Harvard Divinity Bulletin
Volume 32, Number 1

Fall/Winter 2003

Where We Do Standby Janet Gyatso

In the Beginningof Creation Was
Consciousness
by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The Religious
Experience of Jesus
by John Ashton

Hille Haker
on Slavoj Zizek
Christine Helmeron ‘Luther’Where We Do StandThe Convocation Address to Begin the 187th Yearby Janet Gyatso

here do I stand as a scholar of
Buddhism? Where do I standas an American woman scholar of Buddhism—born in Philadelphia;
mother born in Russia; father’s family
from Lithuania; raised Jewish; deep
affinity with Tibet; years of friendships
with and indebtednesses to Tibetan
Buddhist masters; and all with a
Philadelphia cocksure, sarcastic skepticism about most everything? What is my
stance when I am trying to be closest to
the artistic impulses that I originallywanted to follow vocationally, when I am
trying to write passionately, which is
how I feel I must write even while constricted by a highly conservative andcritical field of professional “Buddhology”—not to mention a hesitancy to impose personal feelings upon a foreignculture to which I do not belong? Wheredo I stand, and what is my stance, when I
try to think in a way in which my field
has not yet conceived of thinking, a waythat I myself do not yet know, but toward
which I feel myself surely propelled—that is, a way of inspiration? What is my
stance when I teach students?
Questions like this have long obsessed me in my life, but they are questions that I have taught myself—perhaps
out of necessity—to like, to think aregood questions. As I enter into the spaceof thinking now not only about the
stance of an individual, but also about an
institution and, most of all, about the
stance of a scholarly vocation, I find myself more determined than ever to makegood on the radical Buddhist injunction
to take my stand in emptiness. By this,Buddhists have always meant not purenothingness but rather a self-conscious
recognition of infinite changeability, of
openness, and a place where the dauntingfeat of mustering confidence within what
is provisional can be attempted. For
some reason I have long been compelledby the idea that a solid stance on a groundof flux is the best place from which tocontemplate fundamental matters.
And so it is Buddhist sentiment thathas led me to begin my meditation todaywith the place where we are standing.
And now I’m talking, literally, about thephysical ground itself. I will start optimistically with the multiple possibilities
that this fortuitous site of our convocaJanet Gyatso is the Hershey Professor of
Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity
School. This address was given on September 17, 2003, under a tent pitched on the
Andover Hall lawn.

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Harvard Divinity Bulletin

CHRISTINE BOWER

W

Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, with Dean William Graham.

tion this year embodies—with the airiness and porousness of this tent, a structure that is flexible and easily movable(impermanent, if you will); and with thevery rawness of the ground on which thetent is pitched. There is really a wonderful undecidability of this ground and thistent, and an openness, unmarked, open
to the breeze, open to interpretation. Yetat the same time this place is the mostreal place in the world. It is our present,
where we are now, our first and foremost
starting point from which everything
will follow. I want to juxtapose thisimage with another level of our concrete
situation, the institutional level, which isthe convocation of our cooperative venture at Harvard Divinity School thisyear. This our coming together, ourbeing called together, to begin our vocation, our calling. And so I want to think
about the ground on which we stand,and the orientation of our stance, when
we face our common calling, the study
religion.
It is appropriate to remark first upon
the particular circumstances that haveled us to this ground and tent this year,
for it is the first time in living memorythat the Divinity School has held its
Convocation here. For many years prior
to this, our Convocation was held inMemorial Church, in Harvard Yard, thechurch of Harvard University. But in response to a feeling on the part of somemembers of this community that Memorial Church, by virtue of its Christianidentity, excluded non-Christians fromthe ceremony, it was decided this yearthat it would be better to hold the Divinity School’s convocation in a neutral setting.
don’t know the details of how this dissatisfaction with Memorial Church
dawned upon us. I was not part of theconversation or the decision itself. And tobe sure, one could imagine lots of reasons
to respond that indeed the Divinity
School Convocation has been extremely
inclusive in past years, that the very clear
self-understanding of Memorial Church
is that it invites the participation of all,and that the Christian symbols in the
church do not in fact function to exclude.
(The very fact that I, a Jewish professorof Buddhist studies, was asked to give theconvocation address, and was asked along time before the issue of venue
emerged, is testimony to that inclusiveness.) But I really want to talk about thesituation where we have landed rather
than about what led up to it.
Actually, not unlike the malleableI

