Magic, Death, and Necromancy with Justin McDaniel

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I'm your host, Dr. Pierce Sangero, a professor of Asian history and health humanities at Penn State's Abington College outside of Philadelphia. Today, I sit down with Justin McDaniel, a scholar of Teravata Buddhist Literature and Art. Together, we explore the darker side of Thai Buddhism, including meditation on decomposing bodies, fetus spirits, corpse oil, and the spectrum of white and black magic. We discuss the logics of Thai rituals, their role in communities, and how a misfit Catholic punk from Philly found himself in a rural Thai monastery. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about healing, transformation, and alternate realities, then subscribe to BlackBerl wherever you get your podcasts. Also, find us on Substack to see our members' only benefits. Each episode, our guest provide materials for our listeners to download, so check out what Justin has left for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the show, Justin, my neighbor here in Philadelphia. Good to see you. I reached out to you to ask for your help with the new season of the podcast. Previously, known as BlueBerl, which is a gemstone associated with the medicine Buddha, we were really focused on healing, and we shifted just a couple episodes ago into the BlackBerl. We changed the name and focus. We're still interested in those things in healing and well-being and so forth, but expanding the conversation to include what I call the dark side. We are now stepping into topics like spirit possession, trans, states, negative side effects, psychosis, even that comes along with some spiritual practices and so forth. I was thinking about you as somebody who would be great to have on the podcast right from the beginning in order to snap us out of any romanticized orientalist fantasy about what Buddhism is all about, and to bring us down into kind of on the ground realities of this extremely colorful and messy and contradictory and sometimes dark world. Particularly in the case of teravada Buddhism in Thailand, which is your specialty. I'm thinking of this episode as maybe the dark side of the Dhamma or something like that where we can get into this whole world of spirits and corpse oil and black magic and all of the other dimensions of teravada Buddhism that are swept under the rug in a lot of western discourses around Buddhism, which really want to focus on mindfulness and well-being and nirvana and so forth. That's like the large basket, the Pandora's box that I would like to open up with you here. I think you're exactly the right person to do this with, but why don't you start just by introducing yourself really quickly who are you and what do you do and why did I think you might be a good person that helped to investigate some of these topics. Okay, that's great. My name is Justin McDaniel. My official title is the Khan Endowed Chair of the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. And I teach courses in Buddhism, Buddhist literature, boost art. I teach a course called God's Ghosts and Monsters about end of life issues and funerary cultures in the afterlife. And then I teach two experimental courses, one on monasticism and one called existential despair about. Sadness and I've been teaching a pen for 15 years. I'm from Philadelphia. I studied in Thailand and India and Japan and Laos and a little bit in Burma for many years and my PhDs in Sanskrit. I do want to talk to you about some of these experimental courses. You've gotten a lot of press, a lot of attention for those. And I think they're genius. So I do want to put a pin in that and come back to it later. But just to give us the full lay of the land in terms of your background and your interest in these topics and how you came to be a professor that specializes in Buddhism. So can you just tell us the story a little bit about how did you wind up in a monastery in Thailand in your 20s, right? 20 something. I was 21. Yeah, I didn't have a lot of money. So I took extra classes and I just graduated very quickly from college. And then I went to be a volunteer in Asia initially connected with Cambodian refugees on the Thai Cambodian border. But I was a classics major. So they didn't really need Latin Greek teachers, but I did end up volunteering in a small fishing town as a teacher. I didn't know much about Buddhism before I got to Thailand. At all, I grew up very strict Catholic. Very strict. I mean, all boy schools and all the sacraments and all the things. But I got to know Buddhist monks and nuns. And I decided it's kind of a strange and funny story. Why? But regardless, I became a monk and I loved it. I mean, it was difficult. I was in an orthopraxic sect called the Dhamma Yut. You know, you eat once a day. You meditate a lot. We didn't have electricity. I was on an island in the middle of a river in very rural near the Thai Lao Cambodian border, which is called the Amul Triangle. The playabit was from Laos. And so it was pretty intense. I was novice for a bit and then ordained and did things like what you want to talk about in this interview. Things like corpse meditation, blessed water buffaloes and motorcycles and houses. I married many couples. I performed many funerals, lit many bodies on fire. None of which I thought it would do. This was not my plan. I didn't really have a plan. I was a bartender and student before this. So I didn't have any plan. And I really enjoyed it. And then I decided that the only skills I had were tending bar and Latin and Greek and then Thai and Polly and Lao languages. So I went to study. I wanted to study older Buddhist text. I wanted to be able to read them. And so I did my degree in Sanskrit. Yeah, great. So our listeners will know that I have spent some time in that same corner of Thailand and an international monastery there, which was a forest monastery with very few amenities, but yours is making mine sound like it was more of a retreat. We had electricity. Well, yeah, but you had a very famous teacher. I mean, you got a legendary teacher. And yeah, I was just I didn't. If I had known, I probably would have gone for a teacher better equipped to answer questions. My app, it was very strict. He did not like a chit chat or questions or any questions about what things mean or why we're here. I mean, were you there because you were attracted to meditation? Were you doing any meditation at all? Was it? In reality, I was in a bar in a world town. And I lived with two Thai men who were both them monks. I would drink with them often. And they were always talk about being monks. And one night I said, that does not sound that hard. And I don't know why you guys are always showing off about this. And they're like, well, you couldn't do it, wait. And I go, I bet I could. I bet I'm 100 baht, which is like four bucks at the time of things, three bucks now. And I won that bet. I don't lose bets. