Protestantism in Laos

Transcription

Hi. This is a video to talk about Pali. My own experience learning the ancient language, the most important for the history of Buddhism, called Pali. It's especially important for Theravada Buddhism, it's important for anyone who is interested in Buddhist philosophy. It is a language that has important links to many living languages in India, in Sri Lanka, in Southeast Asia (Burmese, Thai, Cambodian, etc.). This is a video that, obviously, people have requested that I make for some time. Why am I finally making it today? Well, funny story, 30 minutes ago, my final exam for Japanese ended. The end of my level 1 Japanese university course. I am completely exhausted. I woke up at about 6:00 AM this morning, I wrote a two and a half hour exam. The reason why I've got a beard is because I'm exhausted, I've been studying a lot, and burning the candle at both ends. That's the first part of the answer to the question, "How do you learn Pali?" Like any other language, it is a lot of work. It is a lot of hard work. But the truth is, if I don't make a video when I'm exhausted, I won't make a video at all, because if I were well-rested, I would be getting work done. So, in most of my videos I look exhausted, and in most of my new videos in the future I'm going to continue to look exhausted, because that's when I set aside the time to try to make a video and share some of my thoughts and memories with y'all. My patron saint behind me (in case you don't recognize him), that's Edward Snowden, looking down over me. So you might have been expecting a Buddha statue in the background, but no, I don't have that kind of stuff in my apartment. In terms of what gets covered in this video: number 1, I'm going to talk about some of my positive experiences with learning Pali as a language, with being a Pali scholar. That's something I was, in as much as anyone can exist as a Pali scholar, for years and years, and I do have some positive experiences to share. Just lately, in some e-mail correspondence, I was made aware of the fact that almost all of my writing online consists of warnings for people learning Pali. Not necessarily negative, but trying to warn you of dangers and difficulties you're going to encounter, and a lot of my writing about my own life gives a lot of emphasis to the sense of frustration, failure, disaffection, insuperable obstacles that I encountered and that I expect others will encounter in that field. So, in this video, to start with, I'm actually going to say some positive stuff about my experience, secondly I'm going to talk about the central question of the work itself, "How do you learn Pali?", "How do you teach yourself Pali?". It is mostly going to be about teaching yourself Pali because there are very few places in the world where someone else can teach it to you. You're expected to be an autodidact absolutely everywhere, including Europe, Asia, etc. And then Part 3: I'm going to give some thoughts about why I quit. Why I'm no longer a Pali scholar today. So this is going to be one long video. And it will be very interesting to a small number of people, admittedly. If you're seriously interested in Buddhism, if you're seriously interested in why so few people are really competent in Pali, why there is so little new, original research coming out, this is a good video to watch, and if you're considering this as an option for yourself, of course, this is a good video to watch also. A small number of people who know me personally may also find it interesting, or they may not. Arright. The positive side of my experience study Pali, which I never talk about. I never want to sound like I'm boasting, and one of the reciprocal aspects of that is that there are people on the internet and in real life, too, face-to-face, there are people who denounce me by claiming that I was never given access to institutions that I was given access to, by claiming that people never worked with me or never could work with me who did work with me. A lot of people, especially before this Youtube channel started, a lot of people would basically invent an imaginary character for who they thought I was and they would then attack that character, or invent reasons in their own minds for what they thought were my failures or my obstacles or why I couldn't accomplish various things. And very often what they were attacking me for failing to accomplish were things I never wanted to accomplish at all. And, of course, that's partly because my own approach to the history is very sincere but it is very realistic. I am not someone who ever owned magical crystals. I've never owned amethysts. I've never done Yoga. I don't smoke marijuana. I am not a stereotypical hippie involved in Buddhism in any way. I'm not interested in glorifying the past. I have a real, sincere interest in a lot of important historical issues, like slavery and colonialism and the opium trade, and I'm sincerely interested in the ancient history of Buddhism, I'm sincerely interested in the modern, contemporary, ongoing history of Buddhism, but I'm interested in real things. I want to deal with reality all the time, and that does alienate me from most of the people in the field, and that's why, both on the internet and in real life, a lot of those people say bad things about me. I hope you can tell, even from my tone of voice, I really don't resent it. As I'm about to say in talking about the positive side of it that didn't create a problem for me in the field, because the types of events and institutions and opportunities that those people would block me from are opportunities I don't want. They're things I don't want to be a part of. So, y'know, I don't feel any sense of loss that I wasn't invited to events that I would have refused to attend, or that I would have just quietly avoided ever attending. And the other side of that is, these people who kind of put in the effort or energy to try to hate me (and I just note, hate is different from fear: there are people who fear me and there are people who hate me, those are two different things), those people are really unaware that all over the world I had the red carpet rolled out for me, simply because I was a legit Pali scholar. What does it mean to be a legit Pali scholar? Some people judged me on the basis of my hand-writing. I worked very hard on this language, and it is not a spoken language, not a living language you can really have a conversation in; I had beautiful penmanship, and I don't mean writing Pali in Romanized letters, I don't