ground itself, there are a plethora ofways that this situation could be construed. There is a case for arguing that
this is a good development, that our
move out of a specifically Christianspace represents our willingness to accommodate and validate the growing diversity of our student body, the growing
diversity of our faculty, and the growing
diversity of our curriculum itself. (Another illustration of this is the fact that ina few weeks from now, there will be another temporary structure on thisground, albeit for a very different purpose, the celebration of Succot.)
But there is also a case to make that
this development is something tomourn, a break with a venerable tradition at the Divinity School; that it mightsignal an intolerance for other people’s
religious expression, or at least a discomfort anywhere except a neutral, facelessplace, and that this neutrality and facelessness threatens to cast us out into adesert devoid of meaning altogether. In
fact it appears that not only has our convocation been moved out of the church;
there has also been a decision to makethe service altogether nonreligious,
whatever that means. Whatever it does
mean, the decision goes significantly further than merely avoiding sectarian affiliation. So we need to think, too, about
the distinction between neutralizing sectarian affiliation and eliminating “religion” altogether.
Whatever we might think about it,
this is the situation in which we find ourselves now. So if we decide to imagine thesalutary effects of reducing our grand convocation to a bare ritual on the lawn, how
far can we go? In particular, what if we decide to take this very bareness as an icon of
openness and newness? At the minimum,
we could say that this is a chance to build
into our working habits a recourse to
freshness, a habit of frequent refreshmentfrom square one—the bare ground.
It can hardly be entirely coincidental
that the year of relocating its opening ritual to this bare ground is also a year inwhich Harvard Divinity School is in theprocess of re-conceiving itself, not only
through its curriculum but also throughthe vision of its entire mission. Many ofyou here may not be aware that the faculty and administration have had a series ofretreats over the last few years in whichsome quite groundbreaking questions
have been raised and debated. I think wehave begun to come to a consensus aboutsome of the changes we want to usher
through, although let me add right away

that what I will say now is only my particular take on where we are. In any event,
we are still very much in the process of
thinking through—and debating—themany interesting issues involved.
But it is not only to invite especiallythe students here to join us in thisprocess of collective self-reflection that I
have decided to air some of these mattershere today. It is also to encourage us all
to think together about the study of religion at any time and place, and about thekind of orientation that will best guide us
into the future. In this, I want also to
stress that the basic questions we are debating now about the nature of the academic study of religion at the Divinity
School—and our stance toward what westudy—are richly complex issues that do
not lend themselves to final resolution,
ever! And that is a good thing. It shouldbe part of the excitement of every opening of the school year, and the welcoming of a new class, to remind ourselves ofthe fundamentally nondecideable issues
that religion poses, and to valorize that
fact, to build it into our way of writing,thinking, and reading—and teaching. In
particular, as a teacher I aspire to model
for students my own accommodation of
debateability, my own continual rethinking and fostering of a way to think together in mutual responsiveness, as
being at the very heart of where we standwhen we study religion.
I think such principles as continual
rethinking and learning how to think together, mutually, are especially germane
for a divinity school that teaches about
more than one religion. A key aspect ofwhat we have been pondering together
lately directly parallels the matter of ourchange in Convocation venue. One central issue before us at the moment is, indeed, the place of religious traditions
other than Christianity in the HDS curriculum. For the last 20 years our basic
curriculum has been divided into three
sections, or areas: Area I focuses on thenature and interpretation of scripture,
the Bible; Area II has courses in theology, ethics, and the sociology and historyof Christianity; and Area III studies thereligions of the world other than Christianity. Now to have Area III, which atpresent covers Judaism, Hinduism,
Islam, Buddhism, and Meso-American
religions, in the curriculum at all has
been a bold move on the School’s part,but of late there has been an increasing
sense that we need to look again at what
creating such a curricular area actuallysignifies. Think about it: What are wesaying when we have one area that focuses on the study of language, scripturalinterpretation, and historical-criticalanalyses; another in which we ponder
how the resources of religion have been,and should be, brought to bear upon
personal and social problems; and finally
Area III, where we study the religions of
the world? At the very least, we have to
cry apples and oranges. Two sections are
divided by types of problems and approaches in the study of religion, while
the third section is distinguished bywhich religions are taught.
Clearly, the religion that is studied in
the two areas that are distinguished bymethods and problems is overarchingly

