# Faculty Focus: Charles Hallisey on the Beauty of the World and Buddhist Studies at Harvard April 14, 2023 ![Professor Charles Hallisey](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/hds2/files/ff_hallisey_web.png?itok=YditT_YT) Professor Charles Hallisey is the Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School. *Professor Charles Hallisey talks about Buddhist Studies at Harvard, his path to teaching, and the beauty of the world.* **Jonathan Beasley:** Hello and welcome again to Faculty Focus, a special podcast series from Harvard Divinity School, where we speak with HDS professors about their courses and research interests. I’m Jonathan Beasley. Today’s guest is [Charles Hallisey](https://hds.harvard.edu/people/charles-hallisey), who is Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures here at Harvard Divinity School. Professor Hallisey’s research centers on Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Pali language and literature, Buddhist ethics, and literature in Buddhist culture. Thanks for listening and joining us today. Let’s jump right into the interview. Harvard Divinity School · Faculty Focus: Charles Hallisey on the Beauty of the World and Buddhist Studies at Harvard **Jonathan Beasley:** I’d like to start by asking you, what was your experience like as an MDiv student here in the mid to late 1970s? And also, in your opinion, how has the School changed since then, and how has Buddhist studies evolved over that time here? **Charles Hallisey:** The way I came to Divinity School to do MDiv was really almost indirectly. And it wasn't exactly my idea. I was an undergraduate. I had begun the study of Buddhism, Asian religions, and I had the idea I want to continue doing it in graduate school. I spoke to one of my teachers and he listened carefully. And then at the end he said, it sounds all good, but there's one big problem. And I asked, what is that? And he said, you don't know anything about the religions in the country that you grew up in. And I said, well, that's true. What can I do about that? So, he said, why don't you go to a Divinity School for one year and learn something. And if you don't have any money, which I didn't, he said apply for a degree they'll give you financial aid. So that's what I did. I came for a year. And I realized oh, there's a lot to learn, and I was pretty happy about what I was learning. And so I had applied to be in the degree and I just stayed to get the degree. And so in a curious way, I began some things in Buddhist studies, but that wasn't my focus. I began the study of Sanskrit, but I don't know if I took a single course in Buddhism while I was here. I took a lot of courses on Christianity, courses on Hinduism, things on Judaism, as well as a whole range of things that, at that time, were called applied theology or practical theology. And one of the great gifts of doing the degree—[the MDiv degree](https://hds.harvard.edu/academics/degree-programs/mdiv-program)—was doing the [field education](https://hds.harvard.edu/academics/ministry-studies/field-education), which I'm very self conscious that I feel that it transformed me as a, kind of, a student of religion professionally and particularly a student of Buddhism. And so far as I think that what I learned doing—say, hospital chaplaincy—is a lot of the things that my colleagues in Buddhist studies say, oh, this is what Buddhism does, that it has these ways of explaining bad things happening to you by karma or whatever. I realized that no one wants to hear that when they're ill. When they're terminally ill. And what I realize is that what Buddhism, like other religions, do when they work well is that they help you to live well when there's no good explanations. And so that, I think, changed how I began to study Buddhism, what I listened to when I was among Buddhists that I just saw that confirmed over and over that they were concerned about how to live well when things are going wrong and not, like, having airtight good explanations for why bad things happen. One of the things in terms of how Harvard Divinity School is different than then and now. There's a lot of things that I'm really quite self conscious about—how it’s different. And one that is somewhat intangible but I'd say a really profound difference is that, kind of, student employment did a lot of the maintaining of the everyday life of the school. **Charles Hallisey:** The other thing I would say is a, kind of, a difference was that it wasn't really a multireligious place at that point. It was very diverse, but it was diverse in different kinds of ways. And you had a lot of people that nowadays would be called Nones. Having no religious identity. And that was pretty routine and didn't bother anyone. And then the other thing that in a, kind of, ironic way that I think was very good for me is that basically, I was ignored as a student. \[Laughter\] And it suited me very well because no one was demanding of me, explain yourself. Explain what you were doing. Because I don't think that I would have been