Esoteric Buddhism in China

When I was having lunch with Dr. Payne yesterday, he mentioned and recommended the work of Dr. Charles Orzech. Dr. Orzech is one of the few people studying esoteric Buddhism in China after the Tang dynasty.

Generally, in Japanese Buddhist thought, the high point of tantric Buddhism in China was during the Tang dynasty, when it was imported to Japan by Saicho (Dengyo Daishi) and Kukai (Kobo Daishi) of the Tendai and Shingon school, respectively. (Actually, they each founded those schools in Japan but let’s not get into that here.) It is commonly thought that after the establishment of these schools in Japan and the ending of the Tang dynasty in China, that esoteric Buddhism died out. According to Orzech’s work, this is not the case (which was largely news to me).

While looking for more information on Dr. Orzech, I found that he had actually lectured at IBS in April this year. The synopsis of his lecture is on the IBS site. I’ll quote it below:

Esoteric Buddhism during the Song Dynasty (960-1279)
The Tang Dynasty (618-906) is commonly depicted as the pinnacle of Buddhism in China. Likewise, the Tang is portrayed as the moment when Esoteric Buddhism briefly flourished in the court and was imbibed by the Japanese pilgrims Kukai and Saicho. Indeed, most treatments of Esoteric Buddhism in East Asia follow Kukai and continue their narrative in Japan with little or no reference to further developments on the Asian mainland. This is unfortunate, as Esoteric traditions in China continued to develop on a trajectory uninfluenced by Japanese developments. In this talk Prof. Orzech examines three important developments of Song Esoteric Buddhism. First he examines the renewed translation efforts by the first two Northern Song Emperors and their establishment of the Institute for the Translation of Scriptures (Yijing yuan). This effort, along with the production of the first printed canon, was part of a broader strategy to make the Song the center of Buddhist learning in Asia. Second, he explores evidence for the circulation and use of Esoteric scriptures and rituals recorded in the journal of the Japanese pilgrim Jojin on his visit to Wutaishan. Finally he looks at the integration of Esoteric themes, deities, and rituals in the Dazu region during the Southern Song.

As it turns out, his lecture was also recorded and is available on the IBS site. It is 91 MB in size so it is a tad large… If you are interested in this topic matter, it is definitely worth a listen though.

ECMAScript and Internet Explorer

Chris Wilson, the Platform Architect for IE (and generally a reasonable fellow) has put up a short post on the IEBlog on ECMAScript 4. I’ll quote it in its entirely since it is nearly gnomic in its brevity:

ECMAScript 3 and Beyond

There have been a number of blog posts recently about JavaScript developments, e.g. Gabriele Renzi’s “ECMAScript 4, the fourth system syndrome“. For ECMAScript, we here on the IE team certainly believe that thoughtful evolution is the right way to go; as I’ve frequently spoken about publicly, compatibility with the current web ecosystem - not “breaking the Web” - is something we take very seriously. In our opinion, a revolution in ECMAScript would be best done with an entirely new language, so we could continue supporting existing users as well as freeing the new language from constraints (including the constraint of performantly supporting scripts written in the old language). My colleague Pratap (our representative on the ECMAScript Technical Committee) with the JScript team, just posted on their blog about some work they’ve done on this topic. We’re also very interested in feedback from JavaScript web and framework developers on their thoughts about their needs and the future of the language.

Gorilla!I gather from Chris’ post that, while they aren’t going to out and out say so, it is very unlikely that IE will support ECMAScript 4 in IE8 (or perhaps even beyond that). I find that to be too bad. I’m pretty opinion neutral on ECMAScript 4 as a standard as I don’t know a lot of the ins and outs and am not that terribly great of a Javascript Commando. I am pretty positive on the idea of the web continuing to evolve and doing so in a way that embraces new standards. The alternative is that the web continues to evolve but does so in a partisan way not based on standards. I don’t think the net will discontinue its state of constant change, as inconvenient as that may be for the IE team and its plans for global domination through “not breaking the Web” and freezing us at 2001 (joke!).

If the Internet is going to change and develop anyway, they might as well get on the train with everyone else and support standards that people get together and agree on. Otherwise, IE runs the risk of their browser share simply eroding away as the rest of the world moves forward. Of course, many of us are pretty convinced that this is going to happen anyway and it isn’t a bad thing. The problem here is that as long as IE comes with an operating system that has the majority of the market, it is still going to be the 500 lb. gorilla sitting sullenly in the corner.

