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John Kieschnick, "Buddhist Historiography in China" (Columbia UP, 2022)
00:49:10
An interview with John Kieschnick
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John Kieschnick
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Podcast Host (New Books Network Intro)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
Hello and welcome to a new episode of the New Books Network. I'm joined today by John Kiesnick, who is the Robert H.N. hob Family foundation professor of Buddhist Studies at Stanford University. This week's episode is Crossing various Channels, both of Chinese Studies, Buddhist Studies, East Asian Studies, and History. I'm delighted to be joined by the author of previous works such as the Eminent Monk Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography, the Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, and a co editor of India in the Chinese Imagination. Today we will be discussing his new book. I'm very excited to be discussing this book, Buddhist Historiography in China. Welcome John.
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John Kieschnick
Thanks for having me on your podcast.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
I'd like to begin with a question I think many listeners might be very curious about, which is how does one and how did you become a professor of Buddhist studies?
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John Kieschnick
Well, my initial interest was really in China, which was sparked when I was a teenager by objects lying around the house. My parents had lived in Hong Kong for about 10 years in the 50s and 60s and I was born in Hong Kong but left when I was an infant. So I have no memory of their life in Hong Kong. But nonetheless they had Chinese objects around the house, these little ivory balls, there was a little plastic image of Maitreya, a couple of Chinese scrolls, and in particular a bilingual edition of all things the Four Books. And I saw that on my father's shelf and I think maybe like a lot of non Chinese Sinologists, was just attracted to the mystery of the Chinese character and that these Chinese characters could represent the same thing as the English on the other side. For the whatever it was, the 13 year old me and really wanted to decipher those symbols and figure out what they meant. So I started by taking some Cantonese classes with my mother for a few weeks. And then when I found out I could take Mandarin at the community college, I went to the local community college to start taking Chinese there. And that led to an interest in contemporary Chinese politics and contemporary Chinese literature. And then after high school, when I went to university at Berkeley, I discovered that you could also study classical Chinese and that opened up Chinese philosophy, Chinese religion, classical Chinese literature. About the same time I took a course in college from the late, great P.S. jaini, a very charismatic professor of Indian religion. I took a course with him on Buddhism and that's what attracted me to Buddhism. And I think after that the rest is basically an academic CV. So from there I went and did a PhD at Stanford where I worked with Bernard Foer and with Albert E. Dean, and then spent periods studying in Xi' an in Beijing in Taiwan and eventually after graduating from Stanford, I worked for close to 10 years at the Institute of History and Philology as a researcher at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and then spent about six years in the uk where I taught at the University of Bristol and then taught in Hong Kong and the Department of Chinese Culture at Hong Kong Polytechnic. And after that finally ended up where I am now as a professor at Stanford. Overall, at the area that I've tried to carve out for myself in academia is, I suppose, the place of Buddhism in Chinese culture and conversely the place of Chinese culture in our understanding of Buddhism.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
And so your new book, Buddhist Historiography in China, this is the kind of book that for me personally, in my own research, I've. I've always wanted a book like this to be out there because there are sometimes questions that I had about what do Buddhists think of time and temporality? And I was really excited when I saw this, the press release for this book and I reached out. So for our listeners, as a first Basic question regarding this book. Could you explain why was the past important for Buddhists, and in particular for Buddhists in China?
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John Kieschnick
Well, what's interesting is the tendency to assume that the past shouldn't matter for Buddhists. We start with this assumption that history shouldn't be important for Buddhists, first of all, because of the common assumption that India doesn't have a historiographical tradition, and secondly, because of the common Buddhist belief in cyclical time. So if time is cyclical, and if the ultimate goal of Buddhism is escape from the cycle of Samsara, then the past shouldn't really matter. And so I think many people have that assumption going in. But in fact, we find history everywhere in Buddhism, whether it's in East Asia or in India, perhaps in part on a more abstract level, because those cycles of time that Buddhists mostly accept are so vast that there's a natural fascination with determining which bit of that time we are a part of. So in that sense, history has been important to Buddhists. I think history is also important to Buddhists because of the fundamental importance of the doctrine of karma. And karma is a fundamentally historical doctrine. That is, you can only see how karma plays out over time, whether it's in an individual life or over sometimes vast expanses of time, before you see the results of karma created in a previous life. So those are some of the reasons that history is important to Buddhists, as well as the reasons that history is important to everyone, as a way of understanding your own narrative, your place in your society and your place in time.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
Right. And I think that you mentioned India as a sort of an aspect of the story and also of places in society and place in time. I was wondering if you could outline what challenges did Buddhists working in China, obviously not in a vacuum, a social, cultural vacuum. What challenges did they have trying to discuss India and place it within their own history in China?
