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First of all, let me express my gratitude, also in the name of the Sinologie Heidelberg Alumni Netzwerk (SHAN), that you agreed to this interview. We are all very curious about you. There are a couple of reasons: Not only are you a very new professor here at Heidelberg, you are also head of the institute this semester. We thought a lot of the students don’t know you that well yet and we want to give them an opportunity to get to know you and also give you an opportunity to tell us about yourself.

So, let us start with a question about yourself: Could you tell us a bit about your career so far? Where did you study and work before you came to Heidelberg? This is actually not your first time at a German university, right?

Thank you for the chance to talk, it is my pleasure. Briefly: I did not study Chinese or Sinology first. When I first went to university my undergraduate degree was in music. Then I began learning Chinese on the side, but I found it way more interesting. In those days it was reasonably easy to get scholarships from New Zealand to go and study in the People’s Republic. So in 1989 I got such a scholarship and at the very end of that year I went to Shanghai. Then I studied in Shanghai, moved to Nanjing and worked there, and afterwards I was in Taiwan for a while. Overall I was in the mainland and in Taiwan for three years. After moving back to New Zealand I was able to enroll in a Master’s in Chinese Studies. That was the first time that I really focused properly on Chinese Studies in an academic sense. I kind of came in through a side door.

I then learnt Japanese as well during my Master’s, so I was able to go on the JET program to Japan. I wanted to go to Japan since I also wished to learn Japanese reasonably well. I was in Japan for four years overall.

Then I was actually considering doing a PhD in a completely different area. However, my teacher in NZ, who had taught me Sinology for my Master’s, refused to write recommendation letters for me unless I continued to study Sinology. So I applied to study Sinology at various universities in the United States. He also told me which universities he would allow me to apply to, and which not. So I applied only to a restricted list of universities he had given me. It turned out that this was some of the best advice I ever received, and I was extremely grateful to him, in retrospect, for being so directive. I had the biggest stroke of luck in my life because I was accepted at Harvard. I went, of course, and it literally changed my life. I had these amazing five years studying with Michael Puett and Robert Gimello, and a number of other stellar teachers. And then I had another change of direction because I had become interested in Buddhist Studies. At Harvard I was able to focus on Buddhist Studies within Chinese Studies and so I became a Buddhologist principally rather than a Sinologist.

I probably shouldn’t say this now that I am the director of the Institute of Sinology, but I still don’t really feel like a true Sinologist. I feel myself to be a little bit of an interloper, because all my research focuses on problems in Buddhist Studies rather than problems in Sinology, if that distinction can be made.

After my PhD, or in fact still during it, I again got very lucky and landed a job back home in New Zealand. This is very unusual, since there are very few academic jobs in New Zealand at all, especially in such “obscure” fields. The university system is very small, and the chances that a position would become free at the right time for me were very small in the first place, let alone that I would actually get any job advertised. But I got one, so I was back in NZ for 12 years at Victoria University in the capital of NZ, Wellington. During that time, I also spent a year in Hamburg, because I received a Humboldt Foundation fellowship. I was hosted by Michael Zimmermann in Hamburg and I could focus on research without teaching. That gave me an idealistic and almost dreamy introduction to the German academic scene. I was completely enchanted and I thought that I would like to come back. Soon after I returned to NZ in 2016 I saw an advertisement for this position in Heidelberg. I applied, got the job and here I am.

That brings us to the next question: Why Heidelberg?

There’s actually several dimensions to this question: The first is that the NZ academic system, as I said, is very small. For someone in a field as obscure as Buddhist Studies, an “Orchideenfach”, it is practically impossible to have students who study what you yourself really work on. There are not really any students in NZ who are primarily interested in Buddhist Studies, and the system is not designed to support them. So I had to teach broad religious studies my entire time in NZ, and only had a very small number of graduate students who were vaguely interested in something related to Buddhism. I wanted to spend some part of my career at a university that was more diverse, with a richer and stronger tradition in the Humanities.

A second factor was that our children had grown up, so we were free to travel more since they were independent already. When they were younger we had been very happy that we were in NZ because it was possible for them to grow up as New Zealanders. That part of their lives was already concluded, and one of our children actually moved away from NZ, so we were not that tied to NZ anymore.

