Buddhism, Power and Political Order

Ian Harris, Ian Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134129461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Buddismo

Weber's claim that Buddhism is an otherworldly religion is only partially true. Early sources indicate that the Buddha was sometimes diverted from supramundane interests to dwell on a variety of politically-related matters. The significance of Asoka Maurya as a paradigm for later traditions of Buddhist kingship is also well-attested. However, there has been little scholarly effort to integrate findings on the extent to which Buddhism interacted with the political order in the classical and modern states of Theravada Asia into a wider, comparative study.This volume brings together the brightest minds in the study of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. Their contributions create a more coherent account of the relations between Buddhism and political order in the late pre-modern and modern period by questioning the contested relationship between monastic and secular power. In doing so, they expand the very nature of what is known as the 'Theravada'.

Buddhism, Power and Political Order offers new insights for scholars of Buddhism, and it will stimulate new debates.

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INTRODUCTION – BUDDHISM, POWER AND POLITICS IN THERAVADA BUDDHIST LANDS

Ian Harris

These chapters represent an edited collection of essays, some of which were first delivered at a symposium entitled Buddhism, Power and Politics in South and Southeast Asia held by the Becket Institute, St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, on 14–16 April 2004. The intention of the event was to get the widest possible contribution from scholars working in Theravada Buddhist contexts to the debate over what constitutes a natural sphere of Buddhist political activity, with specific emphasis on the history of the last two centuries.

All religions have a political dimension. Yet, despite high-level interest in the political manifestations of the great monotheist traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, little sustained attention has been given to this crucial aspect of Buddhism, Asia’s most important religion. Buddhism has exercised a significant geographic and historical presence in most parts of the continent, often for very considerable periods. It has also played a substantial role in the formation of specific states as well as in less formal ways of interpreting and informing social and political processes, and this influence has continued down to the present.

Early Buddhist sources indicate that the Buddha preached on a variety of politically related topics (Harris 1999, 1f). The importance of Asoka Maurya (268–233 BCE) as a paradigm for later traditions of Buddhist kingship is also well attested, while in China the spread of Buddhism seems to have reflected and reinforced tendencies towards social mobility and a more egalitarian ethos. So Max Weber’s influential observation that Buddhism is a fundamentally other-worldly religion must be, at best, only partially true.

The extent to which Buddhism interacted with the political order in the classical and modern states of South and Southeast Asia has certainly been the subject of important regionally based studies, but there has been little scholarly effort to integrate these findings into a wider picture which might be employed as a means of illuminating relevant social and political aspects of contemporary Asian life. Given the crucial importance of this tradition in key areas of the globe, this is surprising. One factor at play here may be the complexity of the material. Indeed, the literary, doctrinal, practical and cultural manifestations of Buddhism are too complex for any individual, however learned, to do full justice to their political ramifications. Yet the time is surely ripe for the matter to be examined in a systematic manner.

It is clear that, even if in the Buddhist context politics is merely the exercise of power, the nature of such power has been conceived in radically different ways from that in the modern west. To give one fairly obvious example, Durkheim observed, long ago, that the concept of the supernatural is a modern category. Yet from the traditional Buddhist perspective, a way of envisaging the world that has survived largely unscathed into the contemporary period, power has always been something that may be exercised across the natural/supernatural continuum.

As is well known, the Buddha came from an aristocratic family and, despite the fact that he personally repudiated his right to inherit the throne by withdrawing from the world to pursue a life of moderate asceticism, he seemed to have been perfectly content to mix in the society of kings and other nobles after his enlightenment. As Craig Reynolds very aptly puts it, ‘If the Buddha represents the absence of power, then he leaves a very large black hole that exerts immense gravitational forces on all those in its orbit’ (Reynolds 2005: 220).