mean using the same alphabet we use for English, y'know I could read and write Pali in the Burmese tradition, in the Sinhalese tradition (i.e., the tradition from Sri Lanka), Thai, Lao, Cambodian, and I also worked on some of the minority scripts, because I was interested in the orthography. So, branching off from the word orthography, what were the positive things I had happen to me, just by being a legit Pali scholar? Just by teaching myself the language, working very hard, putting up a website, developing good handwriting, developing a deep knowledge of the history, the literature (again, I'm reading reading contemporary studies, I'm reading ancient materials, I'm reading all kinds of stuff), what doors did that open for me? The stuff I cared about, again, it's not some meditation retreat at a hippie institution where people hate me, those were not the opportunities I was looking for. What was rewarding for me and the doors that were opened for me was: I got to see stone inscriptions, in person, I got to see palm-leaf manuscripts, I got to visit archives, and I don't just mean academic archives, although that was also very rewarding for me (all over the world, in Asia, in Europe, I've seen important historical materials in academic archives), I've seen archives inside Buddhist monasteries, I've seen archives inside museums and so on, too. I've had access to wonderful, inspiring historical materials, hands-on. That mattered to me. Those were the doors that were opened for me. Those were the people who respected me. Some of them were individual scholars who knew me for years and who respected my work (however you want to characterize my work). People who were experts and devoted their lives to this stuff met me, got to know me at conferences, sometimes at archives; some of the most important people I met (I was spending all this time at archives), I met those people at the archives. Some of them stayed in touch with me by e-mail for years and years, others were people who met me for 5 minutes once. Show up at a Buddhist monastery, y'know, not just average Buddhist monasteries, but a Buddhist monastery where I knew there was some kind of scholarly or historical tradition that was important, that I wanted to connect with, and y'know, the monks looked at my hand-writing, they looked at my work, they asked about my background, you have some kind of conversation about Buddhism, and they unlock the door to whatever it is. You know, I was treated wonderfully at such a long list of institutions. Again, I don't get offended when people denounce me this way on the internet; people say, "Oh, nobody in western academia could ever work with this guy." And again, this is before [I was on] Youtube, so people would imagine that I was this very scary character. [They had] never heard my voice. I guess they found the textbooks I made, the practical resources, they found that scary, I don't know. Most of it is pretty boring. Yeah, my work on Pali grammar, pretty terrifying. You know, I had an offer to get a PhD, I've had offers, plural, to get PhDs in England, in Germany, in the United States, famous universities like Stanford in the United States… one of the things you can get out of Google [is that] I did deliver this one lecture at Oxford university in the U.K. If I had stayed longer at Cambridge I would have delivered a lecture at Cambridge (I had to leave, I went to Cambodia, so I didn't stay long enough for that to happen). I delivered a lecture at S.O.A.S. in London. When I first got involved in Pali, when I first decided that it was really Pali that was the language that I was going to study, not Sanskrit, not something else, not Mongolian, y'know, I made a list of who were the major figures in the field who were still alive that I'd like to meet, that I'd like to contact or communicate with. And much more quickly than I ever thought would have been possible, I met all of those people. Really, when I was still a beginner, I remember when the last person came off my list, and I had to stop and reflect, "Wow, now every single person on my list I've either spoken to in person, or I've had significant e-mail correspondence with them over a long time." There were people who were not on that list who I did meet and who I benefited from meeting. Again, so, the positive part of my experience is (and this is what I'm trying to share with you, whoever is viewing this), if you are willing to do the work to become some kind of legit Pali scholar, where you have something to show your legitimacy, which can be great hand-writing, it can be that you've done surveys of manuscript material, you just got back from looking at stone inscriptions, you've done something that shows your legitimacy, your sincerity, your hard work, your dedication, your ability, your talent, your intelligence, if you can show that, and you're not an eccentric, you're not insane, you're not corrupt, you're not a cult leader, because many people in this field are some of those things, if you've got that, my experience is, many many institutions rolled out the red carpet for me, and treated me extremely well. And I mean everywhere: in Canada, in Taiwan, in Thailand, some of these being elite, closed, Buddhist monastic institutions. I was only in Bangkok for a couple of days and on the basis of my reputation as it was way back then, back when I had just one small [web]site talking about how to teach yourself Pali on the internet, on the basis of that website and maybe one or two causal articles, I got an invitation to go and meet the most senior, scholarly monks at the Marble Temple in Bangkok. That is an elite institution and I'm not going to say it's hard for anyone to go there, I think anyone, if they want to see the architecture, can arrange to have a tour, but to get the invitation I got at that institution is not easy. And it was easy for me, just for those reasons. When I was in Sri Lanka, I thanked the people involved profusely, when I was in Sri Lanka I stayed in the same Buddhist monastery that used to be the home of Bhikkhu Bodhi. When I was in the United States I met Bhikkhu Bodhi, I talked to him for many hours, it was about a week, I forget it was 5 days or what, it was a seven day retreat [or something]. I talked to Bhikkhu Bodhi about his life, about studying Pali, about Buddhism, about all these things. Y'know, Bhikkhu Bodhi is as famous as anyone gets in this field. All these institutions, y'know, in that sense, I had a wonderful experience, and I went into this as someone whose only university