It took me no time at all to say yes to Sherice’s invitation to speak during one of her classes. I was also thrilled to be able to join in for the seminars leading up to my talk. It was a very surreal experience, feeling both like a Yale-NUS student again and not like a Yale-NUS student at the same time. It was really heartening to witness and participate in the usual lively discussions—it certainly made me ache for those halcyon days… Plus, the syllabus just looked so exciting that I couldn’t resist! The weeks on Vasubandhu, especially his Twenty Verses, dovetailed perfectly with my research interests, so I was more than happy to share more about the text, its structure, and raise some substantive questions. The succeeding back-and-forth with the students got me thinking hard, for which I’ll always be grateful. Thank you for having me, Sherice and the kids from Topics in Buddhist Philosophy!

As a Literature major who was taking my first Philosophy elective, I honestly did not know what to expect. I took a look at the syllabus prior to registering, of course, and I did pretty okay in Philosophy and Political Thought, but I wasn’t sure if that’d be enough to tide me through. Some parts of the course – our weeks on atomism or metaphysical eliminativism, for example – definitely stretched me. Yet, despite how unaccustomed I was to Buddhist philosophy at first, as the semester progressed, I became more and more interested in how the new things I was getting exposed to could speak to my pre-existing body of knowledge. I was particularly interested, for example, in the connections between the (very Western) literature I read, both in class and in my spare time, and the Buddhist philosophical tradition. This eventually culminated in my presentation on representations of Buddhism in Western literature. For our seminar on narrative ethics, the class read excerpts from Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and Vanessa R. Sasson’s Yaśodharā and the Buddha. I was originally supposed to be presenting on Buddhist economics, but Prof Sherice gave me a great deal of autonomy - she was very open to the topics I wanted to discuss, and even encouraged me to pick the readings we did for the class.

Nicholas, an alumnus from the class of 2019, was also invited to do a presentation for that seminar. It was a bit nerve-wracking to have to go after someone who had properly studied all this in grad school, but I thought there was a really nice symmetry in our topics—Nicholas started our section with early canonical literature; I ended the section with literature from the 21st century. Nicholas introduced the class to two important narratives in the Buddhist philosophical tradition - the Buddhacarita and Handsome Nanda, both attributed to the poet Aśvaghoṣa. I had heard of the Buddhacarita prior to taking the course, but Handsome Nanda was new to me. I expected pieces from the Buddhist literary canon to be extremely serious and formal, but Nicholas was very deliberate in highlighting the playful, even occasionally bawdy side to Buddhism. Handsome Nanda follows the Buddha’s younger brother’s path to awakening through renunciation. Unlike his older half-brother, though, Nanda is less impervious to worldly pleasures, and when the Buddha comes back knocking, the reluctant Nanda has to be persuaded to say goodbye to his very loving wife and all the traditional joys of life.

What is the value of literature, and more broadly, the arts, in the Buddhist intellectual tradition? Considering its rigour, one might think that the arts would play second fiddle to the philosophical work, which does the “heavy lifting”. And to a large extent, this has been the case, with Buddhist thinkers like Aśvaghoṣa arguing that art should bear a largely instrumental, didactic function. As Nicholas translates from Handsome Nanda, the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and poetry is just as ‘bitter medicine is mixed with honey when it is drunk’. Yet, art also opens up the space for weird, hilarious, inspiring things to happen. I followed up on Nicholas’ talk by presenting on Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Though the text was written in the 1920s, it was wildly popular with the hippy counterculture movement, who took it as the text if you wanted to learn about Buddhism. It’d be ridiculous to say Hesse’s Siddhartha is a Buddhist text, and yet, this was the reality for an entire generation. It is through art and all the weird paths it takes through history that people come to know something.

Nicholas’ talk gave me a lot to think about in terms of the value of art within Buddhism, and also how art can impact both individuals and larger communities. This line of inquiry would ultimately motivate my final project, which looked at works of Buddhist architecture. It was really interesting to meet an alum who was also doing the things I was interested in, and it made me really happy to meet a like-minded person.

Presenting to Yale-NUS students had me feeling both excited and nervous. Excited: I live for Sanskrit poetry (kāvya). I relished the prospect of sharing why it moves me with a thoughtful audience who’d been thinking seriously about Buddhist themes. Nervous: I’d not presented something so philological since stepping out of academia. What if I’m rusty?

Although the topic’s flitted about the periphery of my intellectual consciousness, I’d not tackled it head-on, ever. What role does beauty, which in Sanskrit poetry entails deploying ornamentation (alaṃkāra), play on the Buddhist Path, a journey that at first glance leaves no room for beauty? I absolutely love Aśvaghoṣa’s poems, and instinct told me that these exquisite, early examples of kāvya were the right texts to talk about.

Sherice’s students did not disappoint – way smarter and sharper than my usual weekday interlocutors. The class felt like the best Yale-NUS seminars: all of us working together to come up with the best ideas. It was nice to know that, like me, some students wanted to be able to have Nirvāṇa but also beautiful things. It was awesome that the students leaned against my ideas as we collaborated in our search for truth. After Chelsea’s presentation, I suggested there was some spiritual kinship between Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and the Buddha’s journey: weren’t these all young people seeking higher meaning by renouncing the comfortable worlds they know? Someone rightfully raised the worry that this thought risked verging into Orientalism, pushing me to clarify my position.

The privilege of attending Chelsea’s presentation was the highlight of my trip. As an unabashed, out-and-proud Global Antiquity minor, I still spend lots of time thinking about Classical Reception, how later interlocutors make sense of an ancient past that came before. While training to be a philologist, I have focused my energies on “Classics” like Aśvaghoṣa and a very narrow set of receivers, such as his later commentators. I hadn’t considered how Kerouac or Hermann Hesse – seeing through a glass, darkly – separated not just by time but language and intellectual context – could also be interlocutors of Aśvaghoṣa and the high Buddhist Sanskrit tradition.

…And it’s nice to know that, in people like Chelsea, Sherice, and all Yale-NUS students – we’re forming our own little Classical tradition, one that will hopefully long outlast our college.