A third factor, which is kind of sentimental, is that when I was young and studied in the mainland, I studied at the 上海外國語學院 Shanghai International Studies University. There was an exchange relationship between the University of Heidelberg and Shangwai, so many of our classmates used to be from Heidelberg. I used to hear these amazing stories about this incredible guy called Rudolph Wagner. So when I was 21 my absolute dream would have been to come to Heidelberg and study Sinology here, but then my life took other turns and that was not possible for me. But I always had this idea in my head that Heidelberg was a special place, so when a job was advertised in Heidelberg it really caught my attention particularly because of that sentimental connection.

The last thing was that it wasn’t just Germany or Heidelberg, although I do believe that Germany is in a really good situation in which to teach and research in the Humanities, but it was also this particular job. As you know, my job is in the Institute for Transcultural Studies. The problematic that is grappled with by transcultural theory is very close to the research direction that my career had taken anyway. I am very interested not just in Chinese Buddhism, but also in the relations between Chinese Buddhism and Buddhism in other parts of the historical world, including the ways that Buddhism changed and developed as it moved to China, and the ways that Buddhist elements might have effected changes in other domains of Chinese culture. The job description also emphasized strength in digital humanities, which was also another direction that I had been working in for several years. It was really astonishing when I saw this job ad that looked as though it had been written to describe me. If I didn’t apply for this job, I thought, which looked as though it was perfect for a person like myself, then perhaps I would just stay stuck in New Zealand for the rest of my life, and never move again. So I just had to apply, since I was especially attracted to this job in particular, and not just Heidelberg.

Let us now move on to your research, since a lot of students at the department of Sinology might not know that much about Buddhist Studies. To start with, could you maybe tell us a bit about what you perceived to be your most challenging research topic?

The most challenging is definitely the one that I’m working on now, but it’s been very complicated and long. Nearly 10 years ago, I began working with a computer programmer, and we have created software tools that we use to conduct certain types of analysis of the entire Chinese Buddhist canon. That’s a very very large body of texts, which has been digitized since the 1990s. Our software tool conducts various types of large scale comparisons of texts in that collection, so that a human researcher can then come to grips with certain research problems on that basis. It’s a collaboration between a programmer and myself, but also between the machine and me—the machine does some of the work, and then I as the human do other parts of the work. On that human side, I use results which were generated with the tool to examine two main sets of research questions.

The first is to find the textual sources of texts that were composed in China. It’s a very large and common problem in the history of Chinese Buddhist texts that there are a large number of texts which were presented in the tradition as translations from Indic languages or non-Chinese languages, but which were in fact composed in Chinese: they are not really translations at all. If you want to identify such a text, the easiest way to do it is to prove that it has inter-textual relations of certain types, which show that its sources must have been Chinese texts and not Indian texts.

The second type of research problem that I use the tools for is to find the features of a unique style of a person or group, and then on that basis to determine who was the real translator or author of a text or a group of texts in the Chinese canon. You asked about the most challenging problem I’ve ever had. Well, particularly this second problem is the most complex problem. In order to test the tools and the methods that I used to apply these tools, and in order to prove to the scholarly community that these tools are powerful and useful, I decided to do a case study of a figure called Dharmarakṣa (in Chinese, Zhu Fahu 竺法護), who was active during the late third and early fourth century, to try and determine which texts were really translated by his group and which were not. That has turned into a very large and complex book project which has been taking up almost all of my research time for about the last four or five years. It continues to become more and more complicated and I still haven’t finished. It’s reached a point where it dominates my life, and also, I must admit, even though I ordinarily regard research as one of the greatest pleasures in my life, creates increasingly large amounts of stress.

That actually brings us directly to our next question: Where do you think computational aids can lead Sinology, Buddhology and the Humanities in general?

I think it is very dangerous to try and predict the future: most people who try will obviously fail. But very broadly speaking, I find it impossible to imagine that in a few decades, or some appropriate period of time, we will not be looking back at this period before computational humanities the same way we that we now look back the natural sciences before mechanical aids to human perception. I think that computational tools in the Humanities resemble tools like microscopes or telescopes in other domains, which have vastly expanded the range of human perception, and make it possible for us to see very far into interstellar space or very small microscopic space. We also have other tools that allow us to see parts of the light spectrum that we were no previously able to detect. Through those kinds of expanded perception, it’s been possible for us to empirically assess all kinds of hypotheses about the natural world around us. Exactly the same is true of the textual world. When we study the textual world, we are very severely limited by the range, types and patterns of attention that we normally bring to texts, in several respects.