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have a plan. I mean, like a lot of my undergraduate students, a lot of them are very interested in Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist meditation or things like this. And I applaud it. But, I mean, I don't tell them this. But I also feel bad for them. They're going to fly to Japan or to China or to Thailand or Dupnipal or something. They're going to walk into a monastery and they're going to be disappointed that everybody's not quiet and everybody's not meditating. There's a temple downriver from us that would have a fashion show once a month. They would have like a catwalk and a fashion show. They have soccer games and they have outside movies and temple festivals and they're wonderful. I think they're really fun but I think you'd be disappointed if you expect it to be this place of just quiet meditation. Now there's certainly many monasteries that are like that. Obviously, there's certainly deep study and deep meditation and all of these things. But a temple is part of a community and not everybody in the community is seeking just to meditate or seeking just for a philosophical conversation that they looking for merit or they are looking to flirt and date or they're looking for career advice or they're looking for good luck in the lottery. There's a lot of things that people want in life and a temple has to in a sense if it's going to be relevant, meet those needs. Maybe not all the monasteries but a lot of monasteries to survive. They would have to do that. And then also monks and nuns, it could be three weeks ago they were a layperson working at 7/11 and you really, I found that Buddhist monasteries that Buddhists weren't one thing because Muslims are one thing and Jews are one thing, Christians are one thing. We're all we all have complex lives. Yeah, I think this has been a major theme of the podcast for the last couple seasons. It has been this mythology or kind of essentialized understanding of Buddhism as something that is only concerned with the transcendent. And our first season was all about the multi-dimensional aspects of healing that you find within Buddhism. Many of which have to do with more embodied and social kinds of practices and activities. I think for a lot of our listeners maybe it won't be news that there's more to Buddhism than just meditation. Although I still feel like I always want to re-emphasize that. So that's a good starting point. I know you've written about this stuff pretty extensively but what were you involved in as a practicing monk in those times along the lines of blessing ceremonies, talismans, possession rituals and trans-rich rules and other kinds of things that were interested in exploring this season on this podcast. I was involved in largely protective rituals and then death rituals. We didn't do any mediumship or what you could loosely say exorcism or anything like that our monastery didn't do any of those things. I have certainly been to monasteries and talked to people, done those things but it wasn't up mine. So largely it was protective. We were on an island in Melbourne. So there was no play people on our island but we would take like a long canoe paddle that to the mainland and then the three villages around there basically we took care of farming villages. So largely it was blessing their houses anything new and water buffaloes and any new animals and there was two new motor scooters that were bought, Honda dreams. That was a big deal because you would have about five families share one so we would that would be a big thing to protect because obviously it's a huge investment. So we would do that sometimes the beginning of the planting season bless tools that they would use to till the fields things like this and so they involved a series of mantras and you would draw Prayan yantras in Sanskrit in this type of talcum powder called pome and you would draw the incantations and symbols on the animal or on the motorcycle or on the house and then it would involve string that you would wrap around it that was soaked in holy water and atitan which you know what it means but like a dedication like a concentration and generally that was just me alone or another monk who ever was available to do that but then for funerals it was four monks and for weddings it was nine we didn't have nine monks at our monastery so we had to borrow monks for weddings from other monasteries and then we would also protect animals particularly Gibbons we had a lot of Gibbon apes in the area and large turtles that were considered important for the community so those things and the boats any time a new boat was built we would bless I'm using the word bless loosely here protect and we would ordain new monks and novices and then I think the most I don't know about a cult but perhaps nefarious thing that we did was that we would if a young person died in the community we would meditate on their corpse before they were buried because if you die in unnatural death which means basically anybody who dies under 45 or 50 is considered unnatural whether be cancer or an accident or suicide or murder or whatever that's considered not natural so you can't cremate those bodies because it would be considered releasing everything that led to that bad death would be unleashed on the community then we would have to bind them fill their orifices with wax so their mouth shots and only did that once actually so the