Video: Buddhist Ministry Initiative Tenth Anniversary Celebration
Full transcript:
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Buddhist Ministry Initiative Tenth Anniversary Celebration, Charles Hallisey and Monica Sanford in Conversation, October 27, 2022.
SPEAKER 3: All right, good evening, everyone.
JONATHAN MAKRANSKY: Good evening. Thanks for that vital response right there. So I think we're at a critical mass where we can get started. I'm really happy to be with everyone here in person. Online, I see we have a growing number of folks joining us on Zoom. So Thank you all very much for being here with us. My name is Jonathan Makransky. I'm the new multi-religious ministry initiatives coordinator with the Office of Campus Ministry here at the Divinity School, in which capacity I coordinate the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, which is a fulfilling and happy job, to be sure. And as an HDS staff member, an alum of the MTS program in Buddhist Studies, and as a beneficiary of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative when I was here as a student a few years ago, it's my great honor to be with all of you tonight to introduce our co-hosts for the evening.
And so without further ado, here they are. We have Reverend Dr. Monica Sanford and Dr. Charles Hallisey. Reverend Dr. Monica Sanford joined Harvard Divinity School as Assistant Dean for Multi-Religious Ministry in September, 2021. Dr. Sanford comes to HDS from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she became one of only two Buddhists in North America to lead a multireligious life department at a college or university. Dr. Sanford is one of the first fully-trained Buddhist practical theologians in the United States, having earned her PhD in Practical Theology from Claremont School of Theology. She also holds an undergraduate degree in design from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Master of Divinity degree from the University of the West. She's an ordained Buddhist lay minister in a Chan lineage and trained as a Buddhist chaplain. Her recent book Kalyanamitro: A Buddhist Model for Spiritual Care, is the first textbook for Buddhist chaplains.
And we also are honored to have with us Dr. Charles Hallisey, who's one of our core Buddhist Ministry Initiative faculty members and who joined the Faculty of Divinity in 2007 after teaching at the University of Wisconsin as Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia and the Religious Studies Program since 2001. Earlier, he taught in the Department of Theology at Loyola University in Chicago and at Harvard University as well, previously, where he was John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in the Committee of the Study of Religion and the Department of Sanskrit and Indian studies from 1996 to 2001.
His research centers on Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Pali language and literature, Buddhist ethics and literature, and Buddhist culture. His most recent book is Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women, and he's currently working on a book project entitled, Flowers On The Tree Of Poetry: The Moral Economy of Literature in Buddhist Sri Lanka. Thank you very much to all of you for being here, and the floor is yours.
[APPLAUSE]
MONICA SANFORD: Thank you, Jonathan. Of course, we have to start our program tonight with a wonderful Thanks To the Robert HN Ho Family Foundation for all of their support of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative over the last 10 years. I just want to say a little bit about the history of the foundation first. Robert HN Ho was born in 1932 in Hong Kong as the grandson of the prominent businessman Sir Robert Ho Tung and Lady Clara Ho Tung. He's the son of General Ho Shai Lai and Hesta Ho Tung Ki Fun. Following his early education in Hong Kong, he received degrees from Columbia University and Colgate University. In 2005, he established the Robert HN Ho Family Foundation to support programs in the arts, culture, the environment, and Buddhism.
With historical roots in Hong Kong, the foundation has a truly global vision, supporting Buddhist temples in both Hong Kong and Canada as well as numerous programs in Buddhist studies, arts, and ministry at schools such as Harvard, the University of London, the University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, Courtauld Institute of Art, Stanford University, Claremont McKenna College, University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, among many other initiatives and partners.
Recently, the foundation has begun to focus on the environment and care for children and young adults in order to build a better future for everyone. The global scope of the foundation is truly amazing, a deep form of Buddhist dana, or generosity.
So I want to take a little time at the start of our program, before we hear from our wonderful alumni, just to reflect on the history of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative over the last 10 years. And, of course, I can't do that alone because I haven't been here for 10 years. So I'm happy to welcome Charlie, Professor Hallisey, to have a little conversation with me.
So we sometimes, as Buddhists, like to consider the causes and conditions that bring anything into being, really. And while the BMI is currently celebrating a decade of work, the seeds for this Initiative were planted much, much earlier-- arguably with the establishment of Harvard College in 1636, or then with the creation of Harvard Divinity School as one of the first graduate schools of the college in 1811.
And HDS was the first non-sectarian theological school in the nation. And that's really notable. It was really radical at the time to be able to educate Christian ministers of any Christian denomination in a single school about 200 years ago. That was a very radical move.
