A whole stack of questions (scholarship for masters, fields of study, school choice)

[bigtops]

Firstly, thanks very much to all of you who've posted here. I've read through a lot of posts over the last two weeks and the information has been very valuable. If I write a question that's been explicitly answered elsewhere, my bad... Please just let me know and I'll go find it. And thanks in advance for your patience with a long email.

I took a short teaching contract to get a feel for life in China (though I suspect that rural Guizhou is really it's own place in a lot of ways) and see if I'd be happy learning the language and pursuing my interests in Daoism and traditional Chinese medicine here... I'm tired of reading others' translations and in a field as open to wishy-washyness as TCM, I suspect there's value in trying to learn closer to the source of knowledge--though as an aside, in my short time here I've already seen there's plenty of junk floating around in the field in China, too. I've found that I like it here a lot and heck, I even genuinely enjoy sitting down to write a character 100 times, so I'm hoping to make study in China the focus of the next few years of my life. I don't know anybody who's done this before, so maybe some of yall can help.

To give some perspective, I'm currently teaching English in Tongren, Guizhou. I have a private tutor, study two to four hours a day on my own (mostly writing Hanzi with some use of the NPRC books and CDs), and regularly get complemented on absolutely blistering pace of at which I'm acquiring the Chinese language. Following those complements, my close friend who hooked me up with the job--a Chinese-American and a former college roommate who feels no need to coddle me--grimaces, sneers, and expertly pokes a few holes in the hot air balloon that is my head. Vicious he is, but I might actually be convinced that I'm somehow fluent if it weren't for him. Tongren folk do let loose with the flattery, my lord. Oh, and I took one year of Mandarin at the university level in 2001-2002. I remembered most of what I learned of grammar but I've had to relearn everything else since arriving in February. I'd guess my written vocabulary to be at around 500 Hanzi by now, my spoken to be somewhat larger. I'm definitely a visual learner... Words stick far better if I see them, or better yet write them, than if I'm told them. As for my questions...

-I'm considering applying for the China government scholarship this winter and as I am nearly 25 I am ineligible for a bachelor's program in Chinese. I also don't know if I need a second BA. Since I have a longstanding interest in Daoism and Chan it seems like it may be worthwhile to try to earn a masters in Chinese philosophy, or even Daoist philosophy specifically. Due to connections I've made for learning about TCM I'm pretty set on Bejing as my place of study. From what I've read here, Beijing Normal sounds like the most attractive school to me, when it comes to learning the language, that is. Does anybody know if they offer relevant programs and if the teaching quality in them is good? If BNU is not the best choice for this kind of study, what might be better?

-Are there any people here working towards masters degrees on the government scholarship? If so, is there anything an applicant should know?

-I know that the status of religion in China is complicated... Is the government welcoming to foreigners who want to come and study aspects of the country's past and present which many consider old-fashioned, superstitious, and so forth (I am speaking more of Daoism and Chan than TCM, which I know many foreigners are welcome to come train in)?

-Clearly, at my level, I am a looooong way from being able to discuss philosophy, religion, and medicine in Chinese. I also have no desire to take classes in English as I wish to be able to continue my education outside of the classroom with practicioners. After completing the two years of remedial Chinese offered to incoming master's students, and disciplined study habits (ie, I'm not headed to Beijing to party and have a masochistic willingness to spend long nights in the stacks), does anybody with more experience think I'm likely to be able to keep up classes taught in Chinese? Might it be better to do a year or more of strict language study before even trying to obtain the scholarship?

-When my teaching contract expires at the end of next month I'll do some traveling and then likely head back to the US for awhile and apply for the scholarship from there. However, since if I even get it I wouldn't be enrolling in school until September 2009, I'm considering applying from the States in January and then heading to BNU on my own dollar in February to launch right into the Chinese program for a semester. Could my being on BNU's rolls for the spring 2009 semester disqualify me for the scholarship?

That's all that comes to mind for now. Again, thanks to any who may have some insight to lend.