Christianity. Yes, there is attention to its
background in the Hebrew Scriptures
along with its historical and cultural context, but the structure as a whole unquestionably serves to position Christianity
as the paradigmatic religion at the Divinity School, and all the other religionsof the world as the Others. And this observation has brought us to the rather
radical realization that we need to get ridof Area III. By which I mean not to eliminate the religions studied there, butrather that they need to be integrated
into the groupings of I and II. For Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism too havescriptures, and philological intricacies,
and hermeneutical problems, and religious institutions, and ethics. We caneven speak of something like Buddhist
theology if we take the time to consider
what that might mean in a specifically
Buddhist context.
We are beginning to take seriously
the notion that students concentratingon ethics, for example, might be just as
well served by taking a course in, say,Hindu ethics as they would in taking
Christian ethics—and that these courses
should be positioned side by side. Or
that a student interested in how politicalleadership can be grounded in religious
scripture might gain as much from acourse on Jewish apocalypticism, which
studies how messages addressing crises
drew on the Bible in late antiquity, as shewould from a course on Chinese Buddhist messianic cults and how they drew
upon the Lotus Sutra to create a compelling political message. At the very
least, we would be able to say, no more
apples and oranges; our entire curricular
structure would be founded in approachor type of issue.
ne of the main reasons that we
can even contemplate such a seachange is that the School is finally beginning to have enough faculty who
actually teach religions other than
Christianity. Appointments have recently been made in Meso-American religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. And interms of personal conviction, there is
now a wide range of religious orientations among the faculty members themselves. To be sure there are still manyholes in the HDS curriculum, as well as
gaps in our faculty diversity—and mostoutstanding, although not actually relevant to what I am arguing here, but I
want to say it anyway since it is so important, is our really pressing need for
African-American Religious studies atthe Divinity School, not to mention
African American faculty members as
such. But as I said, that’s a different matter; what I want to explore right now are
the implications of the larger shift we arecontemplating.
One way of getting at that those implications is to tell you about somethingthat for me was at first a confusing disconnect, and then an amusing irony.
During my first year here I took it uponmyself to ask that we discuss the status ofChristianity at the Divinity School at
our annual faculty retreat. When the retreat finally took place, however, I was
taken aback as I listened to the discussion. I realized that many in the roomO

understood me to be asking about therole of committed, confessional orientations in our study of religion—that is, by
asking what the role of Christianity wasat the Divinity School, I was asking what
the role of people’s personal beliefs werein their teaching. Whereas I had wanted
us to compare our study of Christianitywith our study of other religions, my reference to “Christianity” was taken instead to be synonymous with “ourreligion,” the one to which we are personally committed, as distinct from thevariety of historical, philological, sociological, literary, and philosophical subjects that we teach.
ow, I am not saying that it is a badthing to ask about the role of personal commitments in teaching;
I’m saying only that it is a different question than the one I was asking. Indeed
this different question that people
thought I was asking is the other bigquestion facing Harvard Divinity Schoolright now, although I dare say it is one
that has been an issue since the School’s
inception: What role do one’s commitments, experiences, and, especially, beliefs have to do with what, and how, one
teaches? We might recall that a closely
related question was at the heart of debates around the United States regarding
the introduction of religious studies inliberal-arts institutions in the 1960s—really very recently, when you think about
it. Although our Divinity School had
been exploring such questions in its own
way for many years before, the debatesthat emerged at that historical moment
had a profound effect on the teaching of
religion across the board in academic institutions.
At issue was academic objectivity:
How can one study a religion’s history
objectively if one’s sympathies lie with its
fortunes and truths? How can one train
students to recognize a variety of ways tounderstand a text if one is committed to
one “true” interpretation? There was anaccompanying fear in secular institutions
that the teaching about religion was likely to be used to attract believers and toconvert students. I put these ideas in thepast tense, but these concerns have notbeen put to rest yet, even with the major
successes of the academic field of religion and of the huge, thriving organization called the American Academy ofReligion, and with the wonderful diversity of historical, sociological, literary
critical, hermeneutical, philosophical,
and other methodologies that now all
fall under the rubric of religious studies.
Religion departments are often still at
pains to demonstrate their objectivity
and critical orientation to their colleagues, even while out of the other sideof their mouths they are having to explain to indignant students of religious
conviction why the Bible should be studied from historical and critical perspectives rather than solely in terms of
religious experience and truth.
Among nondenominational divinity
schools within major research universities, HDS seems to be unique in wanting
simultaneously to keep its training ofministers close to the heart of its mission
and to foster all of the intellectual andN