From an early period Buddhism seems to have shown a marked preference for monarchical forms of governance. Nevertheless, the tradition was not univocal in its approach to laws of succession and related matters. While the ideal of an elected king, along the lines of the legendary Mahāsammata, may certainly have been sanctioned by ancient tradition, it does not seem to have been a method of selection that fared well in the historical process. In most Theravada lands the preference appears to have been much more oriented towards the principle of primogeniture punctuated by regular and bloody conflict between competing claimants to the throne. The victor in such a contest could often compensate for the sins committed in gaining the throne by the performance of elaborate Buddhist rites, large-scale donations, and the like. In this manner, he could envisage himself sitting firmly in the tradition of Asoka, the model of all subsequently righteous Theravada rulers.

Such rulers were expected to exercise their power in accord with Buddhist principles. In return they regularly claimed high spiritual attainment. They may, for example, have been regarded as bodhisattvas – the eighteenthcentury Burman King Alaungpaya’s name means ‘embryo Buddha’ – or as the Buddha-to-come, Maitreya. The latter appellation often came with millennial or chiliastic connotations, and we have plenty of Southeast Asian examples of individuals who sought the highest degree of worldly power on the back of claims to be an embodiment of the future Buddha.

In line with Durkheim’s previously mentioned observation, Theravada Buddhist conceptions of sovereignity did not really differentiate between ‘political leadership’ and ‘charismatic authority’ (ibid. 219), for the king’s status was also determined by his possession of merit stored up over previous lives. But monarchical claims are only one side of the coin in understanding the relations between power and political authority. The monastic order (sangha) was itself perfectly capable of challenging the state when it seemed significantly out of line with Theravada virtues. Quite apart from any other consideration, the impact of large numbers of able-bodied monastics in a state of withdrawal from economic activity has done much to shape the societies and cultures of Theravada lands for centuries, and monastic law (vinaya) has provided the basis on which many ‘larger political structures rest’ (ibid. 225). In addition, the renunciation represented by the sangha, and in particular by those members of the order who undertake ascetic practices (dhutaṅga) at the periphery of society (Harris 2000), in the wilderness for example, is traditionally held to generate prodigious quantities of power which may then be transmitted to amulets and relics deemed to be especially convenient physical receptacles for concentrating and storing this supernatural energy (Thai: saksit). Possession of such special objects confers great power on their custodians, be they rulers or those who seek their overthrow. In this context, then, it is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that a healthily functioning Buddhist polity is one in which the respective powers of king and sangha are held in a state of antagonistic symbiosis.

The essays in this collection engage with the ways in which Theravada Buddhism from the late pre-modern period has variously engaged with, or reacted against, a range of historical circumstances which may help to define a general concept of power conceived from a political perspective. As such, the contributors treat debates over the role of education, the evolution of a distinctively Theravada political theory, charisma, anti-colonialism and the rise of nationalism, and arguments over the proper role of political and social institutions. In addition, they seek to shed further light on the Theravada concept of security and protection, law, the acquisition of wealth, the idea of civil society, prophecy, peace-building and reconciliation, as well as the possibility of explicit Buddhist political representation and the proper forms of governance. Not unsurprisingly, the idea of monarchy is a leitmotif that runs throughout most of the collection.

