My Conversation with the excellent Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Donald discuss the Buddha’s 32 bodily marks, whether he died of dysentery, what sets the limits of the Buddha’s omniscience, the theological puzzle of sacred power in an atheistic religion, Buddhism’s elaborate system of hells and hungry ghosts, how 19th-century European atheists invented the “peaceful” Buddhism we know today, whether the axial age theory holds up, what happened to the Buddha’s son Rahula, Buddhism’s global decline, the evidently effective succession process for Dalai Lamas, how a guy from New Jersey created the Tibetan Book of the Dead, what makes Zen Buddhism theologically unique, why Thailand is the wealthiest Buddhist country, where to go on a three-week Buddhist pilgrimage, how Donald became a scholar of Buddhism after abandoning his plans to study Shakespeare, his dream of translating Buddhist stories into new dramatic forms, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Fire is a central theme in Buddhism, right?
LOPEZ: Well, there are hot hells, and there are also cold hells. Fire comes up, really, in the idea of nirvana. Where we see the fire, I think most importantly, philosophically, is the idea of where did the Buddha go when he died? He was not reborn again. They say it’s really just like a flame going out, that is, the flame ends. Where did the fire go? Nowhere, that is, the wood that was producing the flame is all burned up, and you just end. Nirvana is not a place. It’s a state of extinction or what the Buddhists call cessation.
COWEN: What role does blood sacrifice play in Buddhism?
LOPEZ: Well, it’s not supposed to perform any role. There’s no blood sacrifice in Buddhism.
COWEN: No blood sacrifice. How about wrathful deities?
LOPEZ: Wrathful deities — there’re a lot, yes.
COWEN: Then we’re back to supernatural. Again, this gets to my central confusion. It’s atheistic, but there’s some other set of principles in the universe that generate wrathful deities, right?
LOPEZ: Wrathful deities are beings who were humans in one lifetime, animals in another, and born as wrathful deities in another lifetime. Everyone is in the cycle of rebirth. We’ve all been wrathful deities in the past. We’ll be wrathful deities in the future unless we get out soon. It’s this universe of strange beings, all taking turns, shape-shifting from one lifetime to the next, and it goes on forever until we find the way out.
COWEN: Are they like ghosts at all — the wrathful deities?
LOPEZ: There’s a whole separate category of ghosts. The ghosts are often called — if we look at the Chinese translation — hungry ghosts. The ghosts are beings who suffer from hunger and thirst. They are depicted as having distended bellies. They have these horrible sufferings that when they drink water, it turns into molten lead. They’ll eat solid food — it turns into an arrow or a spear. Constantly seeking food, constantly being frustrated, and they appear a lot in Buddhist text. One of the jobs of Buddhist monks and nuns is to feed the hungry ghosts.
COWEN: Is it a fundamental misconception to think of Buddhism as a peaceful religion?
And:
COWEN: …If one goes to Borobudur in Java — spectacular, one of the most amazing places to see in the world.
LOPEZ: Absolutely.
COWEN: We read that it was abandoned. It wasn’t even converted into a tourist site or a place where you would sell things. Why would you just toss away so much capital structure?
LOPEZ: I think it just got overgrown by the jungle. I think that people were not going there. There were no Buddhist pilgrims coming. The populace converted to Islam mostly, and it just fell into decline, just to be revived in the 19th, 20th century.
COWEN: Turn it into a candy store or something! It just seems capital maintenance occurs across other margins. The best-looking building you have — one of the best-looking in the world — is forgotten. Don’t you find that paradoxical?
Definitely recommended, interesting throughout and I learned a great deal doing the prep. One of my favorite episodes of this year. And I am happy to recommend all of Donald’s books on Buddhism.