degree is in Political Science. I don't have a university degree in Buddhism. And, as mentioned, that's one of the things that makes me very different from other people in the field. I remember I read someone's PhD thesis about Southern Laos. Laos is already a small enough country but it had a long period of time when it was split into three kingdoms. This was a PhD thesis about the Southernmost Kingdom. And this PhD thesis referred to it as "a magical kingdom", as a wonderful place, as this sort of paradise on earth. Y'know… when I look at the history of that same kingdom, I see slavery, I see the opium trade, I see the elephant trade. Yeah, there were rice fields, but really the main cash economy had to do with capturing slaves and capturing elephants. That doesn't mean I'm anti-Lao, on the contrary, I devoted years of my life to studying the history and politics of Laos, ancient as well as modern, as well as colonial era. I was very interested in all of it, but whether I'm looking at Buddhism in its strictest definition or I'm looking at a Buddhist society, I don't have those rose-colored glasses on. I'm looking at what's really there, slavery and all, wars and all, hypocrisies and all. Hell and the devil and all; I've mentioned in some of my other videos, one of the biggest mind-games that gets played by Western Buddhists is pretending that hell isn't in the Pali canon. So I've had, in many ways, an enormously positive reaction; I've had a lot of rewards for the effort I put into studying Pali, teaching myself Pali. Now, to give one example of that, Richard Gombrich, who is still alive (he has retired), Richard Gombrich is absolutely one of the most famous and powerful and influential people in the Western study of Theravada Buddhism. He was not on my list of people I was really trying to meet, honestly. I liked his first book, I had mixed feelings about his later books, I'm a critic of some of his work, I'm appreciative of some of his work. He was giving a lecture in Bangkok and I went to this lecture. And, y'know, I'm trying to only tell you the positive side here, there are a lot of negative things I could say; this lecture in Bangkok, the whole conference demonstrated many of the things that are fundamentally wrong with the study of Theravada Buddhism in the 21st century. But Richard Gombrich was there, and he gave an excellent lecture. When the other speakers were giving their lectures, Gombrich was sitting to one side (he was on stage, but not at the podium). And I remember, I won't name who this is (a senior professor with a PhD who teaches in Europe), was giving a lecture talking about Pali manuscripts, palm-leaf manuscripts. And I did not say anything to challenge her, I did not say anything to disagree with her, but when question period came, I asked a question, and from the framing of the question, the phrasing and presentation of the question, it was obvious that I actually knew this material, and I hate to say it, but, it was pretty obvious that she did not. Although she had read a well-prepared script that was, ultimately, just summarizing other people's research, she responded to my question, having a very shrill voice, freaking out on stage, and saying immediately (she didn't know who I was), "Well, obviously, you know much more about this subject than I do, so perhaps you can answer your own question". This is supposed to be an academic conference. Of course, she's scowling, and very negative, and she never said a word to me again in my life (neither by e-mail nor face-to-face), and I had not said anything to disagree with her or challenge her. But the one person there, of course, who really responded positively, Richard Gombrich brightens up and looks at me, and you could see him ask the person [next to him], "Who is this guy? This guy knows what he's talking about!" So that's the positive aspect of it. A lot of people hate and fear Richard Gombrich (and, again, hatred and fear are two different things). I think they hate him for all the wrong reasons. Maybe they fear him for the right reasons. If you're a fraud, Richard Gombrich can expose you as a fraud. And, in a sense, in a really low-key way, that was what had just happened [with the professor who became angry at me] at that conference. But Richard Gombrich saw me there, he immediately recognized that I was not just a talent, but someone who really had hands-on experience, who had done the hard work, studying the language, studying the materials, being out in the field. He invited me to dinner that night. We spoke continuously that one night, y'know, the conference ended relatively early, academic conferences don't run until late hours of the night, so we talked for hours, right then, the minute the conference ended, and then he went to his hotel room briefly to freshen up, then we went to dinner, we talked for hours that night. Later, I met up with him in England; he invited me to give this lecture and said very flattering things [about it]. Ironically, (now, I'm only supposed to talk about the positive things) ironically there was a period of time when people in Buddhist Studies hated me and said bad things about me because I friends with Richard Gombrich. So because this professor likes me, other people hate me, because they think, "Oh, now he's on Gombrich's side, those two are together". At that very conference, just when I was first chatting with Gombrich, saying, "Oh, yeah, y'know, I live in Laos, this is the kind of research I've been doing, this is the type of work I've done the last couple of years"; just standing there in the hallway, the other professors who were there, the other professors and graduate students, a couple of PhD students, stood in a group apart from me and Gombrich in silence, in invidious silence, y'know, fuming. And [they] didn't say a word to us. And Gombrich, of course, he's a very self-confident guy, I remember, he turned to them, and, with a somewhat beatific and yet challenging smile, sort of smiled at them, like, "Are any of you even going to try to talk to me?" He was right to give them the opportunity to come over and talk to him: he's the leading figure in this field, in the field the conference was about. At that conference he's the most senior, most experienced most knowledgeable person, [and] nobody wants to talk to him except me, because nobody has the guts. And, look, why do I have the guts? Why did I have the guts to talk to these people? Because unlike most people who come out of the British academic system, I was honest with everybody. Sorry, one