able to articulate any kind of coherent answer to explaining what I was doing. But looking back, I'm really happy I did what I did. **Jonathan Beasley:** So when was it that you decided to become a professor, a scholar? When did that moment hit you as this is something I want to do? **Charles Hallisey:** I'm not sure it's hit me yet. \[LAUGHTER\] **Jonathan Beasley:** OK. It still hasn't hit you yet. **Charles Hallisey:** So it was always an option. But say, when I finished my MDiv degree here—you finish a degree, you have life choices in front of you. Different paths that you could take. And the choices that I felt that I had that were, kind of, reasonable were one that I could go to graduate school and continue doing things in Buddhist studies, which is actually what I did. But the other was I thought there was a reasonable chance I could get hired to be a high school teacher in a Quaker school in the occupied territories of Palestine. **Jonathan Beasley:** Wow. **Charles Hallisey:** And after I finally went to Israel—decades really, almost 40 years later maybe—and saw the realities of life, I thought, oh, your life would have been really, really different if you had chosen that kind of route. So, I would say at every step of the way, becoming a professor, it was something of, like, another choice that was always possible. But some of it is not really your own, under your own control. Someone else has to say we want you. **Jonathan Beasley:** Yeah. That's true. **Charles Hallisey:** And when I look back, I think, oh, really quite fortunate that my first teaching job in a university was in a theology department of a Catholic University, because I knew that my experience at Harvard Divinity School made that possible. And what my colleagues would say—their phrase was, you don't have a chip in your shoulder about Christianity. And so it didn't—being a student of the Buddhist world of Asian religions, there was nothing in me that, kind of, feels uncomfortable about what Christianity might represent. Whereas for lots of people, there's like—the reason they're studying Buddhism is some other issues they have with theistic religions. **Jonathan Beasley:** Yeah. One of the things, just with your teaching in particular at HDS, as far as I can tell, you teach upwards of six different classes, and I don't think I've seen a faculty member that has six classes listed in their course catalog. Why do you choose to teach so many courses? Not all at once, I should clarify. **Charles Hallisey:** What someone just said about me is that I'm easily distracted. And, you know, someone brings up something I say, well, that's kind of interesting. And part of teaching for me is exploring things with other people, expanding what I'm able to see by what people are sharing with me with what they're able to see. But one of the things that's happened to me, now teaching in Harvard Divinity School, is I teach a lot of courses on how to read Buddhist scriptures. That's part of the scriptural interpretation requirement for the MDiv. And again, I kind of have this sense of myself that good things happen to me is because of someone else's suggestion. So what happened was when I first came to teach at Harvard Divinity School, there was a student was an advisor. He was complaining that there were no courses on Buddhism that would meet the scriptural interpretation requirements. And I just thought, well, I can fix that. And so I started teaching one and then I found out oh, it's pretty interesting. And then added another. And I've taught like six different courses just on engaging Buddhist scriptures. I'm the only one who has done all six. And I probably could keep on adding—I'll keep on adding other ones to it. **Jonathan Beasley:** Is there a common element or throughline with those courses you’re teaching? Is there a common thread? **Charles Hallisey:** Yeah. So the basic, I'm quite problematic intellectually. All of the courses begin with something from Wilfred Cantwell Smith who was on the faculty here when I was a student. And his thinking is kind of deep in the woodwork of a lot of stuff. The study of religion at Harvard. And so he got interested on the interpretation of scripture at a certain point of his life. Wrote a lot about it. All of the stuff that he wrote begins with, what I call, a trail marker. That we scholars don't understand what a scripture is. And so that is the basic thing orienting all of these. This kind of problem of just what is this human phenomenon in which relatively few texts come to mean so much to so many people and so deeply? So that's a phrase from Wilfred Smith. Any concept of scripture that doesn't help us understand how so few texts could mean so much to so many, so deeply is we know is inadequate. And so I'm very clear that there's a distinction for me between an authoritative text and a scriptural text. So, what I say in the class is authoritative texts are tools of repression and scriptural texts are instruments of freedom. So, you can take other courses about authoritative