Help Chris Edit this Personal Statement

This is a draft of my personal statement. It is two pages 1.5 spaced and I want to add a section to address the individual departments I am applying to. The first section has personal history that I can reduce. The second has religious stuff that can be reduced or cut. The third gets a bit long winded on my research interests and can be reduced. Thanks for your help.

A brief history of my path leading to Geography may illuminate my motivations for doctoral work in the field. My final year in high school, I spent staring out the window looking into the sky. Before going to college in Florida, I went to Japan as a Rotary exchange student and lived in the machine of Tokyo. Having escaped the machine in search of freedom I attempted to gain employment as a cowboy in Australia. That failed and I got a job picking grapes and throwing dead sheep into a pile. A few months after I returned to the US, I began my studies at New College, thinking that I would uncover the mysteries of the universe with a thorough study of Physics. After a class called “Asian Religions” my mind was sent tumbling down a very different path. At first, I was attracted to the fact that Buddhism and Hinduism had a broad, cosmological vision of reality. This was consonant with a conviction I held at the time, one that initially led me to physics, that humanity tended to inflate its importance in the grand scheme of things. As I studied the history and philosophy of religion, primarily Buddhism and modern Christianity, this antihumanist bent slowly eroded. Within a few years I was entirely enchanted by the promise of individual enlightenment encoded in Buddhism. While I still did not believe it was possible for a human to fully transcend their mundane circumstances in a passive way (I simply had no evidence for it), I did see that radical change of an individual’s mind was possible and that yogic traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism had cultivated the practices to do so. I was fully taken with the capacity of an individual to be outside of her own context. I had felt this otherness throughout my life as a perpetual outcast. Studying religion revealed examples of practical traditions in which being outside of society as a monastic or spiritual practitioner was allowed for.

Then I went to Nepal and saw living Buddhism. That living religion disillusioned me of my romantic and orientalist notions of the radical freedom of the Buddhist pracitioner. I saw and lived with people who were largely “superstitious” and, to my dismay, were not meditators. The vast majority of the Tibetan refugees I lived with practiced merit accumulation as their primary religious practice. Even the monks I befriended did not meditate. Not only that but they seemed to have a blind faith in the lama as a religious leader. I quickly became disenchanted with Tibetan social structures. After a few months in Nepal, I lightened up a bit and began to probe the subtleties of Tibetan society with a softer eye. What I found was a culture fractured, uprooted, desperate, and savvy about the realities of exile. I also found an oppressive patriarchy that perpetuated religious hegemony, hereditary capital, and rigid class structure at the same time it held up human liberation as its highest value. This apparent paradox did not dawn on me fully until I began my studies in Geography. In the interim years, I spent my time working on several projects. The primary of these was a construction of my own Buddhist practice that dislodged itself from traditionalist visions of Buddhism. In this way I subdivided my study of Buddhism into two not completely separate tracks: study of Buddhist cultural practice as it stands in the light of its own textually inscribed doctrine and study of my own existential being guided by Buddhist principles. While developing an independent post-protestant American Buddhism with a small cohort of friends, I became comfortable with a religious identity (ultimately empty, of course) with which I could negotiate an otherwise raucous cacophony of spiritualist sentiments. In this way, I returned to the Unitarian Universalist fold to find religious community, one that holds my own spiritual practice with respect and honor. With my own Buddhism sustained, I was in an independent position from which to return to the academic study of Buddhist religious history and philosophy; this time within the powerful hermeneutic framework of geography.

There is a special concordance between Buddhism and geography that is probably present in other religious movements, but is particularly compelling in the Tibetan case. The splicing of spiritual experience, religious hegemony, and dramatic landscape demands a sustained analysis of the spatiality of Tibetan Buddhism and the places its practice inscribes on landscape both founded on and driving of discourse. Thus my study has come to a fuller point in which I wish to access and address the variety of forces that create a religious place. Among those, I want to pursue the experience of an individual practitioner, the structures of state tied up in religious hierarchy, the legacy of agrarian capital supporting that structure, the inscription of universalistic discourses upon local landscapes, the resistance of those local landscapes as they are personified by spirits, the compliance of the local after being subjugated by the universalistic bulldozer of Buddhism, the transformation of culture via its landscape, the cosmopolitan project of altruistic Mahayana Buddhism, the colonization of the “barbarous” to support altruism, and the role of advanced and (dis)embodied yogic practice in connecting these structural, discursive, and cosmopolitan/globalizing/universalistic systems with grounded, local, and practical everyday life.