Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism

Hi listeners, this is Tyler Cowen. Please mark your calendars for Friday, January 9th. We're hosting a CWT listener meetup in Austin, Texas at Parkside on East 6th Street. This is your chance to connect with fellow fans and meet me and also the entire CWT team in person and to enjoy some great conversation over light refreshments. We'll have a Q&A session, plus plenty of time to mix and mingle. Space is limited and filling up fast, so click the link in the show notes to register now. It's first come, first serve, and plus ones are absolutely welcome. Just make sure they register at the link as well. Hope to see you there. Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am very excited to be chatting with Donald S. Lopez Jr., I think of Donald as the West's leading expert on Buddhism. He's a professor at the University of Michigan, the author of many, many books on Buddhism, which I think I've read all of. He's one of the editors of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Buddhism, and he has a new book out this year called The Buddha: Biography of a Myth. Donald, welcome.

Thanks for inviting me. Very happy to be here.

What sets the limits of what the Buddha does know and does not know in Buddhist theology?

There is no limit. The Buddha is omniscient. The Buddha knows all of the past, all of the present, and all of the future. He can read the minds of every being in the universe. And so his omniscience includes everything. He knows all of our past karma, all of that.

And he knows all of the future Buddhas.

He knows that the future Buddhas are coming and he knows them by name. Although the next one, whose name is Maitreya, will not appear in our world according to Buddhist time for about 6 billion years. So It's going to be a while.

And what's the source for the 6 billion years measure?

The Buddhists have a very complicated system of time in which they measure things in kalpas and aeons. And we've been able to sort of figure out how those numbers compute into what we would recognize. So it's multiplications by time. Buddhists have very long lifetimes in heaven, very long lifetimes in hell. Our lifespan, according to the Buddhist theory, is actually diminishing from 100 years. It'll eventually get down to 10. Go back up to 80,000, and when it gets to 80,000 again, the next Buddha will appear.

But that number is from the Pali Canon?

Those numbers are from the Pali Canon, also from the Sanskrit. There's not much difference between the two canons on those questions.

And they're not contested?

Well, I mean, obviously, we don't know the future, and both those distant futures and distant pasts are things that are unknown to us. So they're not contested within the tradition itself. That's correct.

Yeah. So within Islam, within Christianity, there are things which are contested, of course. What's the best way of thinking about what it is in Buddhism that is contested?

Well, for scholars, it's when the Buddha lived. We don't know with any precision the year of his death. So in Buddhism, time is measured from the time of his death instead of from the time of his birth. And so sometimes we see Buddhist writings in which they have after the number A.N., after nirvana. So according to the Theravada tradition, the Buddha passed into nirvana in 544 BCE. But I think when I have to write the death date of the Buddha, most scholars in the field will put something like 400 BCE plus or minus 50. And so that's an incredibly large range of time. And the Buddhist traditions themselves, in Chinese Buddhism, we have a completely different number. So there's really no consensus at all on the death of the Buddha's life. There's one text that says he lived till he was 80. That's all we got.

Did the Buddha have 32 marks on him?

He had 32 marks. That's right.

So, uh, and that's not contested.

Well, among those marks is a tongue that could lick behind his ears and cover his face entirely. It included a retractable penis. It included more teeth than we have. So these are things, some of them are kind of just beautiful things like legs like an antelope, a chest like a lion. But his arms, it's said when the Buddha is standing, his hands extend below his knees so he can rub his knees without bending over. So that gives him a bit of a simian look, very long arms.

And webbed hands or fingers?

Webbed, exactly, webbed fingers and toes. And we have no reference at all to the Buddha ever swimming, so we don't know why that is. And so art historians have speculated, sometimes, you know, when you see Greek and Roman statues from that period, it's very hard to carve fingers in marble. The fingers will almost always break off in the process. So sometimes you see that the stone has been left between the fingers to preserve the actual fingers. And I think some people saw this and thought, oh, he had webbed fingers and webbed hands.

Do we think the Buddha died of dysentery?

Well, there is a case of something called red flows that he suffered after his last meal. He was served by a low-caste blacksmith, a dish that according to some was vegetarian, according to others was pork. He had something, some pain there, and almost to the point of death, it says. But then he went on and walked several some distance to the place where he laid down on his right side and gave teachings for almost an entire night. And there's no mention of any pain or any suffering then, but that so-called, what we call the dysentery attack, does appear in the one account of his passing. Right.

So theologically, as you know, there are some very particular ways that Christians make sense of the death of Christ. How is it that Buddhists make sense of the death of Buddha? So you've told us he knew everything. So presumably he knew he would get dysentery from the food, he would die. Is there an account of the broader meaning of that, or it's just stuff that happened?

Well, so what they say is that the most important meals that a Buddha has is the meal before his enlightenment and the meal before his passage into nirvana. These are special meals, and the person who gives those meals is blessed by the tradition for these two important meals. And the gods infuse special powers into those two meals. And so the dysentery attack is explained by the tradition as just this very powerful meal. And he actually told his host, "Give this to me and bury the rest. The other monks can't eat this." So the dysentery attack is the proximate cause of his death. However, before he died, he was meditating in the woods with his cousin and attendant Ananda. And he said, Ananda, if asked to do so, a Buddha can live for an aeon or till the end of an aeon. And Ananda said something like, oh, that's interesting. Later he said the same thing and Ananda said, that's nice. And finally he said one more time, a Buddha can live till the end of an aeon if asked to do so. And Ananda says, Whatever. So at that point there was an earthquake and Ananda rose from meditation. What does the earthquake mean? And the Buddha said, this means that I have relinquished my life force. I will die in 3 months' time. And Ananda said, please don't do that. Please live for an aeon. And the Buddha said, too late. You had 3 chances and that's passed. So he predicted his death at that point with, and then the dysentery attack and that final meal comes sometime after that scene.

This is something I find puzzling in Buddhist theology. Maybe you can clear it up for me. So the Buddha says he can live for an eon if asked to. But who's the asker? Now, the asker could be God, but there's something also atheistic, you might say, about some parts of Buddhist theology. So where is the role for the sacred? How does it relate to apparently supernatural things that can happen? Like, where do the special powers come from?

