Decoding the Gurus - Required Readings: Buddhism - A Journey Through History

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

In this episode of "Decoding Academia: Required Readings", Chris and Matt take a joint stroll through the history of Buddhism through Donald S. Lopez Jr.'s latest book, 'Buddhism: A Journey Through History.' We discuss the unexpected historical and cultural facets of Buddhism, how modern interpretations can often romanticise ancient practices, and whether Matt's mind has been blown. We also consider important issues like the Buddha's retractable penis, incredibly long tongue, and just how strongly we should condemn monks scribbling pictures of their would-be brides. So join us in the cycle of samsara as we strive to earn some merit and at least crawl a little closer to enlightenment.Book ReviewedLopez, D. S. (2025). Buddhism: A Journey through History. Yale University Press.Required Readings - Buddhism A Journey Through History00:00 Introduction to Decoding Academia01:51 Current Book Selection: Buddhism a Journey Through History02:56 Initial Impressions and Apologies06:00 Buddhism's Complexities and Contradictions07:59 Western Perceptions vs. Historical Realities11:27 The Historical Buddha?17:09 Buddhist Approaches to Texts22:09 Comparisons with Other Religions26:38 Orthopraxic Buddhism29:53 Petty Buddhism34:20 Matt's Religion Hot Take37:17 Ashoka: The Buddhist King?39:02 Buddhism's Syncretic Nature39:35 The Syncretic Approach42:49 Anti-Colonial Buddhism43:44 Buddhist Modernism and Science46:58 The Buddhist Canon51:26 Matt's History Thoughts53:06 Buddhism's Cultural and Social Role55:55 Gods and Supernatural Beings56:48 The Attitude towards Women59:36 The Value of Buddhism01:03:35 Religions as Cultural Technologies with Social Functions01:05:54 Monastic Issues01:12:51 Religious Motivations01:14:38 OutroThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1hr 17 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

Hello and welcome to the coding academia. Sorry, the coding, the gurus, colon, the coding academia dash required reading. Our special book club, which exists alongside the unofficial book club, there's a lot of things that go on. What a tangled web we've woven, Chris. What we do here, Matt, what we do here is we, you know, we, we kick votes on the Patron, we select the book to read, we read it, and then you and I come give our thoughts on it, give our thoughts on it. And then the following week, the community come join and give their thoughts. Right? So this is

the system now. It's like a journal club where you're forced to discuss the same article twice. A journal club where you're forced to discuss the same article twice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. This is how we do. And yeah, we look, we're all reading the same books. We're reading books together. They're of variable quality, of variable interest to people. But, you know, that's good, I guess. Push us out of our comfort zones. We're way out of our comfort zone with cod. You're right in your comfort zone with this book. Oh, what? No, no, that's yes. So the history that might be worth

mentioning to people as the last book that we reviewed was called the history of the most important fucking fish. No other fish compares. Yeah, the best fish, bar none. All the fish are dead to me. I mean, it was interesting, was it? Well, anyway, it was a long book about cod facts. And recipes. Yeah.

And we give people a choice. What other things would they like to look at? You know, what would they like? I included? You know what? What would they like? I included a suggestion which was Buddhism, a journey through history, came out just this year by Donald S. Lopez Jr., one of the leading scholars of Buddhism, presenting a history over 2500 years. And this is an offer I'm familiar with. So I knew that, you know, he's generally a good writer and whatnot, but I hadn't read this book.

And you pressured people into voting for it. Well, people were interested and it won pretty and fairly and we decided we'll read this. And now one apology that I'll issue up front is that this was his newest book, right. And I hadn't read it. So I thought this would be a better candidate because this one should be, you know, like a general history of Buddhism. And I thought that would be good. You know, like 2025 up to the scholarship and all this kind of thing. up to date scholarship and all this kind of thing. I did not realize that the format of this work was a very long introductory chapter,

and then a large amount of individual chapters, which are really standalone essays. In fact, they're actually organized in the book, in the book alphabetically. So there is some repetition across the chapters and there isn't really, you know, a consistent narrative that like builds up. It's more like a collection of essays. So I'm not a huge fan of that format, I have to say. And I do realize that that makes it a little bit more of a chore to get through. So on that ground, I issue an apology on that ground alone. Well, just like the American electorate, the voters, I've got no one to blame but themselves.

