INTERPRETING BUDDHIST YOGA

Students and scholars approaching a vast amount of primary and secondary literature, as well as accounts and anthropological and sociological studies of Buddhism as a lived religion, are faced with an array of stories, data, theories and practices, many of which appear to be inconsistent with others.  We try to make sense of these by interpreting them.

The art or science of interpretation – “hermeneutics” after Hermes – has a long history in Asia and in the West.  Buddhism itself has a tradition of hermeneutics, as does each of the Western religious traditions and Western philosophy and law, starting with Plato and Aristotle, becoming “romantic” with Schleiermacher, and “modern” with Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur.  Today’s Western hermeneutics has become largely de-regionalized from specific subject areas, and has been extended to the interpretation of all human experience.

After a grounding in traditional Buddhist and Western hermeneutic principles, we will focus on a number of aspects of Buddhism, including the central question of whether there is a “self” or not, and on esoteric Buddhist yoga, Tantra, central to several of the better-known forms of Buddhism today, including Tibetan Buddhism.  Here we will witness the confluence and, sometimes, collision of traditional Buddhist and Tantric hermeneutics focusing in large part on “spiritual” concerns, and the Western tradition, with its emphasis on economics, power, and gender.  In thinking about which interpretations are “right” -- indeed, whether any interpretation can be “right,” and, if so, "how much?" -- we will consider the cultures in which these scriptures and practices originated, as well as ourselves and our own contemporary perspectives, insights, presuppositions and prejudices.

A primary concern of hermeneutics is the interpretation of so-called "objective" physical and subjective mental realities.  In thinking about the hermeneutics of outer and inner time and space, towards the end of the semester we will consider whether the "objective" and the "subjective" intersect, how much, and look at some descriptions of quantum mechanics and the role of observation of physical reality there, and analogize and contrast those to and with some Buddhist systems of philosophy and practice.