We provide our audience, in fact, with a variety of mirrors. This is the service of scholarship.

No one among us can predict, much less legislate, the future of appropriate or meaningful language—to do so would be to claim individual property rights over something that is useful and valuable only because it cannot be owned by individuals. Like the single true text, the single appropriate expression is only a fiction, a fantasy created by our desire to control the authority of the sacred word.

We would be well advised, therefore, to open the field to alternative models, but to do so with constant watchfulness. There is no single alternative method that will solve our problems.

More common among contemporary scholars is the role of the anti-priest: the guardian of “secular authority.” I do not refer here to the common iconoclasm directed at the consecrated work of other scholars, rather, I refer to the scholar’s interest in undermining the authority of the tradition he or she studies. Seldom is this role part of the scholars public role. The motives remain a mystery to me, but it is clear that it is polite to pretend that scholarship is perfectly neutral. We would advance considerably if we stopped once and for all the pretense that our scholarship is never inimical to Buddhist belief and practice.

On the one hand, the scholar denies his roles as literary creator and craftsman, on the other hand he or she claims to be “original.” On the one hand, the scholar elevates his role to that of the primary creator (devaluating the standpoint of the voices he is claiming to report), on the other, he or she skirts the responsibilities that come with usurping the primary voice.

Humanistic scholarship stands in a no-man’s land between tradition and criticism, between community and individual preferences. It cannot seek and cannot lead to agreement. The greatest mistake we can make is to try to be the fabled “last man” who has “the last word”. Our role vis a vis community is not one of deciding the issues once and for all but one of keeping more than one voice alive.