Ven. Khammai Dhammasami’s ‘Idealism and Pragmatism: A Dilemma in the Current Monastic Education Systems of Burma and Thailand’ identifies the inability of the current monastic community to find a consensus on the principal objectives of monastic education as a major problem. Traditionally, in both Burma and Thailand, the sangha had offered two kinds of taught curricula in their schools: one exclusively oriented towards monks, the other somewhat adapted to the needs of the wider society. As the forces of modernization and westernization grew stronger throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, there were attempts to reform the educational system and these meant that the respective governments eventually took full responsibility for both countries’ secular education needs. Yet the changes did not stop there, for monastic reformers soon began to call for an expansion of their own traditional Buddhist curricula so that they might take on board various new and potentially helpful subjects like English and mathematics. Sangha traditionalists in turn opposed the imposition of these unfamiliar elements, which they denoted by the derogatory term ‘animal sciences’ (tiracchānavijjā), even though mathematics, in fact, appears to have had some natural role in traditional education, particularly with reference to the semi-rote learning of Pali literature. The traditionalists’ opposition to English language acquisition was further amplified by the fact that it represented the primary mode of European colonialism. Nevertheless, and especially given the pattern of Southeast Asian ordination practices, both the Burmese and Thai governments recognized the need to equip monks with a system of learning that would not hinder their prospects if and when they disrobed, and leading monastic modernizers, such as Janakābhivaṃsa in Burma and Prayud Payutto in Thailand, have worked to develop a new kind of sangha education that meets the unique needs of Buddhism, while at the same time being of service to both wider society and the state. These developments have led to the creation of new sangha universities which, ironically, particularly given the sometimes bitter disputes over the imposition of the ‘animal sciences’, have seen part of their goal as producing international Buddhist ambassadors with a level of education suitable for missionary work in the medium of English.

Andrew Huxley is a leading figure in the study of indigenous law in Burma. His essay entitled ‘Rajadhamma Confronts Leviathan: Burmese Political Theory in the 1870s’ takes the career and political writings of U Kyaw Htun and U Hpo Hlaing as its focus. Both men had been heavily influenced by the Theravada Buddhist culture from which they had emerged and both attempted to synthesize the best of indigenous political thought with elements received from the colonial power. U Kyaw Htun had started to work for the British a year before the Second Anglo-Burmese War and, despite subsequent dismissal from his post, he won the Judicial Commissioner’s Prize in early 1876 for his Essay on the Sources and Origins of Buddhist Law. U Hpo Hlaing, on the other hand, was an aristocrat who had been a faithful servant of King Mindon of Mandalay (1853–78). Huxley applies what he terms a ‘listological analysis’ to key writings of both men. He shows that Kyaw Htun’s Essay on the Sources and Origins of Buddhist Law, which includes a short analysis of Burmese political theory, represents a balance sheet between ruler and ruled. It also seeks to demonstrate that absolutism is unacceptable in the Burmese context, while the author underlines the need for due process and the rule of law. When King Mindon died, Hpo Hlaing had been a co-leader of a ‘coup for constitutional monarchy’, and it was in this capacity that he wrote his Rajadhammasangaha in 1879 to instruct the new king in the cabinet arrangements that, it was argued, should now bind him. This work of political theory addressed to a monarch on his taking the throne was both a policy statement of a coup d’état and strong defence of cabinet government. In the light of subsequent political developments in Burma, Huxley regrets that the distinctive political thought of U Kyaw Htun and U Hpo Hlaing was not better received.

In her essay ‘Colonial Knowledge and Buddhist Education in Burma’, Juliane Schober notes that colonizing forces have a tendency to impose their forms of knowledge on newly conquered territories. This takes place in many ways, one of which is in the training of suitable members of the local population to become civil servants and administrators. In Burma, the arrival of European learning gradually displaced India as the ultimate and natural source of knowledge, and marked the beginning of a new relationship between modern science and Theravada Buddhism. In an essay that touches some of the themes previously explored by Ven. Khammai Dhammasami, we discover that monastic education during the reign of King Bodawphaya (r. 1782–1819) already incorporated a variety of putatively secular subjects of Indian origin, such as astronomy, astrology, military arts, boxing, wrestling and music. But by the mid-nineteenth century, when Burmese monks began to come up against a British insistence on the teaching of science, they began a policy of non-cooperation. However, the sangha’s activities had unintended and far-reaching consequences, eventually giving rise to a series of millenarian resistance movements during the 1920s and 1930s. Schober also focuses on the emergence of the Young Buddhist Men’s Association (YMBA) and its promotion of four national objectives: strengthening the national spirit or race (amyo), upholding national Burmese culture and literature (batha), advancing Buddhism (thathana) and developing educational opportunities (pyinnya). Among the reformers who emerged from this background were U Chan Htoon, Judge of the Supreme Court of the Union of Burma and Secretary-General of U Nu’s Buddha Sasana Council, and Shwe Zan Aung, who stressed the compatibility between Buddhism and science. The essay concludes with an examination of the ways in which Burmese governments have continued to politicize education since independence, with particular emphasis on efforts by the military regime, since the 1990s, to employ monasteries in the delivery of basic education in rural areas, particularly among non-Buddhist tribal peoples, and on the strategic closure of schools and institutions of higher education as a means of preventing or quelling student unrest.

