Luis O. Gómez

Luis Óscar Gómez Rodríguez (7 April 1943 – 3 September 2017) was a Puerto Rican buddhologist, translator and psychologist. He is most well-known for his work on Mahāyāna texts and for establishing the Buddhist Studies graduate program at the University of Michigan. His scholarship was characterized by a philological approach to texts emphasizing the historical aspects of ideas derived from the close reading of the primary sources in their canonical languages. He was trained under the guidance of several prominent scholars such as Stanley Insler, Herbert V. Günther, Paul Tedesco, Johannes Rahder|Johannes Rahder, Paul Mus and Étienne Lamotte.
For more than 40 years, he held several academic positions. First in the Department of philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico, then at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and, later, at El Colegio de México. Throughout his tenure years, the University of Michigan conferred him the position “Charles O. Hucker Professor of Buddhist and Religious Studies.” at the Asian Languages and Cultures department, while simultaneously acting as the head of that department. Moreover, he also worked as a Professor of Psychology at the Psychology Department. After retiring, he was granted the title “Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus of Asian Languages and Cultures.” In his later years, having moved to Mexico City, he held a Professor-Researcher position at the Center for Asian and African Studies of El Colegio de México.
=== Early childhood and education ===
Luis Gómez was born on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, in a town called Guayanilla. The son of Manuel Gómez, a physician, and Lucila Rodríguez, a housewife. He was the second of four siblings. His love and passion for reading stemmed from the influence of his great-aunt Carmen Gómez Tejera, the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in Education in Puerto Rico.
He started his Bachelor’s Degree at the University of Puerto Rico at only sixteen years old, and graduated from that program in 1963 with a B.A. in Philosophy and Foreign Languages. By that time, he already had basic command of Sanskrit and Japanese. After graduation, he departed from Puerto Rico to start a Ph.D. at Yale University. In 1967, he graduated from the doctoral program at the Language and Literature Department. He became Doctor of Philosophy in Buddhist Studies, Indic Philology, and Japanese Language and Literature.
In his doctoral dissertation, advised by Stanley Insler, he produced a critical edition and translation of some portions of the Gandavyuha|Gaṇḍavyūha sūtra, a Buddhist text that comprises the 39th chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra|Avataṃsaka sūtra. This edition was based on four Sanskrit manuscripts, three Chinese translations and two Tibetan versions. The work provided a reconstruction of the history of the text by means of studying the linguistic variation of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit#:~:text%3DBuddhist%20Hybrid%20Sanskrit%20(BHS)%20is%2C%22%20or%20%22Mixed%20Sanskrit%22.|Buddhist Sanskrit.
His curiosity in canonical literature and his pedigree of scholarly training lead him to learn a variety of Buddhist languages. Following the multilingual approach of Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, the mentor of his teacher, he acquired reading proficiency in at least six canonical Buddhist languages: Japanese, Sanskrit, Pāli, Middle Indo-Aryan languages (both Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa), Classical Tibetan and Classical Chinese, as well as several modern languages of scholarship, such as Italian, French, German and English. Moreover, due to his interest in religious traditions, he also had competence in Classical Latin. All these languages in addition to his native Spanish, which he often used to create poetry. This fascination with languages gave him the linguistic ability that would later become a hallmark of his scholarship.
=== Career ===
After graduating from Yale, he returned to Puerto Rico as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department. He remained there for one year (1967) before accepting a temporary position at the University of Washington, where he taught during the following year (1967-68), and then went back to the University of Puerto Rico.
In Puerto Rico, along with Roberto Torretti|Roberto Torreti, he edited the book Problemas de la Filosofía (1975), an anthology created for College Students majoring in philosophy. The book includes a section on Chinese and Indian Philosophy, both edited and translated by Luis Gomez. To the present day, it remains one of the few philosophy books in Spanish to incorporate non-Western philosophy on a par with Western thought.
==== Asian Languages and Cultures ====
His tenure at Michigan started in 1979 in the former Department of Far Eastern Languages and Literature. There he taught courses on a wide array of topics, ranging from mysticism to Buddhist literature and philosophy of religion. Moreover, he gave lectures in several courses about ritual with anthropologist Roy Rappaport. Donald Lopez has credited him with training the next several generations of Buddhist Scholars. Reiko Ohnuma, Charles Goodman, Robert Sharf, and Jonathan Silk were some of his doctoral students.
==== Honors and Awards ====
He received several awards for his commitment to teaching. For example, in 1995 he was recognized with the John H. D’Arms for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities, and in 1997 he received the Arthur F. Thurnau award for his contributions to teaching in the undergraduate program.
