On March 11, 2020, the University of Michigan announced that “in person” classes would be canceled for the remainder of the semester, with classes continuing in a “remote” format. No one really knew what that meant, and we limped along, mostly via email, until classes ended six weeks later. The question was how we would teach during the coming academic year, the summer spent in all manner of online trainings in something called “Zoom” and the addition of new terms, like “asynchronous,” to the pedagogical vocabulary.
That fall, I was slated to teach the course that I have taught every fall for over thirty years at Michigan, Introduction to Buddhism. For historical reasons that have long been forgotten, it appears under three designations in the course guide: Religion 230, Philosophy 230, and Asian 230. I use this administrative oddity as an occasion to ponder with the students whether Buddhism is a religion, a philosophy, and the extent to which it is still Asian. It’s a large course, drawing between two hundred fifty and three hundred seventy-five students, depending on the size of the lecture hall that is available between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In these biweekly lectures, I don’t use a computer or PowerPoint slides or clickers, as so many professors do. I also do not use any notes. Part of that is inertia, simply wanting to keep teaching the course the way I have always taught it, a way that, at least based on course enrollments and teaching evaluations, has been successful. More importantly, not using notes forces me to ponder the day’s topic differently every year, thinking on my feet in an effort to present it in a way that the students will find interesting and meaningful.
I have always thought of a lecture course as a conversation between the teacher and the students, a conversation that should not be complicated by digital media or even by a textbook. I have never used a textbook about Buddhism because I don’t want the conversation with my students to be interrupted by an outside voice. Instead, I use an anthology of Buddhist texts in translation, with the texts selected by me. For years I used Buddhist Scriptures in the Penguin Classics series, changing later to the Buddhism volume of the Norton Anthology of World Religions. I have not allowed my lectures to be recorded because I want to preserve the immediacy of speech and because I have always thought of listening as a creative act. This is one of the several elements of traditional Buddhist pedagogy that I have incorporated into the course; in Buddhism, the term that means something like “well read” or “educated” is bahushruta, which literally means “much heard,” not because one is listened to but because one has listened.
Students are required to take notes by hand instead of on their laptops, which must be shut off during class. They resist this until I tell them that research has shown that students who take notes by hand remember more and get better grades. I require them to turn off their phones, something that is difficult to control given the addiction endured by so many students. The only “technology” in the room is very 20th century: a lapel mic to project my voice in the large auditorium and a document camera to project words like “bodhisattva” and “tathagatagarbha” that I write on a sheet of paper with a Sharpie.
I decided to turn the course into a podcast, something they could listen to in the background while they were cooking or eating, something they could listen to while taking a walk or riding their bike, whenever they wanted to.
But in the fall semester of 2020, all of that would have to change because no classes would be held “in person.” I initially thought I would do what would be easiest for me. I would hold the lecture in the usual 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. time slot on Tuesdays and Thursdays via Zoom, writing the technical terms in the chat. The teaching assistants (called GSIs—graduate student instructors—at Michigan) would hold their discussion sections on Friday as they always did but via Zoom. However, I became concerned about the students having to spend multiple hours of their days and nights, some of them suffering from COVID, all of them anxious, staring at their laptops, many more hours than they already did pre-pandemic. I also didn’t see much point in making them stare at my face on their monitors for three hours a week. I therefore decided to turn the course into a podcast, something they could listen to in the background while they were cooking or eating, something they could listen to while taking a walk or riding their bike, whenever they wanted to. I could record two podcasts over the weekend, post them on Sunday night, and give them until their Friday discussion section to listen to them. In other words, I wanted to offer the students space and time at a moment in their lives when those seemed to be in such short supply.
Of course, I had never made a podcast before. The first thing to do was to choose the software. After asking around, I ended up using Adobe Audition. It took some time to figure out, but I eventually did so, with the help of my excellent graduate student Becky Bloom, who took time off from writing her dissertation on a strange text by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to become my recording engineer. After purchasing a good-quality microphone, I was ready to begin recording. But I needed a theme song. I chose an instrumental by two outstanding British guitarists, Robert Fripp of King Crimson and Andy Summers of The Police. I chose it mostly for its title: “I Advance Masked.” I wanted this to be our motto, meaning not only that we were going to keep our masks on but also because we—this class of two hundred forty students, four GSIs, and one professor—were going to advance together, we were going to make it through this thing.
Over the previous summer, faculty had received all manner of instructions and advice about teaching remotely. We were repeatedly told that, when online, students had an attention span of about fifteen minutes. Having taught for many years at one of the great public universities in the United States, I felt confident that my students could pay attention for twenty minutes. I typically spoke for an hour or so during the eighty-minute class I had taught for years, leaving the additional time at the beginning and the end for questions and for the various housekeeping chores that a large lecture class requires. For the podcasts, I was going to need to shorten the lectures and break them into parts. But COVID was not the only cause of fear and despair in the fall of 2020. On May 25, George Floyd had been murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. It was important to somehow honor him in my course. But how to bring Black Lives Matter into a course on Indian Buddhism, especially under all the constraints of the lockdown?