digression leads to another, but I'm giving you here a lot of the positive, rewarding aspects of what studying Pali is like, what it's all about. Don't lie to anyone about your ability, your accomplishments, your background. If you're an autodidact, if you taught yourself, be honest about that, whatever it is, be "up front", because the British in general are not, and that's what you're distinguishing yourself from. Whether or not you have a PhD, whatever your academic background is. I remember I once spoke to a very passionate Sri Lankan guy (who knew a lot about Buddhism and cared a lot about Buddhism), we had this conversation about the history of Pali as a language, about the state of the literature, and he found me to be extremely well-informed and learned and he was very interested in what I had to say. He said, "Tell me, what textbook are you using to teach yourself Pali?" Now because I was really on the grind all the time, I was working hard, I was studying while I was on the bus, y'know, I was passionate about this language and this area of studies, [so] I had it in a pocket in my jacket. "Here's the textbook", I could show it to him, and this guy, he's Sri Lankan, he's not a Pali scholar, but he's a knowledgeable guy, he rapidly leafs through this, and he says, "This is much too basic, this is much too introductory; based on this conversation, you must be far more advanced than this by now." And my reply, in that moment, with no pause, no hesitation, I looked him in the eye and said, "No, actually, I'm on page 25 of that textbook, but I know the first 24 pages exceedingly well." Don't be a fraud: be real with people. If you're passionate about something and you're a beginner, tell people you're passionate about it and you're a beginner. When you get to be more intermediate, be honest about what your intermediate level skills are and so on. And part of the reward for that is that people will help you in a way that's suitable to your level, and, hey, people are going to hate you anyway. In this day and age, I get hatred on the internet, I think all those other people, I think they get plenty of hatred on the internet, too. So, y'know, it's not that you can't win, it's that you can win, and you're also going to have a lot of unreasonable criticism. So it's part of the game. And, look, there are wonderful things about that side of the game, too. As I just mentioned, I started off with that list of people I wanted to meet. If e-mail didn't exist it would have been very hard for me to meet any of those people or I would have just met them once in person, when they happened to be in Cambodia, when they happened to be in Laos, [or] these other places I was living, and then I would have never crossed paths with them again. E-mail allowed you to maintain those contacts. And sometimes you meet people who introduce you to other people. Okay, look, that's the positive, wonderful side of studying Pali. If you do the hard work, if you're not a fraud, if you're honest with yourself and you're honest with other people, if you're a sincere scholar, even as a totally self-made scholar, and you're smart, you're not crazy, you're not trying to start a cult, all kinds of institutions will open doors for you. And the institutions that don't open doors for you, the people who try to avoid you, try to have sympathy for them, a lot of the time they have something to hide. [This is] not only my experience, I've talked to other people who were reasonably advanced in Pali, where they talked to me about their experience, they went to see a Buddhist monk, [and] as soon as it became clear that this person, the visitor, knew more Pali than the Buddhist monk, suddenly the whole mood changes and doors get closed, and nobody wants to put up with you. Even in an academic setting, several times I went and met with professors and then as soon as it became clear what I had accomplished and what level I was at (which can come out in funny ways when you're talking to a professor), then they didn't want to be in the same room with me any more. I remember one university, all of the professors (they had a big department of Buddhist Studies), all of the professors who were really confident in their area of expertise (the specialists on ancient Chinese literature, Chinese Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, Korean Buddhism, whatever their field was), the ones who were really confident in their languages and so on, met with me, and they had looked at my work and my C.V. and were happy to talk to me, they offered to publish my work, they offered to take me on as a graduate student, y'know, as I say, they kind of rolled out the red carpet, it was wonderful. But the one professor at that same university who never met with me, who never responded to any e-mails from me, was the one professor who was supposed to be specialized in Pali. And I sympathize, to some extent, but probably that guy didn't want to talk to me because he looked at the materials I'd sent and he probably felt afraid that I was a challenge to his authority. That, or he may also have had supernatural beliefs that made him uncomfortable meeting me. That's also part of the game. Part two. I said there were three parts to this discussion. I'm glad I did part one, though, because most of the material you'll read from me on the internet is very negative, is warning you about how hard this road is to walk, how little there is waiting for you when you get to the end of the road, and the problems you're going to encounter on the way. Part two, learning the language. Look, I had no teacher for this language. I met Bhikkhu Bodhi, I spent time with all kinds of Buddhist monks, nobody helped me learn the language. Nobody even gave me advice, except for, I guess, negative advice, telling me, "Oh, this institution is a scam, this one is bad," that kind of steering-down-the-road. The number one mistake I made, my number one regret was that when I started working on the language, I was working on poetry. My line of reasoning for this, it was partly based on what I'd read about Sanskrit, about methods of teaching yourself Sanskrit and the historical tradition of how people transmitted and practiced these languages within India (ancient India, of course). I thought the best way for me to be able to study Pali 24/7 would be to memorize short passages of poetry, to pick up that vocabulary and then to be able to go over those poems with a fine-toothed comb and take apart the grammar and so on. So that's not a totally stupid