Preface and acknowledgments

Summary

The origins of this book lie quite some time in the past. In 1979 it was fortunate for me that Clifford Geertz, who happened to be spending that year in Oxford, agreed to act as an examiner for my D.Phil. thesis. In the oral examination, he asked me whether I thought Buddhists were trying to escape from life or from death. I gave a text-bookish, doctrine-oriented answer: that although samsāra, what Buddhists aspire to escape from, is most often called the “round of rebirth,” in fact it involves – necessarily – repeated death as well as repeated birth, and so nirvana is the transcendence of both life and death (cp. 1.1.a on punarmrtyu, repeated dying). That seemed to do the trick at the time (I got the degree), but I was and have remained unhappy with it. It is not that there is a better conceptual, doctrinal answer; what I said is, I still think, adequate on that level. But the thrust of the question calls for a kind of reflective thought about Buddhism of which I was then quite incapable. It is for readers to decide whether or not that is still the case. This book is not a direct, one-thing-or-the-other answer to Geertz's question (I do not believe that either possibility, simpliciter, would take us very far, or that he thought it would), but it is a response to what I feel were some of its underlying concerns.