1/ I’ve been thinking about the #gatekeeping discussion in Sinology as it pertains to Buddhist Studies. Amitabha knows that it's a discussion we should have. My thoughts below.

2/ In my work, translation is a method of decolonization, of challenging orientalist frames, and of exposing the male gaze. How?

3/ Buddhist texts already translated into Western languages are a deeply problematic corpus. As we all know, many texts were selected for translation by colonizers and missionaries who were antagonistic to many parts of the tradition.

4/ Just as problematic, a more benign form of orientalist fetishism has shaped our field of study by defining long-standing research questions, acceptable methods of inquiry, and a special corpus of well-studied texts (the canon of the canon, so to speak).

5/ And this not new in modernity. In East Asian Buddhism, the process of translation, popularization, and fetishism has been going on for 1500 years and has been informed by historical colonization, imperialism, and gender regimes. The canon is less a canon than it is an archive.

6/ Of the thousands of texts we have received in the canon, perhaps, what, a 10% have been translated? That’s not even considering extra-canonical texts, the inscriptional record, material culture, art history…

7/ The sum effect is that what is available in Western translation is a modern, orientalist subset based on an archive of texts created by elite men and funded by one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known which historically colonized Buddhist territories—China.

8/ Translation is therefore indispensable. If we don’t translate new things, we risk reduplicating the imperialism, the orientalism, and the misogyny that we have received, both in terms of our source materials and the questions we ask of them.

9/ This is not to say that translation is the only necessary task for Buddhist Studies, but it certainly is one of the necessary tasks, and a very powerful one at that. As such, language acquisition is incredibly important.

10/ Yet, I want to challenge the unrealistic (often fetishist and orientalist) expectation that a “real” Buddhist studies scholar is able to read across the classical languages of the tradition, which are, in fact, *the classical languages of the entirety of the Asian continent*.

11/ That’s how our #gatekeeping works. It isn’t helpful. That’s not to say that there isn’t room for the true philological savant, but only that such a person is the exception not the rule. We shouldn’t be training students to replicate this. It is a waste of our human resources.

12/ The most fruitful, creative, accurate, and humane method of translation is collaboration. Let’s make more spaces for ourselves and our students to create unique, important, and ground-breaking translations through workshops, translation teams, and reading groups.

13/ At UCLA, Diego and I aim to foster such a community. We want you all there in workshops and in classrooms. I’ve struggled in language acquisition: I’ve made every mistake, I’ve cried. I’ve also been elated from the process of historical discovery. Let’s do it together!

14/ Finally, language acquisition in the modern spoken languages of the regions you study warrants a second thread… or, somebody, take the bait and start it here!