That's right. Not my, I didn't vote for it. But no, look, okay. But we read it. I'm giving a negative impression. I don't mean to. So Chris, you are the, you're the Buddhism guy. Am I the Buddhism guy? You're the Buddhism guy. You knew about Buddhism before. You knew about this guy's work before.

All right, so how'd you feel? Did, big picture. Did you enjoy it? What did you get from it? Did you learn something about Buddhism that you didn't already know? Or did it reinforce and underline fascinating facts about Buddhism that you already knew? Well, it is fair to say that I knew a lot of this kind of material. I like Donald Lopez Jr. and I've read a bunch of his previous books. So I knew he had this slightly critical deconstructivist approach to

examining traditions and history in particular Buddhism, right? But I will say that there was plenty of stuff in this that I didn't know because, you know, there's very specific topics and he's a good historian is the way that I would put it. He's good at finding out and presenting information about specific things. If you want to know about Sinhalese, Sri Lankan Buddhism over the course of 200 years or whatever, you'll get lots of details on that in one chapter. If you want to know about monastic rules, that's in like 18 of the chapters and whatnot. So yeah, it wasn't that there was a ton that was super surprising, but there was

a bunch of stuff that I hadn't come across because he's just quite densely packing information in each of the chapters. So yeah, big broad strokes, nothing really surprising, but lots of new details that I wasn't aware of before. Okay, well, spit it out, though. Get concrete. Tell me like what? Like, what did you learn? I will. Yeah, I will. I will. But you know, you're the rookie here, right? You're, you're the man that hasn't taken a Buddhism 101, of course, you're the person that frequently referenced Zen as the only form of Buddhism that mattered. That's not true. God damn it. Well, so what do I do? Was this eye-opening for you or was the new information bequeathed from it? I had studied about Buddhist history tree and whatnot, but like you hadn't. So nice little judo flip there, Chris. Sure. I'd be glad to give to give my impression.

I don't want you to crib from my notes, man. I'll tell you afterwards, but I don't want to sully, you know, your pure approach to things. So yeah, that's right. I'm like Sam Harris, just by pure impressions. No research. Yeah, don't be polluted by hearing my tics. Yeah, look, I learn a lot about Buddhism. I definitely, I now know an order of magnitude, several orders of magnitude,

more about Buddhism than I did before. Like he said. More than you wanted? More than you wanted. Yeah, and you know, like he doesn't actually make it explicit. Like the sort of things that I get from it is not like he says, oh, this is what this is what this stuff amounts to. Rather, as you said, he sort of gives a whole bunch of details. You know, this is what so-and-so said, and then Buddha made these rules, and then so-and-so got into trouble for this.

And you know, all of the details and all of the records, and the inconsistencies, and the consistencies between different areas, and so on. And so on one hand, it's a lot of facts, bit like co-facts. Yeah, co-facts. Yeah. But to me anyway, I don't know whether, to what degree this is his intention, but to me, anyway, I don't know to what degree this is his intention, but to me, the takeaway from it is that Buddhism is a big, mad, confusing mess of a religion, just like most religions. I mean, not that I know much about religions in general, don't even know much about Christianity. But what I do know is pretty mental.

In the way that old timey stuff from a couple of thousand years ago always is, right? It's like reading about medieval history and stuff. It's one mad thing after the next. And yeah, so that's certainly true of Buddhism. It was difficult to detect much of it. I mean, look, there are obviously concurrent ideas, like, you know, underlying themes in Buddhism, and that needs to do with the self and so on. But there's also inconsistencies even with the sort of fundamental doctrinal elements, just again, with Christianity, famously had a lot of trouble figuring out whether or not

God, the Holy Spirit and Christ are they one, are they separate? You know they had councils like Nicaea and stuff to try to figure this stuff out and probably just made things worse. Yeah so I guess it really underscored for me just how it isn't, you know, it's very different. This is a point that you always make, you love to make this point, that the sort of fond conception that Western adherents of Buddhism have of the religion, which is being fundamentally different from the other religions and more of a philosophy than a religion and very coherent and pure and very nice. And I've got some people who are proper Buddhists, you know what I mean? They consider themselves Buddhist, they go to Buddhist church or whatever it is that Buddhists do in the West.