Well, first of all, there is no God in Buddhism, of course. So there's no creator deity. There's no one to ask him to stay. The special powers come from the fact that the Buddha is someone, a Buddha, and the Buddha is someone who perfected himself over billions of years, many, many, many lifetimes. And he practiced various virtues. They're enumerated as 6 or 10. The 6 are giving, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom. And by accumulating those powers over all those lifetimes, he was able to do something that others cannot do. He achieved Buddhahood at a time when there was no Buddha and no Buddhism in the world. He discovered the path on his own. So this is what distinguishes the Buddha from the rest of us. The Buddha finds enlightenment through his own efforts over many lifetimes, and then teaches us how to do it. And we have many cases of people achieving nirvana just by hearing a single lecture by the Buddha during his own time. So it really is the perfection over many lifetimes, having promised to become a Buddha eons ago, and then finally perfecting himself, whatever that was. Yeah.

Who or what is it that drives, say, the cycles of reincarnation? Is it just a natural process like a chicken hatching from an egg, or there's something extra in the universe that we might think of as supernatural?

Well, it's the law of karma. Whether you want to call that supernatural or not is a question, but karma in Sanskrit just means action. And it means that the universe is, in a sense, naturally ethical, that virtuous deeds as defined lead to happiness in the future, either tomorrow or 100 lifetimes from now. And negative deeds, non-virtuous deeds lead to suffering. So this is the way that the Buddhists without a God can explain the suffering of the virtuous and the fact that the evil flourish sometimes. It's all karma. And as a result of that karma, we are reborn. There's no beginning to the cycle of rebirth. We've all been reborn a bazillion times and we will be reborn forever until we find the path out, which is what the Buddha teaches. And the Buddhists have very specific places where we can be reborn. We can be a god, which is kind of a Mount Olympus kind of god, not a creator deity. We can be a kind of a demigod. These have certain powers. We can be a human. We could be an animal. We can be a ghost. And we can be in hell. And the Buddhists have a very elaborate system of hells. 8 hot hells, 8 cold hells, various trifling hells. And the hells are quite horrific and described in great detail.

And fire is a central theme in Buddhism, right?

Well, there are hot hells. There are also cold hells. Fire comes up really in the idea of nirvana. Where we see the fire, I think most importantly philosophically, is the idea of where did the Buddha go when he died? He was not reborn again. And they say it's really just like a flame going out. That is, the flame ends. Where did the fire go? Nowhere. That is, the wood that was producing the flame is all burned up and you just end. So Nirvana is not a place, it's a state of extinction or what the Buddhists call cessation.

And what role does blood sacrifice play in Buddhism?

Well, it's not supposed to perform any role. There's no blood sacrifice in Buddhism.

No blood sacrifice. How about wrathful deities?

Wrathful deities, there's a lot, yeah.

But then we're back to supernatural. And again, this gets to my central confusion. It's atheistic, but there's some other set of principles in the universe that generate wrathful deities, right?

Wrathful deities are beings who were humans in one lifetime, animals in another, and born as wrathful deities in another lifetime. So everyone is in the cycle of rebirth. We've all been wrathful deities in the will be wrathful deities in the future unless we get out soon. It's this universe of strange beings all taking turns, shape-shifting from one lifetime to a next, and it goes on forever until we find the way out.

And are they like ghosts at all, the wrathful deities?

There's a whole separate category of ghosts. So the ghosts are often called, if we look at the Chinese translation, it's hungry ghosts. So the ghosts are beings who suffer from hunger and thirst. They are depicted as having distended bellies. They have these horrible sufferings. When they drink water, it turns into into molten lead. They'll eat solid food, it turns into an arrow or a spear. Constantly seeking food, constantly being frustrated, and they appear a lot in Buddhist texts. One of the jobs of Buddhist monks and nuns is to feed the hungry ghosts.

Is it a fundamental misconception to think of Buddhism as a peaceful religion?

The peaceful religion part is something I think that's been made much of really since the 19th century. But we have a lot of evidence of Buddhists going to war, of Buddhist monks serving as chaplains on the battlefield, even in the Second World War. So Buddhism is a religion of peace in the sense that the Buddha really talked against violence, but we have throughout Buddhist history all sorts of Buddhist armies, Buddhist wars, and Buddhists killing each other and killing their enemies.

So the Western conception of Buddhism, that starts to be built up in the 19th century? Is that the right way to think about it?

That's correct, yeah. So basically until into the 19th century, Europeans were categorizing the religions of the world as just four, the four nations. There were Christians, there were Jews, there were Muslims, and there were idolaters. And Buddhists were idolaters. And so basically the study of religion since the 19th century has been taking those idolaters and giving them their own religions, each one ending in -ism, right? So Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism. So it's really in the 19th century when we start getting Buddhist texts arriving in Europe via the British in India and the study of Sanskrit, which is then shown to have cognates with Latin and Greek, that this kind of Sanskrit craze sweeps Europe and Buddhist texts become very important to primarily to French and British intellectuals, also in Germany. Often they're atheists, they're anti-Catholic, and they're trying to find a religion of reason, which they then demonstrate or portray the Buddhism as being.

There are 18th century Enlightenment encyclopedias, right? They cover Buddhism, or don't they?

Very briefly. I mean, at that time in the 18th century, we're basically seeing the reports of missionaries. Once there are idolaters, then there are missionaries. Because the Roman Catholics felt, or Christians feel, that Jews had their chance to accept Jesus as the Messiah. They did not. Muslims also did not do so. But idolaters were— they were heathens. They were people of the heath. They were just uncultured, uncivilized people who were available to be converted. And so much of what we know about Buddhism in the 16th, 17th, early 18th century comes from the reports of Jesuits primarily in China, in Japan, in Sri Lanka, and in India.

There's plenty of colonialism at that time, especially to what we now call Sri Lanka. And you go to Sri Lanka, you could say Buddhism hits you in the face, right?

Yeah.

