Andrew Skilton

Elective Affinities: The Reconstruction of A Forgotten Episode in the shared history of Thai and British Buddhism – Kapilavaḍḍho and Wat Paknam

The article discusses the first attempt to establish an independent bhikkhu-saṅgha in England in 1956 and the reasons that this initial attempt failed. The account draws on testimony from George Blake, one of the monks ordained under this initiative. After a short contextualization of the situation in which Blake met with Buddhism in London, there follows a further discussion of two issues on which his evidence sheds fresh light: the falling out of the British monk Kapilavaḍḍho with Luang Por Sodh (Phra Mongkolthepmuni), the abbot of Wat Paknam in Bangkok; and the move away from the teaching of the soḷasakāya meditation at the English Sangha Trust in London.

Critical thinking and buddhist studies—the genesis of a workshop

A brief review of the ubiquity of the critical thinking agenda in UK Higher Education is followed by a resume of its pedagogic history and of its contemporary commercial success. This is followed by a discussion of the nuances of meaning and referent for the term, reservations about current pedagogic assumptions concerning it and the contestation of its educational value in the political and social sphere. Themes from this concerning authority and ‘process vs content’ are applied to experience of Buddhist Studies candidates. This discussion is then tied in to the motives for the organisation of a workshop on critical thinking held at SOAS in 2012, which is briefly described.

‘LOST IN TRANSLATION’: REFLECTIONS ON TRANSLATING SCATOLOGICAL LANGUAGE IN BUDDHIST LITERATURE

Sometimes translating religious texts brings us up against the problem of scatological language. The author examines this problem in relation to a story of a former life of the Buddha and explores a variety of avenues for guidance on how to render gūtha ‘shit’ into English. This includes looking at Buddhist monastic law, which does not necessarily give us the guidance we might expect, and how the existing translation of this source of guidance illustrates the very problem in hand. The textual history and context of the story precludes some otherwise useful strategies for determining our translation and the best guide to the translators hand in this instance turns out to be humour. The author makes a case that, employed judiciously, humour could become a useful hermeneutic tool for drawing meaning from religious literature. Along the way the author also reflects on the influence of the social context of the translator, including changes in British obscenity law, and on the possibility that academia is unconsciously constrained by unexamined assumptions of ‘decency’. Buddhist attitudes to language are also touched upon.