual analysis can be interesting, and Buddhists have been doing it for many centuries, long before the historical-critical method [HCM] of analyzing the Bible, which came into vogue during the 18th century. However, the negative effect of HCM is that it blinds people to the meaning of the Buddhist tradition and practice behind our texts. In the case of Buddhist texts, HCM has the effect of creating an “other.” Many Buddhist studies, carried out by people with only “academic” a.k.a “clinical” interest in Buddhism, resemble autopsies performed by coroners, a phenomena I term “forensic Buddhist studies.”
Graeber further observes:
[I]t doesn’t seem to occur to any of the authors to wonder what ancient Rome or Medieval England might look like if they had to be reconstructed exclusively through ruined buildings and official statements carved in stone.
For example, we have historians like Gregory Schopen, who is engaged in exactly this sort of project, or scholars of the Old Tibetan Documents, and so on, who engage in prodigious speculation about the culture and society of the Classical Buddhist period in Indian history and the imperial period of Tibet.
How do these historians blind their readers? For example, there are historical theories on the development of Vajrayāna in India and Tibet, or violence in Buddhism, and so on, which are consumed by their colleagues and the public, who then canonize the opinions found in these theories as historical facts.
As in the example of the Iroquois influence theory mentioned above, there has been an inordinate amount of effort to locate the origin of the Great Perfection teaching in some text or another that is notably not directly part of the textual tradition of the Great Perfection in order to show that some Tibetans just made it up.2 Rather than give credence to the account that two Tibetan men, Bagor Vairocana and Lekdrup were sent on a royal mission to central India from Tibet in the 780’s to recover the Great Perfection doctrine, historians of Buddhism these days jump through hoops trying to demonstrate any origin for the Great Perfection other than the one chronicles of the Great Perfection themselves record.
To the extent that people in the so-called “West”3 now completely dominate the study of the history of Buddhism, there is mounting tension between what passes as historical research and indigenous Buddhist viewpoints about the history and traditions of Buddhism. There are also some notable contradictions we can observe. Many people interested in Buddhism cannot shake their one-life time, materialist cultural conditioning. They experience cognitive dissonance when they encounter indigenous Buddhist discourse involving multiple lives, dimensions of living beings, planets, world systems, and universes populated in all directions with awakened beings who work for the benefit of all. They find it difficult to square such cosmic panoramas with their inculcated rationalism and literalism. Blinded by texts, they grasp at historical realism aided by textual criticism which is set out to locate their cognitive discomfort in a more comforting narrative which does not conflict with the mythologies they’ve absorbed from scientism and the putative objective reality they’ve been conditioned to accept.
So, how do we read Buddhist history without a book? Buddhist history is not something that can be captured in a book, study, an inscription, a statue, painting, temple, or shrine. It can only be captured by participating in the living Buddhist tradition. We read that history everyday in our practice of the Dharma, and all the skillful means the Buddha and āryas have taught. Buddhist history is the story of samsara and nirvana, the story of paths and stages. We cannot read that history unless we enter the Buddhist path. That history is personal, experiential, and lives in our transmission lineages.
Graeber, David. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .: Essays (p. 61). (Function). Kindle Edition. The Iroquois influence theory is the theory that the Founders of the United States had interactions with Native American federations that significantly informed the formation of the US political system. This caused quite a stir in the 1980’s, where it hotly denied
The same may be said of the Mahāmudra tradition. One wonders, which came first, mahāmudra, or the tantras that discuss mahāmudra?
“[T]here are a whole series of terms—starting with the West, but also including terms such as modernity—that effectively substitute for thought.” Graeber, David. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .: Essays (pp. 35-36). (Function). Kindle Edition.