Update for 10/31:  Chris Wilson has posted a much longer personal response today to the accusations by various parties that IE is trying to stop the web from moving forward. It is worth a read.

Lunch with the Dean

On a different note that many recent postings, I had lunch with Dr. Richard Payne today (well, technically yesterday now). Dr. Payne is the Dean of the Institute  of Buddhist Studies (IBS) and also the author of “The Tantric ritual of Japan: feeding the gods, the Shingon fire ritual.” He is one of the few scholars of Buddhism in America to focus on Mikkyo, Japanese Esoteric Buddhism. He is the only one on the West Coast, as far as I know. As the title of his book mentions, it focuses on the Goma fire ritual, a core part of Mikkyo practice.

Goma
A priest performing the Goma rite

IBS is a member school within the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), which is an institution that supports academic work in the area of Religion and also functions as a joining of a number of seminaries. A friend of mine, Lee Gilmore, did her dissertation there on Burning Man, and both GTU headquarters and the IBS buildings are only a couple of miles from my home. IBS also functions as the seminary for the Buddhist Churches of America, a mostly ethnic Japanese Buddhist church that is well established in North America.

Now that my Master’s Thesis is finished (knocking wood) and through both committee and approval, I’ve been considering whether I want to do doctoral work. Part of the cons of this is that getting a doctor can easily take seven or more years and I’m 36 years old now and would be 37 or 38 by the time I got into a program.

My MA thesis focuses on the beliefs concerning the soul within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late 19th and early 20th century  esoteric and secret society based out of the United Kingdom. For doctoral work, if I do it, I want to move away from Western Esotericism as a subject area. As much as I find it very interesting, it is not a good choice in the long term. This is because it is not within my immediate personal interests and also because no one ever gets paid to do academic work in it as a core part of their job (with only a few exceptions). There are no departments of Western Esoteric studies in North America and, effectively, only two in the world. I am also a Buddhist practitioner with a background in Tibetan Vajrayana and, more recently, with Mikkyo through a Tendai-derived lineage of practice. I am a novice priest (not fully ordained nor having taken all of the vows and responsibilities) within our lineage and I fully expect, given enough time and a lack of enough rope, to be fully ordained as a priest.

(As a side note, most Zen “monks” in the West are not technically monks but have a different status better translated as “priest” in the opinion of many. Being a Buddhist monk means following a very specific set of vows (the vinaya) which are not generally observed in Japanese Buddhist traditions.)

I would like to join my non-technical interests, academic and Buddhist, as much as possible if I do decide to move forward to getting a doctorate. Both of these require that I learn at least a passable knowledge of Japanese (for both ease of communication as well as access to primary material, both textual and the kind that breathe). I may also wind up going on a sabbatical of some sort eventually in order to train more intensely in practice. Beyond that, I would also have to take the step of no longer working full time (and half-time work is not really an option in most technical jobs in the industry…).

In any case, all of this makes IBS, as both an academic and Buddhist institution, a good place to do doctoral work. GTU has a good PhD program and I know or have met a number of people who have passed through it.  I contacted Dr. Payne quite a while back about meeting to discuss both IBS/GTU and his own work in Shingon. Eventually, our schedules worked out and we managed to have the lunch today.

Dr. Payne was very encouraging and friendly in our discussion today. He asked what I felt to be insightful questions about my goals, interests, background, etc. and then gave suggestions on areas of research that would seem to work with those and which would be within GTU’s strengths as an institution. Given that we met for about an hour and a half, it was a good chat and I found it very helpful in my thinking.

I’m not sure if I am going to apply to GTU for next Fall at this point (there is a heavy financial commitment for tuition and I am enjoying my job at the moment). I do plan on seeing if I can get into the first year Japanese classes at UC, Berkeley for Spring term. The last time that I looked, they had a section with morning classes early enough in the day that I could attend without having a conflict with my work. It was made clear in discussions that I could probably get into them as an extended education student. This would lay the groundwork for either later academic training or, at the very least, better access to the Buddhist tradition that I am working within over time.

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