Interview with Sam van Schaik, conducted by Jonathan Samuels

(January 15-16th 2019)

Jonathan: I’m interested in exploring the place, perception, and direction of the field of
Tibetan Studies. I’ll be doing this through a series of interviews with people such as yourself,
who are, in various ways and capacities, involved in that field.
I want to discuss the work you are currently engaged in. But I also want to look
behind that, to try to understand the choices you make, and what has led you to the
perspective and approach you take, and perhaps what distinguishes you from others. The
intention is not to be too personal or probing, but my hope is that we can get behind the
official biography-version of you.

Firstly, on the British Library website, it says you are the Research Project Manager in the
Asian and African collections department, working with the International Dunhuang Project
and the Tibetan Dunhuang collections. It also says that you are the principal investigator in
the project Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State (ERC), and that
your previous research projects at the British Library included Tibetan Zen (British
Academy), Tibetan and Chinese palaeography (Leverhulme) and the Tibetan tantric
manuscripts from Dunhuang (AHRC). One goes online to find out details of a person’s
current position and so forth, but usually gets bombarded by old information. So, is this
information up-to-date?

Sam: As of the beginning of February, I move to the position of the Head of the Endangered
Archives Programme at the British Library. This is a fund-granting programme for
cataloguing and digitising archives in endangered things across the world.

Jonathan: Does this position bring you greater stability? Is there a long-term contract?

Sam: As in my previous positions, it is externally funded. The funding body is called

Arcadia. Their current tranche of funding, which has just begun, lasts for seven years.

Jonathan: That makes your position sound slightly more long term than the previous one.

Sam: Yes, but it is still dependent upon external funding.

Jonathan: Are you involved in fundraising yourself?

Sam: In the seven years, I will probably be looking for further sources of funding within the
broader project we’re doing to expand the activities of the EAP. That’s doing what I’ve been
doing in the past, building projects around the material.

Jonathan: Developing projects and looking for sources of funding is, therefore, a prime
component of your employment?

Sam: It’s something that I have about 20 years’ experience of, and this experience is
something that I want to bring into this new role in order to expand the activities of the
Endangered Archives Programme.

Jonathan: Part of the justification for having you as the first interviewee is that you recently
gave the Aris Lecture here at Wolfson College. We hadn’t met before. A few days after that,
we both participated in a workshop in Vienna. On both occasions you were talking about

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different aspects of the same theme. That is the project you are currently working on, which
we will talk about later. This is on the topic of magic in the context of the Dunhuang texts. I
also got the opportunity to talk with you not only about your work, but also the various
considerations behind your approach.
In comparison with your peers, you are quite a prolific writer. You have many
publications, and you also have your own blog, in addition to your role at the British Library,
which I presume brings with it the expectation or requirement of engagement with the public.
For me, and many others, work currently involves mainly poring over texts and writing. But I
suspect your position is different. Can you say something more about what it entails?

Sam: Yes, as well as doing research, my position has been something like that of a classic
curator. I’m expected to take care of the part of the library’s collection that is the Tibetan
Stein collection. I must also answer any queries that come through about that collection, and
to deal with the people who come here in order to access it and look at the manuscripts. I
engage with them about their research as well. It has been quite an inspiring part of this job.
I’m not just doing my research, but I’m interrupted by people who’ve got their own interests
and agendas. One of my responsibilities is to facilitate what they need to achieve those.
Sometimes it can just be a task one has to do. But other times it has generated work. One of
the things that I’ve really appreciated being able to do is to join with people and do
collaborative publications. A lot of that has come just because I’ve been here looking after
the collections when people have come along wanting to work on it for their other reasons.
For example, Agnieszka Helman-Wazny, the paper scientist, who came to work on Tibetan
paper in general. I had a very fruitful collaboration with her looking at the Tibetan Dunhuang
material. And we published two articles in the end, based on that. And we still work together
when we can. That is one of the collaborations which happened just because I’m here and one
of my curatorial responsibilities is dealing with people who are coming to work on the
collection.

Jonathan: Do people tend to come to you with more general interests, asking you to point
them in the right direction, or do they come there with a clear idea of what they’re looking
for?

