Summer School at Harvard and Junior Year at Princeton
Before starting at Princeton, the program sent me to Harvard the summer of 1963 for an intensive course in Mandarin Chinese. For seven weeks, we had to learn a hundred characters each week. I was eighteen and found this great fun and easy to do; I loved learning.
At Princeton, I continued studying Chinese language and began to broaden my knowledge of Buddhism, Chinese thought and Asian political history. The professors were some of the most prominent authorities in the field – Professors Kenneth Ch’en, Frederick Mote and William Lockwood. Based on what I learned, I wanted to know how Chinese philosophy (especially Neo-Daoism) and its terminology colored the way Buddhism was translated and understood in medieval China, as well as how Buddhism influenced the Neo-Confucianism that arose after its decline.
With an eye to the future, I trained myself to take full, meticulous notes of the lectures in all my courses. After more than sixty years, I still have most of those notebooks and have often referred back to them for helpful background information. I also developed the habit of studying or working all day, seven days a week, never taking off for a weekend. I had to adopt this schedule since my courses were so demanding. Having become accustomed to that regime, I have continued to follow it as much as I could for the rest of my life. To paraphrase Shantideva, when you love what you’re doing, you’re not happy unless you’re doing it.
The six of us in the Princeton program were made members of the Wilson Society, whose dining hall, lounge, recreation room and library offered us an alternative to the exclusive eating clubs. It was a haven for both the more intellectual students and the beatnik types. Once a month, the Society held a cocktail party to which the professors were invited and, throughout the month, the professors could eat for free with us in the dining hall. Most of the classes included preceptorials where we would break into groups of five to ten students for informal discussions with the professor. It was an ideal environment in which I could grow.
There were yet other opportunities to learn from our professors outside the lecture hall. For example, Professor Chen Daduan, my Chinese language teacher, who had also been my teacher at Harvard summer school, taught us calligraphy. We learned how to write the Chinese characters in the traditional manner – making the ink ourselves by rubbing an ink block and writing the characters with a brush. Professor Mote, my Chinese philosophy teacher, invited us students to his home, which had a bamboo garden like the ones I imagined the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove frequented. His Chinese wife cooked authentic Sichuanese meals for us, which we ate in the grove, while discussing philosophy. As an impressionable eighteen-year-old, I fell in love with classical Chinese culture. As a result, I had an aversion toward the simplified characters that were being introduced in stages by the People’s Republic, and so I never learned them. Nowadays, I struggle to read them when I need to deal with them in my work.
Summer School at Stanford and Senior Year at Princeton
The next summer, 1964, I received a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship to take an intensive course in Classical Chinese at Stanford University. It was taught by an elderly Chinese woman, who followed the traditional method of having us memorize the text for each lesson and stand up, one by one, at the start of each day and recite yesterday’s text. For the oral part of the final exam, she said the first words of a passage, and we had to recite the rest. Such training really helped with my later studies, both at Harvard and in India.
At the end of my junior year at Princeton, I was elected to the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa at Rutgers. Although Rutgers was keen for me to return to complete my senior year, there was nothing further in Chinese studies for me to study there. So, instead of returning to Rutgers, I requested and won approval to spend my senior year also at Princeton. To avoid it looking as if Princeton was stealing students from other universities, I was named a Henry Rutgers Scholar. I could take all my courses at Princeton and the Critical Languages program would finance it, but I would need to submit a senior thesis to Rutgers. In that way, Rutgers could award me a B.A. degree in Asian Studies, although an actual degree program in Asian Languages and Cultures was not established there until 1969.
During my senior year at Princeton, I continued studying Mandarin Chinese, started Japanese, and took a survey course in Chinese Literature with Professor David Roy. In addition, Princeton offered me a golden opportunity to continue pursuing my childhood dream to gain the knowledge and learning of all civilizations. I had always been drawn to abstract thinking and so, during the two years I was there, I took elective courses in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Metaphysics, Political Theory, and Religious Themes in Literature with Professors Russell Dancy, Wilfred Sellars, Michael Walzer and Ira Wade – all outstanding scholars in their fields. I was particularly interested to understand how the mind and the emotions work and what was reality. I wanted to learn what the great thinkers of the West have understood.