But that trend towards inclusiveness has just continued to broaden, especially with the founding of the Center for the Study of World Religions, which was in the 1950s, that started bringing scholars of Buddhism and Buddhists themselves to campus. And I want to jump forward from there. There's some really interesting and important history that we've uncovered in between, but I want to jump forward closer to our own time and ask you about the establishment of the Hershey Chair in Buddhist Studies, and in particular about the arrival of the person who holds that chair, Janet Gyatso. What was significant about that?
CHARLES HALLISEY: I have a lot to say about that.
[LAUGHTER]
Some things that were very significant for me personally, but I won't go into that. Let me also just say that in Sanford Monica's reference to a very long history going back to the establishment of Harvard College for the preparation of a learning ministry, that now I can imagine that Dean Hempton, when he has so much time on his hands, that we'll have a book coming from him on re-imagining Puritan history, in which we see that it's all meant to lead up to the establishment of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative.
[LAUGHTER]
So we should just does say that the Buddhist Ministry Initiative impulse, the crystallization of it, really is due to the generosity of the Ho Family Foundation. But it's equally true that without the imagination and the generosity of Barry Hershey in establishing the chair, the Hershey Chair of Buddhist Studies here at Harvard Divinity School, that there would be no Buddhist Ministry Initiative without that.
So part of the discussions that took place in the 1990s about the definition of the Hershey Chair was the desire to find some scholar that would be comfortable both among academics and talking among academics and talking among Buddhists in ways that, say, a comfort and not an opposition between people-- scholars within the Buddhist world, people practicing within the Buddhist world, and then academics who are learning about Buddhism, to bring those two together.
And that I think that the seeds for Barry Hershey's vision landed on well-plowed soil here at Harvard Divinity School because of the direction of Wilfred Campbell Smith at the Center for the Study of Religion, in which he had a very clear aspiration for all of us studying any religion that academics should be able to make statements that were true in two communities at the same time-- one, an academic community, and then, also, the community that was being spoken about.
You can also just say-- and it's a sign of my age, seeing longer histories-- that I had the good fortune to be the colleague in the 1990s of Professor Masatoshi Nagatomi, who was appointed the first Professor of Buddhist Studies, teaching in the Sanskrit and Indian Studies. He was appointed in 1957, I believe, and he was also a member of the faculty at Harvard Divinity School.
But it's also a fact about Masatoshi Nagatomi was that he was an ordained a Jodo Shinshu priest, and that his father was a missionary in the United States and Canada. It was simply just an accident of family the Nagatomi was in Japan visiting family when the Second World War started. And so his family was interned, in terms of the dislocation of Japanese citizens in the United States, and he was in Japan.
He taught a number of really leading lights of academics in North American Buddhist Studies-- Robert Thurman, Jeffrey Hopkins, Alfred Bloom, Paula Arai, Duncan Ryuken Williams-- all of whom had this style of being able to speak in two communities at the same time.
One other thing I just wanted to add because I was a student at Harvard in the 1970s, that I think one of the things that was happening is that Harvard had a long openness to trying to address the needs of students that didn't find welcome homes elsewhere. So when I was a student, the largest demographic cohort of students at Harvard Divinity School were Roman Catholic women-- and so people looking to do ministry in a community that didn't have the resources to help them to do that.
But with the appointment of Janet Gyatso, I would say, oh, she served as a catalyst to take these things that were suspended separately within the life of Harvard Divinity School and to bring them together, and, like any catalyst, to have something filter out, those things to assemble together, to create a completely new kind of possibility of things that were there, in some ways, just by her own imagination and vision of what she saw as possibilities of things that were happening here, and then the imagination of another future.
MONICA SANFORD: Thank you, Charlie. As you mentioned, Buddhism, as we know, has been an area of serious study in the Western Academy for many decades, and Harvard has been home to some of the leading lights, both in the terms of the academic study of Buddhism and the people who could speak to Buddhist communities themselves. All of these areas-- text, translation, Buddhist philosophy, psychology, cosmology, history, literature, art, archaeology-- they've really been the study of very deep scholarship.
So what is unique about the study of Buddhism at Harvard Divinity School? I mean, you talked a little bit about the two, speaking to the two communities. So what's unique about the study of Buddhism at HDS that we don't find in other institutions and other Buddhist Studies departments?