[lilongyue]

I'll answer your religion/philosophy oriented questions, as I'm the only one on this forum with any first hand knowledge of religion in China. My experience is only with Buddhism though. I'm a Buddhist and never had much interest in Daoism.

There will undoubtedly be masters programs in religion. My Chinese professor friend has a Ph.D. in philosophy, and also studies Chinese folk religions. He's been to Taiwan to study that religion called something like "Three in One" (I forgot the real name), that is a combination of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. He's applying to a special program to continue researching it in Japan, actually. So, while the average Chinese doesn't know much about Buddhism or Daoism, at least not much beyond a passing interest or surface knowledge, religion and philosophy is taken seriously among scholars. However, there is a quiet Buddhist revival taking place in China, but you'll have to know where to look to find it and you'll need to be able to speak Chinese to benefit from it.

Any serious study of Buddhism means learning Sanskrit, at least all the key terminology. This is true whether you're studying Chinese Chan, or Tibetan Tantra. If you're studying a Theravadan tradition, you'll be learning Pali. So, if you're studying Chan, and studying it in Chinese, you'll first have to learn all the Buddhist terminology in Chinese, and then the Sanskrit that they are translations, or transliterations, of. Study of Buddhism at a masters degree level will also most likely mean that you'll have to reference the source texts directly, which means learning classical Chinese, as all the sutras, commentaries, and principle texts of Chan are written in classical Chinese. You'll most likely have to learn traditional Chinese, as well. Very little of what you'll learn in one of these Chinese language courses offered in China will prepare you for this.

I'll share with you my experience, as that may help you get a better idea of what you have ahead of you. I've been a Buddhist for several years, and I've studied Buddhism very seriously. As I started out practicing Tibetan Buddhism, where study of the different branches of Buddhist philosophy is central to the monk's lives, I have a very strong background in those concepts and terminology. I also read a lot of sutras, nearly everyone I could get my hands on, so I am well grounded in the principle thoughts, ideas and practices of Buddhism. All of my reading and study was done in English, and out of necessity I picked up the Sanskrit, Tibetan and Pali key terminology. I never officially studied Sanskrit, and taught myself Tibetan for a while.

I have also done a fair amount of meditating, which from a scholarly perspective isn't necessary, but if you really hope to understand what Buddhism is truly about, and what the Buddha himself and the lineage of masters that passed on the teachings were talking about, you'll need to practice. This is especially true when studying meditation texts. Since Westerners began getting interested in Buddhism, there has been a lot of bad translations and scholarship because the "scholars" and translators didn't practice, and so had no first hand experience of what was referred to in the sutras and other texts. If Buddhism and Daoism are more than an intellectual interest for you, you will have to at some point spend time with masters and practitioners from those traditions.

So, when I started reading and translating Chinese Buddhist texts, I already had a very good foundation in Buddhist thought. Without this, even the simple texts I'm translating now would have been very difficult to understand. I am not translating sutras or ancient commentaries on subtle points of Buddhist philosophy, by the way. My Chinese is not good enough for that. I haven't studied classical Chinese, so those texts are unreadable to me. But I have made contact with some of the prominent modern Chan masters in China, and got copies of their teachings. While they are not the most complex texts in the world, they are full of specialized terminology, some originally Indian in origin, other distinctly Chinese, and peppered with bit of classical Chinese and quotes from sutras. The teaching I'm currently translating is advice on meditating with the "Wu" gong'an, and so uses a lot of the special words and phrases that are unique to Chan Buddhism, and not shared with other Buddhist schools. As it is also principally a teaching on meditation, to really understand it one needs some firsthand experience with the process of meditation. This Chan master makes references to Tiantai Buddhism, and the way that tradition talked about meditation, for example 止观. To understand 止观 you'll need to know that is the way the Tiantai tradition referred to samatha and vipassana. Now if you don't even know what samatha and viapssana are you're really going to start getting confused, and probably fail to catch the way these things relate to Chan meditation practices like the 公案 or 话头.

