Buddhist studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the public library where I work as an assistant, the books on Buddhism sit at 294.3 in the Dewey system, and I reshelve that run more often than almost any other. Readers borrow mindfulness guides far more than anything else there, while a translation of the Dhammapada and a worn copy of Rupert Gethin's The Foundations of Buddhism go out only occasionally. I find the gap between those two kinds of borrowing interesting rather than frustrating. It mirrors the question that shaped my undergraduate dissertation and that I would like to pursue at postgraduate level: what happens to Buddhist material when it is adapted for audiences who do not share its frame of reference?

I studied Religious Studies and History and graduated with a 2:1. My dissertation examined a handful of early twentieth-century English retellings of Jātaka stories written for children. In the Pali collection, each tale has a set structure. A story in the present prompts the Buddha to tell a story of the past, and the tale closes by identifying the characters with figures in his own lifetime, the Buddha himself appearing as the bodhisatta. I compared these retellings with the Pali Text Society's English translations. In most of the children's versions the frame and the closing identification had been cut, leaving animal fables with a moral at the end. This changes what the stories are for. They stop being episodes in a long path of perfecting virtues across lives and become lessons about honesty or kindness. My supervisor encouraged me to keep my claims narrow because my sample was small, and I think the argument was stronger for it. I would like to test it more widely, and I now see that I need firmer contact with the primary languages to do so.

For that reason I have been working through A. K. Warder's Introduction to Pali over the past year, usually on the bus to work. Progress is slow. I can now follow simple prose passages with a dictionary, but verse still defeats me more often than not. Even this limited reading has made me more careful. I notice when a translator has chosen a single English word for a term such as dukkha that carries several shades of meaning. I would value formal language teaching and the chance to read texts alongside people who know them well.

My reading has also moved beyond the Pali material. Gethin's book gave me a framework for the main doctrinal developments, and I have begun reading about Mahāyāna literature and the spread of Buddhism into East Asia. I am conscious of how much I do not yet know there. A taught Masters appeals to me precisely because it would let me build that breadth before choosing a narrower research focus.

Work has given me habits I expect to use. At the library I run a monthly local history drop-in, helping visitors search catalogues and digitised newspapers. That has taught me patience with incomplete records and with people who are not sure what they are looking for. Outside work, I volunteer at a repair café, mostly fixing bikes. I enjoy diagnosing a problem methodically, and it is a welcome change from reading. I also go bouldering twice a week. It is a sport that rewards studying a problem from the ground before committing to it, which is not a bad description of how I approach a difficult text.

I am applying for postgraduate study because my dissertation left me with a real question and an honest sense of the tools I lack to answer it well. I am ready for the demanding language work and close reading involved, and I would bring steady discipline, careful use of sources and genuine curiosity about how Buddhist texts travel and change.