Sam: There’s a variety. Sometimes people are very far along with their work. They know
exactly which manuscripts they want to look at. They may be working, for example, on the
Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya texts and they know where to find them. Somewhere in the middle
are those who may be working on something like Tibetan tantric Buddhism. They know that
we have texts on Mahāyoga, but they are not sure which ones they need to look at. I would
help them with that. And then at the other extreme, there might be someone who is just
interested in, say, early Tibetan Buddhism, and will ask, “Can you show me where to look?”
That last category is the most difficult to help, because it’s hard to bring them up to the point
when they actually know what they need to be looking at. But I do try to help all these
people, whose work is at various levels of advancement.

Jonathan: And how much of this interaction with other people would involve going to
physical versions of the texts and actually having a look at them?

Sam: The manuscripts are part of the British Library’s restricted collections, which means
that people must demonstrate a genuine research need before they can look at them, and also
that they can’t get what they need by looking at digitised images or microfilm, or whatever is
available. That is part of the library’s policy, just to ensure that the manuscripts are kept in
reasonable condition, because they’re fragile and repeated use gradually wears them down. If
people can demonstrate that, and it’s worth their while coming here to London (often they

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don’t live in the UK), we facilitate them looking at the original manuscripts. They might have
a particular reason to want to look at the physical object, even though high-quality images
may be available. They may be looking at paper types or inks, or tiny mchan ’grel writing
(notations), or writing in faint inks, which they can’t see even with a good image. These are
some of the reasons that mean someone might really need to look at the original manuscript.
And beyond that, even though one has to be careful about access to the manuscripts, in order
to preserve their longevity, there is nothing to replace the actual experience of dealing with
the physical object itself, to get a sense of its physicality and also the social life that
surrounded it when it was being used. One has to actually see the thing, the size of it, and the
weight of it, to get the information you don’t get by looking at the website.

Jonathan: This is a more general question. How do you describe yourself in situations of
introduction, in academic or other circles? What would be your first description of yourself?

Sam: I don’t have a quick answer to that. I don’t tend to describe myself very often. I suppose
when I introduce myself to friends of friends or people outside the field, and tell them what I
do, I would tend to say something in-between a researcher and a curator. I also have other
hats. I’ve done teaching and other things. But 90% of my work has been that of a researcher
and a curator.

Jonathan: And if people ask you more specifically? I don’t want to put words into your
mouth, but you work with a particular collection. If they were to ask, would you class
yourself as someone in Tibetan Studies? Or would you prefer to class yourself as a historian?

Sam: Again, that’s difficult. I find it difficult to place the work I do. There are several fields
that seem to be relevant, including Buddhist Studies, Tibetan Studies, history, manuscript
studies. But because I haven’t been part of a particular university department, which has
given me one tag or another, depending on who I talk to, I might emphasise one or another of
the different aspects of the work that I’ve done.

Jonathan: I don’t want to downplay the importance of your work. But one of the things I was
most surprised about arising from our meeting (and it turns out that it was true not just for me
but also for many of the people I discussed this with later) is how you pronounce your name.
What has come to light is that many other people, perhaps the majority, are pronouncing your
name incorrectly. Perhaps this is the chance to issue a correction?

Sam: (laughter) I’m deeply shocked! It is originally, I believe, a name which would be
pronounced another way. My family came to England when my father was 13 (from the
Netherlands). To somewhat anglicise themselves they pronounced it like ‘van Skike’, not
‘van Shike’ or ‘van Shake’. So, let it be known! The same happens with the airport Schiphol,
it’s pronounced here more as a hard ‘k’, not ‘sh’.

Jonathan: Your current project involves working on the topic of magic. I’ll have some more
specific questions about that topic itself later. But could you first just say how that develops
from your work at the British Library and exactly what you’re doing on it there?

Sam: The project actually came out of the single manuscript in the Tibetan Dunhuang
collection. This is IOL Tib J 401. And I first encountered it when I was cataloguing a whole
collection with Jacob Dalton, in the mid-2000s. I wrote a catalogue entry for it and realised
that it was a very interesting, very dense ritual manuscript. But then I left it behind, and went
on to other things. Then a few years later, when I was active on my Early Tibet blog, I wrote
a blog-post about it. I called the manuscript a “Tibetan Book of Spells”, and just introduced it

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and looked at some of the rituals in there. And in the years after that, I was interested to see
that this was the most popular post that I ever put on that blog. It seems to be cited in various
online Buddhist forums, where people are quite perturbed by the idea that Buddhist monks
could have been casting spells.

Jonathan: That’s interesting.