mouth shut and then bury them quickly in a few cases the family would donate because we were well known for this we were about four or five monasteries in the region that were known for corpse meditation so they would donate the body of the usually child and there was a room a shack in the monastery on the monastery grounds it would just had dirt floor wooden walls no windows just the light came in through the shafts of the of the wood so it would be a little light in the room and we'd hang a naked body on a meat hook and cut it open with a scalpel from its chin down to its genitalia and so expose the viscera and meditate on the body and the smell was horrendous and the flies and so that corpse meditation was quite intense and you know a lot of people and I think for good reason to be like why the hell would you do this and the the reasoning given to me and I and so reasoning I certainly understand and respect is that you can't imagine a better human being than a child like they're the best of us right like the children are the best of us you're not super self-conscious yet you're not super competitive yet you're not dragged into the world yet you can enjoy the world and you can wonder about it you have a lot of hope about the world and not curiosity but that's the best humans can offer right and when you see a child an 11 year old or the youngest was nine remember that that's the best of us hanging there in a hook and the absolute best human being on earth is still a putrid corpse the child is disintegrating the child is drinking the child smells like if that's the best of us then who the hell am I like any sort of idea that you consider yourself better than other people or you can say yourself more worthy of something than others that's a ludicrous way of thinking about the world when you see a child like no we're all this is the human condition and the human condition is delicate it's very delicate and I am one motorcycle accident away from that child there is very little separating us and I think a lot of people focus on the gruesome part of it which it is gruesome but I think there's an ethical lesson here that I think is quite important like that is exactly what we are and so that don't ever think that you're separate from the state of humanity and when you watch a body like this or you watch a body burning just a regular you know an older person that is dying from natural causes and you set them on fire and that's why I think cremations like in rural areas where you actually see the body burning is a whole lot more valuable than an incinerator and I can completely understand was somebody wouldn't watch this especially if it's your family matter of that I completely understand but it takes a good hour for a body to burn and the smell is horrendous and the hair and everything that you have a lot of time to be thinking about your own mortality and the mortality of people around you in that amount of time when you're doing that and it goes from shock to kind of a humility to also a deep appreciation like for like that burning corpse had dreams that burning corpse made jokes like hugged and cared and love it's amazing that this piece of raw lash could do such amazing things and that appreciate that because you're again you're not that far away from whether it be two years or ten minutes from that happening to you like you know that's going to happen to you yeah yeah thanks for going into that I participated in one of these rural cremations where the body was in a coffin and then they set the fire on fire and the family watches for five minutes and then they leave before the coffin is actually burned away but then once the coffins burned away you know and the body is exposed the whole monastic community came out and stood around and meditated on the body as it was burning and they knew that I had a camera and they asked me to go get my camera and take pictures which I developed in town and everybody wanted pictures so that they could put it on the inside of their kutis and continue to meditate on those images afterwards and the practice of reflecting or meditating on a corpse is actually a canonical meditation that is in the saviathanasuta oh absolutely which is the main suta on mindfulness and it's right there next to mindfulness of the body mindfulness of the breath and all the other kinds of mindfulness that people are very excited about these days and they kind of ignore this section right where the Buddha's giving instructions like this so it may strike a listener as being something that's grotesque and bizarre and very macabre but it's actually very canonical and oh absolutely very much a part of pre modern Buddhism all over the world world and in Thailand anyway, very much a part of modern practice all over the country. These practices that you just mentioned might sound like they're occult, but they're actually very much kind of exoteric, canonical, very sort of normal. So you've drawn attention to the meditation on the impermanence of life and the inevitability of death as one aspect of it. The other aspect is this kind of the superbahavana, the reflection on the kind of putrid nature of the body as a way of detaching from sensory addictions and the very superficial relationship that we have with beauty and so forth. And these are both very core Buddhist ideas and there's probably also some kind of purificatory dimension to having monks meditate on your family members' body probably as seen as a meritorious thing by the family, right? Oh, absolutely. And just as we would put in the mouth of each corpse, we would put four syllables, chichae runi. So that basically summarized the abidama. So just mind, body, consciousness and urbana. So as the body burns, the paper inside the mouth goes on fire. It's almost they're imagining that they're saying the syllables. And so any time that chanting is being done over the body, it's a compassionate thing to the person because that person, whether they died in an accident or they died from cancer or something like this, like, you know, I think sometimes we all imagine that we're going to be quoting yates surrounded by our grandkids. Most likely we're going to be 15 minutes after