January 1999 CLAS notes

Dean: Will Harrison harrison@chem.ufl.edu Editor: Jane Gibson jgibson@clas.ufl.edu Assistant Editor: Ronee Saroff rsaroff@english.ufl.edu Web: Gracy Castine gracy@clas.ufl.edu

Quietly sitting under a tree... Buddhism must be experienced says CLAS professor

A representation of Tanya Storch in meditation, from her book Chinese Scrolls (right).

"Studying Buddhism with a professor can be boring," admits Tanya Storch. She should know--she got her PhD in the subject. "Forcing religion into a Western discourse type of course kills the essence of the material," explains Storch, who joined the CLAS faculty in 1997 as an assistant professor of Chinese religion. "Buddhism must be experienced. What Buddha did to arrive at [what we now call] Buddhism," she continues, "was to just sit under a tree. So how do you teach something that is to be perceived, conceived of and actually practiced, such as quiet sitting under a tree?"

You do it, according to the Russian-born scholar, by teaching performatively, meaning that students must physically participate in the religious practices. "If a specialist in chemistry had never gone to the chemistry labs," she points out, "what would we say of his expertise? It's incomplete, right? So students who have the theoretical part of Buddhism but who've never sat in any meditation, never tried a single asana to see what happens to their consciousness, never tried the effects of the mudras or never drawn a single mandala...their experience, their knowledge, is incomplete."

Storch gives students plenty of theoretical discourse, but she commits herself to making 30-50% of class time (depending on the group) experiential. She teaches them breathing exercises, meditations and how to think of others with love and compassion. Her students keep journals of their experiences, and after three months of practicing these exercises three times a week, many students make them a permanent part of their routines. "It's proven to be very helpful to them as human beings," she says, "and for some it has even provided better results in other classes...they can be much more peaceful about learning."

Buddhist philosophy also helps students experience less trauma in their relationships, says Storch. "Your higher or 'real' self can never be completely detached from the 'othernes' around it," she explains. "You are me and I am you...we are both everything that we are not--the self is never cut off from everything else. All your thoughts came from somewhere and all your cells also came from somewhere, so we are recycled beings in this sense, made out of the other."

        On the research side of things, Storch is fighting to bring materials into her discipline that have been overlooked for a long time. "We, as the academy, have certain prejudices against scholarship coming from nonwestern traditions like Buddhism," she explains. In other words, the Western academy tends only to read, discuss and value select religious and philosophical texts--mostly the translations of the canons and commentaries. "Our weakness is in part that we would not dare to write our own commentaries on the Buddhist religious texts, because we don't feel that we are on the same foot with the Buddhist tradition." This weakness, according to Storch, creates a gap between Buddhist practitioners and academicians. "Practitioners very rarely elaborate on theoretical points in Buddhism, whereas academicians only allow themselves to analyze the texts, to reconstruct the history and to interpret things from the position of outsiders."

       The largely forgotten histories of Dharma, for example, which enjoyed the brief attention of academics in the 30s and 40s, are exactly the type of material Storch would like to see integrated into the study of Buddhism. "These incredible books detail the history of humanity," she says, "but we don't translate them because they're not written from the Western perspective." Rather than view human history through the lens of political events like war, conquest or economic prosperity, the Dharma texts portray the history of human kind as the slow but inevitable development of individual souls toward the ultimate goal of enlightenment. But not just humans; plants, mountains, ghosts and demons are also included, and, says Storch, this stops the academy from taking these texts seriously as historical documentation.

What we consider "truth" today was merely legend yesterday, she points out, citing humans flying and space travel as obvious examples of the way our reality constantly changes. So from the Buddhist perspective, it's not accurate to write a human history within the limitations of nation, religion or technological progress. The Dharma texts and other Buddhist writings attempt to create a unified framework for recording history, one that includes all nations and beings.

"As academicians, we may pick up one or two or three facts out of these texts that seem to be very reliable, and we may refer to those facts when analyzing certain Buddhist historical chronicles...but other stories or other kinds of information in the texts that we cannot make any sense out of, we simply pretend are not there or we call them legends, myths or unreliable data. But at the same time, these texts are about true historical facts. They are very precious for what's recalled in them. The difference is that truth and historicity for them are not the same as for us. And that's what I'm trying to recover--the Buddhist sense of history from those texts--in order to prove that this is scholarship; in fact, it's a very serious attempt to look at human history, just from a totally different perspective than we’ve been taught to use here in the West."

One of the problems in teaching religion in our society, says Storch, is that we cut off all living connections between religion and other activities. "Religion can't be cut off," she insists, "because it imbues everything we do: the way we read books, the way we communicate, the way we go to school, the way we eat food--everything is permeated with our spirituality." For this reason, Storch has long wanted to initiate communications with the Medical School in order to bring spirituality and religion to a more prominent place in medical training and practice. After sharing her ideas with Religion chair Shelly Isenberg, they involved Allen Neims (former dean of the Medical School) into the discussions, and soon the idea for a new Masters program in spirituality and health was born. "Our goal is to take away that gap that is only ruining our health and our spirituality: the belief that the body can be healed medically and scientifically, as if the spirit is somewhere else while the body is being cared for."

Their growing interdisciplinary group has already held several discussion meetings and hosted a guest speaker. 'Ideally, we're going to create a Center for Spirituality and Health that will be committed to developing courses and enhancing research on the subject,' she explains. Courses will include world spiritual and healing traditions and will be offered as electives to medical/health sciences students as well as majors in religion and other related CLAS disciplines like anthropology, for example. 'Participating faculty are very excited," says Storch. "They've said things like 'Finally we have the place where we can come out of the closet to say, Yes--I'm a sociologist, but I looked at doing sociological stuff with a spiritual attitude...or, Yes, I'm a doctor, but I always knew that I needed spirituality to be present in my practice if I wanted it to be successful and fulfilling for me.' We hope to bring this realization to others, that spirituality and health are one, rather than two separate entities."

Three poems from Chinese Scrolls