Peter Gyallay-Pap trained as a political scientist but has been personally involved in attempts to re-establish Buddhist-based welfare and educational projects in Cambodia following the tragic events of the 1970s. In his essay, entitled ‘Reconstructing the Cambodian Polity: Buddhism, Kingship and the Quest for Legitimacy’, he asks the question: can political science can gain a grasp of Cambodian political culture and its vicissitudes with the vocabulary and tools available to it? He responds with a fairly resounding no. Building on the insights of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, he sees the modern Cambodian conception of political order as an allotropic arrangement in which the modern western concept of the nation has been conjoined with the older indigenous symbols of Buddhist kingship and sangha to create a civic religion of loyalty to the Cambodian state. He concludes that, while Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea (DK) ‘. . . could not be a more graphic metaphor of a political system that had lost its existential bearings’, post-DK attempts to embed Cambodian culture and politics within the western liberal paradigm continue to be elusive. It is against this background that he suggests that it may still be possible for Cambodians to construct a modern, or post-modern, polity that does justice to a more indigenous and Theravada Buddhist political culture, and that it is only in this way that the institutions of governance will be able to gain more obvious legitimacy with the Cambodian people.

There has been a significant flowering of scholarship related to Buddhism in Cambodia since the middle of the 1990s, and John Marston is one of the leading figures in this new movement. His essay, entitled ‘The Cambodian Hospital for Monks’, tells the story of the establishment of a place of healing for sangha members in the early Cambodian Independence period which was, coincidentally, also the time when Buddhists throughout the world were celebrating the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of the Buddhist religion. It seems that the project fed into an emerging pan-Asian vision for Buddhism. Its main initiator, Khuon Nay, had a prior background as a member of the country’s major political grouping, the Democratic Party, but he was also motivated by an engagement with the central Buddhist insight into life’s impermanence. His fund-raising involved use of relics and his conception of the healing can be read in moderately millennial terms. The hospital was also a consciously national project with a ‘civil society’ dimension that linked back to both Theravada traditions of kingship and to the reformist Buddhism that had emerged during the French colonial period. Indeed, the location of the hospital some distance away from the historic and French centres of the capital seems to confirm this impression. Furthermore, Marston argues that the project’s backers were able to plug into a form of spirituality that provided them with an authentically Khmer identity, while at the same time recognizing the power of western science and technology. By so doing, this unusual project of modernity was able to draw heavily on the pre-modern and indigenous so that the Khmer could validate their own culture as equal to that of the colonizers.