visiting ours and we're going to shit our hands and we're going to have tubes in us. And most likely delirious or drugged up, we're not going to be thinking about leviness. So that being understood, the monks in a sense are doing the job. They're thinking the good things. They're thinking the, okay, let's put in your mind. Even if you're not thinking of it, all of the things that will happen to your five scondas that this transition will go well because we're smoothing it out. And I think that's a wonderful tax to do for another body, right? We understand you probably didn't have all your philosophical stuff together before you died. So we're going to take care of it for you. And I think that's kind of great service you're providing to people. Yeah. Let's like keep with this theme and let's get into things that are a little bit more occult. So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is this Gumantong or Golden Boy practice, which relates closely to what we've just been talking about. And I'll give you the version of it that I saw and then I want you to like riff on it and see what you think about it. One of the kind of spirit doctors or spirit healers, a mop, he like a ghost doctor, that I interviewed and worked with a little bit in Thailand. His day job was to care for the corpses in a crematorium and get them ready for cremation and so forth. And there was a pregnant woman who had died and he extracted the dead fetus and brought it home and put the fetus in a jar on the altar. And the logic behind this the way I was explained to me in the way I understood it is that like you were saying like a child dying very prematurely didn't even have a chance to live. The probability that that child is going to become a malevolent ghost or a malevolent spirit or the community is going to be harmed and this is a very dangerous situation. But the fetus being brought to the spirit doctor's workspace and put on the altar, he's kind of like adopting that spirit in and helping to transform it by teaching it, by caring for it, transforming it from a malevolent spirit into a spirit that could be reincarnated back into the cycle of samsara and come back as a more beneficial life than if it was just left to go and roam and cause havoc. And so part of his job is to spirit doctors to transform those spirits. That's the version of the Gugman Tung that I'm familiar with because I only ever really participated in healing aspects of magic in Thailand. I never got into the black magic aspects of it. So I just went and set the stage with that kind of understanding and then handed over to you to tell us more about Gugman Tung in general and how this works in your experience and what stories you might have. Yeah. I mean, I think you described it really well. So there are lots of examples of this of Gugman Tung, of the aborted fetuses used as talismans of a sort. It was explained to me in several different occasions, so a different people that you're honoring the body that you're protecting it. It could become menacing. It could be let loose and this is a spirit that doesn't know where to go. So you want to tame that and it's compassionate that you want to give it a purpose and you want to have a send off for it and transition to the next life. But the other way it's talked about is that the body is like a battery that it has a lot of potential energy and that the younger the body is, the more that energy has been wasted. Right? I'm 52 and so I've used up a lot of my potential energy on the decline now. And so my body is, it has enough energy, hopefully, to last a little bit while longer. And then it would be done. But five year old or 20 year old or 25 year old or 10 year old has a lot of potential. They have a lot of potential to come up with ideas to play sports, just our businesses, to create their own babies, all of these things. And then a fetus has the absolute most potential energy. What better source of power for anything? And it's not good power or bad power. It's simply power. You can have a battery that supplies energy to a heart monitor and you can also have battery that supplies it to the guidance system for a missile. Right? The energy is just being used. It doesn't have an agenda. We have all of these bodies that are energy sources. Why don't we use them for something? Now a good monk would not use them for nefarious means, whether it be to murder someone or to act as a criminal or a criminal or a criminal or a criminal or a criminal or a criminal. But it's just a good thing to do. And then you can use it for a certain amount of time. And so I was like, I did not mean to provide like a Buddhist dating service here. So it's, I struggle with this ethically myself. How do we teach this? So it's not salacious. So it's not gory that it's not shocking, but that it's something that makes you reflect critically on what it means to be alive. And that's what I try to do. But you do get students who just want to hear the salacious stories. You know, they just want to get into that. And you're like, okay, let's find, I understand it. I like horror movies too. But let's talk about this in a larger complex religious system. And when I teach these subjects, I teach them as part of a larger Buddhist course and say, okay, we need to be honest. Just like I would teach that Paul Pot, the engineer of the Cambodian genocide, was a Buddhist monk at one point. We have to say that Buddhism has a complexity like any other religion, a complex power system. And I think that's exactly what we're trying to do here. Once you start understanding the system and the logic behind these kinds of practices, you start to see that within that cultural setting, within that social or doctrinal setting, these actually make sense. And they're not so exotic. And yeah, salacious is a good term. From within the logic of this tradition, these are practices that are based in compassion ultimately. And also have heard of people using the spirit of the fetus as like a zombie sort of slave kind of spirit that then can you can like order it to go do deeds on your behalf. Like a doppelganger. There's a few good Thai horror movies. One, the English translation for the title is necromancer. And