idea, it's not a terrible idea, but I regret it. I wasted… in my first year I wasted so much time and effort because I was working on the poetry. What you really want to work on within Pali when you're getting started ideally is a chrestomathy, a selection of passages, of very plainly-written narrative. I mean, I can remember, so I'd been working on poetry for some time, and then I opened the Pali canon, I was reading a particular passage [that] interested me for whatever philosophical reason, and [there] was just this incredibly simple sentence, where it said something like, "And then the Buddha came down the mountain and walked along the road that led to the river, and there was a small army-town there." Reading that, it's kind of ridiculous to say, but I felt like I was reading English, in contrast to the way the language is used in the poetry, the expression was so simple and so clear and so lucid, and, y'know, this was such a contrast. When you are first learning the language that is the type of material (from within the Pali canon) that you want to be reading. Naturally, if you're interested in the philosophy, you may want to immediately start with reading dense philosophical passages, [but] you can't do that with any language. You can't do that with French or Dutch or German. If you're learning Italian you can't start with dense philosophical passages or dogmatic religious statements. What you really need to work on is that boring, practical, narrative use of the language, which is almost all going to be 3rd person, past tense, "He walked down the road". I've done a lot of work… the reason why most people… well, okay, a large percentage of people who know me on the internet know me because I made textbooks available as PDFs, I worked very hard to make educational materials available so that other people could study Pali. You can get that, if you don't already know, if you google my name, you can get it various ways. Within Google Books I digitized some of them so that within the Google Books framework it'll be permanently available, you can download the PDFs, and [also] through different websites that I don't update any more, you can also download those. Some people have used them for years. The textbooks I made, I'm aware, because I speak to Buddhist monks and I get e-mails from Buddhist monks, and I've seen it mentioned in print in various places, the resources I made to help people learn Pali have been used by Buddhist monks in Nepal, in Hong Kong, in Myanmar, in Taiwan, around the world. And, of course, I assume they're predominantly used by people who speak English, because they're in English. I've had some indication that somebody in Russia is using my work, which is great, they never talk to me, whoever the Russians are. Obviously, some of those languages, there's not that much available for people who are serious about learning Pali. The lowest level of pedestrian communication in the language, in some ways the most boring use of the language, is what you really need to work on when you're first starting. And you're not going to find that prepared for you, you're going to have to have a copy of the Pali canon and, in effect, prepare your own selections, find passages that you can read and study that use the language in that direct, narrative way, not philosophy, not poetry, other types of stuff. One of the other things I'm known for is the emphasis that all of my materials give to orthography, to the writing systems. You need to be able to read Pali comparatively in more than one edition. So, right off the bat, develop the ability to read Pali in Burmese script, in Cambodian script, in Sinhalese script (the script of Sri Lanka), develop the ability to have open in front of you more than one paper book with more than one version of the Pali canon, of whatever Pali text you happen to be reading, so that you can do comparative reading between them. What does that win you? What do you get for that? … I remember talking about this with Richard Gombrich, I remember talking about this with a list of professors. I mean, some of the professors, I remember talking to one professor who I won't name, and, y'know, the questions he was asking me, even though he himself had a PhD and was (in theory) teaching Pali at a graduate level, a lot of the questions he asked me I would have taught in a 101 course, in a Pali 101 course, they were really basic subjects, basic questions of where the books come from, which books to use, basic questions you need to know to do any research or just to study the language itself. And I appreciated his honesty that he would ask me those questions, and I was happy to answer them for him. This is one of the other problems with learning Pali, most of university programs will just waste a lot of your time. They may give you an irrelevant education in Hinduism, in Sanskrit, if you're in a program of Religious Studies you may spend a lot of your time debating Max Weber and the history of Protestantism, and theoretical ideas about the study of religion in academia. It's not a complete waste of time, but it is an obstruction to you actually doing the work of becoming a Pali scholar. And this is one of the reasons why many people who have PhDs related to Pali don't have any of the practical knowledge or skills or experience that I managed to get in just my first few years. They haven't been out living in "the jungle" (the jungle in quotation marks)… I spent some time literally in the jungle, when I was in North-Western Laos… but, they haven't been out in Southeast Asia or Sri Lanka doing hands-on work. Nor, in their own apartments, are they sitting alone with the books open hitting the language heavily. They're generally spending their time coping with harassment within a Western academic program. Spending a lot of their time and energy managing the mood-swings of their supervisor, [of] the other grad students, and attending lectures that, again, lectures that may be related to Asian Studies, or Religious Studies, or may address theoretical questions that are currently fashionable, may have a lot of talk about Foucault or whatever the current, trendy philosopher-theoretician is, but they're not doing the work. And they're also not really going to be receiving instruction in the language, in the real praxis of reading and writing and studying the language. So whether you're in an academic situation or not, whether you're in a Buddhist monastery or not (because some people watching this may be Buddhist monks in monasteries, thinking, "Yeah, I