Theravāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity

Juliane Schober, Steven Collins, Juliane Schober, Steven Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317268529
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Although recent scholarship has shown that the term 'Therav?da' in the familiar modern sense is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century construct, it is now used to refer to the more than 150 million people around the world who practice that form of Buddhism. Buddhist practices such as meditation, amulets, and merit making rituals have always been inseparable from the social formations that give rise to them, their authorizing discourses and the hegemonic relations they create.

This book is composed of chapters written by established scholars in Buddhist studies who represent diverse disciplinary approaches from art history, religious studies, history and ethnography. It explores the historical forces, both external to and within the tradition of Therav?da Buddhism and discusses how modern forms of Buddhist practice have emerged in South and Southeast Asia, in case studies from Nepal to Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia and Southwest China. Specific studies contextualize general trends and draw on practices, institutions, and communities that have been identified with this civilizational tradition throughout its extensive history and across a highly diverse cultural geography.

This book foreground diverse responses among Therav?dins to the encroaching challenges of modern life ways, communications, and political organizations, and will be of interest to scholars of Asian Religion, Buddhism and South and Southeast Asian Studies.

Part I
Theravāda as a historical construct

1
Theravāda Buddhist civilizations and their modern formations

Juliane Schober and Steven Collins

Today, more than 150 million people around the world practice Theravāda Buddhism, from Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and Southwestern China to Vietnam, Indonesia, Nepal, among Dalits in India, and throughout diaspora networks in Europe, North America, and Australia. Buddhist practices such as merit making rituals have always been inseparable from the social formations that give rise to them, their authorizing discourses and the hegemonic relations they create. Traditionally, kings acted as patrons of Buddhist institutions and their power was understood as a reflection of moral practice (karma). Merit gained from sponsoring rituals was seen not only in future rewards, but also constructed the fabric of social and political relationships, particularly in traditional contexts. The social formations classical Buddhist kingdoms produced profoundly influenced this tradition in creating what Foucault described as dispositif, which is occasionally translated as ‘apparatus.’ He described his use of the term in the following way:

What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.¹

In tracing the formative processes of a Theravāda dispositif, we need to be attuned to the role of the Pali imaginaire as a lingua franca across time and social space, to the transmission, translation and interface with ethnic vernaculars and to the interactions of the Pali literature with various forms of cultural repertoires, performances, literacy, authorship and discursive authority. Pāli Buddhist textual traditions continue to influence the development of vernacular literatures and local practices in what are now the modern nation-states of mainland Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. They contribute to a cultural discourse through which Theravāda practices continue to be imagined among Buddhist communities and take on local and modern articulations in the rapidly changing contexts of globalization and digital mediation. In some ways, the similarities today among Theravāda practices across time and space are more surprising than the spread of a literary imaginaire among an educated, multi-lingual elite in precolonial times. To consider how debates about modern Theravāda Buddhism are authorized, the chapters in this collection explore some of the ways in which Theravāda Buddhist civilizations have encountered modernity. Like all modern projects, this undertaking has a history.

The study of Theravāda Buddhist civilizations

Since 2009, a group of initially twelve scholars (now twenty-one) has been engaged in study of Theravāda Buddhism as a civilizational force across South and Southeast Asia. The Theravāda Civilizations Project, a scholarly collaboration supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, facilitates an on-going interaction among these scholars that is multi-lingual, multi-sited and comparative. It is the kind of project that can only be undertaken by a group of scholars, whose productivity is far greater than the sum of its individual contributions. Through its sustained deliberations, the group² has generated unique synergies and has come to understand each other’s work in ever more compelling ways. Our collaboration has opened up new spaces for asking particular research questions and, as we probed disciplinary boundaries and pushed thematic comparisons across regions, cultures, history and media, our conversations have also critically interrogated received scholarship on Theravāda traditions.