it is about this guy who has this fetal corpse that he uses a Gu Man Tong and he uses it to go murder people. Like he sends it off to like, I did murder this person because I was sitting here in a restaurant. Everybody saw me here, but my twin, my doppelganger went out and did this. And so it is in popular lore that way. But people pay a lot of money. There's an economic aspect of this, absolutely. And then there's the foundation in Bangkok that actually runs its own ambulances. That like rushes off to like scenes of accidents. Like you might imagine like a lawyer, an ambulance chase your lawyer to collect corpses and ask families, can we have the corpse? And they're at it because this can be powerful. So if there's a profit to be made, people will go after it. Well, it seems like all of the practices that you mentioned so far, chanting, talismans, meditation, as well as the more death-oriented practices we've just been talking about, all of those have a black magic application. Right? They're all forms of power that people have used for nefarious ends. Then there's all this stuff in between, right? Magic for winning the lottery, magic for, like you said, having people fall in love with you or for gaining money or for success in this job interview or what have you. There's this whole spectrum from compassionate blessings to transform negative situations into positive ones through the middle ground to the more violent or greedy kind of end of the spectrum. But logic is the same, right? Across the whole spectrum, the way that people are thinking about the efficacy of magic, it all comes down to this, like, harnessing power and then how do you deploy that power in this world of humans and spirits? And it's how you use that power that matters, right? And so whether blessing a field so it grows rice well, that's really on the same spectrum as blessing a sword so that it slices flesh well. Whereas you know this monk, he's a very famous monk in Thailand many years ago, Lung Pa Koon and Lung Pa Koon would bless kickboxers. He blessed any new army tank. The US sells a lot of tanks to the Thai military fighter jets. He was always blessing new military equipment. And then he said that I think famously I forget the line, but me blessing this jet is no different from me blessing this child. It is just my duty. I am a DASA. I am a servant. I have to use my skills for people who ask me how to use them. But anything used to control a human being would can be considered malicious and anything used to protect a human being would be considered non malicious or beneficial. So the corpse isn't bad, the ritual isn't bad, the corpse oil isn't bad. None of that is bad and none of that is good. It matters how it's used in the J-Tanau or the intention behind it. One teacher explained to me at a temple, it's quite famous for magical practices and I spent a lot of time there. And he explained it to me as imagine a room with bright lights in it. The light is diffused in a library. So everybody can read the lights available so the corners are illuminated. That's where most of us lead our lives. Our energies diffuse. We're spreading it around to appointments, to our family, to our friends, to people meet me, shops and on buses. We're just spreading ourselves out as diffuse light. When a corpse is concentrated like this, they only have one duty. It's like a flashlight in a dark room. That it is this high intensity beam of light. That the energy is only going in one direction. That body has been reduced from a body that can do many things across the day to only being able to do one thing. And we can ignore it and turn off that flashlight and throw it away and say that person was worth nothing. Or we can say, okay, let's use this beam of light to illuminate something, to do something, whether to find something, to protect, to keep us safe. That made a lot of sense to me when he was talking about it. And this is a person who'd done this for years and was incredibly reflective about it. But I think any practice that involves a rare substance can be abused, right? Some people are going to go out and get it to make money to increase their own personal fame or their own personal strength. And I think things are abused and I think they're abused more frequently than we realize. But what I, and I think you were saying this before and I agree with you, that a lot of these things are part of a spectrum of practices. So how can I make this a selfless practice to promote selflessness in a community and say, okay, I'm going to use this corpse that unfortunately people made a choice for abortion. It was a difficult choice. They made most likely. They're having a tough time in their life or they don't have the funds or all the possible reasons to have for abortions is that it most likely was a difficult decision. Can we use this fetus for something beneficial? And I think for some people use it just for pure profit. I was actually planning to ask you, we were talking about all of these rituals that you participated in in your 20s. I was going to ask you to what extent you believed in what you were doing. And as a, as somebody who's been studying rituals for 25, 30 years, I see a lot more similarity between Catholicism and type Buddhism than maybe somebody who's focusing more on the philosophy might see. I see a ton of overlap in the way that people engage with objects and the way that people engage with words and syllables and other kinds of practices. And I'm sure you felt comfortable moving into a Thai ritual space because of your background in Catholicism. But I'm wondering, did you adopt the worldview as well in your time in Thailand or? For me, it was never a question of belief. Did you believe in this? Did you not believe in this? I never even, really, until years later, I never even thought about do I believe in this. And so when I was among, I remember my avid, he came to me one day and he goes, do you have those things that white people love? And it's like this and this and he made like a cross sign. And I go, you mean a crucifix? And he goes, can you get me one of those? And I go, sugar, I could like write home and have one hailed. And he goes, yeah, I want