texts. Those are not hard to understand. But understanding how someone finds themselves, kind of, a large made free from themselves by some kind of engagement with a text, that I find really hard to understand. And practically, people—students in a class really get into it. They, kind of, showed me and said, wow, I didn't realize that. That's an important thing that's happening here. **Jonathan Beasley:** Who are the students who are enrolled in your classes? What are they interested in? **Charles Hallisey:** I have the scripture classes. People of all sorts come. It was like a big surprise to me—a happy surprise when I first started teaching the courses on Buddha's scriptures. Some Unitarian Universalists showed up in the class, and they said, these are our scriptures, too, and I thought that was wrong of me. I didn't anticipate that. What they're saying is true. So you have people who are, kind of, in the MDiv program and they're, kind of, interested in how do I—all the classes are about how do you teach someone else to be a more than competent reader of a text that it can become a scripture? And so, you have people who are interested in doing that on Jewish texts, Christian texts, as well as people in Buddhist studies. And people preparing themselves for Buddhist Ministry. So a lot of the people who show up are part of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative here at the Divinity School, too. **Jonathan Beasley:** I'm just thinking about prospective students who might be listening to this, perhaps, in addition to new students as well, but what makes learning Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School, and being engaged in that kind of work, exciting? Why is HDS an exciting place for Buddhist studies? **Charles Hallisey:** Harvard University, it's like a pretty unique configuration of the study of Buddhism in which Harvard Divinity School, what's happening at Harvard Divinity School plays a really essential part in it. So, you have a pretty high-powered program and study of religion and faculty of Arts and Sciences. And in that, it's a very good representative of how to study the Buddhist heritages from the perspective of religious studies. You also have a powerhouse of area studies, particularly in East Asian area studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And that is a good representative of how to study the Buddhist world within the paradigms of perception that focuses on a place called Asia—area studies. At the Divinity School, with the aspirations of things being as a professional school, and preparing people for kind of professions, caring professions of ministry, it's a different way of engaging the text, engaging the heritages of the Buddhist world. And so my own, kind of, image of it is that in astronomy, you have these ideas of twin stars that are held together by the gravity that each one pulls something out of the other one. At Harvard, we have, basically, a triple star for the study of Buddhism. And that as area studies, East Asian studies is doing, what study religion is doing. Are powerhouses in their own right, but they're locked together in a certain way, and then the Div school is doing something that is also locked with these other programs, but also pulling things out of them that otherwise might not be so front and center. So I think it's not like anything at Harvard Divinity School on its own is part of this larger configuration in which Harvard Divinity School—I think what we're doing here has changed what is being done in the study of religion and in area studies as well. And the study of Buddhism is all over the place at Harvard art, history, anthropology, psychology, government. It's hard to find a place at Harvard where someone's not talking about Buddhism. But that configuration of three different paradigms of perception, there's no place else in North America, at least, that has anything that is remotely like it. **Jonathan Beasley:** You touched on your experience with field education earlier and how, ultimately, important that was for you. Does that also factor significantly with today's students? **Charles Hallisey:** So you could say that the kinds of practical applied engagement with the heritages of the Buddhist world is front and center here at Harvard Divinity School. It also, I think, makes a different kind of interface between what's happening at North American Research University and institutions of higher—Buddhist institutions of higher education in Asia. And so that you have a different, kind of, model of engagement with what people are doing in Asia that would be closer to what is the norm in any kind of Divinity School in North America for Christianity. So, it's just a question of how to relate, like, historical studies, sociological studies to various kinds of studies of what the past was like or the conditions that are happening in the present world. And turning to questions about but what about tomorrow? What is it going to look like tomorrow? So that, I think, is a pretty exciting