want to do better than this Canadian guy"), 99% of the work is going to be you, alone, as an autodidact. I met, face-to-face, some of the last Buddhist monks to really be products of the old education system in Pali. That's partly because I did all of this research on [Pali grammatical textbooks], on the history of pedagogy for the language. This raises a number of interesting subjects that may be useful for people to hear about. I met one Buddhist monk, he was an older guy, I guess he was 55 or 60 when I met him; when he was about 8 years old, he studied with the last traditional master of the Pali language in Sri Lanka, who was then a monk of more than 90 years old. So that guy I met, he was one of the last links to the old ways from the old days for how Buddhist monks used to learn Pali. It's gone. When you meet Buddhist monks, or Asian people, Asian laypeople who grew up in a Buddhist society, if they have mastered the Pali language, and they're under 90 years of age, I guarantee you they learned Pali pretty much the same way I did. And the textbooks they use, even if they're not directly using western textbooks, you'll be surprised to find if you look into the educational materials, which I did extensively, for more than 10 years (I was looking at "What are the textbooks used to teach Buddhist monks in Thailand, in Sri Lanka, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Western academia, everywhere?", I was looking at textbooks, pedagogy, I was not interested in theoretical grammar, I was interested in actual grammar, how it's learned and taught and used in language-acquisiton, how the language is tested, how exams are conducted, all of those questions), everyone you meet today who either really is a Pali scholar or who claims to be will have learned in the Western-influenced style. Now, if you look at my published work, so far I have only said bad things about this, I think, because I was mostly talking about colonialism. And, y'know, European colonialism in Southeast Asia was ugly and brutal and killed people, and burned down Buddhist temples, looted Buddhist temples of their works-of-art, and piled up Buddhist manuscripts and lit them on fire. That brutality is real. What I've never talked about (just because my career as a Pali scholar didn't last long enough) [is that] there are also positive elements to that very sad history. I found a lot of obscure publications produced in Myanmar during the first explosion of scholarly excitement when Western technologies and Buddhist traditions came into contact with one-another. When, under the British Empire, in Myanmar, in Burma, you had for the first time Pali schools being set up (there was just one in Rangoon) where they used a European-style system of examinations, of textbooks, of tests and of language-exercises, directly imitating the way Ancient Greek was taught in Europe (to some extent how Latin was taught in Europe). And of course Europeans also brought the technology of modern book-making, book-binding, so (instead of palm-leaf manuscripts) having ink on paper for the first time. Although my printed work, so far, focuses almost totally on the devastating, sad, terrible, evil aspects of European colonialism, the positive side was that a lot of local people said, "Wow, this is my opportunity to publish that book I was always wanting to publish". You know, maybe their first contact with the technology of book-publishing. And those impulses did not just come from the center. For example, in Myanmar, if you look up the name James Grey, James Grey was producing some of the first Pali textbooks that were European-style textbooks, you know, fill-in-the-blank exercises, these kinds of things, modeled on ancient Greek and Latin, and Pali exams, coming in and writing an exam, the way we in the modern West would think of it, so people would prove they had learned the language. The arrival of these methods… people didn't respond to this as oppression, because at that time the traditional system was still vibrant, many people said, "Wow, this is great, this is an opportunity, this is a new way to learn, or a new way to prove what you've learned". You know, traditional methods rely much more on authoritarian relationships between a senior monk and a younger monk, memorization… I won't get into it, if I digress into that, this video will be even longer. But the arrival of those European scholars, those European technologies-of-scholarship, technologies-of-education, methods of pedagogy, the positive aspect of that was (in the short term) that it touched off a revival of scholarly interest in Pali, within countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Now the bad news is, this was part of a colonial regime that devastated Buddhism and devastated local political autonomy, devastated the local society, that led to the collapse of many things in the culture, [there are] many bad things to be said about it. Cambodia is sort of an interesting exception to the rule that confirms the rule. The history of the Institut Bouddhique, the French Buddhist Institute in Cambodia, has actually been written about relatively extensively (in French, but also in English). I think they did that mostly out of envy, looking at what the Royal Asiatic Society was doing in Sri Lanka and elsewhere and they said, "Well, we have to put a respectable face on the fact that French dominion now controls places like Cambodia and Laos." And, y'know, I got to see the last gasp of that tradition when I was living in Cambodia and Laos. Among the people who opened the doors for me and treated me so well [were] the people who controlled the École française d'Extrême-Orient, that's the (literally) the French school of studies in the Far East, in the Extreme Orient. In Vientiane, in Laos, they were wonderful to me, they opened the door for me, they gave me access to all kinds of scholarly resources, in their archives and so on. And, by contrast, the people in the same institution in Cambodia treated me like garbage, but hey, y'know, it is what it is. Some of those guys talked to me by e-mail, the guys in Phnom Penh, but, y'know, in general, they were not interested in talking to me in Phnom Penh, and that, of course, reflected the fact that the particular people, were they open to Pali scholarship, as opposed to Sanskrit, as opposed to being interested in archaeology, art history and other subjects. But I got to see the end of that tradition when I was in the former French colonies of Southeast Asia. The work of learning Pali is in some ways