Donald S. Lopez Jr.: evaluation

Transcript context

…How did the whole idea come to you? You’re a boy, maybe eight years old. You don’t have this plan. At some point, you have the plan. Where does the plan come from? The plan came together rather slowly. I was a suburban Methodist growing up in Alexandria. My father worked at the Air and Space Museum. I was born in Bolling Air Force Base. I’m a child of the 60s. I was 16 in ’68, the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Kennedy and King, the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I go to college in 1970. That’s the year of Kent State. I think that for many of us of that generation, we thought Western civilization is dead. It’s hopeless. There’s no future here. We had the naive belief that there was some sort of secret in the mystic East, in Hinduism and Buddhism. There wasn’t much to read then. There was Be Here Now by Ram Dass, Tibetan Book of the Dead that you mentioned, works of D.T. Suzuki on Zen. We read all of that stuff. As I said, then you start studying languages and find this larger world. It was mostly just, I guess, from the Buddhist perspective, karma. If they had not hired this particular scholar at UVA in 1970, I would have maybe done something else. I went to UVA thinking I’d be a Shakespeare scholar, and I ended up a scholar of Buddhism. When the Beatles come out with Tomorrow Never Knows in 1966, are you thinking, “This is awesome,” or are you thinking, “I know a lot already, this is BS?”…

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