And people just didn't say much about that? I find that very strange.

Well, so the East India Company did not allow missionaries. It was only later that they allowed British missionaries to go to Sri Lanka. And we find then a lot of scholarship on Sri Lankan Buddhism, some translations of Sinhalese texts. And it's only then that the missionaries then start to speak against Buddhism. But up until that time, we're really looking at Buddhism— the Europeans, British, the French were seeing Buddhism as a kind of a classical religion. Because when Vasco da Gama landed on the shore of India in 1498, Buddhism was essentially dead on the subcontinent. It was just temples in ruins, caves overgrown, broken statues. So they felt they'd found a new classical civilization and it had a language that was related to Greek and Latin. And therefore this was something that really excited them. There was really some sort of a belief that a new enlightenment was going to take place from the discovery of this new language and civilization. So they really thought that they understood Buddhism. That the lost Buddhism of India and all the Buddhism all around Asia were just mere reflections of that, that they'd been polluted with local beliefs in China and Tibet. So it was really something that the Europeans owned. And that's where really the study of Buddhism as an academic field began in the West.

Now, when I read popular literature today, I see this common trope, some notion of what's called an axial age, that there was Buddha, there was Socrates, there was Confucius, Zoroaster. You could add in Homer or Jeremiah. The list varies. And supposedly these people are all about the same time. And there's something special about that era where all this religious thought blossoms. Is that fabricated or do you agree or what do you think? I don't agree.

I think it's the dates are just too vague. We have people who like Laozi, for example, who is the founder of Taoism, who's generally put in that period, probably a mythical figure. We don't know exactly what Confucius taught. And as we've been talking about. We don't know when the Buddha lived and we don't know what he taught. So it's especially on the Asian side, it's difficult to fit those figures into that particular paradigm.

But isn't it odd that the temporal distribution of religions, especially after Islam, which of course is much later, but there aren't that many new ones, right?

That's right. There aren't that many new ones, yeah.

So there's something about that era where there's a special clustering or that just plays no role in your thought?

It doesn't. I mean, I haven't studied those Western figures enough to really make a strong— have a strong opinion about it. From the Buddhist side, the evidence is just, is too thin.

Do we know anything about the children of Buddha?

Yes, he had one child. His name was Rahula. He had been, so the famous story is that the Buddha, of course, stayed in the palace until he was 30. His father wanted to protect him from the sufferings of the world. And on the night that he escaped, there are two versions of the story. He either, his son was born, or his son was conceived. He then left the palace, spent 6 years practicing asceticism, and eventually became enlightened. He left at age 29. And so when he came back after he had achieved enlightenment, his wife was very unhappy that he had left. She said, "At least give your son his birthright," because the Buddha was supposed to become the next king. He was supposed to succeed his father on the throne. And so she understood the birthright to be, now say that your son can now succeed your father as the king. And instead of doing that, the Buddha had his son ordained as a child. So Rahula was a little monk. After his grandfather complained about that and the Buddha made a rule, okay, from now on, the parents must give their permission before a child is ordained. So Rahula became a monk. He achieved enlightenment, entered nirvana at death. And so we have no DNA from the Buddha because he had no descendants other than that one child who never married.

What did the Buddha think of the caste system?

So we tend, when we look at 19th century sources, one of the things that attracted Europeans to the Buddha was what they saw as his rejection of caste. It turns out that that is not exactly true. So there were four castes in ancient India. There were the Brahmins, the priests, there were the Kshatriyas, the warriors, there were the Vaishyas, who were the merchants, and there were the Shudras, who were kind of the laborers. And the Buddha was in that second caste, the warrior caste. And when the Buddha is in heaven waiting to come to Earth, he decides which caste to join. And it's said that Buddhas will always join the caste which is most prominent at that time in the world. And he chose the warrior caste over the Brahmin caste. Now it turns out that the Buddha's primary opponents during the course of his teaching career were the Brahmins, were the Hindus. And so to proclaim his superiority over them is a kind of one-upsmanship on his part. But when we look at who were the people who became monks and nuns, there are cases in the Pali Canon where the caste of the monk or nun is given. And when we have that, it turns out that the monks and nuns are overwhelmingly from the Brahmin caste, secondly from the Buddha's own caste, and very, very few from the lowest class. There is a famous monk from that caste, but there's very few. So the caste system is there. He knows it. But caste does not preclude ordination, and caste does not preclude enlightenment.

If we think, you know, how the Buddha is portrayed in texts, such as the Pali and other canons, versus how the Buddha is portrayed in Buddhist art, are there systematic differences, or it's a fully consistent picture?

His portrayal in Buddhist art is that figure with the 32 marks on his body. There's also 80 minor marks, and those are shared by all Buddhist traditions. So in terms of depictions of the Buddha himself, it's fairly consistent. It just, it happens to differ whether it's a Chinese work or Japanese work. These are artistic conventions in those nations. But in terms of what the Buddha looks like, it's pretty similar.

But in terms of theology, it's broadly similar emphases or different aspects of Buddhism are brought out when it's visual. So if I think of Christian art, crucifixions are very prominent for centuries, right? And obviously they're highly central to the New Testament. But in terms of the space they take up, you could say it's less So it's interesting that the Buddha is primarily portrayed in one posture.

He's sitting in the lotus posture with his right hand touching the earth. This is portraying a particular moment in the story. So the Buddha had spent 6 years practicing asceticism, decided this didn't work. He had this famous meal, goes down to sit down under the Bodhi tree. And at that time, Mara, the Buddhist devil, although he's actually in the god realm, is recognizing that this prince is about to find a way to put an end to to death. And therefore he attacks him with his army. And so this is one of the most violent scenes in the life of the Buddha. All these monsters coming, storms, hailstorms, fires. And the Buddha simply is unfazed by this. He simply touches the earth. And so the Buddha finally is untouched by any of these attacks. And Mara finally says, "You can't sit under this tree. This seat under this tree in the middle of this jungle is not yours. It's not your property. You have no right to sit here. You have to leave." And the Buddha simply touches the earth with his right hand. This is to call the goddess of the earth to witness that he has performed all these virtues over all these lifetimes and therefore has the right to occupy this spot. And she responds with a little tremor. And so this is called the Bhumisparsha posture, the earth-touching posture. And Mara then leaves at that time. The Buddha then meditates all night and becomes a Buddha at dawn. So when we see statues of the Buddha seated, it's almost always in that position. When he's standing, he's standing up often teaching the Dharma with his right hand raised. So for the Buddha himself, it's fairly consistent in terms of the posture and the story behind it.