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John Kieschnick
This was, in fact, one of the great challenges of Chinese Buddhist historiography is that while I would argue that history is important in India, certainly the past is important in India. You don't see the same kind of formal historiography in India that you see in China. Indians were not particularly concerned with dates, for example, whereas Chinese historians from very early on were obsessed with dates, very precise dates. And so this was a source of great frustration for Chinese historians trying to reconstruct Indian Buddhist history in the absence of dates. One striking example, really, is that the date of the Buddha that the Chinese Buddhist historians wanted to start their histories on a firm date of the Buddha's birth, the Buddha's nirvana. And in order to do that, they had to be very creative in their use of sources. So this was one of the great challenges for Chinese Buddhists.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
Yeah. And on the topic of sources, did you find in your reading of this kind of vast body of material, were there anxieties about authenticity when it comes to resources to sources? Was there concerns about Apocrypha sneaking in and reconstructing their understanding of Buddhism?
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John Kieschnick
Yeah, and it's an interesting case because at times you see a very sophisticated analysis of sources in pre modern Chinese Buddhist historical writings in which they use very sophisticated techniques for determining which sources they considered reliable or for arguing for one date over another. But at the same time, there were certain blinders that cut them off from what we as modern historians see as obvious problems with certain sources. So, for example, while they could be very sophisticated in trying to demonstrate that a particular text had been fabricated in Chinese and did not represent a translation from an original Indian language, as soon as they could demonstrate that a text had been composed and translated from an Indian language, they refused to question it. That is, I don't know of any examples of Chinese Buddhists questioning the veracity of a text that, that came, that they could demonstrate came from India.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
But there was also, as I understand it, reading this, there was also an element of authority involved in this understanding of texts. Because was it that the, the texts that were coming from India often were then filtered through court and state sponsored large translation projects? And did this kind of go ahead. Oh, did this give it that, those veneers of respectability on top of the fact of it's their, their kind of far away origin?
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John Kieschnick
Yes, for sure. So the state is a big part of the story of Chinese historiography as it is in the story of most aspects of Chinese history. Most texts that were translated into Chinese were from early on translated by committee, by a large committee in front of an audience and sponsored by the state and eventually incorporated into an official Buddhist canon. And all of these elements, the state support, the audience, the structure of that committee, all lent an air of authority to texts that were in the Buddhist canon.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
So we have a situation throughout Chinese history where there is official, you could say canonical court compiled histories of China and Chinese dynasties and regimes. And at the same time, we have Buddhists tapping into that tradition, but also interpreting what's coming from India. And this kind of brings us onto your discussions of karma, because those listeners who may be familiar with the historiographical tradition, the orthodox one in China, there's a degree in which historians are engaged not only in documenting, but also in verifying, but also in moralizing and discussing the ways that moral authority is rewarded in the past. And so I'm very interested. I was fascinated by your discussion in this book about how the Buddhists brought their own ideas of ethics and morality into their narrations of history with the doctrine of karma.
