Drafting a Statement of Purpose
My application for the doctoral program at the Graduate Theological Union is just about complete. The PhD that I would like to mentor my work there has sent in a recommendation letter for me. This makes me pretty happy as I’m really hoping that we can work together.
One of the last things that I have left to do is the drafting of my academic statement of purpose. I didn’t have to do this (or I don’t remember having to do so) for my Master’s program. The instructions that I have are:
Please provide a concise (300-500 words) academic statement of purpose that includes the following:
- Your reasons for pursuing graduate theological study at the GTU
- Your specific academic interests and proposed research topics and methods
- Explanation of the foundations your academic background provides for to your research interests
- Your reasons for choosing an area/field of study available at the GTU
Now, 300 to 500 words is not a lot. It is around a page or so, depending on spacing. I need to figure out how much to say about my research interests in mikkyo, Japanese esoteric Buddhism. I don’t have a specific thesis topic defined as of yet, just my interests. There is also the question of how much of my own Buddhist background to include in talking about why I am interested in the area. GTU is an academic institution but it is also formed from the union of nine seminaries, one of which being the Institute of Buddhist Studies where I’ve taken classes and of which my (hopeful) mentor is Dean. I would expect that mentioning my Buddhist background as a practitioner as part of my motivation would be reasonable to do.
Unfortunately, I don’t know that many people with PhDs so I don’t have a lot of advice to draw upon here. This isn’t going to keep me awake at night but as one of the last things left to get done, I want to write my statement up and get it turned in with the application.
There are so few scholars that even focus on Japanese tantric practices that it is pretty wide open. That being said, I don’t know Japanese (yet) and I don’t really want to dedicate my scholastic work to being a translator of just a specific text or somesuch. I am much more interested in the theory and rituals around tantric practice than digging out one particular text to translate.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
As someone who did this (and has something of an insider's perspective on the whole thing) here's some unsolicited advice:
1. Don't over think it, but be thoughtful.
2. As far as your personal Buddhist practice, I don't think you have anything to worry about, necessarily. Yes, the GTU (and the IBS) are free and easy in regards to the whole scholar-practitioner thing. But, on the other hand, I wouldn't foreground it. A simple “My personal practice got me hooked and now I want to deepen my understanding/appreciation” works much better than 500 words about deeply personal transformative mystical experiences you may have had. (I have a feeling you wouldn't do that anyway, but, never hurts to hear!)
3. The language thing is a bit of a thorny issue. If you're doing Japanese mikkyo, you're going to have to learn Japanese, even if you're not going to be a translator as such. Have you done any work on learning Japanese yet? Or were planning on doing it all once you got in? Sometimes it help to say things like, “I'm going into this area, and to prepare myself, I've started taking classes.” If not, I would foreground the theoretical background that you've already gotten doing your MA.
The bottom line here is that they want to make sure that you know what you're getting into. The GTU doesn't want to accept students who are going to have to spend five years learning a litany of dead languages AND all of the theoretical/methodological issues in Religious Studies BEFORE they can even start to think about their actual dissertation which will take another five years. They actually want people to graduate.
So, in your statement, it's good to point what's missing in your knowledge and why the GTU is the place to fill in the gaps (i.e., I've done work in religious studies, ritual studies, etc., and Dr. Payne and the IBS's Japanese language classes are really excellent reasons to do this work at the GTU. Make sense?
4. No one expects you to have a thesis, but they secretly do. Even if it's a vague and nonsensical one. I think in my own statement, I made up some malarkey about wanting to study how the historical fact of World War II incarceration effected the ritual development of American Shin Buddhism. That's a pretty meaningless statement when you get right down to it. But it shows that I had a starting point, an area of knowledge I could pursue. It sounds like you have that, so I don't see this being a problem. But I think it's important that they know that you know what your boundaries are — even if you completely abandon them on day one like I did!
Best of luck Al! I'm sure you don't need it!
November 18th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Thank you for the kind thoughts, Scott.
I don't have any Japanese. I've done some basic work on it but nothing to write home about. I figure it isn't ideal but taking Japanese classes has been pretty difficult with a normal work schedule (and the evening options seem to suck from the class that I did try). I figure that I'm going to spend a chunk of my first year in the program knuckling down on my language.
I have a year of German and about a year of (now forgotten) Latin. I also had five years of Russian as a teen that if I had a good reason, I could probably resurrect in less than a year as I started it when I was 12. I figure that I will need some fluency in Japanese (from talking to Dr. Payne as well) and that my German may suffice as a secondary language for the purposes of the school.
As you probably recall, my MA did focus on esoteric practices, initiation rituals, etc. from Victorian England. I could probably leverage that, along with my own academic and practical study as an esoteric Buddhist practitioner, for my work at GTU. That group was the Golden Dawn so it was a quasi-masonic fraternal organization that engaged in an organized set of practices. It would be nice to find something similar, at least in some sense, in North America.
I've actually thought of pitching my work to focus on esoteric Buddhist practices here in North America but that would be difficult to do with a Japanese-only focus and if you included Tibetan Vajrayana, it would overshadow anything else. There are the Shingon churches here in California, the Tendai betsuin now in North America and then the history of practices, such as Doctor Ajari's organization, that borrowed from Japanese practices as well as doing homegrown work. Rev. Keisho, who run the small Tendai hermitage up at Cobb Mountain, was in that organization in his youth. There is also the point that Hawaii has quite a few Shingon and Tendai practitioners during the last 100 years and a number of temples. It might be possible to focus on groups and practices in the United States. The main issue that I see is that the number of people is so small (there are probably less than 100 Tendai practitioners in North America).
November 19th, 2008 at 9:46 am
For the purposes your Statement of Purpose, I don't think you need to get that detailed, i.e., which *specific* group you'd want to work on. For the purposes of your actual program of study, I think you could absolutely do some interesting work on Japanese tantra in the U.S. even if it is a relatively small sample size. It's a small sample now, but it's got a long history that has been more than overshadowed in the field by “convert” groups and famous Buddhists. Dr. Payne's got an interesting article on U.S. Shingon in a book called Buddhist Missionaries in the Era of Globalization if you haven't already seen it.
You'd still need to learn some Japanese. But it sounds like you could spin your application to “I've already got two languages under my belt, so all I need to do is learn one more.” Emphasis on the “spin.”
best.