one. And he used a loud term arsenal. I went it for my arsenal. I said, and he goes, thousands of people believe in your religion. So it must be good. I'm like, well, I think there's like two billion of us, but like whatever. And he goes, but there's a lot of power. So it must be good. It must be something important if that many people have latched on to it. And I was like, why do wonderfully refreshing way of looking at the world? Because that crucifix is the same as an iPhone or is the same as Tylenol, meaning that they work. Like they work and they're useful. Do you need to believe in if you profan or do you need to believe in an iPhone? No, but they certainly do work, right? And they make life a little easier, a little more interesting. And the way he looked at religion, I thought was so refreshing. And it's coming back again to that theme of power, right? That it comes down to the power of the object was what made it useful for him. And so the study of religion, we're not studying truth. That's the beauty about it. We're setting humanities. And I'm an unapologetic humanist. I do not want to make one I study a social science. I don't care about surveys. I don't care about data. I don't worry about all the possible ways we can make religion a science. I'm just not interested in it. I'm not against people do this. But for me, the study of religion is like the study of cuisine or the study of jazz is that there's no right way of doing it. There's more interesting ways of doing it. Like this chicken is going to turn out better if you cook it in this way. It's going to turn out more complex and more interesting, more flavorful. For me, belief is not necessary. We don't need to believe in the koko vahn to eat it. You don't need to believe in jazz to listen to it. And that's why I say we don't read Macbeth and say, do I believe in witches? No, it's really Macbeth because it's a really great story. Right? I'm not interested in a Buddhist texture having a conversation with a Buddhist person because I'm going to judge whether it's true or not. For me, Buddhism or Catholicism or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism, whatever you're studying, this is such a fascinating way of looking at the human condition. So obviously you got very interested in exploring this world to the extent that you decided to learn ancient languages, Sanskrit, Pali and go and get a PhD and really dedicate the rest of your life to studying this Buddhist world that you were exposed to. You're one of the people who I think redirected our attention towards the marginalia. You focused on the ghost stories and the everyday rituals and weirdness of teravada Buddhism and Thailand in a way that didn't dismiss it as this sort of exotic kind of superfluous, cultural baggage approach that many people either explicitly took in the past or implicitly took just by ignoring all of this material, but really brought it forward in a way that made the argument that this is really very important stuff to study as scholar of religion and I think you put these kinds of practices on the map in a way that has been unique and I think has changed the field. I think you're being a little overly nice, but that's very nice. I was part of a trend. I want to attribute it to sound strange, but I think it is attributed to being easily bored. I want to find out in a room of people who the person who feels awkward and who the person who feels at a place and how are they occupying their time because maybe that's how I felt. I have black fingernails and blue hair. I was a punk rocker. I was ridiculously thin. I was a teenager. I was a skeletal and I was not popular. I was expelled from my high school twice. I did terribly on my SATs so horribly it's hard to fathom how bad it did. I was interested in from the Gecko misfits. In Southeast Asia, you have the royal rituals and the beautiful temples and the rich history and the texts and the libraries and gorgeous. Such a wonderful place to be. I'm trained in those things and I certainly have done research on the manuscripts and I just put out a book on those things. I just was interested in what the non-accomplished monk or numb was doing, like the ones who screwed up. The temple that was not attracting visitors or the monks that were not going to pass the exams. I was more interested in what's going on in the corner of the temple than I was in the main room. Perhaps if I was better at school or perhaps I was more classically trained or something like this, I think I might have gravitated towards what was being chanted at the front of the temple and what was being held up as the main text. I probably would have gone that way. And I think that over time, all of us as scholars or anything that we do in any profession, we start to realize how much our upbringing, how much our friends, how much our parents actually influences the choices that we make. But then I met so many practitioners and scholars who I think were kindred spirits who felt the same thing and they were just excited to say, okay, finally, somebody in the room wants to talk about this with me. You are in very good company here at the Black Barrel, the island of misfit toys. I think we've heard from so many people the same sort of thing where it's the whole career really flows from these formative experiences in childhood or in high school or even early college and it's just sort of like the whole trajectory of the career. You can see it in that moment. Of course, only retrospectively. Well, yeah, you don't know it at the time. You don't know it at the time. Yeah, I had no idea. Yeah. I think I want to mention probably your most influential book, The Love Lurent Ghosts and The Magical Monk, which came out in 2011, which kind of explores this whole ghost world in Thailand. You've continued to publish a number of things since then, both about this everyday practice that we're talking about, but then also some textual studies and some other kinds of studies. So I want to give you the opportunity to talk about some of the more recent publications as well. Yeah, after The Love Lurent Ghost Book, I published three others, one on Buddhist at leisure, text Buddhist leisure, and that