You're going to need good Buddhist dictionaries, too. There are plenty of Chinese-Chinese Buddhist dictionaries, but they might not start being of actual use to you for a few years. For a while you should really use a Chinese-English Buddhist dictionary. You'll need on that also has the Sanskrti equivalents, too. This will be a good place to start: http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/. It only allows "guests" to do 10 searches a day. If you want unlimited access you have to submit a translation. This dictionary uses traditional Chinese only, but is one of the best I found available for free. The website also links to other resources. The professor who is made this online dictionary also digitized one of the first Chinese-English Buddhist dictionaries, and posted it on his website. Read his warning about it's use though. The people who originally made that dictionary, Soothill and Hodous, weren't Buddhists and so didn't understand a lot of the concepts they were translating.

So, two years studying modern Chinese will not prepare you for studying Buddhism in Chinese. I'm not saying it's impossible, if you literally work your a** off you might be able to keep up. But at the end of the day, it will really be a lifelong study. If you have anything else related to this you'd like to talk about why don't you PM me. I'm happy to share anything I know with you, although it will be limited to Buddhism.

[bigtops]

Thanks very much for your thoughts. I'm happy to reply via private message but according to this site you don't accept emails from other members. Is there another way to contact you?

[lilongyue]

It seems your PM function hasn't been enabled. My email address is the name I use on this forum at gmail dot com.

[roddy]

Pm's should be available now. However we do ask that unless there's good reason, discussion stays on the board so that everyone can benefit.

I'm the only one on this forum with any first hand knowledge of religion in China.

Bet you aren't.

[lilongyue]

Bet you aren't.

But chances are I am. Whenever the topic of religion in China has come up (at least since I've been on the board) there hasn't been a single person who has posted anything that reveals first hand experience with religion in China. I already started a thread looking for other Buddhists. There weren't any. The last thread I participated in about religion in China had nothing more than foreigners saying what Chinese they knew had said about Daoism, Buddhism, etc. Not one person who had ever spent time in a temple actually engaging in the spiritual practices of that tradition, Daoist or otherwise, posted anything. If there are people with experience that extends beyond visiting temples for tourist reasons, they haven't ever posted.

[bigtops]

Well, I'm happy to reply here as this isn't too personal and I guess any people with similar interests could benefit. Thanks again for your clear insight, Lilongyue. I appreciate your comments as it's pretty difficult, as a beginner, to get a grasp on just how far I need to go. Not surprisingly, it is a long way.

I should probably start by saying that my main reason for wanting a master's degree is not because I aim to be an academic. My hope here is to build a vocabulary that will allow me to communicate in the relevant lexicon with masters who are still practicing in China. I'm less interested in studying them than studying under them, so most important to me is being able to practice as instructed. Having a full ride scholarship to study for up to five years seems like it could be a good way to build a vocabulary like that, but if I'm reading you correctly it sounds like I may well be in over my head after the two years of remedial language study give way to masters work. Is that what you'd guess? I'll have to think of something... Is it possible to go for an MA in Chinese language and just spend the time learning Chinese more or less from the ground up?

Now, I know you can't really speak to Daoism directly (and I mentioned Chan before because of its close links to that tradition), but in your experience would you say that there are definite limits to the potential progress of a practicioners if they do not pick up the classical language? I suppose I'll have to think about crossing that wide bridge when/if I come to it.

Also, I appreciate your points about Sanskrit translations and transliterations. Fortunately, I am familiar with a reasonable number of Buddhist and Daoist translations and commentaries in English and have been able to recieve some oral teachings in both traditions. So, on the one hand, my vocabulary is at least somewhat established, but on the other, I am getting pretty tired of wondering what gets lost in translation.

