Routledge Handbook of Therav?da Buddhism

Stephen C. Berkwitz, Ashley Thompson, Stephen C. Berkwitz, Ashley Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781138493933
• eBook ISBN: 9781351026642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Among one of the older subfields in Buddhist Studies, the study of Therav?da Buddhism is undergoing a revival by contemporary scholars who are revising long-held conventional views of the tradition while undertaking new approaches and engaging new subject matter. The term Therav?da has been refined, and research has expanded beyond the analysis of canonical texts to examine contemporary cultural forms, social movements linked with meditation practices, material culture, and vernacular language texts. The Routledge Handbook of Therav?da Buddhism illustrates the growth and new directions of scholarship in the study of Therav?da Buddhism and is structured in four parts:

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• Ideas/Ideals

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• Practices/Persons

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• Texts/Teachings

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• Images/Imaginations

Owing largely to the continued vitality of Therav?da Buddhist communities in countries like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, as well as in diaspora communities across the globe, traditions associated with what is commonly (and fairly recently) called Therav?da attract considerable attention from scholars and practitioners around the world. An in-depth guide to the distinctive features of Therav?da, the Handbook will be an invaluable resource for providing structure and guidance for scholars and students of Asian Religion, Buddhism and, in particular, Therav?da Buddhism.

The introduction and chapter 20 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I Ideas/Ideals

1 Theravāda Sectarianism and diversity in Mahāvihāra historiography

Sven Bretfeld

DOI: 10.4324/9781351026666-3

Introduction

This chapter investigates how the Buddhist lineages we are accustomed to calling “Theravāda Buddhism” today have participated in historical discourses of institutional identity building and self-positioning against the backdrop of a Buddhist world increasingly characterized by intra-religious diversification and sectarianism.

The Pāli literary tradition has never produced a systematic presentation of Buddhist sects in the style of Vasumitra’s Samayabhedoparacaṇacakra (second/third centuries?) or Bhavya’s Nikāyabhedavyākhyāna (sixth centuries) for Sanskrit traditions. The Pāli commentaries indeed, contain plenty of analytical information on individual doctrinal or legal standpoints deemed erroneous or straightforwardly “heretical” by the respective authors. Sometimes such a view is ascribed to an identifiable group. The Kathāvatthu-Atthakathā is especially rich in this kind of information. A systematic interpretation of the world of Buddhist sectarianism in total was, however, achieved in a completely different literary form: historical narrative. The vaṃsa literature—sometimes called “chronicles” but, better, genealogical literature—does not contain much information on the characteristics of individual sects. But we do learn how the authors of these texts have organized their vision of the Buddhist world as a disintegrated field of intra-religious diversity, how, why, and when they thought the fragmentation of the Buddha’s teaching happened; which global and local challenges for the integrity and survival of Buddhism they perceived; and how they defined their own role in this situation. As religious texts with pedagogical and political impact, the vaṃsas’ ultimate aim is to present role models of good Buddhist behavior (Berkwitz 2004)—in the present context, how they expected that people of authority should act in order to restore the sāsana (the Buddhist institution or establishment) and to preserve it for as long as possible.

I will focus the present essay by discussing the two oldest vaṃsas that have been preserved—Dīpavaṃsa (fourth century) and Mahāvaṃsa (fifth century)—and a late fourteenth-century work written in medieval Sinhala—the Nikāyasaṅgraha. The latter presents the world of Buddhist sectarianism as a memory of the past, written in a gesture of victory by an author who perceived his own period as a time in which the “true” sāsana has prevailed over the heresies of the past.