Is it correct to think of Buddhism as primarily an ideology of the oral rather than written?

Well, so this is also true in many ways of Hinduism. So this is really a fact about India. So we know that the Vedas were probably composed maybe around 1500 BCE. The sacred texts of Hinduism. They were not written down for centuries. They were memorized by Brahmin priests, and they actually had very sophisticated mnemonics. They literally could recite the Vedas backwards and forwards, every even syllable, every odd syllable. And so we know when they were finally committed to writing centuries later that we have something that's very accurate in what was done so far before. So Buddhism was also this oral culture. So after the Buddha died, there was a council of monks that gathered in a cave. And according to the story, two monks recited everything the Buddha taught. One recited the monastic code and one recited the sutras. And the monks sat there and memorized everything. So if we say, let's just say the Buddha died 400 BCE, we don't have any carbon-dated texts of Buddhism from the first century before the Common Era. And so we're talking about centuries before anything was written down. But we know that they were memorized and chanted. We have monks who have the job, or their job is called reciters of the middle-length sutras. And so we have a fairly good idea that what was recited at that time is what we have in the texts. And then of course many, many texts were composed after the passing of the Buddha. There's no question about that.

So as you know, we live in a world where so many people, including in poorer countries, they're on YouTube or they're on TikTok or both, both. How is that reshaping Buddhism today?

Well, it means that there are all sorts of teachers from all Buddhist traditions, both teaching in their native language and teaching in English. So there are all sorts of Tibetan lamas and Sri Lankan monks and Thai monks. We have Buddhist rituals being performed via YouTube, for example, in Japan, funerals, and there's a special ritual that's done for fetuses that have been aborted in Japan that can be done over the internet now. And so we're seeing explosion, of course, of Buddhist teachings online. And then the other thing people in my field are talking about is the use of AI for translation. I was at a conference at Berkeley recently, which was called AI and the Future of Buddhist Studies, because we have this vast canon. The majority of the texts have never been translated. And we're at a position probably in the next 5 years, we can translate almost everything we want to from any Buddhist canonical language fairly accurately.

Should I think of the current time as an age of proliferation of heresies through YouTube, or is there somehow not enough of a canon where that even makes sense? Like, who issues the verdicts here?

There's no pope, right? There's no one to decide that. And so this has been the case in Buddhism forever. Who decides? And when we're in a place like Tibet, there's the Dalai Lama, there are major lamas, we have a situation where the monasteries are powerful, the abbots have power. But all that's gone now. And so who speaks for Buddhism is a big question. Huge one right now.

And the different strands of Buddhism, you know, as you would find in Japan or Korea compared to Sri Lanka, do they regard each other as heresies or they just coexist? Or what's this— what is the hierarchy like?

So we have something called the Mahayana sutras. We have a whole canon of texts that appear after the death of the Buddha, probably beginning in right around the beginning of the Common Era, which are clearly texts that the Buddha did not speak. Greek. So we have these two forms of Buddhism. We have the Buddhism, which we call the Theravada, right, which is the tradition of the elders. That's the Buddhism of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. In Theravada Buddhism, they follow the Pali Canon. In what the Europeans call Northern Buddhism, so China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Nepal, Vietnam, they accept these Mahayana sutras as the word of the Buddha. And so from the Southern Buddhist position, from the Theravada position, those other texts are heretical. The Buddha never taught that. From the Mahayana tradition, the Buddha did teach those sutras as well as the Pali. So they're more inclusive, but they also then disdain the early tradition for rejecting what they consider the Mahayana teachings, what they consider higher.

And this notion that the Mahayana teachings, they're uniquely somehow, you know, the great vehicle, as it's sometimes put. Is that contested or true?

Great vehicle from whose perspective?

That they're more universalistic. There's more open access to Buddhist truth somehow.

That would be their claim. I think from the scholarly perspective, it's not true. It's a kind of an advertisement that they make. But they do have a whole different pantheon of bodhisattvas. They have texts like the Diamond Sutra, Heart Sutra, Lotus Sutra, the most famous sutras in English are all Mahayana sutras. The perspective of scholars, these were not taught by the historical Buddha, and yet they have this great influence.

Now, I'm just some guy who reads your books and travels around. But when I go to these different countries, my gut feeling, not backed by anything firm, is that when I'm in Sri Lanka, that's quote unquote the real Buddhism. Is there anything to that, or that's just totally a figment of my imagination?

Well, the question is, who decides, right? Who decides what's real?

Right.

So from the point of view of the Sri Lankans, that's real Buddhism. They got it first. They got it earliest. They've kept it the longest. It is the case that what is Buddhism died out in Sri Lanka 3 times, had to be reestablished over the centuries. But they claim to be maintaining the early original teachings of the Buddha. But Tibetans would of course dispute that. They would say we have the complete canon that also includes the Mahayana sutras and the tantras. And therefore we have everything that the Buddha taught. So it's just a question of who accepts which text as authentic. But I think from the point of view of what did Buddhist monks look like in the time of the Buddha, they probably look most like the monks in Sri Lanka in terms of the robes and their comportment.

So there's something a bit more original about it. It would be like visiting a Christian church in Armenia or Ethiopia. You wouldn't say it's necessarily the correct doctrine, but there's something more primeval.

It's a longer continuity. Exactly. Buddhism came there the earliest outside of India.

Right. Now, if I look at the historical record, am I right to fear that Buddhism, you know, disappearing is too strong a word, but it used to be prominent in Java. Now it's quite gone. It used to be prominent in what we would call India or a lot of South Asia. Certainly in India, it's quite gone. There was a Pew study that came out, I think, in March this year. In Japan, Buddhism is plummeting. Korea, Buddhism is less popular. China, it's much harder to say, but it's not obvious that Buddhism has a bright future there. Is that just the trend?