[lilongyue]

If you're more of a practitioner than an academic, then I'd say go ahead and attend a Chinese language course here in China. If you were more interested in academics, then you could study back in the West, never learn how to speak Chinese (at least not well), but be able to read it (including classical), and translate or teach. But if your main goal is functional Chinese, to be able to communicate in the language, and to live and study with the masters, then you don't need a degree to do that. It sounds like you already know this, and see joining a master's program as a way to fund your study, and maybe give you more time to devote to study than you might have otherwise. I don't know what your financial situation is like, but if you have the money to study Chinese in a language course here without having to worry about working, then I'd say go for that. There's no way your spoken Chinese will ever progress as fast in the West as it can here. It's also rather cheap to live and study in China. Of course, if you don't have the money to pay for two years of language study, but can get a full ride scholarship, then that's not a bad option either. I don't know what kinds of master's programs Chinese universities offer Westerners, if you were thinking of entering a master's program here.

If you pay for your master's degree with loans, then you'll be up to your ears in debt when you finish, and will have to immediately find work to pay off the loans. That situation won't leave you much time to practice. If you do end up with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, you can count on heading back to the West to find work when you've finished your studies, as paying off school loans with the kind of salary you're likely to get here would take a lifetime (unless your lucky and score a really nice job, but I wouldn't count on that happening). Going back to the West will mean being FAR away from the teachers you want to study with, too. You may have already thought about all of this, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

Besides money, another thing to think about is what you plan on doing with the knowledge and experience you gain from living and practicing Buddhism or Daoism in China. If you don't go the academic route, but want to translate Buddhist/Daoist teachings, then you'll forever be outside the ranks of the "academics." That doesn't mean you can't make a name for yourself, but will be seen as someone writing or translating "for practitioners." This is the case with a friend of mine who has published many translations of Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. He's done fine for himself, and is relatively well known by people into classical poetry and Chan, but is not taken seriously in academic circles. Do you see yourself as ever wanting to be taken seriously by academics? I myself will fall into the to "for practitioners" slot, as I don't have any degrees in Chinese or Buddhism. I'm not worrying about what academics think because I'm not writing for them, and they aren't translating the stuff I'm translating. However, if you see yourself as wanting to teach Chinese or Eastern religion someday, then you'll have to get some degrees under your belt.

From what I know about Chan, I'm guessing you will eventually need to learn classical Chinese to study Daoism, at least if you want to get below the surface. As Buddhism and Daoism are still far from being integrated into the daily life of average Chinese, the amount of literature written for the general public is limited. Academic books about Buddhism/Daoism are very difficult to read, you need a rather high level of Chinese to get through them, and even non-academic stuff may have a lot of quotes from sutras (which are in classical Chinese), so they aren't necessarily easy reading either. Depends on the author. However, if a book is written very simply, then it might all be surface stuff you already know about the religion.

The stuff I've been reading, and translating, recently are all teachings by modern monks, in simple modern Chinese. So I can understand most of it without needing to look up every other word. Last year I went to the Fourth Patriarch's temple, and they started sending me their monthly magazine. In it I saw a teaching by Minghai Fashi （明海法师). It was a great teaching, and in Chinese I could understand! So I started snooping around, and getting names of other prominent modern day monks. I went back to the Fourth's temple and met with Jinghui Fashi (净慧法师), and got some of his books, only one of which has been published outside of the temple. A very nice monk also gave a book of teachings by Foyuan Fashi (佛源法师). Jinghui and Foyuan were the direct disciples of Empty Cloud (虚云老和尚), and so are the leading Chan masters in China right now. Minghai is Jinghui's disciple. So I'm working on translations of these monk's teachings, and will first try to get them published in some Buddhist magazines in the States, and then put a book together once I have enough material.

I have yet to study classical Chinese, so there is still a lot of stuff I can't read, unfortunately. A Chinese friend of mine suggested I study classical Chinese myself. He recommended I buy a text book and just work through it. Haven't gone looking yet, so I'm not sure how feasible that is. The Chinese people I've spoken to about my desire to read sutras have said I should study things like Confucius first and then tackle sutras. But outside of monasteries, I'm not sure where one can study sutras. I'm guessing that in a religion course one would study some. But if you are really serious about in-depth study of Buddhist sutras you might have to make your way to one of the monasteries that have sutra studies programs. Taiwan has a lot of these, there are called Foxue yuan （佛学院). China also has them, but right now I only know of the big one in Bejing, which I think is called the zhongguo foxue yuan (中国佛学院). These kinds of place usually only have monks, and maybe some lay people preparing to ordain, but I'm sure anyone can join, so long as you can speak Chinese.