the same as any other language and in some ways it is uniquely difficult, and uniquely awful. You have to have incredible motivation, incredible stamina, and incredible focus. During the more-than-ten-years I was involved in Pali you have no idea how many people got in touch with me by e-mail saying, "Yeah, I'm into this, I'm 100% committed to this, I'm going to learn this language, I'm going to become a scholar in this field", and then at some point, two years later, five years later or what-have-you, they're gone, they drop out. And of course I can sympathize with why. [It is an] enormous sacrifice of your time, and as I've said to many people, if you compare it to learning how to play the guitar, learning how to play the guitar is a lot easier, the rewards, socially, even economically, are much greater, and, y'know, people aren't going to hate you for it. People will love you for being a legit Pali scholar but people will also hate you, because you're a threat to religious authority, you're a threat to certain political assumptions. Sometimes you're a threat to national pride. There was a guy in Thailand (and I don't want to shout out his name), I remember… he was based in Bangkok, and he had connections to the universities there, but only informal connections, he wasn't a professor, he was just present as a self-made scholar in Bangkok. And when I was out in the remote North-West of Thailand, where I was speaking Lao not Thai, I remember I spoke to a woman who didn't seem to have any formal education, but she cared about Buddhism, and she said to me passionately, she said, "You know, there's this one foreigner in Bangkok, and he's a real scholar of Buddhism," (which is true, that's a reasonable compliment to give the guy), "He's a real scholar of Buddhism, and whenever he goes to academic conferences in Bangkok, all the Thai scholars have to hang their heads in shame and be silent, because that guy, that foreigner (he's a white man, he's a westerner), he really knows his stuff, and the professors in the Thai universities, they're all corrupt, and they don't know what they're doing." That might be a slight exaggeration, but there was a lot of truth to it; and what shocked me was that I was standing on the banks of the Mekong river, I was in the middle of nowhere, and I was talking to somebody who was not a career academic, somebody who I believe had no university diploma at all, and she knew this. She was in-the-loop for this "gossip", or whatever you want to say. So that reflects [the fact that] just existing as someone who can offer a dissenting opinion about history, about the language, about the religion, that's a threat that is really felt at the core of these very conservative, very hierarchical institutions, in Thailand as [the] example. And many people will say to you, well, Thailand [is] a relatively easy-going, open-minded culture, compared to Taiwan, compared to Japan. You want to talk about orthodoxy, I can tell stories about Japan, y'know, having academic conferences where nobody's allowed to ask any questions, getting peer review back that says, "You dared to criticize this other publication therefore we're not going to publish this". You're dealing with the most conservative and most hierarchical aspect of these different cultures, and Sri Lanka… tempers get really hot in Sri Lanka. In some ways it's better than the kind of silence imposed on Buddhist Studies in the rest of Asia, but in Sri Lanka people will scream at you, and I think people get into fist-fights with you often enough, too. I say this, and look, you know, my research is not controversial. It shouldn't be by any reasonable standards. If I had been working on Ancient Greek or Latin, nothing I have to say would be considered controversial. During the years that I was a Pali scholar I openly identified as Buddhist. I was fundamentally pro-Buddhist, and that doesn't mean that I was uncritical of Buddhism. I'm not pro-slavery, I'm not in favor of men and women having unequal rights (I support men and women having equal right), I support democracy, I don't support ancient kingdoms. None of that, I felt, disqualified me as a Buddhist, as someone who could make a positive contribution to the scholarship and the religion. I considered myself an advocate for the religion. I considered myself somebody who not only was willing to discuss Buddhist Philosophy and history as interesting, but really, during those years when I was a Pali scholar, I felt that I was somebody who could positively preach some of that stuff. You know, propound it in a non-objective way. All is impermanent. Life is suffering. There is no soul. To me, those things are still worth talking about, they're still worth preaching and so on. And in terms of the cultural aspect of it, all these countries have cultural problems and political problems, believe me, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, they got problems. I'm not interested in rose-colored glasses, I'm not interested in glorifying them uncritically. But, compare them to Indonesia. Compare them to Bangladesh. Compare them to Communist China. I also have a lot to say in favor of Theravada Buddhist countries, politically, socially, culturally and so on. In many ways I was well-suited to be a kind of positive, uplifting advocate for this stuff. I wasn't in a position of hostility to this field of studies. This brings us to point 3, why did I quit? If I put in all this time, if I gained reading comprehension in the language, if I put in all the hours to, as I mentioned, [develop] very good hand-writing, the ability to not only read but write in the Burmese tradition of Pali, the Thai, the Cambodian, blah blah blah. [If] I put in all this time and effort, why would I quit? Well, you know, I remember I got on the phone with somebody, he was a PhD candidate at the time, I don't know if he's now finished his PhD, and he talked to me about altruism. He said to me, "Well, your work must be motivated by altruism." And I said, "No", and that shocked him. I said, look, when I was working with a charity on the border between Laos and Myanmar, and that charity's raison d'etre was to hand out sacks of rice to starving people, that's altruism. Let's not mess around. Altruism exists in this world. On the border between Thailand and Laos there is an orphanage to help babies born with H.I.V./A.I.D.S. who have been abandoned by their own parents. It's run by Christians, not by Buddhists. It's controlled by Christian missionaries. That's altruism. I used to talk to