And there's also Tibet, right, which you didn't mention. So yeah.

But Tibet is China.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, Buddhism as a monastic tradition, which is really from the point of view of Buddhism, Buddhism exists in the world as long as the monks are around. They talk about a time in the future when the yellow robes of the monks will turn white. White robes are the monks of lay people. So the Buddhists predict their own decline and disappearance. From the view of Buddhism, it's happening a little quicker than they predicted in the earlier texts. But we do see Buddhism as a monastic institution, which is really what it sees as its own heart, as disappearing.

And do you think there's something about Buddhist doctrine that's somehow not sufficiently well suited for religious competition, or it's a historical accident, or it's just, you know, the Buddhist doctrine is correct?

I think it's— you mean why it's disappearing?

Why it's disappearing or diminishing.

It's diminishing primarily for political reasons, I think. I think that the Buddhists have not been able to adapt in ways that have been consistent with the governments that support them. So Buddhism, of course, right, the word that we translate as monk in Sanskrit, bhikshu, means beggar. That is, Buddhist monks and nuns beg for their food. They may not touch money, they may not till the soil. So Buddhism has always, always relied on patronage, and that patronage was primarily that of kings. Kings are mostly gone now, and so what— who are the patrons of Buddhism now? That entire monarchy system has largely disappeared except in Thailand, where notably Buddhism is very strong. So it's really the decline of monarchies that has been the primary reason for the decline of Buddhism, at least on the monastic level. Devil.

But is there something in the doctrine that makes it harder to attach to, say, autocracies, which are common around the world? Or do you think it's just an accident?

I think it's mostly an accident. Buddhist monks have always done quite well with kings. And what they do is— the idea is that Buddhist monks keep their vows, and by doing that, kingdoms are safe from famine, they're safe from disease, they're safe from foreign invasion. That hasn't worked.. And so that patronage has disappeared. And because of that, the support for the monastic institution has declined sharply.

So if I think of the Dalai Lama, who's quite prominent in the West, from what I know, he's named by what, a Mongolian ruler hundreds of years ago? Dalai Lamas, they're typically commonly involved in politics. What exactly makes the Dalai Lama legitimate and to whom?

Where does that come Well, that's probably a whole nother segment, but briefly, the Dalai Lama is— so Tibet has this strange institution called the incarnate lama. This is unique to Tibetan Buddhism. The idea that a great teacher will die and then his followers will find the little boy who's been reborn as this lama. They will educate him, he'll become a great lama, and this will go on for generation to generation. This was— we find this in Tibet beginning probably in the 11th century. So there were a bunch of these incarnate lamas in Tibet. Tibet, and one of whom became patronized by a Mongol Khan who called him Dalai Lama. Dalai is the word for ocean in Mongolian. Several Dalai Lamas later, there was a civil war in Tibet. The Dalai Lama called another Mongol Khan to his aid. He defeated the enemy, who were other Tibetans, and that Dalai Lama was placed on the throne of Tibet in 1642. This is the 5th Dalai Lama. So he became the temporal and religious ruler of Tibet. Tibet. This had gone on now until we're now on the 14th Dalai Lama. Some of the Dalai Lamas were very powerful, many were not. So obviously, as we're seeing now, and as we can see in Tibetan history, this form of political succession is very inefficient. So the Dalai Lama dies. He leaves a letter or some sort of indication where he'll be reborn. They wait 2 or 3 years for a child to be born, send out a search party around the country and look for a child who fits the criteria to be the next Dalai Lama. This is done through oracles. It's done through giving the child possessions of the previous Dalai Lama, which one was yours in a past life. And then that little boy is brought to Lhasa, put in the Potala Palace, educated, becomes head of state when he's probably 20. So we have this interregnum of almost 25 years between Dalai Lamas in which the country is ruled by a regent. And if that regent wants to, who is effectively the king of Tibet, if he wants to continue, well, maybe the Dalai Lama will die. And we have good evidence that several Dalai Lamas were actually poisoned by their regents. So we have this person who's head of state. He's the ruler of the country. And now the current Dalai Lama has just turned 90. And of course, he left— Chinese troops came into Tibet in 1950. Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959, has not been back.

Just from a purely pragmatic point of view, how effective is the succession process? So if I look at the current Dalai Lama and I ask myself, well, if I had to pick someone, I could spend 5 years doing central casting and have all of Hollywood on my side. It would have been hard to pick someone who's as effective as he has been. He's just as perfect for the role, seems to be highly skilled at being a Dalai Lama, but it's quite random, right?

It is random. He's unusual. I think he's— well, I think when we look back at the Dalai Lamas, we'll look at the 5th, who's the one who became head of state, and the 14th as two of the greatest. There's no question. Yeah.

But have we had catastrophic Dalai Lamas?

Yes, we had the 6th Dalai Lama who said, I don't want to take this vow of celibacy, and if you make me do I'm going to kill myself. So he declined the role and died mysteriously after writing some very beautiful love poetry. So some have been great, some have not been so great. And so it is random. And of course, that 25 years from the time of the death of one to another is different in the 17th century than it is in the 21st century, right? You think of the current Dalai Lama passing away. He's just said that he's hoping to live till 130. So there's still some time. But after that happens, they have to find a new child. World. And 25 years in the 21st century is— there's a lot can happen during that time, obviously, right?

Yeah, but it seems fine if they just step down, right? You know, as would be the case in a monarchy. But of the 14, how many of them have just been bad people?

Well, we don't know much. A lot of them died young, as I said. The 6th who stepped down is beloved. None were tyrants.

And Buddhists in other countries, how many of them just have basic respect for the Dalai Lama, even if he's not as special for them?

I think basic respect is there. He's special to the Tibetans and he's special to the Mongolians. They would regard him as the incarnation of this great bodhisattva of compassion. But for other Buddhists, I think they're happy that he has promoted Buddhism as he had over the course of his time in exile. And I think he is respected, definitely, yeah.