First, we cannot read or process more than a very small amount of text in a single human lifetime. The most prodigious humanists have always been limited in the range of texts that they could consider, be aware of, or hold in their memories. Computers, in the last analysis, do not have such limitations, or at least, quantitatively speaking, they have a vastly greater capacity than any human.

Secondly, even the sharpest human can only perceive a certain level of detail in the texts. The tools that I use have already shown me that there is a vast amount of detail that humans typically overlook, which can evidentially meaningful if only we know where to look.

The third thing is this: While I don’t mean to say that computers will replace humans, we also have large blind spots. We only see the things that we are conditioned to find meaningful or interesting and significant. Those patterns of attention are determined by a complex range of factors, including our psychology, our education, our culturation, and the history of problems that have been regarded as meaningful in a scholarly field. A computer does not entirely have the same biases. Some of these biases can follow through into the way a computer is programmed, but at the same time, precisely because it is a very crude and blunt instrument, the computer also finds a whole lot of stuff we weren’t looking for. Sometimes in the middle of a large amount of garbage we find gold, things that are extremely meaningful.

So I think in those respects it’s reasonable to anticipate that over time computational tools—and here I mean not just tools that digitize the texts, but rather, processes or tools that radically expand or transform our definition of what it is to read or what it is to examine a text—such tools are likely to significantly expand the range of questions we can ask and answer, when we study a large amount of text in various constellations. This is a very vague kind of answer, because it is very difficult to anticipate exactly how that will happen. But I feel reasonably certain that it eventually will be the norm, as it is now in the natural sciences, for scholars in some sense to be cyborgs, that is, humans who operate using the extended powers of perception and computation that machines can give us.

In more finite terms, I think that the types of methods that I have been using in application to the Chinese Buddhist canon also have immediate possible applications to other bodies of premodern Chinese texts, i.e. other texts in classical Chinese. There are other very large bodies of literature like the Daoist canon, the 24 dynastic histories, and the various other texts that were often collected in the imperial collections like the Siku Quanshu 四庫全書. I think that there too, our tools, and tools like them, will have a very large range of applications. But then also to other languages, with modifications as required by the different syntactical and semantic structures of those languages, and the different ways that they are amenable to computation. In the field of Buddhist Studies, where I think I can see a little bit outside my own box and imagine how some of that transfer might be made to other fields, I think that there is also potential for other corpora in Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, possibly Mongolian and other Buddhist languages. It might also extend to other corpora in languages that have nothing to do with Buddhist Studies: other Indian corpora, for instance, or to classical corpora in the Mediterranean or Arabic world. I would expect that on the one hand, the methods I’m using have probable modifications that will make them useful to other fields of philology; and on the other hand, that methods that I have never imagined will eventually transform philology in similar ways to the ways that my methods are transforming the way I think about Buddhist studies.

Okay, now maybe something a little more hands-on for our students: If there were students who are interested in the field of Buddhist Studies, what would be your recommendation for a good starting point?

Well, if they want to read one book, I normally recommend John Strong, Buddhisms: An Introduction. I think that that is a very good introduction. There are also other good books of a similar type, for example, Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism; and in German, Freiberger and Kleine, Buddhismus, Handbuch und kritische Einführung. There are other introduction books like this, but beyond that it becomes very complicated very quickly. There are many many different topics and areas in Buddhist Studies and as in many small fields, there aren’t so many good textbooks that cover the smaller parts of the field. In the history of Chinese Buddhism for example in English, a standard work that everybody still uses is over 60 years old. It’s obviously missing a great deal of recent research, but there isn’t anything to replace it at the moment that we can recommend instead.

Similarly, when one thinks about other general histories of Chinese Buddhism, a couple of the other really major works (Zürcher, Tsukamoto) only cover the beginning of that history, like the first three centuries of the Chinese tradition. They are excellent, but they only cover that limited period, and are in some other senses quite specialized, and also now quite old. There's been a turn in which I think the trend is now no longer towards the writing of general books. Scholars instead do much more specific research works and those kinds of large works are neglected, especially in English. In German there are still more scholars who produce good works of this type, I think.