Volker Grabowsky describes himself as, ‘an historian not specialised in Buddhist studies’. Nevertheless, his ‘Buddhism, Power, and Political Order in Pre-Twentieth Century Laos’ touches upon issues crucial to the understanding of how Buddhism interacted with wider Lao society in its pre-colonial past. It addresses three interconnected questions: When and how did Buddhism become the dominant religion in Lao society? How did Buddhism influence Lao conceptions of kingship? What was the relationship between the political and religious orders in pre-colonial Laos and to what extent did Buddhist monks help legitimize and strengthen political institutions? The author investigates how accurate the standard view on the diffusion of Buddhism in pre-colonial Laos is in the light of the historical evidence. He concludes that mid-fourteenth-century Cambodian influence was not a decisive factor in the diffusion of Buddhism in Lao society and that it was not until the reign of Sainya Cakkhaphat Phaen Phaeo (r. 1442–79/80), that Theravada Buddhism became the dominant religion of the ruling elites. From that time on, kings tended to abide by the tenfold royal code (dasarājadhamma), build stūpas, manipulate relics, dedicate Buddha images, donate land to the sangha, and institute the practice of temple serfdom much the same as their fellow rulers in other regions of Theravada Southeast Asia. The author also discusses an interesting case of antagonistic symbiosis between ruler and sangha as illustrated in the career of a senior and charismatic monk called Pha Khu Phon Samek, aka Pha Khu Achom Hòm (literally, ‘the learned monk whose faeces smell [good]’), following King Suriyavongsa’s death in 1695.

Peter Koret’s ‘Past, Present, and Future in Buddhist Prophetic Literature of the Lao’ offers a unique glimpse into a genre of writing hitherto largely ignored by the scholarly community. Prophetic writing effectively represents a tradition of underground religious literature which authors can reflect on the social, political and other ills of their time in a context that gives a far higher degree of protection from persecution than that allowed by alternative genres of writing. Koret divides his coverage into two sections, one dealing with materials produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the other focusing on writings from the mid-twentieth century. Both clearly reflect the political and economic circumstances of their times, many from the former period dwelling on the suffering of the Lao and other groups under Siamese domination, and both, while fitting into a general Theravada pattern of explanation, nevertheless possess elements that might be regarded as heterodox. To give one example, the god Indra, the falsely attributed author of much Lao prophetic literature, regularly comes to the fore as an enforcer and powerful agent of righteous anger, to such an extent that the Buddha is relegated to the background as an ultimate but very remote source of justification. Nevertheless, these works tend to avoid simple solutions to present suffering whether caused by government oppression, war, foreign domination or other factors. For the Lao authors of these works, the only real solution to suffering is a fundamental restoration of the moral and orderly ‘world’ of the past, in line with mainstream Buddhist principles.

The Buddha’s defeat of Māra (māravijaya), the mythological embodiment of all negativity from the Theravada perspective, has been a potent political metaphor in Southeast Asia for many centuries. The Buddha’s principal ally in this incident is the Earth Goddess (nang thoranee) and in her ‘In Defence of the Nation: The Cult of Nang Thoranee in Northeast Thailand’, Elizabeth Guthrie explores that deity’s association with fertility but also with more aggressive protection, which in the modern period has taken the form of the protection of the nation state. Focusing on the northeast Isaan region of Thailand, and the relatively new Khon Kaen City in particular, Guthrie traces the relationship that has grown up between Nang Thoranee and the Thai political right since the end of the Second World War. The construction of a Nang Thoranee fountain shrine in Khon Kaen coincided with a period in which the central government was trying to deal with a putative communist threat in the northeast of the country. But in the late 1990s, the earth goddess’s devotees turned to her again in attempts to protect themselves from the adverse economic effects of International Monetary Fund policies towards Thailand. Some believed that she would reveal vast hidden sources of underground gold which could be used to help the nation pay off its international debts. The essay also considers possible financial corruption at the shrine itself and its inevitable decline once the country’s economy began to move in a more favourable direction.

The final essay in this volume, ‘King, Sangha, and Brahmans: Ideology, Ritual and Power in Pre-Modern Siam’ is by Peter Skilling, who uses inscriptions, the Three Seals Law Code, chronicles, royal eulogies, and other primary materials to illuminate both the conceptions and idealizations of kingship and religion and the intricacies of ritual relations from the Ayutthaya to the early Ratanakosin periods. He argues that ritual was essential to the political functioning of the states that evolved within and beyond the boundaries of modern Thailand, and that its role in state economies and regional and trans-regional diplomacy should not be dismissed a...