In the West, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is a big deal. But is that even a real thing? How'd that happen?

Well, again, that's a whole another program. I have written a book about this, as you probably know. The Tibetans, they have a very strange idea So the idea in Tibet is that in order to have a text be authentic, it must come from India. And the Tibetans crossed the Himalayas, went to India, brought back many texts. They invited many great Buddhist teachers from India to come to Tibet. But we have this phenomenon, this idea that one of these people who came from India called Padmasambhava buried a bunch of books all over Tibet thinking the Tibetans are not civilized enough to really take advantage of the true teachings. So I'm going to bury some teachings all over the country and let them be unearthed at the appropriate time. Time. So these are called treasure texts. This is a famous genre of Tibetan literature. So the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is one of these. It was dug up apparently by someone who then— but again, this is a way, when we look at this historically, we're looking at a way for Tibetans to have Indian text without going to India. And these texts are buried and they're in a script that only the discoverer can read. So he has to translate it into classical Tibetan and then proclaim this text. Tibetan Book of the Dead is one of these. And it was rather randomly suggested tested by an American theosophist called Walter Evans Wentz, who was visiting Sikkim in the early 20th century. He got it translated by the schoolteacher, a Tibetan schoolteacher at one of the boys' schools nearby. And because he was a theosophist, he loved the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This was something very important to Madame Blavatsky. So he called it the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And then he put all of his sort of theosophical crazy footnotes and introductions around that text. And it became, as you just said, one of the most important works in the Western transmission of Buddhism to Tibet. It's been translated much better now, the whole thing is available. But the Evans-Wentz story and how this came about has been a very important moment in spreading Buddhism to the West.

And he was just some guy from Trenton, New Jersey, right?

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. He was Walt Wentz from Trenton, but he went to study in the UK. And because his mother's last name was Evans, he changed his name to Walter Evans-Wentz, hyphenated to sound to sound more British.

And the Theosophists, have they just distorted, you know, in particular the British or sometimes the American understanding of Buddhism? You know, what's the distortion, the main difference they made?

Well, I think what they claim is that— so in theosophy, there were these enlightened masters who lived on the continent of Atlantis. And when Atlantis went under, they moved to Tibet because they felt that they don't do well with magnetism. So magnetism in Tibet was supposedly less. And so they lived in the mountains of Tibet unknown to the Tibetans. And Madame Blavatsky called them the Mahatmas. So Mahatma Gandhi is actually named after these theosophical masters. So she claimed to have gone to Tibet to have studied with the Panchen Lama and to have discovered texts in a language called Senzar. There's no evidence that she really went there. There's no evidence that she met the Panchen Lama, of course. And there's no such thing as a Senzar language as far as we know. So this is part of the romance of Tibet, the mystification of Tibet that took place in the 19th and 20th century as Asia came under European control, the one place that was not under that control was Tibet. So it became this— this is where Shangri-La comes from, Lost Horizon, all this is that all the myths about Asia crossed the Himalayas and remained there in Tibet until 1959 when the Dalai Lama came out.

And Rudolf Steiner is still influential in Germany, or his writings rather.

Yeah, Steiner I don't think was a theosophist, right?

Well, he's a fellow traveler. He had his own thing. Yeah. But is there much Buddhism in that, or again, it's a lot more fabrication?

I haven't studied Steiner, so I've looked a lot at Theosophy and Blavatsky and Olcott, but not at Steiner. So I don't have much to say about that. I'm sorry.

If someone asks about Zen Buddhism from Japan, just theologically, what is special about that?

Zen is interesting in the sense that it does not seem to have originated in India. The claim, of course, is that it had. But so here's the story that the Buddha was about to give a teaching And instead of giving a teaching, he just held up a flower. And one monk got it. And he passed on what they called the mind-to-mind transmission over the generations until it went to someone named Bodhidharma, who traveled to China and brought it to China there. Bodhidharma is probably not a historical figure. So Zen is among the major traditions of Buddhism. It's the one that we cannot trace directly back to India. We have this word in Sanskrit, jhana. Jhana is the word for meditation.. And in the Chinese, often just transliterated Sanskrit terms rather than translating them. So they took jhana and called it chana. And so shortened down to chan. That character chan is pronounced Zen in Japanese. So Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese mispronunciation of a Sanskrit word that means meditation. And it is the meditation school. So Zen is what they call a special transmission outside the scriptures. They don't care so much about the sutras, at least that's their claim. And they talk about the mind-to-mind transmission, that is the experience of enlightenment going from teacher to student. Yeah.

If we think about, you know, South Asia, Tamil Nadu is not today Buddhist, but Nepal and Bhutan are, and of course, much of Sri Lanka. How did those lines get drawn?

Well, so obviously Tamil Nadu was part of the British colony of India. India. And so, and we know that Buddhism had disappeared from that part of the subcontinent by the time the British arrived. In Nepal, Nepal is a majority Hindu country. But there is a small community called the Newars who are Buddhists, and they are the living link to Indian Buddhism, and that primarily in the Kathmandu Valley. So that's why we have Buddhism there. Sikkim was also a small kingdom, as you know, became part of India in the 20th century. And again, it's really so close to Tibet that it really is, they're Tibetan Buddhists. So in In Nepal, the Newars follow Sanskrit Buddhism, Indian Buddhism, and then in Sikkim, they follow Tibetan Buddhism.

And in Java, how does Buddhism disappear?

Obviously, Islam comes, but Buddhism probably disappeared just because of the change in trade routes. Buddhism spread via trade, monks traveling on ships, kings being Buddhists. And again, Buddhism survives or declines when there is royal patronage or not. So when the king becomes a Hindu, the king is no longer a Buddhist, Buddhism is going to decline in that kingdom.

The story still seems odd to me, though. So if one goes to Borobudur in Java, spectacular, right? One of the most amazing places to see in the world.

Absolutely.

And we read that it was abandoned. It wasn't even, you know, converted into a tourist site or a place where you would sell things. Why would you just toss away so much capital structure?