As a child of the 1960s, I have an embarrassingly encyclopedic knowledge of rock music, long wanting to teach a course on the topic but lacking the musicological expertise to do so. In designing the podcasts, I decided that during each lecture I would play two songs, or, more accurately, two versions of the same song. The first would be the original by one of the great poets and musicians—women and men—who invented the American art form called the blues. After twenty or thirty minutes, halfway through the podcast, I played a blues classic by such giants as Howlin’ Wolf (“Spoonful”), Rev. Gary Davis (“Death Don’t Have No Mercy”), Geeshie Wiley (“Last Kind Words”), Big Mama Thornton (“Ball and Chain”), and Albert King (“Born Under a Bad Sign”). Then, at the end, I would play a cover version of the song, sometimes by one of the British bands of the 1960s—the Stones, Cream, the Yardbirds—sometimes by a more contemporary artist—Rhiannon Giddens, Cassandra Wilson, Bonnie Raitt.
In almost every song, I was struck by how much Buddhism was buried in the poetry of the blues.
Altogether, I chose fifty-two songs. There is a lot to say about each song; usually, I would say very little apart from the title, the artist, and the year. Still, in almost every song, I was struck by how much Buddhism was buried in the poetry of the blues. Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain” is about taking his lover to the train station “with a suitcase in my hand,” never to see her again. The final line is, “When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind. Well, the blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind.” There is a lot of Buddhist philosophy in that line, where “the mind” (with its many meanings) is separate from our emotions. I ended up making twenty-seven podcasts, each between thirty and forty minutes. These were the topics, with two podcasts devoted to several of them: Why Are We Here?, The Buddhist Universe, The Life of the Buddha, The Four Truths, The Order, Women and the Dharma, Meditation, Nirvana, Veneration of the Buddha, The Rise of the Mahayana, The New Buddha, The Perfection of Wisdom, Buddha Nature, The Pure Land, The Bodhisattva Ideal, Buddhist Tantra, Buddhism in America, Seeing the World with the Eyes of the Buddha, Final Thoughts.
The podcasts turned out to be a great hit, with students saying that they listened to single podcasts several times, that they had listened to them with their parents, that they had listened to them with their roommates, that they had listened during a bike ride, that they had listened as they were falling asleep; I did not ask whether it had put them to sleep. They would write to me to say how much they loved a particular song, that a song was a favorite of their mother or grandmother. They asked whether I could post the lectures on Spotify.
There was a midterm and a final. The students were also required to write a short paper, choosing one of three topics. The first noted that scholars have asked whether the tradition we have been studying should be called “Buddhism” or “Buddhisms.” That is, is the tradition a single entity with a common core, or is it a number of entities loosely collected under a single name? The students were asked to consider the nature of Buddhism. Is it a single religion? If so, what is it that unites it? Or is it several traditions that are different and incompatible?
The second paper topic pointed out that Buddhist sutras were written for centuries after the death of the Buddha, with anonymous authors attributing their own words to the Buddha, thus allowing the Buddha to address important issues of the time, sometimes in the form of prophecy. Using the literary style of a Buddhist sutra, the students were asked to compose a sutra, setting forth what the Buddha might teach those living in America today.
The third paper topic described the blues as among the most powerful and evocative expressions of the human predicament in the history of music. They were asked to select one of the songs from the podcasts, find the lyrics of that song, select a passage from those lyrics, and provide a Buddhist commentary on those lyrics. One student wrote a paper called “The Origin of Suffering, as Told by Howlin’ Wolf.” Another, inspired by Robert Pete Williams’ “Grown So Ugly” (covered both by Captain Beefheart and by the Black Keys), was called “Growing Ugly: Transience and Ailments of the Illusory Self.”
One of my favorite musicians is Frank Zappa, known both for his sophisticated orchestral compositions and his “comedy music.” Zappa was very underrated as a guitarist. He never covered a Delta blues, but his favorite guitarist was Johnny “Guitar” Watson. In the last podcast, I played his classic song “Three Hours Past Midnight”: “It’s three hours past midnight, and my baby’s nowhere around.” At the end of the last lecture, I played Zappa’s heartbreaking instrumental “Watermelon in Easter Hay” from Joe’s Garage. Before the song begins, the narrator, called the Central Scrutinizer, says, “Joe has just worked himself into an imaginary frenzy during the fade-out of his imaginary song. He begins to feel depressed now. He knows the end is near. He has realized at last that imaginary guitar notes and imaginary vocals exist only in the mind of the imaginer.” It’s something one could imagine that the Buddha might say.
“Love In Vain”
By Robert Johnson
I followed her to the station, with a suitcase in my hand
And I followed her to the station, with a suitcase in my hand
Well, it’s hard to tell, it’s hard to tell, when all your love’s in vain
All my love’s in vain
When the train rolled up to the station, I looked her in the eye
When the train rolled up to the station, and I looked her in the eye
Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry
All my love’s in vain
When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind
When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind
All my love’s in vain