critical questions proper to an objective
and academic study of religion, and towant all of its students to have exposurein both approaches. This is a tall order,
but it gives us a special opportunity, for
we are positioned right at the edge—
hopefully the cutting edge—of one of themost challenging sets of issues confronting not only the field of religion, butalso many other academic fields struggling with the relationship between the
researcher’s personal identity and bias
and their perceptions and conclusions(anthropology is another such field; so is
physics; so are literature and history).
What I want to explore is not thefrustration or the apparent tension, butrather the promise of such complexity. It
is precisely the intellectual hybridity ofHarvard Divinity School that puts it inan especially propitious position to explore fruitfully the undecideablilities ofthe stance of a scholar of religion—
much more openly and daringly than ispossible in a liberal arts religion department, for example, precisely because of
our avowed links to ministerial training,whereas in a religion department the investments of individual scholars in theirown work are frequently masked or denied, and the expression of the personalis discouraged or even disparaged. But
we are also in a better position to takerisks and break new ground than wewould be in most denominational seminaries, with our commitment to the diversity of religious orientations, and ourcommitment to a critical academic orientation. It is just here, where we refuse
to give up either of the two sides of ourvery complex mission, that we are called
upon to confront the source and status oftruth, the impact of multi-perspectivalism, the threat of nihilism, and the possibility of meaningfulness. In short, I think
it is only in a world in which we fully recognize that there are many religious
stances, even some noble human ones
that have no religious affiliation at all,that we really are put face to face with—and really have the means to explore—
the methodological questions I just was
raising about the study of religion moregenerically And if what I just said is true,
this means in turn that our quest to study
religion well should have impact upon allof higher education at the university, foragain, similar questions about truth, perspectivalism, nihilism, and meaning
plague every humanities discipline, andevery science, especially when they arebeing done well.
One of the first questions that we
may encounter when we study morethan one religious stance is this: How do
we maintain in our school’s mission the
productive tension between critical objectivism and committed subjectivity if
we have a seemingly relativistic view to
one side of the formula—that is, to thesubjectivity? By this I mean to say that if
we provide a spectrum of traditional
lenses through which to study religious
ethics, say, or religion and politics, it appears we are suggesting somehow that allof those traditions have an equal purchase on truth. We must be suggestingthat while ethics is indeed a criticalhuman endeavor, we learn about it(Continued on next page)

Fall/Winter 2003

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Gyatso(Continued from previous page)equally well, if differently, by studying
Buddhist ethics and Jewish ethics, for example. That could be saying in turn thatneither of those is absolutely true, and it
smacks of a relativism—Buddhist ethics
is only for those who are Buddhists, Jewish ethics are for Jews, and both ethics
are merely the product of their particular
historical and cultural circumstances.
That might bring the scholar to take astand outside of all of them, to say that
ethics is a historical artifact, but it nevertouches a truth for all times or peoples.
That’s the way that relativism, at least
the pernicious sort, turns into nihilism
and also an essentialism (i.e., to insist that
Buddhist ethics is only for Buddhists, isto essentialize what it means to “be” a
Buddhist), but I would like to suggestthat there are other ways to view the liberal and pluralistic place in which our diversified curriculum is leading us tostand. Another way is, indeed, to recognize that every particular ethical system isrelative to its time and place, but that ethical thinking wherever it arises is a lastingly rich and compelling activity inhuman experience, and, moreover, thatthe more I am exposed to ethics in all its
varieties, the more nuanced and multiply
ethical I am led to be. Using the same
logic, then, let us say that religion is alastingly rich and compelling activity inhuman experience, and the more I know
about it in all of its varieties the more religious I am inspired to be.
ote in this that I have not posited
any universal, tradition-free,generic, or perennial religion
that is at the bottom of all its varieties.
What I am experimenting with, however, is the idea of a passionate religiosity—or maybe I should say love ofreligion—that animates the mission of
our School while not being associatedwith, or bound necessarily to, any one
religion.
The question of how to study religion religiously while also remaining
aware of its relativity and historical embeddedness is one of the places where I
would like to leave this incoming classstanding, or pondering—not with theanswer but simply poised to ask thequestion. And there are so many ways toabide in that space; I can imagine a spectrum, from the historian who marvels
with delight at the seemingly infinite variety of weirdness that religious humans
have come up with, to the Jewish theologian who finds new depths of beauty inher own convictions by observing a
Muslim man kneeling in prayer to God.
For one end of that spectrum—the
one tending toward critical history—
part of what I hope that our Divinity
School will give us is a certain entitlement to be passionate about what westudy and write. And I don’t mean to saythat passion is the privileged domain of
religion, but simply that the study of religion has special resources to contribute. I want to go further than that,
however. What is it about religion thatN