Well, I think it just got overgrown by the jungle. I mean, I just think that people were not going there. There were no Buddhist pilgrims coming. The populace converted to Islam mostly. And it just fell into decline just to be revived in the 19th, 20th century.

But you know, turn it into a candy store or something. It just seems capital maintenance occurs across other margins. And the best looking building you have, one of the best looking in the world, is forgotten. Don't you find that paradoxical?

That is odd because we do have Buddhist temples being destroyed. We have mosques being built in their place sometimes. But Borobudur, which of course, as you say, the most magnificent Buddhist monument in the world, just kind of got forgotten. It's gotten somehow. I don't have a good answer to that.

This isn't really a religious question, but it seems to me Thailand is much wealthier than other Buddhist countries.

That's true.

Do you have an account of why that has evolved?

Because Thailand never became a European colony. This was the great achievement of King Mongkut, that he knew the Christians well. He was on good terms with them. He established trade relations. We know that the French were trying to convert the Thais to, or Siam, to Christianity, Catholicism from the time of Louis XIV. But the kings of the 19th century, Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, kept their country free from the British and the French. And they remained, therefore there was no conversion. Buddhism remained the state religion. As you know, Thai kings serve time as Buddhist monks. So they become monks for some period of time. And they support the Sangha, the community, very strongly. So that's why we see Thailand as being the wealthiest and most prosperous Buddhist community in the world right now. Right now.

But Ethiopia and Tibet were not really colonized by Europeans, and they're both extremely poor, right?

When? Now or—

Nah, but even historically, Ethiopia briefly, there's an Italian presence. Tibet is never Europeanized. There's general evidence that the longer you were colonized, actually, the richer you tend to be today, especially if it was the British. So it's odd to say that Thailand is so wealthy because it wasn't colonized.

Well, it wasn't colonized, but traded, right? So they established trading companies, all the trade went on, they just never turned the government over to the Europeans. Tibet, of course, the valleys are at 12,000 feet, right? Tibetan trade came primarily through China and it was mostly just for tea. And so Tibet was never wealthy, but the monasteries survived quite well because the monasteries ran the economy. So when we say the economy of Tibet declined after 1959, it was because the monasteries were closed down by the Chinese. Chinese. So it's just how wealth is distributed and where that wealth comes from. Thailand, as a seafaring nation with good relations with the French and the British for centuries, they did fine. Tibet didn't.

Let's say an educated person, you know, with some means came to you and said, I want to do a 2 or 3 week tour of Buddhism around the world. And they'll spend whatever it takes. Where would you send them for a 2 or 3 week tour? What are the essential landmarks or places?

I would send them to India. This is, of course, where it all began. And we have these four places that are the four sacred sites: the place of the Buddha's birth, the place of his enlightenment, the place of his first teaching, and the place of his passage into nirvana. All of those are well maintained. Buddhists go on pilgrimage there from around the world. So you see Buddhists from all over the world there. There are incredible temples at Ajanta. So there is a four-week tour of India that one could do and be just completely amazed and captivated by the beauty of the architecture architecture and the artwork there.

So you only send them to India, you know, no Sukhothai, no Borobudur, nothing in Vietnam.

India is the first place. That's the homeland. That's the sacred land. That's the Mecca. But of course, Thailand has incredibly beautiful temples, which are beautifully maintained. Borobudur, you have to go. If you can go to Tibet, of course, there are incredible monasteries and temples there. So across the Buddhist world, there are remarkable monuments and artworks that that you could go to any Buddhist country and be captivated, but I think India would be the first place to go.

And if you send them one place in Thailand, where would that place be?

I think I would go to Bangkok just because there are so many great monasteries there. That's where, of course, the palace is, and you can see the close relationship between the king and the Sangha. Yeah.

And your own position as leading expert on Buddhism, what is it you had to do to get that in terms of travel, languages, obviously study and writing, but just physically, what are the things you needed to do?

Physically, I had to attend a university where Buddhism was taught, and I had the good fortune to go to UVA. Did all 3 of my degrees there. When I was a senior, they hired someone who was an expert in Tibetan Buddhism. So if that's just either my good luck or my bad luck or my karma, that that was the person that I studied with. I began studying Sanskrit and Tibetan at Virginia Virginia. And after doing my graduate studies, we all were supposed to go to India for a year. So I spent a year on a Fulbright in India in 1978-79, where I studied in a Tibetan monastery. So after the Tibetans went into exile in '59, they reestablished themselves across the subcontinent and South India. Monasteries that had 10,000 monks in Tibet were rebuilt and had probably 300 monks. So I spent a year in one of those monasteries. I was the the only person there who wasn't Tibetan. No one spoke English. So I had to learn how to speak Tibetan. I studied with the great abbots of that monastery. And so after you've studied Sanskrit and Tibetan that much, there's really only one sort of profession open to you, job open to you, that's to become an academic. So I got a job first teaching at Middlebury College and then later, and I've been at Michigan since 1989. So that's the short story.

But how did the whole idea come to you? So you're boy, you know, maybe you're 8 years old, you don't have this plan. At some point you have the plan. Where does the plan come from?

The plan came together rather slowly. So I was a suburban Methodist growing up in Alexandria. My father worked at the Air and Space Museum. So I'm a— I was born in Bolling Air Force Base. But I'm a child of the '60s. So I was 16 in '68. '68 was Tet Offensive, the assassination of Kennedy and King, Democratic Convention in Chicago. I go to I went to college in 1970. That's the year of Kent State. And I think that for many of us of that generation, we kind of thought Western civilization is dead. It's hopeless. There's no future here. And we had the naive belief there was some sort of secret in the mystic East, in Hinduism and Buddhism. There wasn't much to read then. There was like Be Here Now by Ram Dass, Tibetan Book of the Dead that you mentioned, works of D.T. Suzuki on Zen. We read all of that stuff. And as I said, then you start studying languages and find this larger world. So it was mostly just, I guess, from the Buddhist perspective, karma. If they had not hired this particular scholar at UVA in 1970, I would have maybe done something else. I went to UVA thinking I'd be a Shakespeare scholar, and I ended up a scholar of Buddhism.