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John Kieschnick
I think that Buddhist historians were very self aware that they were introducing something new to the Chinese historiographical tradition when they discussed karma. So my favorite example of this is this. One of the most famous sections of Sima Qian Shiji is in his biography of two officials named Shu Qi and Boyi, who were virtuous men, but who, through no fault of their own, died these horrible, miserable deaths. And after describing their lives, Sima Qian has a famous lament about the caprice of fate. You know, how could these virtuous men have suffered in this way? Is there no justice in the world? And Sima Qian kind of leaves this open question as a. As a point of, you know, emotional release for himself, right? That how could this have happened? But some centuries later, when Dao Xuan, the great Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk, was writing about this same story, he criticizes Sima Qian for not understanding the basic principles of karma. That is, if Shu Qi and Boyi suffered during their life, it is from moral decisions that they had made in previous lives. So there was justice. They were being punished for something they had done in previous lives, and their virtuous actions during their lives wouldn't go unrewarded in a future life. They would be rewarded for those virtuous acts. So for Buddhist historians, there was great power, great explanatory power in the idea of karma as a way of understanding the thread of justice that runs throughout history. And at the same time, they could use karma also as a tool for explaining causation, for explaining why certain events happened throughout history, and tracing those back to moral decisions that individuals had made in the past. So that's part of what makes karma such a power, such a powerful historiographical tool. And I think that karma, maybe more than any other element, is what distinguishes Buddhist historiography from other forms of historiography, whether in China or in other Buddhist cultures.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
Right? And on this topic of karma, you brought up this idea of individual decisions and actions and this kind of agency. In this book, you also discuss the role that prophecy plays as well, and this idea that things could be fated to happen based on prophecies in the past. In your exploration of prophecy, did you see an interaction or a conflict between the way that karma is used as a historiographical tool? But then this idea that things also being preordained through prophecy.
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John Kieschnick
I don't see so much a contradiction in that. I think a skillful Buddhist historian would see that the prophecies are fulfilled at some level because of karma in the past. So I think they would bring those two together. What puzzled me most about the persistent reference to prophecy in Buddhist historiography is that they're usually referring to events that have already taken place. Right. So they are not in general, interested in prophecies that are beyond the historian's life. They're interested in prophecies that have already been fulfilled in the past. So they tell a story in which a particular monk prophesies that a monastery will burn down after so many years, and then they record that in fact, after that period, the monastery did burn down. But what's always puzzled me and still really continues to puzzle me is that in the stories themselves, these prophecies never seem to really do anyone any good. That is, they're telling stories about a holy monk who prophesies a certain event will happen, and then no one acts on that prophecy and the prophecy comes to pass. So I still remain puzzled as to why they continue to tell these stories. To a certain extent, they lend legitimacy to claims about the sacred character of the prophets, of the monks making these prophecies, but that doesn't really seem to be the driving force behind them in the book. I argue that, in part, it's a way, as in so much of historiography, of simply bringing order to the past, of saying that events played out the way they did, not because of a random circumstances, but because of, first of all, karma, and second, because of certain preordained dynamics. But to be honest, I'm still not entirely convinced by my own argument, and I still remain a bit puzzled by just the prevalence of these prophecies that never really seem to help anyone in the stories that they're told in.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
Right. Yeah. It is sort of perplexing when you put it that way, but I do take note of how you. How you sort of elicit out of this. This idea of ordering the past and ordering the world, and that that kind of ties in, then later into what you notice is this shift in Buddhist historiography into the second millennium of the current era, where there's a rising provenance, the prominence of the. The genre of genealogy and the importance of creating ordered lineages. I was wondering if you could explain you use this term genealogy, many will understand that Buddhist monks were primarily celibate, and therefore, when we use genealogy, we're not necessarily talking about genetic or biological genealogy. Could you explain this practice of these genealogies in that context?