The goal of our Project was not to compile a dictionary of Theravāda Buddhism or map all its local articulations. Nor did we set out to reify some vision of a pure Theravāda world. This recognition also intervenes against disciplinary approaches that attribute exceptional authority to some sources by asserting that “in my village, this practice …” or, similarly, that “The Buddha said in my favorite sutta …” Understanding texts and other narratives as integral to a living literary imaginaire allowed us to revise our understanding of the role of the Saṅgha as gatekeepers of the Buddhist teachings (dhamma). Instead, we wanted to describe what diverse practices in different places and times might have in common, while asserting, from the start, the fact that there are continuities and differences, inflected by local histories, diverse practices and vernacular languages that together give rise to specific Theravāda social formations.³

Because thematic research is inherently interdisciplinary, comparative and multi-sited, our collaborations also changed how we construct Theravāda studies and frame inquires, indeed, how the study of Theravāda defines its subject. In the course of the project, we came to rethink scholarly approaches to the field of Theravāda studies and its subject, Theravāda practices—both of which are undergoing major transitions. Our project thus came to engage several trajectories, involving, on the one hand, a collaboration of scholars drawn from multiple disciplines, the humanities and social sciences, including history, anthropology, ethnography and studies of Pali and vernacular literatures; and on the other, searching for new ways to explain local and cultural diversity in the Theravāda repertoire, a concept Justin McDaniel (2011) employs, following Ann Swidler (1986).

Looking back, it seems that we started the Project with far greater certainty about what constitutes ‘Theravāda’ than many of us might assert today. Moving away from essentializing notions as ‘the original word of the Buddha’ found in the Pali ‘canon’ we came to see that various evolving traditions are construed by communities to be the pristine teachings of the Buddha. Little of what we call today Theravāda Buddhism was likely part of the ‘Doctrines of the Elders’ or ‘original Buddhism.’ If, as Steven Collins reminds us in Chapter 2, we know little about the history of Buddhism prior to Aśoka, we must concede that a Theravādin understanding of Buddhism during its formative period is constructed primarily in mythic terms. An important focus of our work was rooted in the effort to historicize what Foucault referred to by the word dispositif, namely those genealogies and traces of civilization that allow us to map out “the particular and historically imbedded inclinations in the normative network of social reality … the history of government, [and] the articulation and examination of our contemporary and historical and social reality.” Foucault states that the dispositif stands for “precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements.”⁴ Important conceptual questions about how to define the subject of Theravāda studies emerged from these considerations. How we can move from the universal to the local and how can we move from individual narratives to social and intellectual formations that shaped communities and civilizations? Generalizing from an individual life story to broader cultural trends often requires extensive study of contexts to be compelling. How do we avoid the dangers of extrapolating too much from particular narratives, individual lives, or from textual debates? What can be compared across Theravāda civilizations and how can we describe those phenomena as they are refracted in individual lives?

These questions forced us to explore interdisciplinary collaborations to extract new readings of our textual, ethnographic and aesthetic sources. As project participants worked to rethink the subject of our study—Theravāda—across national, linguistic, ethnic and social boundaries, we also wanted to make explicit how themes in the Pali imaginaire come to be articulated locally. As our initial perspectives changed, new concerns emerged about translation, about readings of text and context, shifts between Pali and vernacular languages, and about the construction of meaning and its social relevance. By tracing genealogies of practice and disciplines in Buddhist lives, we uncovered a new vocabulary that is cognizant of the range of Theravāda articulations across cultures, histories, and literary imaginaires. Given that theorizing links between Theravāda practice, text and history is wrought with complexities, we worked to develop a new language to capture shared premises to re-think how and what we study. We are preparing to publish future volumes on the life of the Buddha and on themes in the study of Theravāda civilizations.

The Pali imaginaire: texts and civilization

Talal Asad reminds us that religious ideas and practices are inseparable from the social context in which they emerge.⁵ Religion is, after all, a product of human imagination. By the same token, Buddhist discourse and practice draw upon the repertoire of the Pali imaginaire—about cultural narratives recounted in emic terms like Buddha, bhāvanā, nibbāna, dhātu, kusala, dāna, sāsana, Saṅgha, paramparā, vaṃsa and so on—to create cultural meaning in particular social formations and hegemonies. For the purposes of this Project, ‘civilization’ denotes not an essentialized classic model of refinement, but rather the generative iterations of open-ended Pali discourses, practices, disciplines and sensibilities to construct a meaningful reality across a multiethnic, social and historical geography. The study of Theravāda Civilizations encompasses a literary tradition in Pali that Steven Collins has termed the Pāli imaginaire that embodies literatures and histories that are much older than the term ‘Theravāda’ itself. It inspired particular forms of civilization, hegemonic kingdoms, religious institutions, practices and aesthetics for more than a millennium. Indeed, Benedict Anderson singled out Pāli is one of the languages that exemplifies a trans-local imagining of regional communities prior to the advent of print capitalism and modern nationalism.⁶ As we trace these genealogies of knowledge, practice and sensibilities through time and space, we come to historicize the dispositif, those traces and technologies that form enduring formations and institutions.

