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Sujato advising students thinking about academia career

 I higlight a few points that are especially important

Sujato advising students thinking about academia career

msg #14

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/why-devadatta-was-no-saint/15769/14

Well, now you’re talking! Here goes a list off the top of my head:

  • Suspect dramatic theses and radical reinventions. They almost always turn out to be overblown or just plain wrong.
  • Facts are sacred. Your values shape the kinds of questions you want to ask, but the facts shape the kinds of answer you get.
  • Learn to enjoy changing your mind. It’s growth!
  • Scholarship has nothing to do with publishing cool-sounding articles. It should serve some actual benefit for humanity, else it is a waste of time.
  • The most powerful method is empirical. Stay as close as possible to the facts, whether they be the text, the history, or whatever it is you’re studying, and cautiously infer from them. The further you infer, the less confident the conclusion.
  • When the work of scholars faces valid criticism, the criticism should be accepted and the work either withdrawn or changed. When you see scholars who don’t correct mistakes, don’t take them seriously.
  • Academics love turf wars and personal vendettas. Never get drawn into them.
  • When you see what is popular and faddish, do something else. It’s quite possible, and even common, for theories and ideas to prevail for decades in academia while lacking any real foundation. See: string theory, behaviorism, monetarism …
  • Buddhist studies is in its infancy, and lacks a huge amount of foundational work, such as the lack of complete translations of canonical texts, or a good and complete Pali dictionary. Theory has displaced serious work, but the field will not advance until the foundations are solid.
  • Postmodernism is boring and ran its course years ago. Articles with unconventional plurals in the title (“Buddhisms”) were cool in the 70s, but then, so were flares.



Sujato commenting on what happens when wrong ideas gain popularity

(excerpts from msg #13 of same thread above)

As a scholar, I studiously avoid any reference to the personal life of the people on whose work I comment. What matters is the evidence and the ideas. But when faced with a case like this, well, our academic and personal lives are not as distinct as we thought. It’s insidious, isn’t it?

These ideas, clearly driven by a deeply twisted personal agenda, become couched in quasi-academic, quasi-progressive language, and too many people are willing to jump on board the train of the latest fad. And then, due to a lack of vigor or critical rationality, the ideas circulate in the mainstream, where they subtly influence attitudes and behaviors. In a very real sense, this is the re-emergence of Devadatta’s own corruption. He, as the personification of the dark side of Buddhism, is overthrown. But somehow like seeks out like, and those of an element will find each other.

...

When I read Ray’s book, as a forest monk I was inclined to see it favorably. It was right up my alley! However, as I looked into the details I could see how thin and overblown much of it was. I went from cautiously favorable, to skeptical.

Then when I did the detailed research I realized it was just a nothingburger. The scholarship was sloppy, handling of sources was misleading and unreliable, and the thesis was overblown if not entirely incorrect.

Nevertheless, his thesis on Devadatta gained a lot of influence. Even after I had shown it to be baseless, some teachers 16 are still promoting it.

Honestly, this is one of the reasons I lost faith in academic work, especially in the US. The quality is so shoddy, there’s no serious acceptance of actual factual research, and even disproven ideas get repeated again and again.

It’s one thing for inquiry to be informed by one’s beliefs, it’s quite another thing to blithely ignore facts.




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