Sam: Then in one more post, I talked about a ritual in there against diseases caused by the
nāgas: that used a frog moulded out of barley-flour. I’d noticed when reading Charles
Ramble’s book, The Navel of the Demoness that he reported a similar kind of ritual in Nepal
in the late 20th century. I was struck by how similar these two rituals, about 1000 years apart,
were to each other. I wrote about that on the blog as well. A few people came back and said
what a fascinating post that was. But I was also struck by how difficult it was to say
something about this in an academic context. One could say, “Look at this ritual from
Dunhuang, in the 10th century, and here is something that someone else has pointed out in the
20th century and look how similar they are!” But without some kind of structure to link the
two, just pointing that out doesn’t get you very far in terms of an academic study. So, that
remained just a blog-post. But in the course of my current project, I decided to go back to that
manuscript and look at it in more detail. I realised how much it tied in with the themes of the
project, which is about the role of Buddhism in the transmission of culture outside of India,
particularly across the Silk Road into China and Tibet, and how much these kinds of rituals –
including things like divination, protection medicine, and things that are often spoken of in
terms of “magic”, like aggressive rituals and those for love – how much these sort of minor
rituals, let’s say “worldly rituals”, were important in the movement of Buddhist monks out of
India and the establishment of smaller communities on the Silk Road across into Tibet and
China. I wanted to explore the role that this kind of manuscript, the type of rituals it contains,
and the practices around it, played in the way that Buddhist communities operated on the
ground, and the way the monks in those communities interacted with lay communities. I
found this a very interesting way to explore the kind of bottom-up approach to the spread of
Buddhism, looking at the interaction between the monks and the lay community, not just at
the high-level, with kings and rulers, but in terms of fulfilling the needs and developing a
relationship with the ordinary people; the farmers and householders.

Jonathan: That is an interesting origin story, with the blog. Is it a unique case, where you had
such interest shown in something that it inspired you to go on to a publication?

Sam: I don’t think it’s a unique case. When I was writing a blog (and I have basically stopped
now) – I think it was over about seven years, from 2007 to 2014 – I found that there was
relatively little interest in some things that I wrote, but others generated a lot. Things to do
with early Tibetan history tended to generate a bit less than those to do with Buddhism.
Things to do with Dzogchen seem to generate more interest than anything else. Sometimes –
and this is why I found writing the blog very useful – peoples’ replies and comments would
help move my own understanding forward, and that would sometimes inspire me to follow
the topic further. There were a series of posts that I wrote about the perception or the self-
perception of Tibetans as the “red-faced” people before the advent of Buddhism – Tibetans
depicting themselves as a kind of barbaric people before Buddhism came – and how the idea
of the red-faced people was associated with that. I wrote three posts on this and had a lot of
comments and discussion with people about it. And that developed into an article about early
Tibet and its relations with Khotan, where we first see the idea of Tibetans as the red-faced
people. So, there were other examples of blog posts developing into articles.

Jonathan: Was the blog ever intended initially as a testing ground?

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Sam: No, it wasn’t. Initially I thought of just writing certain things about the manuscripts. For
example, “Here’s an interesting scrap I found”. Or “Here’s something we found on the text
when we used infrared photography on it”: more the sort of manuscript studies kind of thing.
And this developed into something more like mini-articles. I found that it was, in a way, quite
liberating, because when you’re writing in a journal article there is a sort of classical form to
it, where you have your hypothesis and your evidence, and then you have a conclusion. It is
quite hard to get away from that. It is always in the background, however much it may not
look like that. But with the blog I found that you could write something of about 1000 words
and just put it out there, reporting a thing as interesting and puzzling, that I might have some
ideas about, but haven’t come to any conclusions yet. I also found when you write like that
you get many more responses than if you put something out which is more like a mini
academic article, where you say “I’m the expert and this is what I’ve looked at, and here’s the
conclusion I’ve come to, thank you very much!” That wouldn’t generate as much interest or
as many responses.

Jonathan: In a way you were using it to remove some of the normal boundaries. It was
certainly opening up new lines of communication, but also bypassing certain processes. Was
that the intention at the beginning, or was it that you felt you had a responsibility to share
some of the things you were finding in a collection that was not, after all, your personal one,
as it were?

Sam: Yes, I wanted to share some of the things that didn’t have another outlet, and there
would be no other way of publishing them. 100 years ago, or more, there were often pieces of
a single page or a page and a half, where people would just communicate some little
discovery or something. I had it in mind that it would be nice to do that. But there is less
scope for that sort of thing now, in the world of peer-reviewed journals, than there was in the
good old days of ‘antiquarianism’. Later I moved on from that, to do more short, open-ended
research articles.