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Harvard Divinity Bulletin

inspires passion? Perhaps we could talkabout the homologies drawn in many religious traditions between romantic, oreven sexual, love, and love and devotion
for God. Or perhaps we might just like it
to be that the Divinity School is a placethat not only tolerates but also encourages—in fact abides in comfort with—
passion in one’s academic work.
Or perhaps—and this is to movefrom being the critical historian to being
the philosopher of religion—one might
think in formalistic terms about what it
is at the bottom of mundane existencethat gives rise to religion. I have in mind,
as an example, Martin Heidegger’s meditation on the nature of thinking and hisbrilliant and provocative realization thatto think is synonymous with having gratitude1—that, inspired by the etymological connections between “think” and“thank,” he was led to ponder what it isthat calls upon us to think, how what isthought-provoking is a gift, how boththinking and thanking are rooted inmemory, a memory that is founded in
keeping in mind, in concentration, and,in the end, in a kind of devoted abidingwith. And this idea that the act of thinking is in its very nature akin to a devoted
gratitude for its being points to a
provocative affinity between a most basic
human activity and one of the most basic
sentiments of religiosity.
I would like to use such a discovery of
pious gratitude at the heart of all thinking
as a model to explain to myself (surely abundle of contradictions religiously ifthere ever was one) why, while I don’t believe in a deity who is looking down uponme, or can make anything happen for oragainst me, why I still pray, fiercely, when
I am hoping for something, maybe mostin those moments when what I am wanting is beyond my power to effect and, infact, is most unlikely ever to be fulfilled.
An example would be when, in a Buddhist key, I pray that all people aroundthe world be removed from their terrible
suffering in war and plague, or when I
pray that all the animals of our world
who are suffering severe hardship andtorture could be relieved of their agony. I
wonder about this stance of prayer, which
seems to have nothing to do with any ontological propositions. I think of the Divinity School as a place where I canwonder, professionally, about that stance.
And finally, we might imagine what
the theologian-to-be, or even the minister-to-be, will take from this academic environment that will relate to her vocation.
Does the deployment of critical historicalmethods temper homiletic fervor, or does
it foster sensitivity and contemporary relevance? Does the identification of layersof the Bible as the products of particular
historical circumstances—or even morechallengingly, as adaptations of older,“pagan” traditions—undermine faith, or
will it increase our appreciation of themultiple sources from which religiosity
emerges? Does the recognition of similarstyles of devotion, or claims of legitimacy
in disparate religions, undermine theoriginality of revelation, or does the comparison make for a precise context inwhich to recognize the uniqueness within
the similarity while, even more important
yet, providing a set of bridges, or com-

