Prof. Christoph Emmrich: A Personal (Inter)View

by Jackie Cowan

I had intended to conduct an interview with Christoph Emmrich, one of the newest additions to the UofT Historical Studies Department, back in December. However, incompatible schedules and unpredictable life circumstances threatened to postpone the interview indefinitely. Fortunately, we were able to find the middle path and conduct interview through e-mail. While I worried that the results would lack the dynamism of a face-to-face discussion, this electronic journey has not only cleared up some of my misconceptions of Buddhism (namely that Buddhism is a religion, not a philosophy as commonly touted), but more importantly reiterated to me how important (and how difficult) it is to love others with compassion and without condition or attachment.

Christoph Emmrich is currently focusing his teaching on South Asian Buddhism and offers an Introduction to Buddhism undergraduate course at UTM and an Introduction to Sanskrit Buddhist Tantric Literature for graduate students at St. George. Interestingly, Prof. Emmrich is somewhat of a tourist guide, giving his undergraduate UTM students a ‘tour’ of the vibrant city of Kathmandu, Nepal, introducing them to its various Buddhist inhabitants and chronicling the emergences and resurgences of Buddhism across Asia. Prof. Emmrich’s graduate students downtown learn to become ‘codebreakers’ and decipher the tantric idiom known by some scholars as the “twilight language” while understanding how tantrism was integrated in Buddhist doctrinal material and ritual.

Prof. Emmrich earned his Ph.D in Classical Indology at Heidelberg University where he taught for a number of years. He also has extensive field experience in Bhutan, Laos, and most recently Nepal. Incredibly, Prof. Emmrich has a working knowledge of 15 different languages, including German, Polish, Buddhist Chinese, and of course, English. Currently, he is working on a book that focuses on Newar rituals and its intersections with gender and historiography.

1) Where else have you taught? How is UTM different from the other universities? Is the reception of Buddhist classes or Buddhism in general different here than elsewhere?

Until last year I had taught courses on Buddhism only at the University of Heidelberg in Southern Germany and in Florence, Italy. My German Buddhist classes were usually made up of students who had grown up in Germany, whose mother tongue was German and whose exposure to religion would have been either Roman Catholic or Lutheran Christian religion classes during their early school days. Most of them would not practice any religion and their parents would not have been very strong practitioners either. This means that my students used to be a rather homogenous crowd who encountered the texts and historical narratives I presented them with no other strong template in mind except a very vague idea of popular Mitteleuropean Christianity. Buddhism for them was a religion practiced far away in Asia or by some small alternative groups in the big German cities or advertised by travelling Tibetan lamas. During their studies starting from their first year, students are additionally expected to engage with the classical languages of Buddhism, Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan as well as to get acquainted with the non-Buddhist classical literatures of South Asia. This gives them both a good grounding and broad outlook, but also keeps them focussed on ancient rather than living Buddhism. The situation here in Mississauga is very different: my students have very diverse backgrounds, many of them come from families with a rich religious life and most of them are aware of the ways Asian religions generally travel with the people by whom they are practiced. This means that students here come with much more sensitivity regarding living Buddhist traditions and their historical vicissitudes and with much more detailed knowledge than German students. My UTM students are surprised at some things I say, react by remarking that some of the materials worked on in class have made them rethink what they knew, - which is one of the most encouraging things a teacher can hear.

2) What do you feel is (are) the most common Western misperception(s) of Buddhism? The movie "American Pie" has introduced 'tantra' to teen population; why do you think tantra has been popularized in such a manner? What are the common western misconceptions about tantra?

Misperceptions? That Buddhists are more peaceful and more spiritual than people from other religions.
Historically societies with Buddhism as their main religion have proven to be prone to both war and political repression not less than others: Tibet was a powerful military actor in the centuries prior to its annexation to the PR of China as were the Buddhist kingdoms of Southeast Asia like Burma or Siam who used to devastate each other's capitals, stealing images, destroying temples and slaughtering both monks and laypeople. Currently, Sri Lankan monks are in the forefront of protesting against holding talks with the Tamil separatists and favouring their military defeat instead, a stance that goes back to Buddhist chronicles in which Buddhist patriarchs encourage Medieval kings to slaughter the Tamil intruders because "they are less than human" and because the island belongs to the Sinhala people who are the only garantors for the protection of Buddhism. Again, the image of Buddhism as peaceful emerged in the West in the late 19th/early 20th century when peace as opposed to war became a value associated with rationality and progress and was used to critique certain religions such as Christianity or Islam and has less to do with Buddhism that with the multiple forms of criticism to which Buddhism may lend itself.