So when the Beatles come out with Tomorrow Never Knows in 1966, are you thinking, this is awesome, or are you thinking, I know a lot already, this is BS?

No, in '66, I was 14, right? So I thought, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. That was my inspiration in many ways. So I thought it was fantastic. Beatles are are very big for people of my generation.

And the year you spent in the monastery, what was the biggest surprise of that experience?

I guess I was surprised by how kind everybody was to me. They have their own monastic schedule. They're very busy. Monks have a lot to do, a lot to study. And the greatest teachers of the monastery said, "You know, I'm busy, but I'll teach you what you want to know." And I got private teachings from the abbots, from the greatest scholars of the monastery over the course of that year. And that's really sustained me throughout my entire career. Career. Yeah, that kindness.

And you feel they had a very deep sense of Buddhism and they knew classic texts, could teach you many things.

Absolutely. Yeah, they were super scholars and they'd memorize hundreds of pages of texts.

And financially they're supported by their government or?

Well, there was, of course there's no government, right, in India. So they were given kind of scrubland by the Indian government and they supported themselves primarily through donations from the West and from Tibetan farmers in the area to, as always, support the monastery. So, but it was a very, it was a very austere life for all of us. Yeah.

And what was the biggest hardship or source of pain other than not having creature comforts?

I can't think of any hardships. You know, I was just, I would sit in my room under my single light bulb and listen to the tapes I'd made of my teachers and make transcripts of that on my little typewriter. I have only fond memories at that time. And I also didn't get sick, which of course many people did in India at that time, Westerners. So I kept my health. And I was on a Fulbright, so I later learned that my stipend was larger than Indira Gandhi's salary at that time. So I had a lot of money that I could also give to support some monks, which I did, of course. Yeah.

And just so day to day, it was just plain outright fun.

Well, it was. I was by myself a lot because they have their own schedule. Of course, they have ceremonies, they have chanting, they have their own classes. So I would just read while I could. And then whenever the abbots could see me, I'd go go and sit for a couple of hours with them. So there wasn't much. I didn't have much to listen to. I remember I'm a big baseball fan. My father sent me the Sporting News. And I remember pouring over the box scores of the Carolina League. I had so little to read apart from Tibetan texts. But otherwise, it was fine, yeah.

And you learned Tibetan and Sanskrit. Right.

Those are the two languages for Indian Buddhism, yeah.

If you could learn learn one other language to help in studying Buddhism, what would the next language be?

It would be classical Chinese, yeah.

Classical Chinese, yeah.

Yeah. Right.

And then Japanese, or?

Well, the Japanese are basically reading Buddhist texts in Chinese. And so for Korea and Japan, Chinese is the canonical language.

And if you think of, you know, your own life, so your book, again, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, I recommend all of your books. The biggest one, I think it's called Buddhism: A Journey Through History. Is that correct?

That's correct. That came out in January. Yeah.

That to me is the single best place to go for a comprehensive look at all of Buddhism, not just life of the Buddha. But this is about life of the Buddha. Other than reading your books, if someone wants to learn about Buddhism and taking this tour you've outlined, what else should a person do?

You know, I think reading Buddhist texts in translation can be very rewarding. So works like the Lotus Sutra, the Heart Sutra, to take the famous ones, there are many commentaries on those works. Pali canon's all been translated into beautiful English. So I think get away from the sectary resources as soon as you can and get to the original text in translation, I think that's the most fruitful path.

And if it's partly an oral religion, one should just talk to monks or what's the way to do that?

Yeah, talk to monks. Yeah, talk to— there are many, many monks giving teachings on YouTube, hundreds, I'm sure. I don't keep up with it. There's too many to follow, but monks generally know what they're talking about.

And your Princeton Encyclopedia of Buddhism, how many pages?

Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism is the dictionary.

I'm sorry, how many pages is that?

I've kind of repressed that, but it's, it's, I think it's over 1,000. Yeah, this was a, a huge task and it became standard reference work for the field. Yeah.

And that took you how many years?

So this, I did this with my colleague Robert Buswell at UCLA, and I think it took us probably from start to finish about a decade. Yeah.

And mainly you're nagging people to send in their entries.

We, we wrote every entry.

You wrote every entry? Yeah. I didn't know that. That's phenomenal. Yeah. The two of us wrote it, yeah. So what is the skill you have that enabled you to write every entry?

Well, I chose an excellent scholar as my partner, and he knows Chinese and Korean very well. He also knows Sanskrit. So among us— and he'd also been a monk in Thailand— so we had enough life experience between us and enough teaching experience between us and enough languages between us to sort of put together the list of terms that we thought needed to be there. And then again, with the help of our graduate students. So it's not to say that we did it all by ourselves. We had a lot of help from our students over that decade, we had the bases covered, I think, to get that done.

And if you think of the next or maybe current generation of younger scholars of Buddhism, do they evince a similar level of dedication?

I think so.

Or is it somehow in decline? Or you think it's fine?

Well, part of it is the state of the American academy, of course. That's a whole other conversation. Religion departments are declining in some places right now. There aren't the jobs that there were, I think, at certain times during my own career. So our own graduate students are having trouble getting academic positions. Sometimes they can work as translators, sometimes they can do other things, but the academic field of Buddhist studies, at least in the U.S., is in a bit of a crisis right now.

And last question in two parts. If you just think of yourself, what is it you want to write next? And what is it you want to do next with respect to Buddhism?

Well, I've been thinking about a book called Buddhism and Business: A Brief History. I have an idea about how that would go. And I also am kind of worried about the book itself as a form. As you know, sales of books in general are declining for all sorts of reasons. But there's so many great Buddhist stories and there are ways of conveying Buddhism in other ways. So I'd like to find a way for Buddhism to make its way into drama, into film, into radio plays. And so I'd like to find a way to take Buddhist thought, Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist stories and put them into this new medium. That, that would be my, my dream right now.

Donald Lopez, thank you very much.

Thank you, it's a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @CowenConvoes. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.