mon spaces, in which to share religiositywith likeminded people from other partsof the world? Here I am indebted to Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s insistence that wemust be friends with the people whose religions we study, we must come to know,
as he says, “those qualities of the believer’s
life that can become known only in that
personal two-way relationship known as
friendship,” in which there is an implication that we have an ability to abide withother people’s religion—not just to study
it but also to inculcate ourselves in a common space so as to inhabit the questionsof religion together.2
When I first came to HDS two years
ago I harbored some question about whata Buddhologist would be doing in a divinity school, and even why the endowment of my chair had been accepted in
the first place. Although I was aware of
the very liberal and pluralistic orientationof HDS, it was still not clear to me howwhat I would be teaching would actually
fit into a curriculum that, as just discussed, seemed thoroughly Christiancentric. The answer of course was Area
III, but that only moved the question
from “why Buddhist studies?” to “why awhole area of the curriculum devoted to
non-Christian religion?” As I poked
around for an answer, one of the main
reasons that I heard was that knowledgeof the other religions of the world were
thought to be particularly necessary forour ministerial training program. In thisday and age, with our globalizing society,
it is essential for a minister in any denomination and any neighborhood to have agood idea of the religious backgrounds
and heritage of all people around—so as
best to comfort the sick, give solace to thegrieving, to avoid insult or insensitivity toanyone, and to present one’s message inways that will be understandable to as
many people as possible.
I am very happy to be in the positionof educating Christian ministers in asmuch as they wish to learn about Buddhist ideas, customs, and literature. It isan honor to be in a position to explore
the resources of Buddhism with members of different religious communities.
But I have to say that if this were the only
reason for having Area III in our curriculum it would represent an impoverishedview of what the study of the non-Christian religions promises (again, Buddhism
is just one example). My own vision ofArea III at HDS is epitomized rather bya striking testimony I heard from an
MDiv graduate of the School who is now
the full-time minister at a Lutheranchurch. Tim Stein, pastor at Faith
Lutheran Church in Cambridge, said
during a recent panel here that the single
most influential course that he took
when he was a student at HDS was aclass in Buddhist ethics. He didn’t elaborate, but I know enough about his
preaching and ministry to know that hehas been deeply moved by what helearned from Buddhism during that semester. And notice I say “learned from”
Buddhism, rather than “learned about,”a key distinction for which we are indebted to Charles Hallisey.3 This knowledge that Pastor Stein “learned from”
did not shake his commitment as a
Lutheran or tempt him to convert.

Rather, he simply learned some thingsfrom the way of compassion thattouched him, and that perhaps affected
his understanding of himself and his
ability to be empathetic with others, insights that would continue to inform his
fully Lutheran ministry today.
It is probably our growing interest in
this sort of cross-fertilization, the profound effects of learning “from” many
forms of religion beyond the one withwhich we identify, that is the main reason why we are now in the process of figuring how to get rid of Area III. The idea
is that when the study of non-Christianreligions is integrated curricularly withthe study of Christianity, students will
still be able to concentrate on one or another specific religion, but there would
be no separate curricular category forthe “other” religions of the world.
Rather, if this change comes to pass, wewill be saying in our very curricular
structure that what we study here mostfundamentally is “religion”—or , if you
like, from a more socio-historical perspective, “religions.”
his shift is indeed a sea change.
Not only for what will surely still
be our Christian majority here, butjust as much for those of us working in
the other religions that are being so integrated. The best example I can give youof that again draws on my own field andexperience, an interesting reading groupin which faculty and doctoral students in
Buddhism from across the board at Harvard participated last year. We chose as
our last reading for the year an anthologyof essays entitled Buddhist Theology, andwe asked ourselves what the editors were
trying to do with that collection, andwhat the provocative title could mean.
In fact the American field of Buddhist Studies has been suffering from thelack anywhere in the United States ofsomething like a divinity school, or evena theology department, to promote Buddhist theological thinking. With the exception of a couple of small Buddhist
seminaries that are struggling because of
their very invisibility, Buddhist studies
has virtually always been taught in the
United States in liberal-arts religious
studies programs. And here the curious
irony obtains that while there is frequently a desire on the part of departments to hire committed Buddhists toteach Buddhism, it is also widely felt
that, in terms of teaching and writing,there is no room for confessional or normative Buddhist studies in the academy.
Something like Buddhist theology
would represent a move to write about
Buddhism from the inside, and this has ahost of problems. Most crucially, thelarge majority of Buddhologists in the
United States represent themselves as
not Buddhist, and the few that are Buddhists are recent converts. To do Buddhist theology without a communityfrom which one comes and for whom
one speaks does not make much sense.
Actually there is indeed a growing
American Buddhist community, but it islargely unconnected to academia, and it
sorely lacks the intellectuals and visionaries it needs to address the slew of difficult issues facing contemporary religion.