One further course was on Hegel, Nietzsche and Existentialism, taught by the world expert on Nietzsche, Professor Walter Kaufmann. Once I went to Professor Kaufmann’s office to ask him a question about Nietzsche’s thought. Instead of answering, he gave me one of Nietzsche’s texts in German and said, “Look it up yourself.” This was an invaluable lesson that if I wanted to find out about something, I needed to look it up myself in primary sources in the original language. I realized I would have to gain literacy in the Asian languages to be able to do the same with the Buddhist sources.
During the last semester of my senior year, I wrote my thesis for Rutgers on the Neo-Daoist philosopher He Yan (Ho Yen). The expert in Neo-Daoist thought, Professor Donald Holzman, was visiting Princeton that year from the École des Hautes Études in Paris. He agreed to advise me in my research by helping me locate the primary source material. Beyond that, I was on my own, applying the lesson Professor Kaufmann had taught me.
There was one more significant event that contributed to my development during my time at Princeton. My roommate during my senior year, Michael Goldstein, was a brilliant chemistry student. He later went on to become a prominent pediatric neurologist. For a research project, he had access to the mainframe computer at one of the advanced labs. It filled an entire room, and to do a calculation required punching holes in a stack of cards and feeding them into the machine. I often joined him in punching holes and, from this time onwards, I have maintained a great interest in computers and what they can do. I also joined him in playing billiards and pool at the Wilson Society. My time at Princeton wasn’t all study and learning.
I was accepted at Harvard for my graduate studies. To finance it, I was awarded both a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship as well as a National Education Act Fellowship. I accepted the latter, which financed my entire education at Harvard. In fact, the government paid me a generous stipend to study. The Vietnam War was raging, and the United States had hardly anyone who knew Chinese. Studying Chinese, especially under a State Department fellowship, kept me out of the war. The prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam was very scary, and I was extremely grateful to have this exemption. Although there was an expectation that I would work for the government afterwards and I even had to go for an interview, there was no obligation and so I politely declined.
Summer Study in Taiwan
There was still the summer between Princeton and Harvard, and I wanted to continue my studies. I had no wish to take a break. The Critical Languages program had sponsored my summer language studies before starting my junior year and had arranged a fellowship for the summer between my junior and senior years. I decided to ask the administrators at Princeton if the program could also sponsor my intensive language study even during the summer after graduation. My proposal was to go to Taiwan and arrange private Chinese language lessons with a personal tutor. They generously agreed and so, in the summer of 1965, at the age of twenty, I went to Taiwan, stayed with the Chinese family of a friend at Princeton and took private lessons.
Taipei at that time still had a taste of old China: it was a city of bicycle rickshaws, no tall buildings and no Western products. Chiang Kai-shek was still in power, which meant there were many restrictions. No bright-colored clothing was allowed and schoolgirls had to wear their hair cut as if a bowl had been placed on the top of their heads, above their ears, and everything below shaved clean. Despite this drab look, the ubiquitous giant cockroaches and sleeping for the first time under a mosquito net and using a squat toilet, I found I was perfectly happy being away from the comforts of the West. Living with a family who knew no English, I made great progress in my spoken Chinese.
I also took the opportunity to visit Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea and got to see them while they still retained most of their traditional flavor. In sharp contrast with Taiwan, Hong Kong was very colorful and vibrant. It had only a few skyscrapers, while Tokyo and Seoul had none. In fact, the road from the airport to Seoul was not fully paved, as the country was still recovering from the Korean War. The home of the family of a friend that I stayed with in Tokyo had mostly tatami rooms and a small Zen garden attached to the traditional bath. Staying there was like being in a dream. I fell even more in love with Asia and wanted to experience more.
Settling in at Harvard
Harvard graduate school was quite different from what I had experienced at Princeton. Although Harvard College was still all male at the time, women were admitted to graduate programs, although they were a small minority. Like Princeton, almost the entire student body was White, but here at Harvard there were a handful of Chinese and Japanese students studying in the East Asian graduate programs.