looks at Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Nepal and Burma and different sites in these places like Buddhist amusement parks and Buddhist memorial sites and public spaces. And that was really fun to write. And then I did a book called Wayward Distractions on that's a lot of Buddhist art and affect theory. And then this recent book called Cosmologies and Biology is a collection of rare medical manuscripts and hell escapes, hell manuscripts talking about heavens and hells and the body and how do you move between worlds and things like that? How do you heal yourself, but also how do you ensure a good or bad rebirth? And so and they're just beautiful manuscripts and the paintings are spectacular. So it's a private collection and London of Siamese manuscripts that was collected, illuminate manuscripts from Central Thailand, 150 years old, but they've been well preserved there and the curator of amazing person, he just didn't know what he had and he wanted somebody to look at it and it was one of the most impressive collections I've ever seen. I was really fascinated because they're just so artistically they're so beautiful that I wanted them to be exposed and these detailed medical manuscripts and the maps of the body and then the detailed descriptions of heaven and hell and the paintings are just so spectacular that just as art objects they should be seen. Yeah. I'm looking forward to taking a look at the medical manuscripts in particular. So congratulations on that publication and looking forward to digging into it. So through every single thing I've done up to this book is that I'm interested in how Buddhist learn to become Buddhists and I was interested in this because I don't know how I became Catholic. Like I don't remember learning it. I was in Catholic school. I was in all boys Catholic school for 18 years. I went to a Catholic college. I went to Boston College. But I never once remember like reading the Catholic manual like I know when saints days are. I know how to bow. I know exactly when to pray. I'm culturally so deeply Catholic that it seems fluent to me. But I don't remember ever learning it and most Buddhist I meet are just like that. They can't tell you when they became a Buddhist. It's a mixture of texts and movies and films and their mom and their brother and their best friend and advertisements and being bored at the back of a ritual while people are chanting or flirting for the first time at a temple. It's all part of growing up. And so how do we learn this? And I'm interested in how Buddhist learn how to be Buddhist through text, through film, through manuscripts, through rituals, through entertainment. That is continued to occupy me and I don't think I'll ever get to the end of that. I'm just continually fascinating how people learn to be who they are. And I just signed a contract for a new book that I'm expanding outside of Buddhism that I'm interested in how we learn through fiction. And I was struck one time many years ago. My son, we were talking to our next door neighbor and he had grown up with his person living next door for years. And he didn't know her last name. He didn't know that she had a sister like all these basic facts about her life. But he could tell you for hours he could talk you about the entire family history of Darth Vader. Darth Vader was much more real to him than this living breathing person next door. And that influences life in a sense more. You know, he learned about good and evil through Star Wars, right? Didn't we all? Yeah, exactly. But that's a valuable learning. And so why do we separate learning through fiction versus learning through fact? Does it really matter if he was real or not when he lived dates or possible? All these things does not matter. What matters is that you incorporate that person's life into the way that, you know, like you said, worldview, but how you reason out problems. And I'm just interested in the process of learning that I always tell my students that there is no point in having professors anymore if you want knowledge. Like we're not necessary. Google can do a lot better than us. There's more facts at your fingertips. Like information is not something hard to get anymore. Like you don't have to go to archives. And so if you want to go to a university and you want to learn about something, knowledge should not be your goal. It should be the process of learning. And so I'm very interested in the process of somebody learning what to value as knowledge, not the knowledge that they have. So I don't go out into a field looking for experts. Experts are the most boring people in the world, right? You want to look at a person that is in the process of trying to figure it out and what resources they'll use to try to figure that out. And as you said, I think really well before, what they choose to ignore, right? What they choose to ignore is a whole lot more interesting sometimes than what they're interested in. And I'm hoping that my new work is continuing that curiosity with the process of becoming a person, right? And learning how to be in the world. And you're never going to get to the end of it. That's what the best part of being human is is that we're not going to get to the end of it. Just as a jazz musician doesn't get to the end of jazz and a chef doesn't get to the end of cooking. Yeah. So you've talked about teaching quite a bit. And I promised that we would come back and talk a little bit about your classes. And your classes have been these two experimental classes that you talked about have been covered in mainstream media in a couple different places. So maybe we'll add some links in the show notes so people can go and read in more detail about what you're doing there. But I think it's worth bringing to the conversation right now when you're talking about what your goals are in terms of teaching beyond just facts, but actually teaching people like how to value learning in a different way than when they come in the door. But maybe just describe these two courses so that our listeners can get their appetites wedded and go follow up. Sure. So the one is called Living Deliberately and it's a course on monasticism. And I think what makes