TThe likely place that community could
turn to, academic Buddhology, suffers
under a strong sense of its limitations, of
being restricted to studying Buddhism“objectively.” Indeed many of us—and I
can attest there was some trace of this in
my own case—feel considerable apprehension, especially with respect to getting tenure, that being a committed
Buddhist would actually undermine ourstanding in the field.
Now this should make little sense ina world in which virtually all of academia
has already rejected the ideal of objectivity—the idea that we should eliminate
subjectivity from academic work. That is
now agreed to be impossible. Nonetheless in Buddhist studies the ideal of
doing just that, eliminating all subjectivity in one’s work, still exerts a powerfulforce, such that in both the UnitedStates and Europe, people in Buddhist
studies are trained to speak only about
what the tradition “itself” says, what atext “itself” says—as if we could ever getat that free of our own framings, as if the
tradition itself knew exactly what it wassaying and was consistent all the time, as
if the text itself was fully self-conscious
in every word it recorded. I think thatsuch expectations have left my fieldbankrupt of ideas, frightened to learn
anything “from” the wealth of materials
that we study, too intimidated to appropriate anything whatsoever for fear ofsounding like a new-age entrepreneur,and too removed from the spirit and vitality of the traditions we study to venture anything original about intentions
or mentalities or tensions whatsoever,save to jump at a chance to prove a Buddhist wrong, to expose myths, or simply
and safely to edit a new text. And even
that, I can tell you, is not safe.
I think you know what I am going tosay: I am hoping that Buddhist studies,and indeed the study of all of the Area III
religions, at Harvard Divinity School
will be newly freed to find some intermediate place to stand, between extreme
philological conservatism and extreme
new-agey fundamentalism. A place
where this field can find room for voice
and originality in its scholarship. A place

for a Western Buddhologist to standwhen assessing Buddhist tradition froma critical—for example, a feminist—perspective. Such places have been cleared
for Christian scholars and intellectuals
across the board in the United States,
and members of our faculty here havecontributed critically in that clearing;
Buddhologists can learn from them.
We also need a place from which towrite—and perhaps this idea is closest to
my own heart—in ways that will be exciting and inspiring not only to other Buddholgists but also to scholars of English
literature, historians of medieval Christianity, historians of the subaltern collective in South Asia, scholars of American
religion. A place where we can begin not
only to talk about Buddhism not only as aset of unique, historically specific traditions, but also to recognize that we areoften exploring issues about institutions,and writing practices, and disciplines,
and ethics that are not uniquely Buddhist
at all, and have as much to say to scholarsof European religion as Foucault has tosay to scholars of Buddhism.
inally I want HDS to be a place
where Buddhist theology—whatever that might come to mean—isinformed closely by historical scholarship but also is brilliant in a thousand
ways on how Buddhist intellectual andliterary history can contribute to real-life
pastoral contexts. And that leads me to
my last point, about the still-vexed placeof ministerial studies at HDS.
Just as scholars should get guidance
and ideas on how to do critical Buddhist
feminism and critical Buddhist theology
at HDS, the School should also be an
ideal place for training Buddhist ministers. As in the case of the many Christiandenominations served here, of course
such Buddhist ministers in training—and
I have in my mind some of the young,vital leaders of the Zen centers around
San Francisco—would probably needextra training in the specifics of their tradition, from their own sectarian resources. But the more critical point is this:So many of the situations and issues they
will face as leaders in those Zen commu-