It is crucial to keep in mind that all three works represent the viewpoint of the Mahāvihāra Nikāya, one of Sri Lanka’s ancient Buddhist lineages. Much of their information and conceptual antagonisms have to be interpreted against the background of the sectarian agenda of this lineage. They were not unrivaled, not even within Anurādhapura, the ancient Sri Lankan capital where the Mahāvihāra Nikāya had its original base. Sadly, the alternative perspectives of their local rivals have fallen prey to historical contingency almost completely after the Mahāvihārins prevailed in the early post-Anurādhapura period. Hence, their point of view not only monopolized the cultural memory of the Sri Lankan Buddhists but also shaped the paradigms of Buddhist history-making in Southeast Asia since the thirteenth century when the Sri Lankan Buddhist “neo-orthodoxy” (see the following discussion) started to expand their influence into Burma and Siam. I may add that the antagonistic picture of the Mahāvihāra texts may not necessarily be representative of day-to-day interactions among members of different sects. We have many historical examples for good intersectarian cooperation and exchange, even programmatic curricula for the study of each other’s literature. Close friendships between members of different sects may have been as common in historical times as they are today. We should also be cautious with the essentialized qualities and characteristics our sources attribute to different Buddhist lineages—for example, the strict “anti-Mahāyāna” attitude commonly associated with the Mahāvihārins. These may often be idealized images rather than descriptions of social realities.

Sect and Nikāya

I use the terms sect and sectarianism reluctantly. They are increasingly challenged in Religious Studies due to their historical roots in ancient Christian polemics and their underlying pejorative sense in modern use. In Buddhist Studies, the term sect is still widely used and has been stripped of much of its Christian heritage. When Buddhist scholars speak of “sects,” they usually mean the Sanskrit/P āli term nikāya. The nikāya concept is complex and has different connotations in different contexts. But it always defines an institutionalized group identity between the local face-to-face community and the global totality of the “saṃgha of the four directions” (caturdiśasaṃgha). I prefer the translation “monastic lineage” to “sect” or “school,” in order to highlight the genealogical logic implied in the concept and to avoid an overemphasis of a distinguished belief or exegetic system as a defining characteristic. Some points need to be sketched in order to clarify the concept:

• The nikāya concept belongs to the field of monasticism. A Buddhist layperson is not a member of any nikāya. In this respect, nikāyas resemble more the Catholic monastic orders (Franciscan, Dominican, etc.) than Christian denominations or sects (Catholic, Protestant, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.). Each monk and nun belongs to a nikāya. This affiliation is conveyed with the ordination ritual and tied to the nikāya-specific version of the Vinaya (monastic legal codex) they are ordained into. Unlike the Christian distinction between “the” church (= community of the orthodox) and “a” sect (= community of followers of a heresy), the Buddhist nikāya concept is a technical term of monastic collectivization and is per se not tied to polemical contexts.¹
• A shared Vinaya recension (and enactment principles²) is constitutive for all members of a nikāya. In this respect, a nikāya can be interpreted as the virtual community of monks and nuns with ritual and jurisdictional compatibility. Earlier scholarship understood nikāyas primarily as dogmatic schools. Some nikāyas had their own literary tradition, starting with a specific recension of the Tripiṭaka, commentarial material, and so on. However, given the scarcity of sources, it is unclear to what extent such textual and doctrinal originality was constitutive for the historical nikāyas.³ Moreover, it seems to have been possible for a monk or nun to adopt another nikāya’s doctrinal system without abandoning the institutional framework of the nikāya in which they were formally ordained (cf. Kieffer-Pülz 2000: 289). A complete formal “conversion” to another nikāya required more than a shift of doctrinal orientation. Such a step would demand a full reordination into another Vinaya regime, implying that the number of ordination years of the “convert” would be reset to zero—such a relapse of hierarchical rank was surely not chosen often without very good reasons. For the same reason, nikāyas are not a characteristic of “Hīnayāna Buddhism,” as some scholars suggest by using the term “Nikāya Buddhism” as a replacement for “Hīnayāna” in efforts to eschew usage of the latter for its historically pejorative connotations. The reasons for an individual monastic community to reject or tolerate, accept, or impede “Mahāyānist” or “Tantric” practices have to be sought out among the factors of communal socialization and politics (group pressure, social expectations, internal policies, institutional agendas, etc.) rather than its formal nikāya affiliation. As we will see, the Theriya Nikāya—or “Theravāda”—was a strong promoter of Mahāyāna and Tantric texts and practices for many centuries.
• For polemical purposes vinaya- and dharma-related issues are often conflated. The scholarly sdebate whether nikāyas were primarily doctrinal (dharma) or legal (vinaya) institutions, is fairly obsolete in this context (Bechert 1985, 1993; Walser 2005: 99ff). For the sources discussed in this chapter, nikāya schisms are always the result of disrespect for the “true” and “authentic” word of the Buddha. Thus, deviance is a matter of an “evil” (pāpa) attitude, not so much of concrete issues and open debates.