CHARLES HALLISEY: So let me just give-- me being me, I'll give a caveat about talking about uniqueness. So when I came as a student here to Harvard Divinity School in 1975, one of my undergraduate teachers, who was a graduate of Harvard, got his PhD here, advised by Professor Nagatami, but he was from Texas. And he gave me the good advice. He said, you know, what people at Harvard don't understand is just how parochial they are. And they cannot imagine that there's 100 students at the University of Texas who would be valedictorian at Harvard.
And so the idea that, oh, Harvard is unique, we do have a specialness. But part of what, I think, the real vision of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative has been is to reach out and recognize there's lots of other places that are doing things that we really need to depend on, encourage, help them to do what only they can do. That being said, let me say that discerning the uniqueness, the specialness, of Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School, I think requires, seeing the distinctiveness of Buddhist Studies at Harvard more generally. And it's a very unusual configuration that is here now.
Some people have heard me say this before, but just as in astronomy, sometimes you have what are called twin stars, two stars that are held together by some kind of gravity, in a certain way, that Buddhist idea generally at Harvard is a constellation of three very powerful configurations of constellations for the study of Buddhism. One is in the Divinity School, that I'll come back to. But also, a real center of energy is the Committee on the Study of Religion, locating the study of Buddhism within the traditions of the academic study of religion. But then, equally important are the area studies departments of locating the study of Buddhism within the broader study of the culture and history of particular regions of the world, like East Asia or South Asia.
And there's also other programs where the study of Buddhism at Harvard is now grounded-- art history, anthropology, the Kennedy School, Law School. We find it all kinds of places. So the Law School having Lobsang Sangay here is one acknowledgment of that.
The other thing that has happened at Harvard connected to the Divinity School, because the Center for the Study of World Religions is part of the Divinity School, that it created part of the energy for the study of Buddhism for a very long time. The first director of the Center, Robert Lawson Slater, was a scholar of Buddhism, and his work is still worth reading today.
In the 1970s, it had-- throughout its history, it had a mission of bringing scholars from around the world to live and study at Harvard, to live in the Center to study at Harvard. The first person that I studied Buddhism with ever was one of the visitors to the Center, a great Buddhist thinker from Sri Lanka, Mahinda Palihawadana, who I had a good fortune to study with in 1972. The Dalai Lama was brought to Harvard on his first visit to the United States when the United States finally allowed him a visa to come here to speak in 1979, then and again, and he gave a week's commentary on the Bodhicharyavatara during 1981, which I also had the good fortune to be able to hear.
And then, the Monshu-- the let's say the Pope of the Nishi Nongan-ji School of Jodo Shinshu in Japan, was also part of an inter-religious dialogue at the Center in the late 1980s. So with that larger background, would you say, oh, the Divinity School has created this third star that is affecting the other two-- of area studies and the study of religion.
On the one hand, it's providing a context for the education of a learned Buddhist ministry for American Buddhism, although I would say with an incredible international awareness that many other places that are doing this don't have the same international awareness that the Divinity School, because of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, has been able to aspire to. It's been an effort to make Harvard less parochial, by just saying there's other places that know things that we want to learn from.
There's also, I would say, that it is creating the study of preparation of Buddhist ministry education within a multireligious environment. That is particularly unique. On one of my visits to a Buddhist University in Kyoto, I met with the Dean of the equivalent of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative at this Buddhist University. I told him about what we were doing here in a multireligious environment. And at the end of the conversation, he said, before I met you and heard about what you were doing, he said, I had the thought, what can they do that we can't? And how could they ever do anything that is even close to what we're capable to do?
And he said, but now, when I hear your talk about doing education of Buddhist ministers in a multireligious environment, I realized, oh, it's really important what you're beginning to do.
Now, the last thing-- I might add to it based on my own experience, as I would say I'm very happy, comfortable being an academic who is studying the Buddhist world and not working as a chaplain or Buddhist minister-- but I would say my own experience as a MDiv student at Harvard left a profound impact on me as a student of Buddhism. I'm very aware all of the time that some of the things that I'm attentive to is, things that I care about, that is different than my professional colleagues in the academic study of Buddhism.
I would say, where did that difference come from? It was because I did field education when I was an MDiv student. Something about listening to people at the edges of the finitude of human life changes how you study Buddhism. Wilfred Smith had a fabulous aphorism that he said. "I would never trust anyone who studies Islam who doesn't have Muslim friends." And I would say, oh, that's true for everyone studying different religions.