Jonathan: I wanted to ask your opinions of the peer-review system. But you say you’re not
posting on the blog any more. So, what has changed? Is it just a time-management issue or is
it the nature of your work?

Sam: I think it is largely time-management, and there’s also a little bit less contact with the
manuscripts day-to-day, which were the main drivers of writing. I also think that things
sometimes just run their course. I did what I wanted to do. Towards the end it began to feel
that I ought to write something at least once a month. And once it becomes a chore, it is not
really worth doing any more. It basically came to a natural end.

Jonathan: That’s understandable. But did you run into any problems with it, apart from
feeling that it had become a chore and was taking up time, and perhaps also the joy of sharing
things with people had decreased over time? Did you run into any sort of limitations, where
you felt that it wasn’t working anymore, and wanted to try something else? And would you
encourage other people?

Sam: Yes, I would encourage other people, and I don’t think there is any natural limit to the
form that made it come to an end. It was just more about the availability of my own time and
creativity for that writing form. But I would encourage other people, and I did that in the past,
when younger academics said, “I like your blog, and I’d like to do something like that
myself, but I’m worried that people would take my ideas for their own research”.

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Jonathan: That was one of my questions.

Sam: I understand that especially when you’re doing your PhD and you’re not well
published, there’s that concern. But there is a certain freedom I’ve had working here, not to
have to worry about that too much, because I’ve been free to publish or not as I pleased. But I
also think there is a bit of a misconception that there will be many people hanging around for
a new post on the blog, waiting to steal it and quickly write an article in a peer-reviewed
journal. But I’m sure that more people have read those blog-posts than any article. It quickly
became quite well-known when I put stuff out there. I think that in a relatively small field it
would be very obvious if someone else were to take something and use it in their work. I just
think that this is less of a concern than it might feel to some people.

Jonathan: … although it should be stressed that you have access to the collection in a way
that is different from most people and you have a good publication record. But some other
people you referred to, like those working on a PhD…

Sam: No, exactly. By the time I started in 2007, I already had a reasonable publication
record. I could feel quite confident, due to my visibility, whereas other people might not. It is
interesting that in terms of our field, the other main blog which is still going is the one of Dan
Martin. He is similarly someone who doesn’t have a classic academic position. So, he also
doesn’t have pressure about publications.

Jonathan: Yes, there is something interesting in the way that your situations correspond to
each other. You’re saying that someone feeling this pressure or actually coming under
pressure from their institution to publish might be less inclined to share things, because they
want to store them for future publications?

Sam: It is one of the negative aspects of being assessed, by universities and academics,
through research publications. Another negative aspect in our field, at least in the humanities,
is that this has tended to discourage joint publication and collaboration, because people are
assessed and get a better score as a single author. One of the freedoms of not being in that
assessment system is to be able to collaborate as much as possible and author whenever one
feels like it.

Jonathan: Yes, I recently talked with a prominent academic, who is heavily involved in the
evaluation process. I had been discussing the idea of collaborating with someone else on a
publication. But his first reaction was to discourage me, saying it would count for nothing in
terms of our publication record; that in professional terms such a publication would mean
nothing.

Sam: Yes, I’ve often had the same response.

Jonathan: I’d like to ask another question, and you can interpret and answer it in any way
that you see fit. How did you end up doing what you’re doing?

Sam: That is a question that I’m often asked, and I’m sure you are as well. I suppose one of
the things I sometimes point to is that when I was growing up, my parents and I moved
around to different countries, and in the 80s we went to Nepal. I lived in Kathmandu in my
early to mid-teens and although I was at the age where I didn’t take a deep interest in the
culture there, I still have a strong impression of the culture of Kathmandu itself, and Boudha,
where I was several times. In the early 90s my parents were in Bhutan for several years, and
though I wasn’t living with them, overall, I probably spent about a year there myself. Then I