Most graduate students, including me, lived in apartments off campus. For the first two years, I shared one with Mark Mohr, a childhood friend with whom I had gone to summer overnight camp and who was also studying Chinese. Years later, Mark went on to work for the US State Department as a specialist in arms control. He was part of the American teams that negotiated the First START Treaty with Russia and that held the unsuccessful discussions with the North Koreans to end their nuclear weapons program. Over the years, from time to time, our paths would cross, and he would share his experiences. These even included witnessing the Tiananmen uprising from his hotel window when he was serving as a special envoy in Beijing. It was fascinating to get a “behind-the scenes” picture of these historic events.
Unlike at Princeton, there was almost no contact with the professors at Harvard outside of the classroom. Most of the classes in the East Asian programs were held in the rooms of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and most of us brought sandwiches from home to eat in its student lounge. There was no opportunity to share ideas with people in disciplines other than our own, but we were given so much work to do, there was little time to miss those interdisciplinary discussions that I had cherished at Princeton. What I really valued, however, was the quality of the courses and professors. The intense pace of the courses and the depth and volume of the material covered strongly energized me.
The classes were quite formal and most of us men wore suits and ties. This was the 1960s, the beginning of the hippie era, and although I was never attracted to the hippie way of life, I grew a droopy mustache, had Gandhi glasses and wore psychedelic ties with the three-piece suit I had custom made in Hong Kong.
Although it was illegal, more and more people my age were smoking marijuana and taking psychedelics. I had been introduced to marijuana on a ridge overlooking the Nevada desert on a drive East at the end of my summer at Stanford. I had continued smoking occasionally during my senior year at Princeton, but while at Harvard, I was in the habit of smoking late each night after completing all the assignments and preparations for the next day. It helped me to wind down, relax and go to sleep. I think it helped me not to find the workload stressful.
Exploring the Mind-Body Split
While growing up, I always had a tendency to retreat into my mind and rejected my body, most likely as the result of my difficulty breathing because of asthma, and possibly because of having missed attention to my needs when I was a baby. Although this imbalance supported my academic success, it had led to problems in my early relationships. I struggled with the feeling that I was only a mind and not a body and, at times, the feeling that I did not exist at all. To reassure myself that I was real and had a body, I would sometimes synchronize my breathing cycle with the breathing cycles of my friends. Although, at the time, I didn’t view this as a type of breathing meditation, it functioned as one and helped to ground me.
While at Princeton, as part of my quest for universal knowledge, I had started to learn about the thoughts that Western and Asian philosophers have had concerning the mind and reality. These were the topics I was most interested in. But I found that Cartesian dualism and “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) just compounded the problem of how to deal better with body and mind rather than offering a solution. I had not gone deep enough yet into Chinese and Buddhist thought to find relevant answers.
Ever since that Rutgers course on Asian civilization, I had been experiencing one after another dream-like experience without a break – Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Taiwan and now Harvard Graduate School – each more incredible than the last. There was no time to slow down and digest it all. It all seemed unreal. In the face of the enormous workload from my courses, I retreated further and further into my mind. I started to notice that I was unconsciously touching things, for instance windows of stores as I was passing by. It was as if, by experiencing tactile sensations, I was trying to reassure myself of my physical existence. Seeing that my behavior was starting to become compulsive, I exercised self-control and was able to break this habit.
Recognizing that I needed some space to gain a better perspective on what was going on with my life, I decided to go to a psychiatrist, Dr. Sapir, which I did, twice a week, for the next year and a half. The type of therapy he employed was non-directive. That meant that I would direct the sessions myself, and so I used the opportunity to thoroughly analyze my life up until then. Not knowing any better, I treated it like a university course. Proceeding like this, I gained many insights that were helpful in dealing with my personal history, especially with regard to my suppressed feelings about my father’s sickness and death. They were also helpful for clearing up the misconception that I was somehow responsible for my brother’s death.
These insights, however, did not help with the body-mind split that I felt. The only thing that helped at the time was my late-night custom of turning on after finishing my daily assignments. For about an hour, I would indulge my senses by listening to loud music and eating junk food. The heightened sense perception this produced reaffirmed that I had a body and gave me a sense of balance. To intensify my bodily senses, I even tried LSD with some friends, which was all the fashion at the time. To start to resolve the seeming body-mind split, however, would need to wait until I received extensive Buddhist teachings in India. Specifically, I would need to learn about the five aggregates of body and mind, the conventional nature of a self or person as an imputation phenomenon tied to the five, and the selflessness or voidness (emptiness) of persons, and I would need to meditate extensively on all these topics. At this stage in my life, except for selflessness, I hadn’t even heard of the other topics, and what I had read about selflessness was not deep enough.