[It is also a common misperception that] Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion.
Buddhism came to be regarded as a philosophy and not as a religion by Western scholars in the late 18th and 19th century, who were either critical of Christianity, claiming that Buddhism was everything Christianity was not: rational vs. irrational, thought vs. belief, without rituals vs. ruled by rituals, human-centred vs. God-centred, to name but a few points. Those scholars were in search of an alternative to Christianity, and particularly one which would coincide with their own ideas of science, humanism and progress. They would be scholars for whom the ancient Greek philosophers as well as the modern philosophical exponents of the European enlightenment served as models to construct the figure of the Buddha as a philosopher concerned with ethics, epistemology and truth. The current belief that Buddhism is to be defined as philosophy go back to these roots and are carried by similar interests.

[Further misconceptions are] that Buddhist practice is mainly about meditation and nirvana. That we know exactly what the historical Buddha taught. As in all misconceptions there is a lot of truth in them and as all misconceptions they tell us more about what we expect than about what there is. That tantra in general and Buddhist tantra in particular is about sex is the most frequent misconception. Buddhist tantra is about as little about sex as the Christian church service is about cannibalism. The parallel also holds true in the sense that tantra is almost exclusively about rituals which go on for hours and outwardly look very much like things one can witness in Hindu temples or Christian Catholic or Orthodox churches, with incense, lights, recitations, offerings and hand gestures hardly any layperson understands, but is familiar with from childhood on. Again, there has been a historical tendency in European and American societies to exoticise and eroticise the “East”, to appropriate it by reducing it to the object of one’s desires and fears. Tantric Buddhism as a religion which is cool about sex comes handy as a counter-model to one’s own religion, perceived as repressive and un-erotic. Buddhists whose practices may be called tantric do not think of doing anything erotic when they worship at the temple. They may rather think that what they are doing may help their sick aunt get better. - I must see “American Pie”.

3)Your focus on iconography, the late indoctrination of tantrism and the literary tradition of Buddhism seems to emphasize the importance of the 'communication' of Buddhist ideals/traditions. How important is it to 'update' Buddhist writings in order to appeal or make more applicable to the current generation, western society or even from language to language? Is anything 'lost in translation'?

You touch upon a point which I find absolutely fascinating and which drives my own research and my teaching: how are Buddhist ideals communicated? I think that the production of Buddhist artefacts, thoughts, practices, texts, schools etc. is indeed best understood as a process of ‘updating’, of translating, of adapting to new circumstances which always includes making sure that nothing is lost or rather struggling to decide what it is that may or may not get lost. On the other hand, communicating in a Buddhist way does not mean that there is a Buddhist ideal which remains unchanged and has to be updated to a new non-Buddhist environment. The environment itself may be already shaped along Buddhist lines and new ideals may be made fit that environment. Or that so-called Buddhist ideal may under changed circumstances suddenly appear unclear, devoid of meaning, deficient, even un-Buddhist, which may lead to it being abandoned or replaced or thoroughly changed. The situation is indeed very tricky, but the diversity of forms of Buddhist practice both locally and historically shows that there is no easy way of explaining how Buddhism is communicated. Is anything lost in translation? Yes, all the time. If it weren’t lost there would be no loss for later generations of religious innovators or conservators to point at and no re-discovery they could claim to have made. In Buddhism, as in so many other religious traditions, everything imaginable is lost and found all the time.

4) In my personal experience, some people I’ve met have rejected some Christian dogmas
because they consider them inapplicable or ill-suited for today’s society. Have Buddhist traditions/rituals been drastically altered in order to 'keep up' with the circumstances of the 21st century? If so, which traditions/rituals have been 'updated' and in what ways?

Many, particularly younger Buddhists I know are unhappy about the things the monks or priests say or do, unhappy about what their traditions represent, with the way their customs collide with the beliefs they have developed in school, at university or in exchange with people from other countries. Being dissatisfied with the religion one was brought up with is something common to most religions, to Christianity as much as to Buddhism. This also means that “modernization”, as one may call changes dating back to the colonial period has been a growing part of the various forms of Buddhism. They reach back to Sri Lankan monks developing methods of preaching apt to compete with Christian missionaries or the establishment of publishing houses to promote Buddhist ideas in the 19th cent. and have led to a greater involvement of the monks in social work, such as education and health, adapting traditional roles of the clergy to contemporary needs. Individual traditional Buddhist leaders such as Buddhadasa in Thailand and the Dalai Lama have reformulated the Buddhist doctrine in ways to additionally accommodate the modern, literate, urban professional, by de-emphasizing devotional, legendary, mythological or cosmological aspects, including the belief in rebirth and superhuman beings and stressing instead the ethical and social message. The strength of many forms of Buddhism seems to be not so much radical change of the whole complex of doctrine and practice, than rather this diversification in regards to the public they are meant to address.