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was in Manchester, where I was studying comparative religion, and began to focus more on
Buddhism, taking courses on it. By the third year I was studying with David Stott, who later
left academia to become a teacher in the Kagyu and Sakya traditions. I studied with him in
my third year of university, the same time that he became my meditation teacher. After that I
thought, “Well, why not stay on and work with Tibetan texts?” I went on to do an MA and
then a PhD. I chose the Longchen Nyingthig (Klong chen snying thig), because that was the
text I was already familiar with. During the course of the PhD I worked out a theme to follow
with that text, which was the tension between the sudden and gradual approaches to
enlightenment. This is something that I’ve continued to look at throughout my career. That is
how I got to the PhD. I had no great career plan, but towards the end of the PhD I got a job
here at the British Library, working on the Tibetan collection from the Silk Road. To begin
with, it wasn’t the Buddhist manuscripts, but the wooden slips from the Tibetan forts of
Miran and Mazar-tagh. I was cataloguing those along with Tsuguhito Takeuchi. That pulled
my research interests into very different directions, but fortunately I was able to unite them a
little bit when I realised the strength of the Dzogchen material and related things in the
Dunhuang manuscripts. Within a couple of years of coming to the British Library, once I
finished the PhD, I moved on to look at the early Dzogchen and tantric practices.

Jonathan: Would you be happy with the description of the path and background that led to
where you are as faith-based?

Sam: Yes and no. I suppose that with the university experience, approaching Tibetan
Buddhism both as a series of classes I was taking at the university and then also as a
practitioner, make it feel like there were two aspects to it. I had some wise advice from
another Manchester professor, Alan Williams, who works with Zoroastrianism. He said,
“You’ll have to be very careful with this; being both inside and outside the tradition”. He
said, “Consider it like a window, and you can sit inside and look out or you can go outside
and look in, but in a sense, it’s always the same thing.” I’m not sure exactly what that means
(laughter), but at least it felt like there was a way to do both.

Jonathan: This discussion comes up a great deal, about how much room there is in academia
for expressing or admitting some sort of faith. It might be seen to compromise one’s
academic objectivity. There is the question of how much damage it might do to one’s
credibility and perhaps career path. I know of some people who don’t necessarily have any
personal bias against those with a faith-based background, but who avoid engagement with
them, and wouldn’t invite them to give lectures or presentations, because they are concerned
about how it will be perceived. They want to give the impression that they regard faith in the
same way it might be regarded in any other academic field. In terms of that advice which you
were given, do you feel that it resulted in a separation within your own life, where you say
there are two different things here?

Sam: I don’t feel that there is a separation. It also doesn’t feel that it would be very
psychologically healthy for there to be too much of a separation. Maybe I haven’t examined
my own psyche enough yet. But I also feel that Buddhism is a tradition that has always
deconstructed itself. It’s a tradition that is quite comfortable with this path of analysis and
questioning, debate and deconstruction. I don’t know whether there is something specific to
Buddhism that makes it a little bit easier to take an academic view on the tradition, as well as
having an insider’s view: maybe there is.

Jonathan: I wanted to talk a bit more about publications; how you have approached them and
the choices you have made. There were differing opinions about your book, Tibet: A History.

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It was reviewed many times. It wasn’t intended only for an academic audience, but to reach
out to a wider readership. I won’t ask you to comment on any specific review. But do you
feel that the intention was appreciated by the academic community? Do you think that they
judged it in the right way, or by a set of standards that were not applicable to it? How do you
feel about it all?

Sam: That book came about after being approached by one of the editors of the Yale
University Press, in 2008, with an interest in Tibet. I think he may have been looking for
something more addressed to contemporary politics. But I put in a proposal basically saying
that you couldn’t understand what’s going on right now unless you have an overview of the
whole history of Tibet. And that’s how that book came to be. So, right from the start, it was
intended to be something that could reach out to an audience interested in Tibet but who may
only have heard about it through the news and wanted to know more. It was primarily
directed towards those people, but of course also with my academic peers in mind. I wanted
to write something that was approachable, but also defensible, using good sources for what I
was saying. That said, it isn’t an academic publication. The genre of narrative history is really
where you tell a story and to do that you occasionally have to use your imagination. There are
points at which a proper, dry academic approach wouldn’t have worked. I probably didn’t
read all of the reviews of the book because I don’t seek them out…

Jonathan: That was another question, but go on…

Sam: I did read a couple that were critical, one mainly on factual points and another one more
on theoretical points, about not taking into account some more recent research, for instance,
some of those published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. About the factual problems, I
was able to address some of them in the later paperback edition. So, that review was quite
useful. The paperback version is actually slightly better than the hardback version of the
book. As for the other one, I felt that it wasn’t necessarily the book to introduce everybody to
the cutting-edge theoretical developments in Tibetan Studies. I wasn’t too concerned about
that. In terms of the other feedback, people are, of course, more polite to my face. But the
best thing I’ve heard from a number of academics is that they use the book as a textbook in
their classes on Tibetan history and recommend it to their students to read. And if they’re
doing that, it can’t be too bad. I’m quite pleased.