First Year Program at Harvard
I began my studies at Harvard with a two-year program for an M.A. degree in Far Eastern Languages. That first year I took an advanced Chinese literature course taught all in Chinese. We had to read twenty pages in Chinese for each class and write papers and all our exams in Chinese. Entering Harvard, I was well ahead of most of the other students in my program, and so I had no difficulty keeping up with even the native Chinese speakers in this class.
I also took a second year of Japanese and courses in Intellectual History of China, Survey of Buddhist Thought, and Survey of Chinese and Japanese History with Professors Benjamin Schwartz, Masatoshi Nagatomi, John Fairbanks and Edwin Reischauer. These were some of the most famous names in the field. In their lectures, they used the historical approach to trace the evolution of key philosophical concepts. Having understood the power of this approach as an analytical tool, I have applied it repeatedly in my later research.
During this first semester at Harvard, as I was personally interested in the issue of non-existence, I wrote a paper for my Chinese intellectual history course analyzing non-existence in the context of Western and Chinese thought. From the very start of my interest in studying the transmission of Buddhism in Asia, I had been drawn to the linguistic analysis of translation terms. Now, from the reading list for this course, I learned about the Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis that language affects thinking patterns. Based on this hypothesis, I first traced the historical development of the Neo-Daoist interpretation of the terms usually translated as “being” and “non-being.” In doing so, I emphasized the linguistic basis for thinking of reality in terms of this polarity. I then examined the Indo-European terms “to be” and “not to be” and the influence it had on ways of thinking – specifically, the influence it had on the Buddhist formulation of what is usually translated as “emptiness” or “voidness.” Finally, I analyzed the effect that the linguistically based Indo-European way of thinking had on the historical development of the Chinese Buddhist presentation of voidness.
I recognized at the time that this was just a preliminary analysis. To go further in this direction, I would need to improve my language skills and rely on primary sources. Writing this paper, however, was the first step I took in what has become the major focus of my meditation – analytical meditation on voidness.
Summer School and Second Year Program at Harvard
Never wanting to interrupt my studies, the next summer I took an intensive third-year Japanese course at Harvard, which finished the Japanese requirement for the M.A. degree in Chinese.
The second year at Harvard, I took an advanced Classical Chinese course with the erudite Professor Achilles Fang, who loved translating classical Chinese into ancient Greek. Deepening my knowledge of Confucian and Daoist philosophy, it prepared me to be able to read classical Buddhist Chinese. To understand Buddhism further, I also learned the importance of knowing more deeply not only the philosophical context in which Buddhism developed, but also the cultural and historical context within which it flourished. I therefore also took courses in Chinese Institutional History with the eminent Professor L. S. Yang. Despite all my Chinese studies, however, I was instinctively drawn to Tibet, and so I added an anthropology course on Cultures of Inner Asia with Professor John Pelzel. The emphasis was on the various forms of shamanism found throughout the region, from Tibet to Siberia.
A required course for the Chinese M.A. was Sinology Research Methods, and so I also took that my second year at Harvard. We learned how and where to find information needed for our future research. Each week we were given a list of twenty research problems to solve, and we were expected to write a paper of at least twenty pages with the answers. This was long before the Internet, let alone search engines or AI-powered search tools, and we were expected to make use of all available Classical and Modern Chinese, Japanese, English, German and French sources. Professor John Hightower, who taught the course, was highly disappointed that none of us in the class could also read Russian!
As a typical problem, we were given a Tang Dynasty poem. We were told that in order to appreciate it, it would help to know the view from the monastery where it was written. What was the view? To solve this puzzle, we needed to identify the monastery, find its present name, and locate it on the captured Japanese intelligence maps from World War II held at one of the Harvard Libraries. Working on problems like this taught me the ingenuity and research skills that I have needed to use in my future work.