Fnities are not unique to Buddhism at all,and are really quite the same as those
faced by liberal Christian, Jewish, andMuslim communities across the country.
A budding Zen priest would learn
enormously from Peter Gomes on how
to preach with wit and passion, would
know so much more about how to guidea new American Buddhism by studying
the urban religion of Italian Americans
with Robert Orsi, would have insights
about how Zen developed in East Asia
by studying the syncretic origins of
Gnosticism with Karen King, would acquire a new intelligence about the basisof contemplation by taking Sarah Coakley’s course on Christian spirituality andmysticism, would get ideas about how to
encourage a feminist revamping of Zen
institutions through an education in thehistory of feminist biblical interpretations from Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
would learn about the art of self-revelation from Leila Ahmed.
I think the reason a Zen master in
America would be such a better Zen master in America if she had a Master of Divinity degree from HDS is that Zen
Buddhism in America is in many ways
more about the America part than the
Zen Buddhism part. And I say this not
only from a recognition that Buddhism inmodernity is a new Buddhism, and not
only in light of a post-Orientalist critiqueof Western projections of Buddhism,
which are so far from what Buddhism was
historically. I say it also from the perspective of the very conditions for religion
today in the Zen center and the Reformsynagogue and the progressive Episcopalian Church. We are all looking at thestatus of celibacy, the role of women, andthe nature of gender in religion in America; we are all affected by the need for
racial and economic justice; we are all facing the problem of faith in the nuclear
age. As Peter Steinfels has suggested
forcefully in his blunt new book, A People
Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic
Church in America, if a religion fails to respond with intelligence and ingenuity to
the axial shifts in culture going on today, it
is going to die a fast death.4
But more than calling for relevance, I

want us never to forget that this American religion, like Emerson’s—and our—still “new yet unapproachable America,”5is just in the making. We are participating right now in the making of it at theDivinity School, just as we are making
what the study of that religion should be,
and discerning how a divinity school
should take leadership in the new century. With Emerson, I am obsessed withthat shining image just beyond the horizon. I am impatient to be there already.
Yet I learn from him that I will never bethere. And perhaps I can now say—not
only for myself, but also for Harvard Divinity School—that to learn that theplace where we stand is a shifting andever new place is a good thing, a goodplace to start to feel at home. ◆Notes
1 Martin Heidegger, What is Called
Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray.
New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
2 “Comparative Religion: Whither—andWhy?” p. 39 n. 18, in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, edited byMircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa.
Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1959, pp. 31-58. He goes on to say
in the next sentence, “This is peculiarlytrue of religious faith, but applies insome measure to all human discourse.”
3 It was Hallisey’s Buddhist Ethics classthat Tim Stein was referring to. Hallisey
has elaborated his distinction between“learning about” and “learning from”
further in his essay “In Defense ofRather Fragile and Local Achievement:
Some Reflections on the Work of Gurulugomi,” in Religion and Practical Reason,edited by David Tracy and Frank
Reynolds. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1994, pp. 121-162, regarding the difference between treating
something as an object for analysis, andadopting it as a tool of analysis (p. 136).
4 A People Adrift : The Crisis of the Roman
Catholic Church in America, New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2003.
5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,”in Essays: Second Series, Cambridge,
Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 259.

In the Beginning of Creation Was Consciousness
The Dudleian Lecture for 2002-03
by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
y lecture title may sound somewhat strange, but I chose it on
purpose. I believe that we are, atthe present moment, at the cusp of thecurve of life—what the French call coursede vie—of the paradigm that has dominated Western civilization since the Renaissance. And this transformation has at

M

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is University
Professor at George Washington University. This lecture was given on May 1, 2003,
in the Sperry Room, Andover Hall.

its heart the question of consciousness.
This change began about 50 years ago,right on this campus, with Thomas
Kuhn, a major American philosopher ofscience and an old friend, and a few others, including myself, who were grappling with this question of paradigm
shifts. He and I did not exactly agree on
what the shift was or what we meant byparadigm, but we both felt that a majorchange was afoot. Of course, thesethings do not happen quickly, as he himself pointed out in his important writ-ings. It takes some time. But I do believethat the most important questions thatface present-day civilizations involve not
only solutions within the present parameters within which people think, but also
those parameters themselves—that is,
the paradigm within which human beings carry out their intellectual and also
practical activities.
So, I speak about “in the beginningwas consciousness.” In fact, the original
title I had thought up for my lecture was“In the Beginning Is Consciousness”—

because “in the beginning” does not simply refer to a past time; it involves a principal reality here and now. Let me begin
by quoting from several of the sacredscriptures of the world. In the Rig Veda,
the oldest of all Hindu sacred scriptures,
we read, “When alone is the dawn beaming over all this, it is the one that severally becomes all this.” The one is Sat,
Chit, and Ananda—that is, the threestates of being, blessedness, bliss, and, ofcourse, consciousness, Chit.
(Continued on next page)

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