And I know that they have that version of Buddhism. So yeah, it is interesting to look at all those details because it's just a really complicated melange, most of which is pretty unappealing to modern sensibilities. Again, not really a ding. So is every other religion. So is other medieval type historical stuff. They thought about things differently from us.

The attitude to women, for instance. Yeah, I actually think that's an interesting point because there are things in this that I do think are the good version of deconstructivism, like that kind of approach to saying, here's the popular image of something or the broadly accepted one. But actually when you look where these have come from or how they've been constructed, it's like it comes from these sources and whatnot. Right. And here there's just a lot of like the prevalent image of Buddhism in the West that you would get if you read Robert Wright, if you read Sam Harris, if you read various other proponents of the

Buddhist modernism that is popular in the West, it basically regards almost all of the information that is in this book, which is dealing with Buddhist history as like not really what Buddhism is about, like for our history. And I think that is clearly wrong from this account. It is also like you said that, first of all, the very opening salvo, which I think is an interesting thing is it argues that the level of evidence for the historical Buddha is a lot shakier than other comparable figures, right? Yes. That's in the first chapter.

I did not know that. I always assumed that he was probably had, if anything, better historical evidence for him being a real person than the big JC. Yeah, and that's not the case, right? But the thing is, like you said, I kind of like this in the way Donald Lopez writes, because it's like he's incidentally just completely under these fundamental assumptions. And he's kind of like, you know, well, so like the evidence, you know, is a lot shakier. You know, we generally wouldn't regard this as like strong evidence for someone actually existing. And then he's like, but anyway, lots of people have believed that he did exist. So let's carry on for the rest of the book as

if he does because whether he did or he didn't, the idea of a Britta has certainly had a lot of impact for our history. I like that. That's neat because he's just like, it doesn't really matter. The fact is that the stories around the Britta have had a lot of influence, which is true. But I also think things like, I'll butcher this name map, but I remember there was a part where he was taught, it might be on the chapter that's on self, right? And he's talking about like how Buddhism, one of its most famous doctrines is around the doctrine of no self. But there's

always been this issue about likeation with no-self. The Buddha, yes, but also the Dalai Lama is able to identify belongings from his past lives. That's one of the criteria for identifying him. But there's there's no self, right? Continuing. There's just like a collection of Darmic aggregates, which are flowing. But he has these specific memories and attachments to specific objects. And, and there's lots of metaphors that people like to use candles, like lighting, the fire transferring between candles, but it's not the Siam and all this kind of thing, but the part which I remember there, and this is a good example of the construction is that he mentions this sect. I think they're called the Pukka Lava, Pukka Lava, that might

be it. I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong. But it's essentially like a sect which was often presented as heretical, like because they argued there is a self or at least they had a view that a lot of the other popular Buddhist sects regarded as too much notion of a fundamental self. In leader works, they're just a sect that's been up on these heretical Buddhists who had this view that nobody really bought into. But when you look at the historical records about people that were traveling around at the time, it seems that this was actually a very popular sect. There were lots of monasteries and it had a lot of patronage.

So it wasn't this fringe, non-significant thing in early Buddhism that it's kind of presented as. And it was, in that respect, like a fairly major Buddhist sect that had a completely different view about the nature of self. But that's now relegated to the dustbin of history. It's like, that's not Buddhist, right? But it clearly was Buddhist for a couple of hundred years. So yeah, that kind of thing I think is good because it just makes people realize that these kind of very rarefied views of the contemporary Buddhism that is popular in the West being what Buddhism was throughout history and what original Buddhism is actually about is wrong. According to the records, like original Buddhism has a lot of stuff about magic and it has a lot of stuff beating up on Brahmins and saying how stupid

Brahmins are. And it has the Buddha, frankly, being a bit of an arsehole to various rivals and doing demonstrations of supernatural powers in order to shame people and whatnot. So yeah, it's like petty beefs, but only applied to that period. I do remember a surprising number of petty beefs. That sort of petty behavior. Like there was, what was that incident where the guy, he was at his wedding and Buddha went to his wedding. And you really don't want Buddha come into your wedding because he convinced the guy not to get married to cancel the wedding. So the poor woman was left at the altar there.