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John Kieschnick
So the genealogy is essentially a family tree, where instead of parents and children, you have masters and their disciples that form a lineage of monks. And this idea of lineage has always been present in Buddhism, and the relationship between masters and disciples has always been important. But it became particularly prominent, as in the Tang Dynasty, especially in the Tiantai lineage, and more than anywhere else, in Chan lineages, where different monks would trace their ancestry back through a series of masters, all the way back to the early patriarchs of their tradition, then to India, and eventually to the Buddha himself. So there has been a wealth of really excellent scholarship on Chan genealogy in the past, I don't know, 40, 50 years reading through these texts and showing how different lineages tried to link themselves up, back to. To an authentic tradition that goes back to the Buddha, implying that those who are not in their genealogy, that monks who are not on that family tree, are in some way less authentic than they are. And what I've been trying to do in my own reading of this material is to make the point that these genealogies aren't just a way of establishing lineage. It's also a way of ordering the past. It's also a type of historiography. And you even have examples of historians using genealogies that aren't to their own personal benefit. So it's a way of taking hundreds of biographies of monks and putting them in an order, even when it's not necessarily legitimating the lineage of the historian themselves. So that was one of the things I've tried to do with genealogy. The other big, more abstract question was whether you see historical consciousness in these Chan genealogical histories. And the histories are typically, it's a disciple who meets with a master. They have an exchange, and the essence of the dharma is transmitted from the master to that disciple. And then many of these stories are collected into these large genealogies showing who was whose master, who was whose disciple. But one question that was raised some decades ago by Chan scholars is whether there is really historical consciousness in these types of works. By that, they meant, did Chan monks and writers of these Chan histories write really care about whether the events they were describing actually happened as described? And this is a major problem in historiography is the question of whether the sort of objective reconstruction of the past, for its own sake, is essentially a modern invention. So is it possible that for ancient historians, medieval historians, the point of history was to convey a moral lesson, or the point of history was to promote a particular agenda or particular ideal? Or did they actually care whether the events they were describing happened precisely as described? And my conclusion, after going through the material in detail, particularly looking at the points at which historians kind of intervene in their narrative, my conclusion was that in fact, the conventional understanding that it's to some extent they were trying to reconstruct the past, that they did care that the things they described happened as they described them, holds up pretty well. And I say that because, whether it's in the Chan historiography or other Buddhist historiography, you often find debates over what seem to be really mundane matters. The Chinese historians in particular were very concerned with precise dating. So you'll have these very virulent debates between different historians arguing whether a certain event happened in 841 or 842. But nowhere do they explain why this matters, what's at stake. And when I collected enough of these sorts of examples, I came to the conclusion that what was at stake for them was a demonstration of their historical craft, their craft as historians, and that underlying these efforts was in fact, a fairly traditional, conventional desire to reconstruct the past as it happened. So that's the second thing I was trying to do, especially in the Chan chapter, by looking at Chan genealogies where historians make these kinds of adjustments to dates or calculate exactly how many days did it take Bodhidharma to travel from the south to the capital. In those arguments, we can see this allegiance to reconstructing the past as it was.
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Podcast Host (New Books Network Intro)
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
Yeah, and this this thread of the idea of craft and the degree to which the historians recognize that they're engaging in a craft, either explicitly or implicit, like runs through the runs through the whole book. You also raised another thread that runs through, which is agenda. And I was particularly struck by, in your discussions of genealogy, the times when genealogical writing could be quite dangerous or provocative, and the degree to which there was actually sectarian kind of tensions and conflict within Buddhist communities.
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John Kieschnick
Yes, in this I'm really standing again on the shoulders of the giants of Chan literature who have been writing about genealogy, like I say, for the past 40 or 50 years and have gone back to the standard story, the standard genealogy, especially inch, of Bodhidharma transmitting the dharma to his disciple, to his disciple of the sixth patriarch and the fifth patriarch. They've gone back and especially by looking at Dunhuang documents, shown that the conventional genealogy of Chan that most of us would know, or most Chinese Buddhists would know in the 20th century was just one possibility, and that there were many competing genealogies in which the dharma went in very different directions. So these scholars have shown very clearly that a lot was at stake in these genealogies. Nothing can tear a family apart more quickly than a disputed inheritance. And you see that at play in these genealogies as well, that where you are in the family tree represents how important you are in the family, and worst of all is to be left off of the family tree, especially when what is at stake is your legitimacy as a religious figure. So there was a lot at stake in genealogies. There was lots of contention. Often the most emotional passages in Buddhist historiography are when historians are criticizing their enemies, criticizing other historians. I don't know if this is true of academic writing in general, but it's definitely true of the Buddhist historiography in China. And they were emotional because their own legitimacy was at stake in how these genealogies were constructed.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
So you mentioned standing on the shoulders of giants of previous scholarship. And this, this kind of brings us to the penultimate chapter on modernity, where we are introduced after a long period of history, where Chinese Buddhists are writing histories of Buddhism themselves to now having outsiders, non Buddhists, writing history both within China and outside of China, Westerners, Japanese scholars, and also bringing in academic tools and different disciplinary frameworks to analyze Buddhist history. I was wondering in this period, what is the tension between this kind of inner, if you will, writing of history within the Buddhist communities and then the scholarship of Buddhism from without.