Jonathan: What I got from my discussions with you and coming to understand more about
your role, is that this is something which distinguishes you from other people in this field.
Reaching out seems more integral to the role that you have. You always seem to have an eye
on the potential and need for that. And you always seem to be addressing both academic and
non-academic audiences.

Sam: Yes, as we were discussing earlier about the curatorial role, part of it is looking after a
collection that is somewhat restricted and esoteric, in the sense that it is difficult to
understand everything that is in there, and to get into it. And part of that role is to make that
material more accessible and to bring it to a wider audience. So, I suppose one could see this
approach as a part of that. And I would also link it to the other thing that we were discussing
earlier, which is the certain amount of freedom I have due to not being in an academic
institution and subject to the research assessments that are part of that life.

Jonathan: It is often the case, not only in academia, but when someone who specialises in a
particular area makes some attempt to reach out to a wider audience, others from within their
area have problems with it. Have you encountered any slightly snobbish reactions to your
attempts to reach out?

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Sam: I know what you mean, but I’m actually struggling to think of any, at least of cases
where anybody has said anything to me directly. I try to be fairly compartmentalised in what
I’m writing. If it’s something for a peer-reviewed journal, I’ll do it in the style and idiom of
an academic piece. Whereas in a book, in the monograph like Tibet: A History, one can go in
a slightly different direction. And then in the blog, as I was saying earlier, one can take a
different approach, by posing questions without attempting to provide all the answers. I think
it’s like writing for different genres and understanding the basics of what is expected in each
specific genre. For instance, I recently wrote an article on the story of the things that fell on
the roof of the Palace of Lha Tho tho ri gnyen btsan, including the prayer known as the Pang
kong phyag rgya pa. I looked back in the Dunhuang manuscripts, and this is in fact a
repentance prayer from China. I wrote that maybe it features in this story because repentance
prayers were important to the establishment of Buddhism during the Tibetan empire. When I
write this kind of thing, I’m probably not reaching out to a huge audience, and I’m also not
expecting that my academic peers will criticise it. It’s a very classical model of scholarly
writing, taking a manuscript source and talking about it to address another problem. In this
case, and a few other things I’ve done, I was going into a bit more detail on things that Rolf
Stein – the famous French Tibetologist who worked on Dunhuang manuscripts – did in the
past. I also feel like it is a little bit of a homage and standing on the shoulders of some
previous Tibetological and Sinological giants.

Jonathan: I don’t mean only Tibet: A History, but more generally, I feel that in your more
recent monographs, the topics and the way you have presented them seem to be reaching out,
not restricting themselves to an academic audience. This is reflected in the language and
approaches you’ve used to communicate things. We’ve talked about how you’ve used the
approach of narrative history. But are you someone who feels that there should be more
flexibility in academic writing, or is it that you’ve had a conception of a broader audience and
felt that the academic style of writing just wouldn’t be appropriate for them?

Sam: I think there is a place. I think there’s a real tension in academia in general, in that we
are being asked to reach out more and have more impact, and have greater visibility, but
actually, the constraints of the genre of writing academic articles and monographs militates
against that. And the way that they are assessed also militates against it. I think that there is a
bit of a bind that academics are caught in, in terms of being encouraged to reach out to
connect better with society in general, but being bound by this peer-review system, and the
fear that if they do that, someone is going to point at them and say they did something stupid.

Jonathan: Something that I have experience of is being presented with a set of guidelines or a
format and being told that I must write something according to these, in a non-academic
style. Do you ever feel restricted by formats and guidelines?

Sam: Do you mean guidelines in terms of being asked to write something for a particular
publication?

Jonathan: Yes, an approach always brings some constraints. And one can also sometimes get
the feeling that others judge your work without taking into consideration the fact that you
don’t necessarily have free reign to do whatever you want, in an unlimited number of words.
You are often just presented with the particular format and have to work within that. But
anyway, do you feel constrained by such things, or do you approach it constructively,
thinking that a different format presents a new opportunity?