That year, I also began my study of Sanskrit. I wanted to know the philosophic context within which Buddhism arose and developed in India to the same level as I knew the Chinese context to which it adapted. As it turned out, I had to educate myself in classical Indian philosophy. The approach for learning Sanskrit at Harvard was purely philological. This suited most of the other students as they were primarily classics majors, interested in comparing Sanskrit to Latin and Greek. We needed to be able to identify the grammatical inflection of each word in a text and to translate accordingly. It was assumed that we could do that without having any explanation of the complex grammatical forms. I was grateful for my childhood study of Latin. Although it was not needed for the study of science, it gave me a firm foundation for studying Sanskrit.
This philological approach has proved invaluable in my present work. The Tibetan translations from Sanskrit are remarkable, given the enormous differences in the two languages and the lack of any resources when they were done. Nevertheless, the Tibetan language lacks the grammatical complexity to be able to render all the differences in tense, voice, person, number and case that Sanskrit has. It also lacks the enormous vocabulary. Frequently, several Sanskrit technical terms with distinct meanings were all rendered with the same word in Tibetan.
Previously, without comparing complex philosophical passages in Tibetan with the Sanskrit originals, I had not even been aware of these distinctions. And without these distinctions in the English translation, the precise meaning of the passages often got lost. However, the original Sanskrit versions of many Buddhist texts are now available online. The problem is that the original Sanskrit of even more texts than that have not been preserved or are not readily available. To help with that problem, there is now an eighteen-volume Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary, which contains extensive bilingual quotes from Buddhist texts. I always consult this dictionary to find a passage with the term in a similar text in order to uncover the intended meaning.
Sometimes there are discrepancies between the Sanskrit and Tibetan versions of a passage that cannot be explained by that method. I have sometimes found that they could have derived from a difference in one letter of a Sanskrit word, probably due to either a scribe’s error or a smudge on the original palm leaf page that the Tibetan translator used. Like this, I continue to make good use of the research skills I learned at Harvard,
Although my time was almost entirely filled with work those first two years at Harvard, there were brief times for relaxation. One of Mark and my classmates in Chinese Studies, Jamie Pusey, was the son of the president of Harvard and lived in an attic room atop the presidential mansion. He went on to become a professor at Bucknell University. When the Batman series began on television, Jamie would invite the two of us each week to his room to watch it. Like a naughty child, he would sneak us upstairs by a hidden back staircase. It was so outrageous to be watching Batman with the president of Harvard in the rooms downstairs. It tickled us greatly.
Summer Research Project at Harvard
Having completed all the course requirements in Chinese and Japanese for the PhD degree in Far Eastern Languages, I asked and received permission to study for a joint PhD between Far Eastern Languages and Sanskrit and Indian Studies. That would take two more years of course work but, as a joint degree, it would not require also studying Pali and Vedic. Tibetan would be enough in addition to Sanskrit. Pali would have been useful, but unfortunately, I passed that opportunity by. Nowadays, when I need to translate a passage from Pali, I struggle slowly through with a grammar book and a dictionary.
During the summer between my second and third years at Harvard, as a follow-up to my course in Sinology Research Methods, I participated in a project for preparing a digital database of secondary literature on China. Having explored the computer labs at MIT and seen the prototype of the first computer games, I was intrigued to learn more about the possibilities that computers offered now that they no longer filled a room and required punching holes in cards.
My task for the summer was to sit in the stacks of Harvard’s massive Widener Library where all its books were shelved, locate and skim through hundreds of books and articles on China, and tick the numbered boxes for the century, geographic area and main topics treated in them. Aside from learning more about Chinese culture, I learned the importance of databases, which proved very useful for my future work with Berzin Archives and Study Buddhism. It also prepared me for working that fall, as part of my grant, as a teaching assistant to Professor Holmes Welch on Chinese Culture. I found that I really enjoyed teaching and working with students.
Third Year Program at Harvard
During my third year at Harvard, I continued studying Sanskrit. Under Professor Daniel Ingalls, we read the Bhagavad Gita (Skt. Bhagavad Gītā) and a selection of the Upanishads in the original, but again, only analyzing the grammar and not the philosophical content. I also started my study of Tibetan. Inspired by the anthropology seminar I had taken, I also wanted to study Mongolian, but sadly it did not fit into my schedule. I even applied for the course in Sogdian but was rejected because I did not know Farsi. Just studying Tibetan from among the Inner Asian languages would have to be enough to satisfy my thirst to learn Buddhist languages.