Our discussions have focused on core themes, such as conceptions of the Buddhist world (sāsana) and history (vaṃsa) and we compare such Theravādin iterations across different cultural and historical contexts. Indeed, to trace and account for family resemblances can be more vexing than acknowledging variations in practice and discourse. Through these discourses, sentimentalities, practices and social formations Theravādins construct an understanding of sāsana that profoundly shapes the world that they inhabit—socially, intellectually and culturally—where the Buddha’s presence is venerated and where past, present and future events are encompassed by a Buddhist framework of meaning. This is, after all, how the ‘really real’ is constituted through semiotic ideologies.⁷

Sāsana

Ritual and ethical practices such as gifting (dāna) and giving one’s self though ordination are central tropes in the social reality Theravādins conceive of as sāsana.⁸ Etymologically the term means to ‘order,’ ‘instruct,’ ‘teach,’ and the word can simply mean ‘a message.’ It can refer to a body of ideas (and texts) which claim to convey the Buddha’s teaching outside of any historical or material embodiment; in grammatical literature non-Buddhist grammarians (sadda–satta–vidū) are contrasted with those ‘of the Teaching (sāsanika). It can also refer to just such a thing: monks and nuns ‘go forth’ into the Saṅgha (sāsane pabbajjanti), it is a bounded entity with an inside and an outside (locative case sāsane, ‘in the sāsana,’ and the term bahīra, ‘ouside’; on more than one occasion when a monastery is founded it is said that the roots of the Teacher’s Institution have gone down (into the earth) (Buddhasāsanassa mūlāni otiṇṇāni). It continues its existence in time, as an ideology and through relics: the nirvana of the relics (when a Buddha finally disappears from space and time) is simultaneous with the disappearance of the sāsana (sāsana–antaradhāna).

Vaṃsa

This Theravādin understanding of time linking events and locations creates a particular historical consciousness expressed in chronicles (vaṃsa) and related genealogies of the Buddhist dispensation. Vaṃsa literature is found throughout Theravādin civilizations and comprises a genre of chronicles that usually follow a similar often structure, whether they are composed in Pali or in vernacular languages. Often beginning eons ago with Gotama Buddha’s aspiration to Buddhahood as the ascetic Sumedha under the then-Buddha Dīpaṅkara, or with the time of Gotama Buddha, they establish genealogies that link specific places, monastic lineages, reigns and sources of merit like Buddha images and pagodas to the wider Buddhist world. They convey particular Theravādin views of history and epistemologies in or derived from the Pali imaginaire, and project a specifically Theravādin causality to understanding the events of the past. The nineteenth-century Burmese chronicle sāsanavaṃsa, for instance, traces history from the time of Buddha to that of the Burmese kings, thus creating a narrative frame to explain the presence of his teachings in Burma and, by the same reasoning, making Burma part of the Buddhist world. Other chronicles recount royal and monastic lineages or the highly canonized biographies of foundational individuals. Royal and local chronicles often describe the hegemonic fields of merit of their patrons and affirm their patron’s charisma, authenticity and authority. Contemporary scholarship recognizes local difference, cultural inflections and historical particulars which are recorded in dynastic chronicles by describing the triumphal narratives and patronage of righteous kings. Such literature illustrates the creative process of linking emblematic events in those narratives and locations with the lives and the places that have been celebrated by the presence of the Buddha. “The interpretation of history,” Berkwitz writes, “by Buddhists in Sri Lanka, is conditioned by the country’s collection of historical writings (vaṃsa) and archeological sites that jointly speak to a past shaped by Buddhist kings and monks for a largely Buddhist public.”⁹

Practices and technologies: disciplines of self

Theravāda civilizations, of course, contain aspirations as well as facts and ideas, of which the most central is the ideal of the practice of the Middle Way (majjhimā paṭipadā), which refers to a restrained form of asceticism which is imagined to lead...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Theravāda as a historical construct
• PART II Local cultures and Buddhist vernaculars in colonial modernity
• PART III Theravāda Buddhist practices in the contemporary world
• Bibliography
• Index