So then I would say that just as good as reading, it might be a good idea to take a course. At this university I am actually about to start teaching my lecture course called Introduction to Buddhist Studies. [Note: This was the case when the interview was conducted; the first semester of that course is now over, but the second part will be taught in the Summer Semester 2021.] There I attempt the very difficult task of trying to give an overview over the field of Buddhist Studies in a relatively short time. That is not to say that my course is perfect, but it is a different approach that you can’t give if you’re just engaging through readings. It gives the possibility, as all courses do, to be less formal and say: Well, in my opinion after 30 years in this field, these are some of the most important questions that scholars are trying to come to grips with, and here are some articles and chapters to give you some first impressions of the ways that scholars have thought about this.

Let us move away a little from the academic side and give you an opportunity to introduce yourself as a person. To start with: How do you like it in Heidelberg? How do you like the German environment?

I really like it. Heidelberg, I think, is a fantastic place. The main complaint that I hear from some colleagues, depending on their own background, is that it’s too small and a little bit quiet and conservative. But for me that is not a problem, because I come from a very small country, and I find very large cities a little bit over the top. And I think if you add the surrounding towns, which are all very close, places like the towns in the Odenwald and in the direction of Mannheim and so on, it is actually very similar to the capital city of New Zealand in size. So for me this is kind of about the right scale. My wife and I really love the woods around here, so we spend a lot of time on the weekends walking in the Odenwald or sometimes in the Pfalz.

You also asked about Germany. We were very much attracted to Germany when we lived here in 2015 and that was one major reason that I applied for this job because we thought that Germany was a country where we could be happy living. So far we haven’t been disappointed. There are two or three main factors in this attraction to Germany for us.

The first one might sound a little bit naive to say, but I believe that Germany is still a reasonably fair society. It’s a reasonably secure place for many people to live and has a relatively flat wealth gap, relatively good welfare and inexpensive university education. The fact that university education is still not outrageously expensive is a really good indication of what is special about Germany in comparison to many other countries; also the fact that health care is still fairly strong and universal—those sorts of things are important to us.

A second factor that makes Germany very attractive is that Europe is very old and New Zealand is not. Now, I know that there are older places in the world than Heidelberg, but the fact that Ladenburg is just down the road and the Romans had a great big Kastell there,  that there was a Mithräum across the river just where the River Café is in Neuenheim, and that the so-called Celts were doing whatever they were doing up on Heiligenberg in the first millennium before the Common Era—all that is a radical contrast to New Zealand. We only have “history” for about 200 years to speak of, and even prehistory only for about 1000 years. Before that, there are no human traces whatsoever. We have the newest landscape in the world in human terms. So for a historian to live somewhere where you can feel the deep past around you is really quite exciting, and I find that really rewarding.

The third thing, although I feel that this is a little bit masochistic of me to say this, is that we were very much attracted by the idea of living outside the English speaking world and living in a different language. My wife and I both had good experiences earlier in life, learning other languages and living in places where other languages were spoken, and we were attracted to the idea that we would live in Germany and get the chance to speak and live in foreign language. Actually this turned out to be very painful, because it turned out to be quite difficult indeed to try to learn a new language seriously, especially to actually speak it, in your late 40s or early 50s. I had also never before been in the situation where I was learning a new language while working in an extremely intense professional environment, where I needed it urgently in order to negotiate complex professional situations. That makes it a lot less fun, I must say. But still it is rewarding to have the chance to learn German. German is a very intricate and fascinating language, despite all of its traps and difficulties.

That brings us to another question that interests us all. We are all very impressed with your German, so: How do you learn?

Well, I don’t, not as well as I would like. I started learning German when I was 38. This is also kind of masochistic: When I finished my PhD dissertation the “treat” I gave myself as a reward was that I allowed myself to learn a new language. So I started teaching myself German to read. I did learn it pretty much by myself for many years. I just used textbooks and learning to read was not exceptionally difficult, I found, after the other languages that I had learned. But I didn’t have very many opportunities to speak. Over Christmas 2013-14 I was actually in Germany for a shorter visit, so I began trying to speak. Then I came back for 2015 and I tried to speak as much as I could, and went to a few night classes. But even then, my work environment and my work then was entirely in English, because I had to spend most of my time doing my research, and I do that in English, Chinese, Japanese, but not very much in German. I certainly have not yet published in German, and don’t have the intention to do so, if I can avoid it, because it is just so much slower for me to work that way.