At that time, 1967, the only books readily available about Tibetan Buddhism were by Evans-Wentz, Lama Govinda and Alexandra David-Neel. Tibet was largely a mystery. The only textbook for learning Tibetan was written by Heinrich Jaeschke, a Moravian missionary interested only in translating the Bible into Tibetan. The textbook tried to explain Tibetan grammar in terms of Latin, which did not fit it at all. The Tibetan course at Harvard was taught by Professor Nagatomi and, since I knew Japanese, as did the one other student in the course, he taught Tibetan grammar in terms of Japanese grammar, which fits it quite closely. Nagatomi, however, had no idea of the spoken language or even how Tibetan was pronounced, and so we pronounced every letter of every word. In typical Harvard fashion, we had been given only one day to learn the script. Having had to learn a hundred Chinese characters each week when I first studied Chinese, this did not present a big problem.
Robert Thurman returned from India that year with his new Swedish-German wife Nena. He had been studying there, often privately with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as the first Westerner to become a monk in the Tibetan tradition but had now disrobed. Nena had been a Vogue Magazine fashion model and had previously been married to Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor who had popularized psychedelic drugs, especially LSD.
Thurman and I soon became classmates and lifelong friends. He told me about his teacher, the Kalmyk Mongol Geshe Wangyal in New Jersey, close to where my mother lived. I therefore started going to visit him on school holidays and got my first taste of Tibetan-Kalmyk Mongol culture. Although I never had the chance to study with Geshe Wangyal, spending informal time with him made me want to explore Tibetan Buddhism even more.
During this third year at Harvard, as part of my quest to understand the mind and emotions, I took a private reading course with one other student on Freud and Jung with Professor Robert Bellah. We met every week in Bellah’s office for incredible discussions about their theories, especially Jung’s explanation of the development of the ego with its individual identity into a Self that fully integrated all aspects of the collective unconscious. But, in the end, although I found Freud and Jung’s theories profound and helpful, I was not satisfied with their models of the mind. I felt that they only partially explained how and why emotional problems arose. I wanted to learn even more about the mind. I wanted to go even deeper into Western, Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist thought. Although each of them might be useful, I felt one of them must have the deepest answers to what the actual origin of emotional problems was and how to get rid of them. I still had not decided which system gave the answers I sought.
Like Princeton, Harvard also offered the opportunity to audit courses by famous professors, such as The Character and Social Structure of America by Professor David Riesman and The Human Life Cycle by Professor Erik Erikson. We could also audit courses across town at MIT, where I audited one on the History of Western Science with Professor Houston Smith. Like this, I took full advantage of such opportunities and learned much from these luminaries of the Western intellectual world that would be helpful in the years ahead. For example, Erikson’s theory of the eight life-stages in the psychosocial development of ego-identity, complete with the main features and goals of each life stage, proved to be a useful tool for going further in my self-analysis after my work with Dr. Sapir had ended with his moving to New York.
Summer Backpacking and Hitching through Europe
During the summer between my third and fourth years at Harvard, I finally took a break from my academic pursuits. As was the custom at the time, I backpacked through Western Europe and Morocco, mostly hitchhiking and staying in youth hostels. I hitchhiked with David Talamas, a Christian Palestinian American whom I met at a youth hostel in Amsterdam on my first day in Europe. He had attended Collège du Léman, a private boarding school in Versoix, Switzerland, and was studying Arabic at Harvard. He already spoke several European languages plus colloquial Arabic. That made our travels together much easier.
After we returned from Europe, David and I shared an apartment, and although he came from a Catholic background, we quickly resolved any prejudices we might have had about each other’s cultures. My discussions with him were the start of my interest in Arab culture and the eventual work I would do in the sphere of Buddhist-Muslim relations. He went on to become a businessman, a serious Buddhist practitioner and a lifelong friend.
In Geneva, David introduced me to Stanley and Louise White, American expats who had had to leave the USA during the McCarthy era. They lived in a suburb, commune style, with their children, grandchildren and about a dozen international artists and writers. With lively philosophical and political discussions around a massive table at communal dinners, I was introduced to a whole new world. It opened my eyes to exciting lifestyles and intellectual possibilities outside the academic world and made me receptive to what I would find when I went to India a year later.
