Acknowledgments from the Editor

Sherice Ngaserin

In the verse you just read, Vasubandhu invokes the imagery of breaking pots and analysed water to speak on the nature of self and reality. In Topics in Buddhist Philosophy, these images became reference points for arguments: we’d mention “like the pot” and immediately know to take something as being merely conventionally real. Throughout the course, we’d collect more images: Vajirā’s chariot, Subhā’s eye-gouging, Mallikā’s lack of grief. And with these images in mind, we asked what it meant for Buddhist practitioners like Vajirā, Subhā, and Mallikā to live and breathe anātman.

We read about anattan (अनत्तन्) in the Pāli Canon, anātman (अनात्मन्) in Abhidharma, śūnyatā (शून्यता) in Mahāyāna, kōng (空) in the Heart Sūtra. All of these were terms, translations, interpretations of what it meant to understand and subscribe to a philosophy of no-self. We read the fierce debates between different Buddhist intellectuals on their meanings, and more importantly, how we should live in light of their meanings. How does one interact with the world when that which is commonly agreed upon to exist and matter turns out to be mere illusion? Do we retreat from the world to seek nirvāṇa? Or is nirvāṇa something to be found right here?

We interrogated what holding to no-self implied for how we should deal with anger; for whether we could speak of rights and injustice in this view. We asked what no-self meant for dealing with grief, and tried to imagine how it was possible that Mallikā felt no grief when her husband and thirty two sons were murdered in a single day. Can we accept this as an implication of no-self? Should we? We asked what it meant to love and be in love without self. We discussed the dissolution of jealousy, the cultivation of sympathetic joy, and tried our hand at the love meditation. We talked about what Buddhism had to say about animals, environmentalism, gender, and capitalism.

We met with Yale-NUS alumni who studied Buddhist philosophy when they were students here and have gone on to work in academia, the civil service, and journalism. This year they returned to their alma mater to talk about all the ways in which they have continued to work on and develop their views on Buddhist philosophy. I thank Shina, Vincent Lee ’19, Nicholas Lua ’19, Fay Lee ’20, Mak Rui Teng, Phoebe ’22, and Wang Xing Hao ’23 for their enthusiasm in sharing their knowledge and experiences with our students, and for continuing to offer mentorship and advice to our students after their visits. 

We spent the semester unselving, or deconstructing all the conventions and internalised beliefs that arise from the veneration of self. And after a semester filled with exegesis, argument reconstruction, and academic essay-writing, we did our best to end our time in the course by unessaying. As Daniel Paul O’Donnell writes about his rationale for devising the assignment format known as the unessay:

…the essay form, which should be extremely free and flexible, is instead often presented as a static and rule-bound monster that students must master in order not to lose marks… Far from an opportunity to explore intellectual passions and interests in a personal style, the essay is transformed into a formulaic method for discussing set topics in five paragraphs: the compulsory figures of academia.

The unessay is an assignment that attempts to undo the damage done by this approach to teaching writing. It works by throwing out all the rules you have learned about essay writing in the course of your primary, secondary, and post secondary education and asks you to focus instead solely on your intellectual interests and passions. In an unessay you choose your own topic, present it any way you please, and are evaluated on how compelling and effective you are.

The transition to thinking about the unessay was marked by us leaving our usual meeting spot at Classroom 13 to sit cross-legged in a sprawling studio, surrounded by empty canvases and oil pastels that rubbed bright colours onto our hands and clothes. There, artist, somatic therapist, and alum of the college Teo Xiao Ting ’18 ran a workshop entitled Tracing Attentions: somatic explorations of mindfulness. And in our penultimate class of the semester, we abandoned our pens and laptops, wielding dice and cards to play the Buddhism-inspired tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Swordfarer. We were incredibly fortunate to be introduced to Swordfarer by the game designer Tan Shao Han, a frequent collaborator on Yale-NUS courses across the disciplines, and his colleague Alanna Yeo. 

The course culminated in an Unessay Symposium where students shared their unessays over açaí bowls from ahimsa sanctuary. This was inspired by my fond memories of the PPT Symposiums that featured in early iterations of our Common Curriculum’s Philosophy and Political Thought syllabus. To this day, I recall the silly scripts I performed with my peers about Laozi and Aristotle squabbling over admissions criteria for a new liberal arts college, about Ibn Ṭufayl and Thomas Hobbes arguing over the way to deal with an international crisis. I hope that the Unessay Symposium provided similar memories for the students of Topics in Buddhist Philosophy. Here, my thanks go to Shao Han from Curious Chimeras, Alana from Thorn & Key, and Xiao Ting for providing our students with creative inspiration for their unessays, and Ash and the team from ahimsa sanctuary for catering this event.

Finally, I’d like to acknowledge all the individuals and divisions who made this course and this zine possible. David Post (Dean of Faculty), Rajeev Patke (Division of Humanities), Neil Mehta (Philosophy), and Matthew Walker (Philosophy) came together to co-fund these course activities, and it is due to their generosity that we were able to enjoy all the events that you will read about in this zine. Nur’ain Salleh from Faculty Affairs was essential in providing logistical support for these events and ensuring that all our visitors got paid for their time. Ashlyn Thia, Indrani Kaliyaperumal, Kenneth Lee, Ng Li Fang, Yvette Soon, and the Yale-NUS MCT team made crucial contributions to supporting the course. Alan Anand photographed our workshops, and many of his photos appear in this zine. Sam Cheng designed this zine, encapsulating the aesthetic sensibilities that we wrestled with during the art and poetry section of the course. 

We are also incredibly fortunate to have received the NUS Buddhist Studies Group Faculty Grant, supported by the Foo Hai Ch'an Monastery Fellowship. The grant allowed us to breathe new life into the zine in the form of a print run. Here, my thanks go the inaugural Chair of the NUS Buddhist Studies Group, Jack Chia, for his tireless commitment to promoting Buddhist Studies in Singapore and the support and encouragement he provided to our zine project.

Thanks also go to my once-teachers and now-colleagues Amber Carpenter, Andrew Bailey, Malcolm Keating, Matthew Walker, and Neil Mehta for their advice throughout the course; Emily Friedman, whose generous sharing of her syllabi introduced me to the unessay and inspired me to incorporate visitors and games into my syllabus; and Brendan Mooney, Ng Sai Ying, and Vincent Lee for their comments on initial drafts of the Topics in Buddhist Philosophy syllabus. On a more personal note, I would like to thank Jay Garfield for inspiring me to study Buddhist philosophy when I was a first year undergraduate at Yale-NUS, and for encouraging what felt like an impossible dream of one day returning to teach it here. 

This zine is dedicated to the inaugural – and perhaps only – students of Topics in Buddhist Philosophy. Their inquisitiveness, their erudition, their care for one another were evident in every section discussion, reading comment, and assignment. I am indebted to them for inspiring me and challenging me at every turn. 

Do take the time to linger on each and every one of their unessays.