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John Kieschnick
I considered for a long time when writing the final chapter on mostly the 20th century on modernity, whether or not to include academic historians. Because for modern historians, if your goal is to understand the history of pre modern Chinese Buddhism, the key figures are really almost all academics. There are these giants, Hu Shi Chang, Tang Yongtong, Chenyuan. These are great Chinese scholars who began to employ these new methods to study the past. They had were kind of quite a uniform group. They were all men. They had almost all of them studied abroad. They'd studied in Berlin, they'd studied in England, they'd studied at Harvard, et cetera. They all came from the same sorts of elite families. They all knew each other. They all went back to China and took up prestigious positions in the new prestigious universities and published in the same journals. And this was really the foundations of modern Chinese Buddhist studies in China. And similar things were happening in Japan which were at least as important for understanding China. But within the Chinese world it was this group of elite historians who kind of happened to settle on Buddhism as a topic of interest. But instead of looking at those figures, I decided instead to look at a handful of mostly monastics who had a faith commitment to Buddhism. These are people who called themselves Buddhists. So if we look at those academic historians I just mentioned, none of them were self proclaimed Buddhists. And some of them, like Hu Shi, was even anti Buddhist. He had very strong views opposed to Buddhism. But instead I focus on a couple of monks and their own emerging style of historiography. And again, they're very similar, these different monks, but they are in a completely different world from the academic historians. So instead of coming from elite families, most of them came from either middle class or even very poor families. They were raised in monasteries where they were largely self taught, they published only in Buddhist journals and had very little interaction with this exciting new historiography that was coming out of the universities. So my favorite example of that is, is that Tai Xiu was very interested in the way that Chinese history was characterized in H.G. wells book. H.G. wells wrote a Brief History of the World which had a section on China in it. Tai Xiu didn't read English, but he read the Chinese translation and then responded to this book and was inspired by H.G. wells take on Chinese history. Well, it turns out that H.G. wells, when writing that section, was consulting with the Chinese historian Fu Senyan, who at that time had met with him in London to talk about Chinese history. Instead of absorbing these new ideas directly from an academic historian like Fu Senyan, basically across the street, Tai Xiu in his monastery had to learn about it in this circuitous way via H.G. wells in England. So they were, these monastic historians were separated intellectually, they were separated socially, and they were separated economically from the academic historians. But that also is part of what makes them interesting, is they don't quite fit into the standard historiography of modern China in that they were absorbing some of these ideas from academic historians, but indirectly and at the same time developing their own techniques. I mean, the most interesting one of these that I spent quite a bit of time writing about is the remarkable Yin Xun, who again, was largely self taught and never mastered foreign languages, but definitely mastered the Chinese Buddhist canon and spent his entire career just immersed in the Chinese Buddhist canon, writing mostly about Indian intellectual history on the basis of Chinese materials and doing very interesting things.
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Interviewer / Podcast Host
Yeah, what I really loved about this, this chapter in particular, the, the one on modernity, was how sympathetic you were to the concerns and challenges of these 20 if these 20th century practicing Buddhist historians and how they were seeking within their own tradition to kind of explain the challenges to Buddhism that were coming from these, you know, elite, educated, secular academics. And it made me think just more broadly. I wanted to ask, as a historian of Buddhism yourself, where do you see your position and the task of a historian of Buddhism in light of recognizing these two different traditions both within and outside of Buddhism?