Having a good foundation in the terminology and concepts in English will help a lot! You definitely don't want to be trying to get your head around a difficult concept AND some tricky grammar.

Good luck, and let me now if there's anything esle I can help you with!

[bigtops]

At the moment, I can't think of anything else you can help with. What you've said so far has helped a lot, though. Thanks.

[whitebigsanitat]

I thought I'd contribute my own $.02 to this thread. I'm more interested in studying the history of Chinese religions than I am in their contemporary practice, so I'm coming at this from a different angle than you are. I will say, though, that if you do want to do any work on Daoism that takes a scholarly approach, learning classical Chinese is absolutely essential. Even scholars who focus on contemporary Daoist practice (e.g. Lagerwey, Anderson, Goosaert) make extensive use of materials written in classical. And if you want to understand Daoist practice more deeply, it would certainly help to be able to go back to earlier materials and trace their origin and development.

As to your question programs, I think that Beida or Renda would probably be good choices, too. I have a friend who did a year of classes in the Philosophy Department at Beida (Chinese universities tend to lump their religious studies faculty in with their philosophy departments) and he really enjoyed it. (If you do go to Beishida, watch out for that professor (I forget her name) who does the Chicken Soup for the Chinese Soul interpretation of Zhuangzi--her scholarship has been pretty heavily criticized.) If you're willing to look outside of Beijing, I know that Sichuan Daxue has a center for the study of religion. Nanjing Daxue is also supposed to be really good. Also, if you're willing to consider moving to Taiwan, there's a bunch of good programs (and a whole lot of money from the government) that you could look into.

Best of luck with your decision. I got the Chinese gov't scholarship for an MA at Beida a few years ago but turned it down for a program in the States. I'm regretting that decision and am going to be applying again for CSC funding sometime down the road. Anyway, let me know if there's anything else I can help you with.

--Edit: I just saw your last bit about the feasibility of studying classical on your own. I know one guy with amazing classical who did just that, but he's honestly one of the most brilliant people I've met, so I don't know if that route is for everyone. You could try to work through the Shaddack primer with a tutor and see how that goes. Especially when you're beginning classical (and I say this as a seasoned veteran with a whole year and a half of study under my belt), though, there will be all sorts of stuff that makes absolutely no sense, so it's good to have someone walk you through the basic grammar.

[woliveri]

Personally, I've always been attracted to Taoist practices rather than Buddhist.

The reason for this is I've found taoist practices are practical, straight forward and understanding coming from the TCM theory world where as Buddhist seem to be attached to rituals and the temples I've found in the states give a "feel good" answers rather than direct and clear answers and understanding.

In addition, the Buddhist temples I've visited in China (and Taoist) seem only to be concerned with entrance fees, selling trinkets, and selling Incense. I have a friend who pays 100rmb for a train ticket to Hangzhou (round trip), 35rmb to enter Lingyin temple grounds, and 30rmb to enter the actual temple, and even more money for Incense for prayer. This for a person who makes less than about 1500 rmb a month.

just my thoughts.

[周易Joey]

Hello Everyone

My main interest is also in the practice Chan Buddhism, but I'm also interested in Daoism and mythology/psychology in general. I got my CSC scholarship to get a Master's degree in Chinese philosophy from Zhejiang university. I've already lived in Hangzhou for a year, and now I'm doing another year of Chinese classes before I start my graduate studies next year.

Particularly for lilongyue,

I want to ask you-is the translator friend you mention Red Pine/Bill Porter?, I met him last year when he gave a lecture at my college... he was a great inspiration to me. Also, how about your meditation practice- do you sit alone in an apartment or are you practicing with others?

Best,

Joe

[buanryoh]

"as I'm the only one on this forum with any first hand knowledge of religion in China."

I have first-hand experience of Catholicism and various other forms of Christianity in China. Does that count?