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Sam: Yes, I think so, at least in the cases where it has worked, I found it quite exciting to
write something where there were different expectations and I think writing without
guidelines possibly can be a little bit paralysing, because of the breadth of the possibilities
that one has. For example, recently, coming into my current project, the ERC-funded Beyond
Boundaries project: it was something on a massive scale, involving Asia, Buddhist culture
and Sanskrit. I had all kinds of ideas of books to write about this, and I wrote thousands of
words of notes about it. And in the end, with all the freedom I had, it just wasn’t possible to
write something that encompassed all of these things. So, I ended up choosing just one
manuscript, the Buddhist book of spells, and writing on that. I guess I do need something to
hang things on. But yes, I find the constraints that come with the project are actually helpful
or can be turned into something helpful.

Jonathan: For example, with your more recent book on Tibetan Buddhism, The Spirit of
Tibetan Buddhism, it comes across as a textbook-type of work. Is that something that you
came up with yourself, or were you approached to write it?

Sam: That’s part of a series, also now published by Yale University Press, with a fairly broad
remit, to bring the religious texts of the world to a wide audience. There wasn’t very much
structure, except that you were supposed to be presenting a text or texts that had not
previously been translated, or a portion of them that had not been translated. To be honest,
thinking back now, I did struggle with some of the constraints of that format. Although again,
this may well have been more the wealth of possibilities than the limitations. The format was
that of a semi-chronological series of texts, which also allowed some of the themes of
Tibetan Buddhism to be explored, I came up with that after quite a long period where I
struggled to think how to do this. So, no, it wasn’t easy and there were constraints in that
genre that did take a long time for me to work out. I wasn’t even entirely sure by the end of
this project, but it was the best way that I could approach that subject.

Jonathan: For the remainder of the time I wanted to go back to your current project about
magic. You gave the Aris Lecture here in Wolfson, then immediately following that, we were
together at a workshop, where you again talked about the topic. So, you were talking about
the same text, although for a different audience. But what immediately caught the eye when
the lecture was advertised was your choice of the term “magic”. And in both presentations,
you started off with what might be seen as a justification for your usage of this term. That’s
because you are aware of the complications, and that many people view it as a loaded term. It
has not been used a great deal in the context of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly. There might
be two separate dimensions to this. On the one hand, I feel that people might shy away from
using the term in Tibetan Studies because there’s this strong sense of uniqueness and people
want to maintain that, in the terminology and the concepts that are used. People want to assert
that our area is somehow different and so they don’t want to engage with some of these
bigger concepts. The more complicated dimension is the whole issue of cross-cultural
judgements, and whether it is valid to use the term like magic. We discussed particularly the
second one, and I’m wondering what your thoughts are at the moment. I’m sure you still
intend to use this term. But you had some feedback after the Vienna presentation. Where are
you in terms of your thinking now about the appropriateness of the term “magic”?

Sam: Yes, that was discussed by some of the people at the workshop in Vienna, and you and
I had a very fruitful discussion, which I’m grateful for. It helped me refine my thoughts on
that a bit. Before saying something about why magic is maybe a problematic term in general,
to answer the first point, on applying it to Tibet, I suppose that is one of the things that I find
attractive about it. One thing which drew me towards using the term was looking at other
traditions that had been examined under that heading. For example, there was a very good

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book, based on Jewish sources, Ancient Jewish Magic, by Gideon Bohak, published about 15
years ago, I think. There are other things based on Hellenistic sources and so on. One of the
striking things is how many similarities that there are both in the aims and the structures of
the texts they use. In these different traditions we have books of rituals which bring together
divination, healing, and things like love magic, aggressive magic, invisibility, and so on.
These things cluster together in traditions. Such clusters of practices have been studied
together under the term “magic”. Looking at the Dunhuang Book of spells and later versions
of the same thing in Tibet, such as the Ba ri be’u ’bum, down through to the one produced by
Mipham in the late 19th century, they clearly have a similar cluster of practices, which get
transmitted through the Tibetan tradition. For me, one of the nice things about using the term
magic was that it allows you to see Tibet not as unique, but as part of something that has been
going on in other cultures as well. The second point is trickier, because of course magic as a
term has a complicated history. It comes out of the Christian tradition, where magic is largely
a negative thing, contrasted with miracles, and it is really defined as any sort of supernatural
act that is not a miracle, given by God. That history is problematic and probably leads on to
the kind of 19th and 20th century formulations of magic as something entirely opposed to
religion, being some sort of prescientific attempt at healing and things like that. So, there is
this issue with the term magic and its history, but I think that the reason why it is still being
used at the moment is because it is a useful way of talking about a particular genre of
practices that seem to cluster together, like the ones I mentioned earlier. It is still useful.
Scholars who continue to use it tend to be quite careful to define what they mean. I think that
the main point is to look at why you’re using this term, how it actually helps you to
understand the tradition, and whether you have some kind of baggage, which would be
problematic. I have tried to address those issues while still using the term. It has not been
favoured much in Tibetan Studies. But some people, such as Bryan Cuevas, have recently
used it. He wrote a biography of Ra Lotsawa and has also written an article about Mipham
Gyatso’s Be’u ’bum book of spells. He has been quite keen to use the word magic, and to
look at some definitions of it, related to sympathetic magic and how those might be applied to
the Tibetan practices. So, I think that it is not just me (laughter). I think also it might be an
interesting way of looking at the Tibetan tradition: first, just to isolate a group of practices,
and though not in a very heavy-handed way, place them in a global vision of comparative
religious practice.