place for thinking about what does it mean to study Buddhism in the twenty-first century? **Jonathan Beasley:** I'd be remiss if I did not ask you about your current book project, which is titled, “Flowers on the Tree of Poetry, the Moral Economy of Literature in Buddhist Sri Lanka.” Could you tell me a bit more about the project and how that's going? **Charles Hallisey:** The project's been going on for a very long time. And it, kind of, has different parts that I focus on. And I'm hoping the next year to, kind of, accomplish another big chunk of things. But the way to explain it, biographically, is that when I went to study in Sri Lanka as part of my doctoral education, the person who became my teacher in Sri Lanka was a specialist on literature. I was interested in Buddhism. But he was interested in poetry and high literature. I would say that one of the many gifts that he gave me is that he taught me how to read in a certain way. And his example, what he shared with me became transformative for me in my professional research life. So just two examples of this. One is that the way I studied with him as that we would sit across the table like you and I are now. Each of us would have the same book open in front of us, and he would read out loud, and I would follow along. But what was really, kind of, very important to me was following how when he took a breath, I began to see, kind of, units of words in ways that are not the same as what period might indicate or something. But even more important is that sometimes he would read something out loud, and then he would stop and he would read it out loud again. And then he would just say under his breath to himself, “very nice, very nice.” And so they were at first, I didn't pay much attention to it, but then I began to be really, kind of, trying to see what was he seeing that was so beautiful? And so this is one of the things that I learned from him is that to read a Buddhist text well is to see how beautiful it is. And what it allows you to see. The other, kind of, vivid memory I have of studying with him is that one day, at the end of one of our sessions, he said to me, don't go home directly today. I want you to take this bus, go to this neighborhood in Colombo, get down, go down the street. There's a temple there in the yard is a tree that's in bloom. And so, I went to go and see that. And he said, remember that a few weeks ago we were reading and there was a description of the color of the Buddhist skin and it said it was the same color as that flower. And so then he said, you need to see the flower. And one of the things that I learned in that is that what was inside of the text was, kind of, vibrating, resonating with the world outside. And that the world became part of the text. The world became more beautiful because of what the texts were, kind of, connecting to, drawing our attention to. So part of this whole project on the moral economy of poetry would be, kind of, maybe to share some of the things that I learned from my teacher in Sri Lanka about this is what these texts are doing. And one of the things that really changed me as a student of Buddhist heritages is that what's front and center for people learning about Buddhism is what's called the first noble truth, that all of this is suffering. But what's central to the Buddhist world that I know was heritages that I know is that that's true, but this world is also beautiful. And so part of the idea of the moral economy is what, kind of, emerges from certain conditions that you wouldn't say are necessarily intended. And one of those would be that this is a beautiful world. If only you look, that you'll be mesmerized by just how wonderful everyday things are. So that's the category of the moral economy of that that's something that is not intentionally or directly aimed at emerges from different kinds of practices that are there. And one of them is just stunning how beautiful this world is. And that doesn't take away from all of the misery of the world that is there and the horrors of things that are going on. **Jonathan Beasley:** But it's nice to be reminded. **Charles Hallisey:** But right next to all of the horrors is there's this other thing that is going on as well. **Jonathan Beasley:** Yeah. That's a nice note to end on. Thank you so much, Professor Charlie Hallisey. **Charles Hallisey:** Sure. **Jonathan Beasley:** My thanks to Professor Hallisey for giving us an inside look at his teaching and scholarship. This is the final episode of this academic year’s special Faculty Focus series. We will still be sharing lots of great audio content, though, so please subscribe to Harvard Divinity School wherever you get your podcasts, and don’t forget to visit our website or follow us on social media if you’re interested in learning more about HDS, our faculty, and the student experience. Until next time… See also:- [ Faculty and Research ](/discover-stories-about/faculty-and-research) - [ Buddhism ](/featured-topics/buddhism) - [ Faculty Focus ](/topic-tags/faculty-focus)