=== Work ===
==== Bodhicaryāvatāra ====
He worked for over forty years on the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra and produced several translations of the text in different languages, along with an influential review of three contemporary translations. His review, dubbed “The Way of the Translators: Three Recent Translations of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra,” does not only provides an assessment of previous translations, but also shows the problems translators must solve when dealing with the Sanskrit Shastra|śāstra genre, and with the cultural specificity of Śāntideva’s work. His English translation of the Bodhicaryāvatāra appeared in the Norton Anthology of World Religions and his annotated translation in Spanish was published under the name Camino al Despertar. The latter is accompanied by a critical introduction to the oeuvre, as well as dense endnotes that provide a roadmap to understand both his translation choices and the methods used in Buddhist textual studies.
====Translation====
His knowledge of several canonical languages prompted his interest in translation, which led him to become an avid and skillful translator. He rendered influential Buddhist works such as the Sanskrit and Chinese versions of the Shorter Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra|shorter and the Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra|longer Sukhāvatīvyūha sūtras, published under the name The Land of Bliss, as well as translations of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra and Kamalaśīla’s Bhāvanākrama|Bhāvanākramas'.
Furthermore, Luis O. Gómez was also interested in translation theory. He considered translation a process of cultural transference, a view that he sums up in his review on the Bodhicaryāvatāra’s translations. There, he mentions that “the value of a translation is not determined exclusively by a goodness of fit between audience and translated text, or between preferred interpretation and preferred rendition. The value of translations is also measured in terms of grammatical and idiomatic constraints, by rhetorical and cultural parameters, and by the limitations of cultural context and language usage.”
==== Buddhist Translators Workbench ====
In his final years, he established the Buddhist Translators Workbench (BTW) at the Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Studies. The project, produced along Indologist Ligeia Lugli, is a lexicographical tool that helps translators of Buddhist Sanskrit texts render technical terms into English. The database provides contextual information on the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic particularities of Buddhist lexical items.
==== Sudden/Gradual debate ====
Luis O. Gómez also produced three relevant articles that contribute to the understanding of the Samye Debate and its contemporaneous controversies within early Chan Buddhism|Chan tradition: "Indian Materials on the Doctrine of Sudden Enlightenment," "The Direct and the Gradual Approaches of Zen Master Mahāyāna: Fragments of the Teachings of Mo-Ho-Yen," and "Purifying Gold: The Metaphor of Effort and Intuition in Buddhist Thought and Practice.” He also published a Spanish translation of the Bhāvanākramas in order to showed the Indian side of the controversy.
These articles, written as a response to Paul Demiéville’s essay "Mirror of Mind," framed the debate by shedding light on the view of Kamalaśīla on par with the view held by northern Chan master Moheyan|Heshang Moheyan. According to Luis O. Gómez, the debate could be seen as an ideal polarity between two interpretations of the enlightenment experience, the Chinese side characterizing it as simple, ineffable and innate while the Indian side portraying it as a gradual process of spiritual growth susceptible of been divided into steps and degrees.
Robert Sharf characterizes Luis O. Gómez contribution to the understanding of the debate in terms of the methodology he followed in his articles. He mentions that Luis O. Gómez distinguished his research by an approach that focused “on local inflection and difference. In other words, [he held that] the culturally specific and local inflections often reflect, albeit obliquely, concerns that reach across cultural and historical divides.”
==== Pure Land Buddhism ====
Among the many contributions of Luis O. Gómez to the field of Buddhist studies|Buddhist Studies, the translation of the four Sukhāvatīvyūha sūtras stands out. He steadily worked on these translations for more than 10 years in order to produce the most philologically accurate version of these scriptures in a Western language. His work, dubbed in English as "The Land of Bliss, the Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless light—the Sanskrit and Chinese versions of the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras," is a freely translated and annotated rendering of the Chinese and Sanskrit versions of each of the sūtras, four versions in total, so as to capture the nuances that separated South Asian and East Asian forms of Pure Land faith. The “free translations” and the introduction of this book aimed at making the sūtras accessible tohe non-specialist, in other words, to those lay readers who are not familiar with Buddhist vocabulary or doctrine. A second volume aimed at the specialist never came into fruition.
=== Posthumous ===
The University of Michigan inaugurated the yearly Luis Gómez Memorial Lecture. On November 2019, Reiko Ohnuma gave the first lecture entitled: “Why Are Buddha Statues So Big? Space, Time, and Human Bodies in Buddhism.”
Category:1943 births
Category:2017 deaths
Category:Puerto Rican Buddhists
Category:Spanish psychologists