But I would say that the Harvard Divinity School's uniqueness is adding something that says, until you've sat with, suffered with people when they're facing things that have no real answers, you don't know how to study what is important to them. And so in that, I think what we're doing is pulling out of the area studies, and this, the academic study religion programs of how to study Buddhism, another dimension that they're not able to have access to themselves. So that's what I mean by the constellation of-- the gravitational pull between three different stars.
MONICA SANFORD: I just love that metaphor of the-- being someone who's always loved astronomy, I love that metaphor of the three-star system-- which, if anybody's interested to know, the closest star system to Earth is a triple star system, of three stars. But I just want to emphasize that point for a moment of educating a learned Buddhist ministry. Because prior to the last couple of decades, Buddhists and other religious minorities in America have not had that kind of opportunity to receive a graduate level theological-- what we call a "theological" education, as much as we can argue over whether that word applies or not, "theological." But it hasn't it hasn't been an option until very recently, and certainly not in a university like Harvard with the two other stars and the multi-religious background, that deep engagement in both religious learning and ministerial skill-building for sitting with people, for example, at the end of life or through other crises that they're facing.
Those kind of programs, until recently, were available for Christian and Jewish leaders but not for other kinds of religious leaders. And that started to change with the establishment of a small number of, first, Buddhist colleges in North America, and then Buddhist students enrolling in institutions like Harvard Divinity School. And although the HDS curriculum was not designed for them in mind, the school was welcoming and invested in seeking ways to help Buddhists and other students succeed. And this led to a major curriculum redesign in 2005 when HDS took a hard look at the Master of Divinity degree and fundamentally redesigned the program to just be much more flexible.
And I'm wondering, what do you think-- having been here through some of that, what do you think has been the result of that redesign? What are students able to do as a result? What do they tell you about it in their classes. Since some students are here, I'm wary about trying to save stuff and then saying, I've never said anything like that.
[LAUGHTER]
CHARLES HALLISEY: What I would honestly say that I think is important is that the Buddhist Ministry Initiative has changed the whole curriculum of Harvard Divinity School. So it was within my memory that it wasn't just that the MDiv curriculum changed. That wasn't sufficient. It was that there weren't courses that were being taught that were meeting the requirements for the program degree in MDiv, as it were. Every semester, students who were in the Buddhist Ministry Initiative couldn't count on having courses that would be in scriptural interpretation, or histories, and theologies, and practices.
That's different now. Now, every semester, there are multiple courses for people who are looking to have courses focusing on Buddhist things that can meet the requirements of the MDiv program. So that in itself, I would say, is a major shift and accomplishment the reorganization of the MDiv program in 2005 set in motion.
But I think something far more important has happened. I've learned a way of describing it from Dean Teddy Hickman Maynard, that Harvard Divinity School, in its trajectory, is-- it calls itself multi-religious, but it's on the way to being, or it's already at, what I would say, an interreligious Divinity School. And what that means is that the Buddhist Ministry Initiative is not siloed as separate from everything else that's going on.
So people are taking courses on pastoral care for the dying that are part of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, but they're not considering themselves Buddhist. People are taking courses on Buddhist scriptural interpretation that are-- they're not Buddhists, but they're learning how to think about the interpretation of scriptures. And one of the things I would say was my own parochialism, that when I started to teach courses on Buddhist scriptural interpretation, I wasn't expecting Unitarians to come into the class and say, these are our scriptures, too. And I said, oh, that's true. I have to enlarge my vision to accommodate them as well.
So that kind of movement towards the Buddhist Ministry Initiative as being a catalyst, something that is pushing Harvard Divinity School from being just a multi-religious institution to being a place where a learning ministry is prepared, but in a multi-religious setting with inter-religious aspirations and valuing.
MONICA SANFORD: Thank you. So as we can see, the curriculum redesign made HDS a much more dynamic and inclusive place for Buddhists and for students of other religious backgrounds, and even those of no religious background. And that included one student who connected HDS to the Robert HN Ho Family Foundation, who saw that potential to invest that [? Philip ?] talked about in the next generation of Buddhist leaders.
So the BMI was then formally founded and held its first programs in 2012. And you've been here and intimately involved with that entire process, including serving as the academic advisor for our three current international host scholars and numerous other students. So as Buddhists, we don't often talk about pride, but I'm going to ask you, what are you most proud of over the past decade? Or what are you most happy that has happened as a result of all of this work over the past decade?