When I came to Heidelberg, I had the same difficulty. HCTS, where I work, is an English medium institute, so all of teaching is in English and a lot of the other interactions as well. I am surrounded by German colleagues, as well as other international colleagues, but the German colleagues speak English so unbelievably well that it would be completely unnatural to hold a conversation in German, when they can speak English so much better. And to tell the truth, I also find it very difficult to find time to study German, and I feel as though I am not learning it very effectively at all. But that’s not the answer you wanted, right? You want to know how I do do it when I do it.

Maybe some pointers? What would you suggest for our students in the Chinese Studies?

I think it’s very personal. You have to figure out your own psychology and your learning style. I have a few things that I do whenever I try to learn a new language that I have found helpful. But I am not really a model, I don’t think that I’ve learned brilliantly.

So one thing is, I write down everything I can—anytime I hear a new word I write it down. These days I use Anki. I then try to have regular memorization sessions where I memorize vocab. If I could, I would do it daily, but at the moment I don’t have enough time. I think it is also important to memorize examples and phrases, not just single words. You’ve got to have a little bit of context. Not too much, but you must memorize things in context for them to be really meaningful.

The second thing I try and do is use my mouth. For me it is really important, even though it is the most difficult thing—or perhaps precisely because it is the most difficult thing—to actually speak. So even when I am studying alone, I try to say things aloud, to hear and pronounce them. I think that makes a big difference. Then you get muscle memory, you get auditory memory, you get a whole lot of other parts of your brain activated, I suppose. It’s quite different from just sitting there silently and trying to do it all inside your head. That’s another important step.

The third is that I try and read as much as I can in the language that I’m learning. Especially when I first got here, for an entire year I “allowed” myself to read novels, even though normally these days I only read specialist scholarly literature. But the condition was that all the novels had to be in German. So for a year I read quite a large number of novels in German and that helped me just to feel more at home in the language.

We have two more questions. Do you miss home and what do you miss most about New Zealand?

Of course, especially in Corona times it’s terrible. But it’s not possible for us to travel home at the moment. Both of us miss our daughters, we haven’t been able to see them for over a year and a half. And I miss the sea. In New Zealand the sea is always close and I grew up by the sea. Even though Heidelberg is beautiful and the Odenwald is near, it doesn’t have enough water and there is nowhere you can hear the right noise—the sound of the sea.

And although I just said I enjoy living in a foreign language, I also miss “my” English. One thing I’ve learned from learning so many other languages in my life is that your relationship to your native language cannot be replaced. When I was young, my ambition with both Chinese and Japanese was to speak them like a native speaker, and to have a native-speaker-like relationship to the language. I tried very very hard to do that, and in the end, I concluded that you would have to be a genius to achieve that as an adult. For me it was probably impossible. But what that taught me is that your native language really is a home, and there is no substitute. There are many many things I am constantly aware of that I can do with my native language that I can’t do with other languages, and never will be able to. But I also miss not just English in general—there’s plenty of that around—but “my” English, as I said. New Zealand English is not really a very strong dialect, not in the sense compared to real dialects in Britain, Germany, let alone in China. But it is still different. Quite different even from American English or British English. So it doesn’t feel the same to speak English with anyone who is not a New Zealander, or maybe, at a stretch, an Australian. In Heidelberg I only know my wife and one other New Zealander that I speak to regularly. So I am quite isolated from my real native language, and from the real to–and-fro that comes in a native language. That is quite isolating.

To conclude, is there anything else you want to share with us?

Probably it is like preaching to the choir, but I do think it is worth remembering that the Humanities in general and the study of Sinology in particular is a very worthwhile endeavor. We’re in a time now where it seems old-fashioned to some degree, and where the trends seem to be turning away from disciplines like ours. But I think that we should keep the faith, we should remember that this is intellectually and culturally an extremely important enterprise, and do all that we can to persuade other people that it is a worthwhile thing to do.

Thank you very much for your time!

The interview was conducted on November 2, 2020 by Rafael Pekmezovic.