So to her had to go away and become a monk with Buddha. It's all very well and good. But the guy was sad, right? He was missing his wife because he probably did want to get married. And apparently he was using chalk or a rock or something. He was- Could draw a picture. He was drawing pictures of his bride-to-be. It's kind of pathetic really. I mean they can't have been very good pictures because he's scribbling them with a rock. So I'm just imagining this crude kind of thing.

Stick chalk woman. Hopefully it wasn't just a stick figure with boobies. Hopefully it wasn't just a stick figure with boobies. Hopefully it wasn't that. But anyway, the Buddha saw that and got very angry and didn't ban him from drawing pictures of his bride, but banned all pictures of people. A lot of the Buddhist canon, there's tons. This is one of the things like there's so much, right? Like it's a very literate tradition in a lot of ways. But the interesting thing is also in this respect that like there's a chapter on text and it's kind of pointing out that like, you know, Buddhism is doctrinal religion.

It's got tons of doctrines. It's got cannons. It's got people who disagree about like which sutra and whatnot is the proper one. But the way the texts exist in Buddhist tradition are not the way that they're necessarily imagined in the kind of like philosophical version of a text, which is you study this text and you learn the inside. It is much more like you master the recitation of texts and spreading it. And the texts themselves say, if you do this, if you repeat the text, if you

make more copies of it, you will be reborn into like a, a heaven realm where you can, you know, get enlightened easier or your, your karmic benefit will, you know, spread throughout the eons and all that. So lots of this stuff is based around the ability to memorize, recite, and spread texts and texts themselves having power. You can bury them in the ground. They will help a statue become more powerful or potent or these kinds of

things. Actually, Chris, this is a bit off topic, but you're reminding me of our previous chats about the unreasonable proclivity of human beings to do cultural transmission. Yeah? And is it manifested in just imitation, even when the imitation makes no sense. This can lead us to be actually kind of stupider than say chimpanzees sometimes because we don't pay attention to the why. We just want to replicate the cultural information and pass it along. But at a civilizational level, it's kind of a superpower, right? Because obviously it means we're like a super organism that can, you know,

you know, transmit information across generations. Now, yeah, so you just made me think of that with this, with this tendency, not just of Buddhism, but of most religions and cultures to have that kind of, you know, that sort of slavish copying mentality. I mean, you had whole monasteries in Europe dedicated to copying out manuscripts, right? So yeah, I think there's something to that. Yeah. And there's power in the text, preserving the texts. I also like this thing. I find it so human. It just is the thing, just to be clear, even though I myself don't buy into a whole bunch of things, I think that all religious traditions have philosophical insights, interesting things. I'm sure there's

lots of people that get lots of benefit out from being part of a Buddhist sangha or doing Buddhist practices. I'm not dismissing any of that, but it's more like their traditions. They are these big things which have existed for thousands of years in lots of different countries. And they reflect, you know, the culture and the concerns of the people, humans, right? They're just all humans talking about human things. Yes, there's lots of gods and demons and whatnot in it. But like, you can see the

very consistent human concerns. And like one of them is constantly saying that the other earlier texts or the earlier interpretations or the other schools are like the lesser interpretation. Like it's not that they're wrong. It's just that they're kind of designed for people that are not on your level. So the text will be like every time a new one comes, it's kind of like, and there's this format in Buddhism that like, I heard from the Buddha, but he actually only told us he is super advanced, our hats who were following him, right? This wasn't the sermon he gave to everyone, or this one he buried in the ground. And now it's only appeared like 500 years later. So you can constantly say like this particular version, it is better than all of the previous

ones. Yeah, the dumbed down version for the proles. Yeah. Yeah. And you have this beautiful concept, skillful means, which is like, it's okay to lie or misrepresent things if it lets people get to the truth more easily, right? If it leads them to the truth. So you might say something which is entirely inconsistent with something that you say elsewhere. And people can say, well, yeah, but that was just like

skillful means. Like he was talking to different people. So according to what they needed to hear, he would like... That's convenient. Yeah. So you can, he would like. Yeah. Yeah. So you can't really be wrong. Yeah, I like that. I like that. OK. All right. Now, so Chris, we get it.

We get it. We get it. We get it. We get your critique of the Sam Harris's and the, what's the other guy's name? Why am I Buddhist? Robert Wright. Robert Wright of the world.