CHARLES HALLISEY: There's a number of things that I am most proud of in the sense of a certain kind of a feel of things that are going on. One of the things, I think the Ho Family Foundation's own values were translated to us here at Harvard Divinity School, and their concerns about-- they were looking for institutions to connect to each other. And they were trying to figure out ways in which their own philanthropy, their own vision, could help places around the world to be in contact with each other.
I haven't had much to do with it, but what inside Harvard Divinity School we refer to as the Buddhist Ministry Working, Group the formation of conversations, collaboration between all of the different schools in North America who are engaged, now, in the training of Buddhist ministers, Buddhist chaplains, I would say that is a great accomplishment. I'm very proud to be in an institution that is learning how to work with other institutions and not be in competition with other institutions.
I'm also very proud. The feel, the ethos, the culture of the school is that the life of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative is a display of a non-essentialist vision of what the Buddhist world is like. Some of that has come from the Fellows, the International Fellows, that were first funded by the Ho Family Foundation, in which, for them, they had to get used to American Buddhists talking differently than they were used to, American Buddhists referring to, "my sangha," and for people from other parts of the Buddhist world would be, "what sangha?" That kind of different ways of talking.
Getting used to just the internal diversity of Buddhist life, and finding ways in which people say, yeah, but we belong together. That, I would say, I am happy to be part of, to witness. And sometimes, I'm happy to laugh about and things.
I'm not sure if Venerable [INAUDIBLE] has signed on yet, but he told me an anecdote one time of being in the cafeteria when I was in Rockefeller Hall, and someone who had taken an Introduction to Buddhism class seeing him buying lunch, and saying to him, you're a monk. You're supposed to be handling money.
And he's very quick witted and has a good sense of humor, as all who know him know. And he immediately retorted, and you're a layman. You're supposed to be buying me lunch.
[LAUGHTER]
And so just learning that kind of etiquette that you could say, oh, Buddhism, is a full-service religion, not just a system of ideas, and that it has to do with how you hold your body, how you interact with people, that we've created a context in which people become confident in that world.
One other thing, just for me personally, I'm very, very proud of-- so Harvard Divinity School now has one probably the best Pali program outside of Asia. When I was in the University of California at Berkeley a couple of weeks ago in which there's a Buddhist Studies program, they spoke to me about how the study of Pali in Europe and in the UK and North America has been decimated in the last 10 years. People, when they retire, when they pass away unexpectedly, are not being replaced.
And so in the face of this kind of loss of learning, opportunities to learn, Harvard Divinity School has taken the study of Pali of the area studies, South Asia department, and moved it over here, made it part of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, in which we have, probably, the largest program of three years, all the time, of courses for three years of Pali being offered.
And I would say that my Advanced Pali classes are intellectually very exciting for me. And they're very-- a lot of people just are there reading difficult texts with a lot of energy and creativity. And the result, is something I feel a great deal of gratitude. So I would say the universe is kind, giving me a chance to be in a world where people are both skilled in reading Pali and are happy sharing reading things together. And that is a hidden aspect of, this is what a learned ministry looks like.
And one small thing I'll just add. In what we're reading now, what came up is about a monk who was having a failure of accomplishment in his meditation life because of some gap in his learning life. And the Buddha's beloved disciple, on the recognizing of that, realized what he needed to be taught.
But in that small thing, these great commentators are taking up, what had happened to this man? What we could see is, well, this is what Harvard Divinity School is about-- a learning ministry in which scholarship and practice need to not only be side-by-side, but they go hand-in-hand and depend on each other.
MONICA SANFORD: Yeah Thank you so much, Charlie, for sharing your wisdom with us, and for your support of the BMI and all the Buddhist students for many years. And I'm personally glad to hear you speak of the Buddhist Ministry Working Group, because that was my first exposure to the BMI before I even came to work at this wonderful place. I was one of those representatives from one of the other Buddhist institutions in North America and was welcomed to conversations with people from all different varieties of Buddhism in different institutions on, what does it mean to train Buddhist chaplains, to train Buddhist ministers, vocational leaders, for work in North America and around the world?
So I truly benefited from that before my current position. And it also reminds me that I need to do more Pali. I--
CHARLES HALLISEY: You do.
MONICA SANFORD: Yes. I do. I really do.
CHARLES HALLISEY: All of us need to do more Pali.
MONICA SANFORD: Yes.
CHARLES HALLISEY: So thank you, Charlie.
MONICA SANFORD: You can't have a happy life if you don't study Pali.
[LAUGHTER]
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SPEAKER 1: Sponsor, Harvard Divinity School, Office of Ministry Studies.
SPEAKER 2: Copyright 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.