Buddhists about it, and say, "How can you leave this for Christian missionaries to do? C'mon, these are your orphans, these are your… you've got to organize a Buddhist alternative." No no, [they would reply,] "Leave it for the Christians", "bad karma", "if those babies were born with a disability, we don't wanna know because that's bad karma". This is the stuff you deal with, if you really are out there in the field, this is what you deal with in Buddhism today. That's altruism, those two charities I mentioned as examples are altruism. What am I looking for? For me as a scholar? For me as an independent intellectual? As someone who is definitely not making money out of Pali, out of Theravada Buddhism, out of this language, out of these histories, cultures, peoples, it's still not altruism. If you put in this time and this work, what you want back is an intellectual reward, not a financial reward, but that intellectual reward is still tremendously important. And your motives, if you're honest with yourself, are not altruistic. If you take the time to write an academic book-review (you don't need a PhD to do that, if you're still a student, you can start writing book-reviews now), what's motivating you? It shouldn't be an animus toward the author of the original book, it shouldn't be to try to score points by showing that you're smarter than the book you're reviewing, it shouldn't be anything like that. If you're going to review a book that's out there, it is because you want to be part of an intellectual tradition, a discourse, a dialogue. You want to be involved in discussing those issues, and who do you want to discuss them with? You want to discuss them with other people whose opinions you respect. If you put in the hard work to really learn Pali, to become a Pali scholar, etc., and let's say you go to that same conference I described earlier where I met Richard Gombrich for the first time: why are you going there? It's not altruism. You're not going there to make money, either. You're not going there on an ego trip, but you're going because you hope to be part of an intellectual tradition of some kind. [It could be] a brand new intellectual tradition. It doesn't have to be an intellectual tradition that stretches back to more-than-2,500-years-ago in ancient India. It can be a brand new intellectual tradition, but you want to be discussing these issues with other people who care about them, with other people who know about them, with other people whose opinion you respect. So that's not altruism. And, what I've just said, I think if people are really honest with themselves, in many different areas of intellectual endeavor, they would agree, they would say the same thing. If you ask someone who is a Marxist, "What motivates you to do all this hard work about Marxism?", I'm sure many of them would say it is because they want to be part of this intellectual tradition, they want to engage with other people they respect, and so on. After so many years of being involved with Pali, with Theravada Buddhism, after doing everything I wanted to do, and many things I never dreamed I would do… Look, I never dreamed I would have the experience of waking up on the Mekong River. I never dreamed that the Mekong River would go from being this tremendously distant, exotic place to being a mode of transport for me, taking these small wooden boats up and down the Mekong river. I never thought I'd meet Bhikkhu Bodhi in his current location in the United States. I never thought I would sleep under the same roof where Bhikkhu Bodhi used to live, where he became famous, the forest hermitage in Sri Lanka. I never thought I'd see any of that stuff, I never thought I'd do that stuff, I never thought I'd meet those people. I never thought I'd be able to see the kind of ancient artifacts I saw… wonderful. I'd done it all, but what was missing was exactly this question of an intellectual tradition, of having colleagues you respect. And, again, you know, I've mentioned that within Western academia there were all kinds of people who appreciated my work, and who were positive and encouraged me… because I mentioned Stanford by name, I'll use that as the example. You know, Stanford, they said, "Yeah, okay, you can come here and get a PhD", and there are details, obviously, about how the application goes, blah blah blah, but the reality was that if I had gone to Stanford all of my colleagues would have been Tibetan specialists. Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan language, Tibetan history. That's not my tradition. I don't want to be a part of that. I don't want to talk about that. I don't hate Tibet, but look at a map, Tibet and Thailand are remarkably far apart. And, you know, there may be some wonderful scholars of Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan History, Tibetan Politics, at Stanford or at other universities. I don't want anything to do with that. You know, I've got to be honest with myself about that. After a number of years not just being in the game but seeing so much directly, hands-on, visiting so many universities in person (not just reading about them on the internet), and, you know, in terms of reading, I wasn't just reading ancient [texts], I was reading all the new academic literature that comes out, there aren't that many decent journals, there's not that much to read, sadly. But, you know, I started at the University of Toronto that still had an excellent library built up by A.K. Warder (and I met A.K. Warder!), you know, these guys left behind their books. After getting this incredibly thorough survey, I had to admit to myself, there is no tradition today for me to be a part of, and I can't create a tradition out of nothing. And I can't do this totally alone. I'm a Canadian citizen. Come back to Canada. Is there any way I can study Pali in Canada? Is there any way I can study modern Burmese in Canada? Is there any way I would be able to work on… Long story short: no. I could have ended on a positive note, instead the positivity is at the beginning of this video. So, if you want to cheer yourself up, hit play again, go back to the start, and hear how wonderful my life was as a Pali scholar. Because there were a lot of wonderful things about it. With nothing but a backpack, a bicycle, and a lot of hard work, I went everywhere, I did everything, I lived my dream. When that dream was over, I had to look at the reality of the tradition as it exists today and say, "I can't be a part of it". Is that a happy ending or a sad ending? Can't it be both?