Jonathan: Although I had some inkling of this before, what comes across again is that this
can be seen as another manifestation or extension of your sense that your work should be
reaching out, and something that a broader audience could, if they’re interested, engage with.
You don’t want it to seem so specialised that it only relates to one particular culture or
region. You’d agree with this?

Sam: Yes, I think so. But I think it’s not just that: for me, personally, if something doesn’t go
a little bit outside the world of my studies, I would probably start to find it a little dull. So, it
is not entirely altruistic thinking and what will appeal to others. It’s also framing a topic in a
way that will make it appeal to me to work on.

Jonathan: Has this framing also helped to open up new areas of engagement with others
outside your field? Has the comparative framework created new dialogues with specialists
from other areas?

Sam: Certainly. For example, there is a curator of Ethiopian manuscripts here at the British
Library, who works on magic in Ethiopian culture. He is from Ethiopia and is quite aware of
the tradition of practices that is still current there. Conversations with him have been
fascinating. We find at least one practice in Ethiopia which is very similar to one found in

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Tibet and other Buddhist countries, which is the prasena (mirror) divination, where a
prepubescent child gazes into the mirror and is questioned on divination issues, by the monk
or whoever is doing the ritual. Such a ritual appears both in Ethiopian manuscripts and in
contemporary culture, as it does in Tibetan manuscripts and contemporary culture. I did a
little bit of work on this particular ritual, and it seems to have Babylonian origins. We can
perhaps even say that it has spread both east and west and is a case of things that don’t just
look similar but have their roots in the same place.

Jonathan: That’s interesting, but we don’t have time to explore that one any further. In the
last few minutes, I really wanted to move to another question. Something I’d like to ask all
the people I’m interviewing is for their observations and thoughts about the current state and
direction of Tibetan Studies. Have you anything you would like to share with us?

Sam: (pause) We seem to be at a point where the swell of popular interest in Tibet has
declined a little bit. I think this may be affecting the take-up of courses in universities and
perhaps also the audience for books on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. And that may not be a
bad thing, because if you look at catalogues of publishers, there are certainly enough of those
out there. Tibetan Studies has gone in many, many directions as well. It has partly developed
into an academic field with areas to specialise in. For example, there are those who work in
anthropology, ethnography, early history, Old Tibetan, or interactions between Tibet and
China, such as in the Ching dynasty. When one goes to conferences of the International
Association of Tibetan Studies there is so much going on. Now the field is too big to actually
be covered by a single scholar. That’s a natural development, and it’s a healthy thing in terms
of the academic study of Tibet. It has matured. But it means that there are fewer people who
can really understand the field as a whole now. As to its the value and the direction is should
go, one’s feelings on that may depend on where one came from. As we discussed at the
beginning of this chat, I came to this through practice, originally. If there was a direction I’d
like to see some development in, it would along the lines of trying to integrate what I find
valuable on the inside in Tibetan Buddhism with this view from the outside, where we’re
looking at historical sources or whatever our primary sources happen to be. I think probably
the way to do that is to study, for example, practices of tantric Buddhism or Dzogchen and to
take on the experiential aspect a little bit more from the academic point of view. If that could
be done, I think it would be valuable. Though I think that due to the genre-limitations of
academic writing there are lots of barriers to doing that.

Jonathan: I could go on, but I think you don’t have any more time now. So, I just wanted to
say thank you very much. I have certainly learned a lot more about you and your approach. I
hope this also gives others some insights into your way of approaching things and helps them
appreciate it. Anyway, I have enjoyed the discussion.

Sam: Thank you for asking thoughtful questions. It is nice to talk to somebody who was
thought about some of the things I’ve written and has some comments.

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