it controversial is that students have to take monastic vows. And so they have a vow of silence for a month. No emails, no computers, no speaking. That includes in all their other classes. That includes at their jobs and all of these things. And so they have to get permission from their parents and their other professors. They have dressing restrictions, eating restrictions. They get up at 5.30 every morning and we have meetings and exercises and then we slowly get stricter and stricter over time. And the other course called existential despair is 4pm to midnight. So it's an eight hour class. And there's no syllabus and there's no papers or exams or things like this. And they have no idea what they're going to do each class every time it's different. The one thing that links each class is that we read a book covered a covering class. And so we spread out over three floors and they can put their feet up and we eat together and we read intensely sad books about being intensely sad. And then we have a deep discussion from 9pm, 9.30pm to midnight about the book. And sometimes authors come in and they embed them. The students don't know they're reading a book by the person who's in the room. And so that's really a great course and we look at things like addiction and death of a loved one and unrequited love and divorce and abuse and failure and things like this. And I always say to them that I don't really care about their 19 year old self or the 20 year old self. I'm concerned about their 45 year old self. I'm concerned about their 55 year old self that when life gets hard, two mortgages, a child with an addiction, a mother that just died from cancer, life gets hard. And that I want them to have the emotional resources through literature and through music and through art that they can turn to. And we can use these resources to think about these very difficult problems if we allow ourselves to do it. And so that James Baldwin or Carson McCullers or Yuki Mishima or I don't know, Mako Kawakami, they can be as great as resources, emotional resources as religion or as a therapist. It's just absolutely fantastic when you give Tony Morrison or William Burrows to a 20 year old and you say sit down and we're going to read the whole book cover to cover. The amount of energy and thought that they bring. to reflect to go with these books, when they don't have to write a paper on it, when they don't have to analyze it, they just have to talk about it. I've been humbled as a professor. I am just so impressed with them. And yeah, very intense classes. But good. It takes a lot of energy from me, but it's well worth it. Yeah. There's something that strikes me about both of them, just structurally in addition to the content where maybe this is overstating the case, but it seems almost like right of passage or initiation here that you're leading them through, taking them out of ordinary time, whether it's at 5.30 in the morning or it's this extended class until midnight, and going through this really difficult and emotionally impactful event together as a small group and coming out the other side. It has this kind of, I don't know, alien structure of it. Yeah, I never thought about it in that way, but yeah, that's a really good point. That's really got, yeah. I remember being in college, and I worked full time in college, and I was there very short time. I have a college experience. I never went to a sports game. I'd never part of a club or anything like that. It wasn't fine. I was there to get a degree. But I always thought, I thought college was going to have these moments, these moments of we just read a passage from something, and that was amazing. I never remember having those moments. And I would have that feeling one day. I would have a feeling where an idea is so important. It like tears me apart. And these students pay so much money or time. They're giving us good years of their lives. And I can't give you that moment. I can't do that. But like Christopher Isherwood can, if we read this, you're going to feel something. You don't have to like it. It's not about liking something. This is a great achievement of human emotion. And this is essential for how we live. And let's have these moments. I don't know when it's going to happen for a particular student, but I do not want them to leave college without having that moment where they felt like for a second, like I felt like something was transforming in my life. And you can see it and then you're like, oh, you just had a moment, right? And that's going to stay with you. You're going to forget my name. You're going to forget this class. You're going to forget who was next sitting next to you, but you're not going to forget that moment. And that's going to be really valuable to you. One day when you're talking to your daughter or to your best friend or to your mom and they're having trouble in their life, you're going to be that emotional intellectual resource for them. That's my own kind of internal mantra when I'm teaching. It's never, what are they going to remember for the test? You know, what are they going to remember 30 years from now and not be able to ever forget? What a rare opportunity we have to take people, right, interesting, complex people and saying for two hours or eight hours, I have your attention. So let's have a sense of urgency about this and make this serious. And I just, I'm so impressed when students like take that off. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. I'm glad I asked you that question. So I really appreciate your time and thanks for spending the evening with us here. Yeah. Come down the bar, we'll be open in March. So I'll be in Southeast Asia a little bit in the winter, but then come back the old new bar we are. All right. Black Barrel Party. Let's do it. That's it for today from us at the Black Barrel Podcast. If you're listening to us on one of our partner podcasts, you can subscribe directly to us for ad free episodes or look us up on Substack to check out members only benefits. This episode is hosted by Pierre Saguaro and produced and edited by me, Lan Lee. Our music is by Jonathan Pettit. Until next time, be happy, be safe and be well. [Music]