- [37:06]
John Kieschnick
So where do I see myself in this tradition? So one of the things I'm trying to do is to incorporate Buddhist historiography into the discussion of Chinese historiography more generally. So China is seen by many as being the great historiographical tradition. It has a continuous historiographical tradition from very ancient times right up to the present. And there's a wealth of scholarship on that topic. So one of the tasks I've set for myself is to try to claw out a space in that tradition for discussing Buddhist historiography particularly. So that's really my mission. At the same time, I'm trying to understand the dynamics of Buddhist historiography as it develops from the ancient period right up into the modern period, and to in some sense, at least support or recognize the efforts of some of these monastic historians, the monks working outside of that sphere of elite influence and academia in the 20th century, and to recognize the creativity of their work and also possibly their value for creating a different type of historiography. So I'm not going to be the one to write the Buddhist history of China, which would write a history of China from a Buddhist perspective, with an emphasis on causation, on no self, and on karma. But nonetheless, I think that's an interesting project for a committed Buddhist writer to take up, and it's something that I would be interested in seeing.
- [39:03]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Me, too. Yeah, that sounds like a really exciting prospect on that topic of, say, the future of the fields that you've been looking at. You finished this volume with a discussion of Xiang Yen, whose this. This book actually belongs to the Shengyin series in Chinese Buddhist Studies. I was wondering, do you also keep abreast of the newer generations that you mention briefly, of these practitioner Buddhist historians who are getting now PhDs while also being members of the Sanghya Sangha?
- [39:41]
John Kieschnick
Well, that's really been the shift in recent years, is that now I think Buddhists who are writing on Chinese Buddhist history in China have gone the academic route. So often they're receiving their PhDs in the west or in Japan. They're publishing in academic journals and academic presses. So at this stage, the distinction between a Buddhist history of Buddhism and a more secular academic history of Buddhism isn't as sharp as it once was. I ended that way by saying that in suggesting that, in a way, perhaps we've come to the end of Buddhist historiography. That may be premature to say that, but my point is that we no longer see even monks writing history using the sort of traditional Buddhist vocabulary to talk about the past that we once saw. They're no longer using karma to explain events when writing their histories. They aren't relying on prophecy as they once did, and in many ways are taking a fairly conventional academic approach to the history of Buddhism or to history in general.
- [41:01]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
And if I may, I wanted to ask a question just about working as a historian on this particular book. I was really impressed by the amount of material that you're working with. And you'd structured this volume by theme thematically, going through sources, karma, prophecy, genealogy, modernity, rather than making it a chronology. And I found that that was really helpful in discussing the issues. But also I noticed that you were picking from all of these different areas of the tradition. My question is, how did you go about organizing, taming and selecting the material for this project?
- [41:41]
John Kieschnick
Yes, and maybe in a kind of a haphazard way of reading through different sorts of texts and noticing certain themes. So it's basically reading. I think in total there may be 30 texts that I used at least frequently in the book. And so as I read through them, I followed certain themes that stood out. And in particular, I was always looking for themes that would suggest something distinctive about Buddhist historiography, as opposed to historiography more generally. And that's where those themes emerged. So another book which would be very useful would be a more straightforward chronological history of Buddhist historiography, which I kind of sketched out in a few pages, but didn't pursue. I mean, that's another book I would like to see, would be a good 3, 400 page book that simply goes year by year, showing the gradual development of genres of Buddhist historical storygraphical writing. But I guess that's just the way I think more thematically. So that's the approach I took in this book. But this is really just the beginning of the study of Buddhist historiography. So I'm drawing on other scholars who have worked on Buddhist historiography over the years. But given just the sheer wealth of material that's there, there's so much more to be done on all different levels, from philological studies and translation of basic historical works to. To a deeper exploration of some of the themes that I just barely touch upon in the book.