OK. But I mean, isn't this true, absolutely true of any religion at all times? It's not a special thing to do with like modernistic Western interpretations of Buddhism. As you emphasize, like Buddhism has been sort of reinterpreting itself and getting, you know, different versions of all been claiming to be like the real version, the better version, the distilled version, basically through its entire history in all places. That's also clearly true of other religions, all the major monotheistic ones, I would say. Right? So like modern religions, take anyone, take Catholics, take Anglicans or whatever, every one of them would be claiming to

Anglicans or whatever, every one of them would be claiming to have the best, most distilled version of what it's really all about. And all of them basically discount all of the crazy shit, say in the Old Testament, about taking slaves and killing women and children and all that, and genocide basically. They just go, well, that's not what it's really about. So like, this is just, this is kind of normal, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. So like, actually, one thing that this book did make me think about was that, you know, I did see Buddhist modernism, which is like the type of Buddhism that people will be most

familiar with. Buddhism is a philosophy, it's not a religion, it's completely compatible with modern scientific understandings. As Robert Wright's book is titled, Why Buddhism is True, or something like that. Science is just verifying what Buddhism shows. I find that kind of approach in general, slightly obnoxious, right? Because it requires an element of cherry picking. But the thing that this book reading it made it clear was that this is totally in line, as you say, with what Buddhists have done throughout history. And what people in religions have done throughout history for a time, is like reinterpret it, argue that the current whatever their sutra or preferred version of Buddhism is actually the closest to the original

true teaching of Buddhism. And like Buddhist modernism is just a new variety of that. So it's actually very much in keeping with the tradition. So there is that aspect to it. But I much in keeping with the tradition. So there is that aspect there. But I think why I think this is a good book to read, and maybe more so than like a critical deconstruction of Islam or Christianity, at least for Western audience, is that Buddhism has an esoteric, exotic, like kind of aura around it for Western people, I think, in general, where it is not treated in the same category as Islam or Christianity, or even something like Shintoism, which is, you know, kind of understood as like a foreign religion or like the bone religion in Tibet or whatever. Buddhism is seen as like something separate and beyond that. And this book and the general output of Donald Lopez Jr.

I think there's a very good in-depth key is for saying no, like it's a tradition like all those other religious traditions. It's complex. It has lots of diversity of interpretations, lots of different schools. It's frankly fascinating. Oh, weird historical shit. And to me, it's much more interesting when you actually grapple that, yes, we're all people, yes, we all have like concerns about the mind and, you know, meditation

experiences described in early meditation manuals from thousands of years ago echo what people are experiencing now, right? Because we're humans, we've got the same kind of cognitive apparatus. But also, there's so much weird shit. There's so much culturally specific concerns, supernatural beliefs and motifs, which make it clear like, no, we're not always in the exact same cultural setting. There's lots of diversity and the concerns of people 2,500 years ago, although yes, you know, the anger, jealousy, hatred, all these things map on, but there's lots of idiosyncratic things which are very specific to particular cultural

maluse and background. So I like it for that reason as a corrective, particularly, I think, for Western people or people that are not from Buddhist countries, because I feel like people in Buddhist countries do recognize that Buddhism is a religious tradition and they don't have the kind of, you know, hagiographic approach to it. You know, it's not exotic for people from those countries. What's your experience in Japan? Because I checked with my wife and she's completely ignorant about all of this stuff. Oh yeah, they don't. Generally speaking, I think Buddhist history

isn't taught very much in Japan in particular. A lot of the thing is just around the story of the Buddha, the kind of like hygrographic recounting of his life. Most people know that, but they actually don't know about the different sects of Buddhism in Japan or what their differing beliefs are, that kind of thing. But this is my, this is also an interesting thing. This is because Buddhism in Japan is mostly orthopraxic. It's just about- What does orthopraxic mean? Oh, thank you. I'm glad you TVL.

You're in your fancy words. Yeah. Well, so orthodoxic is that like what matters is belief right like which particular sect do you believe to which God do you endorse in this Can think of a price it gets like what matters if you go to the temple and you do what you're supposed to do If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at patreon.com slash Decoding the Gurus. Once you do, you'll get access to full-length episodes of the Decoding the Gurus podcast, including bonus shows, Gurometer episodes, and Decoding Academia. The Decoding the Gurus podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.

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