This was the summer of 1968, the summer of protests and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Although I was not directly involved in any protests, I was staying with many Czech students in a hostel in Rome when news arrived of the Russian tanks rolling into Prague. Witnessing their shock and despair, I became aware, for the first time, of the personal difficulties people faced in the communist world. Growing up in America during the Cold War, I had no idea of what life was like for people living there. As it turned out, the first communist country I taught in was Czechoslovakia (1985), and the first meeting with a president that I helped arrange for His Holiness the Dalai Lama was with President Vaclav Havel (1990) one month after the fall of communism there.
Fourth Year Program at Harvard
After returning from Europe, in addition to more Tibetan and Sanskrit classes during my fourth year at Harvard, Thurman and I, together with a Japanese student, had a course with Professor Nagatomi in which we studied how a Sanskrit text on logic was translated into Classical Chinese. The Chinese translation was excellent, but the Tibetan version, translated from the Chinese, was unintelligible, and so we did not look further into it. The class was held in Nagatomi’s small office. He would chain smoke the entire time, as did Professor Ingalls during our Sanskrit class. This was quite common in the 1960s. Despite the smoke, I loved the course and was really interested to see what lessons could be learned from previous efforts to translate Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into other languages. We paid special attention to how the technical terms were understood and translated – a focus that I have maintained for the rest of my life. The course also gave me the basis for understanding the use of Buddhist logic that I would encounter in my studies with the Tibetans in India.
In our informal meetings, Thurman sometimes told me about His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan refugee community in India and that it was possible to study there. Excited about the possibilities to do the research for my PhD thesis with the Tibetans in India, I applied for both Fulbright and American Institute of Indian Studies Fellowships. I was awarded both and chose the Fulbright. Professor Nagatomi and I had decided upon translating the Guhyasamaja (Skt. Guhyasamāja) Tantra as my topic. Thurman and I had read a few passages from it in our advanced Tibetan class, comparing it with the original Sanskrit version and the Chinese translation. I was keen to learn more about it. Relating it to what I had learned in my reading course on Jung, I thought it would reveal the workings of the mind on a deeper level.
To help me prepare for my PhD oral exams in Indian, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophies, Harvard gave me a private office. It was a room, complete with an attached bathroom, in a converted hotel next to campus. I called it my “Sense-Deprivation Zone.” Despite all the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights protests that were raging on campus, I was oblivious to them, locked in my soundproof office with all the window shades drawn, a thermos of coffee and no furniture besides a desk and a chair. The only break I took from this intense study was to watch Star Trek with David, as we now had a TV. In the end, I was perhaps over-prepared. During the oral exams, I supported my explanations of issues in Indian and Chinese philosophies with quotes from primary sources that I wrote in Sanskrit and Chinese on the blackboard. I had picked up the habit from my summer at Stanford. I easily passed.
Summer Journeying to India
While reviewing all these philosophical systems, I tried to imagine what it would be like to think like them. I was anxious to find out and so, after passing the oral exams, I immediately left for India with a Pan Am ticket that allowed me unlimited stops along the way. My first stop was London, where I met the famous Tibetologist David Snellgrove at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). When I informed him of the topic of my dissertation, he told me that one of his doctoral candidates, Francesca Fremantle, was already translating the Guhyasamaja Tantra, plus a Sanskrit commentary. It was clear that I would need to modify my topic. Fremantle went on to become a Buddhism teacher with the Longchen Foundation.
I continued my journey, making my way slowly through Europe, spending some idyllic time at the artist commune the White family had in the south of France. I also traveled extensively around pre-Islamic revolution Iran and pre-Soviet invasion Afghanistan. My childhood friend, Jon Landaw, had been in Iran for three years in the Peace Corps and his friends there hosted and offered me a taste of Persian culture. In Kabul, I met up with Perry Link, my next-door neighbor and fellow Chinese student at Harvard, who went on to become a professor at Princeton. We hired a Russian jeep and an Afghan driver to take us on the dirt road to see the great Buddha statue in Bamiyan. The conditions in Afghanistan at the time were totally medieval. There was no modern development at all. Aside from one telegraph wire, there was nothing connecting Bamiyan with the outside world.