- [43:25]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
And of these 30 works that you are, that you were working through, you obviously working very closely and reading them very closely, and that really carries in the book. I was wondering, was there any particular author of these works that you felt an affinity with, or what was kind of stands out as your favorite of them to work with and to study?
- [43:47]
John Kieschnick
Oh, there are a lot, but I guess the one that I've spent the most time working with is Zanning, the author of the Songkao Sheng Quan. I made the kind of dubious decision whenever it was 25 years ago or maybe longer, when I was in graduate school, that I was going to translate this text, the Song Gao Shengjuan. And I've been working on it ever since. And I'm still working on the translation of that text. I say a dubious decision because the. There's a more famous collection of biographies of eminent monks that's Huijiao's, which is more famous, more influential, and also much, much shorter. So in retrospect, that's really where I should have started. I should have written. Started on a translation of that text, but instead I've been involved with the Song Kaohsungjuan, and I've also been involved with a scholar named Zhang Booyong and Marcus Bingenheimer at Templeton At Temple, Sorry. To create a new critical Chinese edition of the Song Kaohsunzhuan. And we've been working on that again for years, and it's been very complicated because of the textual difficulties of the text. It's a big text with lots of difficult passages, with multiple editions, with many sources for the original that you can still uncover and compare to the text. So that's a project that's been going on for decades, and I hope to finish before too long.
- [45:23]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Right. And in terms of the volume as well, I wanted to say this book is really wonderfully concise and very sort of directed and carries you through the argument. I'm always curious, asking authors, was there any material that you decided to leave out of this book because it didn't fit with the frame that you were putting together?
- [45:50]
John Kieschnick
Well, there's a lot that I've left out. Coming up with specifics is difficult. There are lots of authors that I would have liked to have talked about in greater length. There are a couple of genres that I would have liked to have talked about more, so particularly local history. I didn't talk about local gazetteers, and there's a long tradition of the Buddhist local gazetteer, which is in some ways distinctive from other gazetteers. So that's a huge body of material that I left out. I also left out the whole genre of autobiography. And Buddhism in China plays an important role in the history of autobiography because in the Ming, there were prominent monks who began to write autobiographies at a time when others were not writing autobiographies. And that has continued up into the 20th century and the 21st century of monks writing memoirs. There's a whole oral history series in Taiwan that's publishing memoirs of older, eminent monks and nuns and lay people that could also have been brought into that. So those are two big genres I would have liked to have put in, and lots of individuals, anecdotes from all of my notes that I would have liked to have included, but I hoped that I could keep the book kind of manageable. That's why I left them out.
- [47:12]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Wonderful. It's really apparent that Buddhist historiography is a really, really fertile area of scholarship and remains in the future. We've taken up a lot of your time today. I'd like to thank you a lot. And I'd like to finish with a pretty standard question, but one I'm very much eager to ask. You mentioned already your translation, your ongoing translation of the Gao Sandran. What are you working on next and what might we see from you in the future?
- [47:45]
John Kieschnick
Well, it'll be sometime coming, but I've just started work on a history of vegetarianism in China. And just this summer I started with what now I project to be chapter five or chapter six, which is Vegetarianism during the Republican period. I just started by going through newspapers from that period and pulling out references to vegetarianism and reading through some of the works of prominent Buddhists at the time. And it's just been fascinating because there's so many such a collection of eccentric figures and free thinkers. There's a connection to msg. There were arguments over vegan soap, there were anarchists who were vegetarians, and there were Buddhists who were drawing on very traditional ideas about karma and rebirth to promote vegetarianism. So I'm having a lot of fun with that and that that's. So the Republican part I see is just one chapter. And my ideal would be, if I can pull it off, to write a general history of vegetarianism in China, including not just Buddhist vegetarianism, but vegetari in popular religion in Daoism, ideas about meat in the pre Buddhist Chinese tradition as well. So that's what I'm invested in right now, alongside the translation of the song Kaohsiun.
- [49:11]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Excellent. Well, I look forward to both of these projects once they're ready for the world. I'd like to thank you very much for joining us today, John.
- [49:20]
John Kieschnick
Oh, thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.