5)Tell me a little about Buddhist iconography. How is it different from an alphabet? Is it more open to interpretation than an alphabet? By using a written language, did it make Buddhism less accessible for those not educated enough to know how to read?

“Iconography” is the system behind the practice of making icons, with “icon” meaning an image used in religious practice. “Buddhist iconography” is something anyone learns who is trained in painting scrolls, frescoes and manuscript illustrations or fashioning sculptures representing buddhas, bodhisattvas, tantric deities, relic containers or generally religious representations. As the way most of these images are made, - both in terms of the way the material is worked on, as well as regarding the forms and styles of the images themselves,- is strictly prescribed by the tradition and formulated in handbooks, learning a certain iconography, be it Burmese, Thai or Tibetan, is a bit like learning a language, with its vocabulary and grammar and to be a good painter means to have mastered the iconography. Using images gives Buddhist narratives which are handed on through language, spoken or written, a parallel existence with cross-references from one form or representation to the other. Visitors to a temple can look at the pictures on the temple walls and talk about the figures and stories depicted. Buddhist manuscripts are intellectually accessible to very few and even among the monks who know how to recite the texts relatively few have the scholarly training to read and expound them.

6) How do you balance teaching Buddhism as a source of spirituality and as an academic discipline?

By being aware of the fact that I practice the latter to understand the former.

7) I’ve often wondered how geography can affect the social, political and economic climate of a country. How has the unique (land-locked) geography of Nepal shaped the way Buddhism was adopted and developed there?

This is a very intriguing question. I do not think that one can establish a direct connection between topographical features and forms of Buddhism, though one can probably identify a host of connections mediating between the two. Topographical features influence the forms of economy, the movement of people and commodities, which in turn shape their social organization and their conflicts. And then there are events beyond that horizon which have different causes and spill over and influence. Again, contemporary Nepal is an artificial entity created by different powers over time, the current royal dynasty who conquered and brought together much of what is modern Nepal, the British who needed a buffer state between the Raj and Tibet, and much of what holds true for Nepal holds true for other regions of the Himalayas. Additionally, there are many sub-regions within Nepal and there are many Buddhisms: Newar Buddhism can be localized in the Kathmandu Valley, ethnic groups called Sherpas and the Tamangs, who practise forms of Tibetan Buddhism, are found in the mountain ranges bordering Tibet, Theravada Buddhism from Burma is spreading throughout the country and exiled Tibetans together with monastic communities from Bhutan are constitute a very strong presence. If we pick the case of Newar Buddhism, - which is the focus of my own research, - and its locality, the large, fertile and protected Kathmandu Valley, on an old trade route, half way between the North Indian plains and the Tibetan plateau, we can assume that it was a place where there was enough money to create a Buddhist culture famous for its rich art and architecture, sponsored by Hindu kings who kept the Buddhists linked to the other great South Asian religion, a Buddhist culture admired by Tibetans and Indians alike, to which much of the scholarly Buddhist elite fled when their large North Indian monasteries collapsed in the late 12th century, where Tibetans sought refuge when their home country was annexed by the Peoples Republic of China in the mid-20th century, a valley with a political situation more stable over centuries than in most of its neighbouring regions. Landlocked, mountainous regions probably tend to be more successful in maintaining old structures and traditions longer than others, but the Kathmandu Valley seems to have been all other than “locked”. An old myth goes that in ancient times the Kathmandu Valley was covered by the waters of a lake which drained and left behind a fertile plain. If we indeed want to use a topographical metaphor this place comes closest to a lake around and within which living beings live and prosper, in good and in less good times.

8) This is a personal question I've often wondered. What is the difference between indifference and 'detachment'?

The difference between indifference and detachment is love. In indifference there is no love, but in love you can be both attached and detached. You can be attached if loving means that you are crazy about someone. And you can be detached if loving means that you can allow the person you love to lead his or her own life separately from yours and keep loving. Or if you can allow and accept him or her to have passed away and died without being desperate or angry and still preserve your love intact. Indifference is easy: you either feel it or you don’t. Being madly in love, though more rare, is probably as easy, once it has happened. But detached love is difficult, as is detachment, and is something which does not come without experience and practice.

9)If you had one short quote or saying to live by, what would it be?

athavaa bhavitavyaanaam dvaaraani bhavanti sarvatra, which translates as: “And yet, the doors leading to the events which have to occur are everywhere.”

10) What's your favorite jello flavour? (I just wanted to throw you for a loop there)

I am not a jello person, I prefer Snack Pack, - vanilla.