It is unclear when and how the nikāya concept came into being historically. Scholars have widely accepted the Buddhist view that institutional splits of the saṃgha into first two, then several nikāyas were the major factor driving the diversification of the early Buddhist movement. It is commonly assumed that this process was well underway by the time of Aśoka (Lamotte 1988: 292, Hirakawa 1990: 105ff., Sasaki 2002, Bechert 2005b: 25.).⁴ However, considering the decentralized organization and expansion of the Buddhist movement in its first centuries, I find this archetype-based, linear bifurcation theory implausible. This model is ultimately derived from nikāya genealogies that were written at a much later time⁵ and that, more likely than not, have projected the sectarian antagonisms of their own period into the remote past. In the following, I suggest a more dynamic relational emergence theory. I assume that religious technologies and contents were not transmitted as fixed sets within well-defined sectarian boundaries within the first four or five centuries of Buddhist history. They rather circulated freely among the more and more widespread Buddhist communities along cross-related paths of short-distance diffusion and long-distance transmission (Neelis 2010). Such a network of confluent, communicating nodes will sooner or later generate “hubs” governing arrays of associated nodes—namely, clusters of monastic communities with close relationships (either through dispersion, local proximity, or intense travel connections), and they will start to condense and to enter a process of tradition building by thematizing the distinctness of their shared religious heritage from others. This process will gradually harden the fluidity of the movement and progressively transform it into a structured landscape of mutually distinguished virtual communities.

As an early step of this process, some geographical hubs seem to have started to self-identify under a toponym by the second or first century bce. This is, for example, the case for the term tambapaṇṇika “(those from) Tambapaṇṇi (= Sri Lanka),” an attribute India-visiting monks from Sri Lanka gave themselves in inscriptions from the first century bce.⁶ Another probable case are the Haimavatas, who seem to have been based somewhere in the Himalaya region originally and to have resettled or founded a colony in Sāñchī by the late second century bce (Willis 2001). I assume that these early toponyms were not (yet) nikāya names conveying the idea of ritual/liturgical exclusivity and institutional autonomy,⁷ but they may have connotated a certain degree of distinctness in the sense of a specific local color of Buddhism. A full-fledged nikāya identity, in contrast, requires an institutionalized comparative self-reflection, demarcating the respective tradition’s textual and habitual peculiarities (at minimum its vinaya code) systematically from others. A nikāya is, thus, more than a more or less self-reliant local tradition, even if some like the Tambapaṇṇikas, the Haimavatas, or the Rājagirikas may have started as such. The nikāya idea transcends the logic of vernacular tradition building by de-territorializing the identity of the community, turning it—at least potentially—into a mobile and geographically expendable “global player.” Most nikāyas seem to not have tied their distinctness to a specific geographical origin but to certain characteristics of their religious transmissions and approaches (e.g., Sarvāstivāda, Caityavāda, Sautrāntika, Bahuśrutīya) or to the genealogical affiliation to a certain founding figure (e.g., Kāśyapīya, Dharmaguptaka, Siddhārthaka, Dhammarucika) or to a blend of all this.⁸ As far as literary and epigraphical evidence allows for conclusions, the development of nikāya identities started not much before the first century ce, when we find the first unambiguous nikāya names mentioned in North Indian inscriptions.⁹

The nikāya concept, then, seems to be much younger than commonly believed and must be seen not as an outcome of early Buddhist diversification processes but as a product of a later paradigmatic shift of Buddhist self-reflection and interaction. While the Buddhist network had certainly developed diverse approaches to the teaching of the Buddha and varying transmission...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Technical notes
• Theravāda Civilizations Project
• Introduction
• Part I Ideas/Ideals
• Part II Practices/Persons
• Part III Texts/Teachings
• Part IV Images/Imaginations
• Index