Living Buddhism

Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community

Julia Cassaniti

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501700972
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

In Living Buddhism, Julia Cassaniti explores Buddhist ideas of impermanence, nonattachment, and intention as they are translated into everyday practice in contemporary Thailand. Although most lay people find these philosophical concepts difficult to grasp, Cassaniti shows that people do in fact make an effort to comprehend them and integrate them as guides for their everyday lives. In doing so, she makes a convincing case that complex philosophical concepts are not the sole property of religious specialists and that ordinary lay Buddhists find in them a means for dealing with life's difficulties. More broadly, the book speaks to the ways that culturally informed ideas are part of the psychological processes that we all use to make sense of the world around us.In an approachable first-person narrative style that combines interview and participant-observation material gathered over the course of two years in the community, Cassaniti shows how Buddhist ideas are understood, interrelated, and reinforced through secular and religious practices in everyday life. She compares the emotional experiences of Buddhist villagers with religious and cultural practices in a nearby Christian village. Living Buddhism highlights the importance of change, calmness (as captured in the Thai phrase jai yen, or a cool heart), and karma; Cassaniti's narrative untangles the Thai villagers' feelings and problems and the solutions they seek.

Part I

Emotion

1

Cool Hearts

Goy’s family spread through Mae Jaeng, from the family’s house behind a wat near the center of town, out to the market down the road to the main town intersection, and across the bridge over the Mae Jaeng River. The river meanders slowly through the valley, swamping the fields in the rainy season and lying low for people to build bamboo huts over to relax by in the dry season. It floats across the valley floor and continues on to the regional capital of Chiang Mai, following a long path through the mountains, eventually making its way to the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok and finally out to the Gulf of Thailand. The dust in Mae Jaeng doesn’t make it as far: it accumulates, turning the few paved roads into mud when the rain comes and rising again as thick dust in the heat. On the sides of the roads are shops and houses, most of them wooden but with a few concrete ones for the bank, the hospital, and a few new stores. Every five hundred meters or so are the serpent statues marking the entrance to a wat, the golden spires of the buildings reaching up farther than the houses and the palm trees around them and creating a sparkling glean to the landscape.

When I returned to Mae Jaeng for a year of extended fieldwork, Goy invited me to stay with her and her mother Mae Daeng at their house, and I happily moved in. Mae Daeng’s nine brothers and sisters all lived in Mae Jaeng, with extended relatives staying at the family outpost house in Chiang Mai or farther away, even to the United States where her niece Niw worked as a nurse in Baltimore, Maryland. When I first arrived, though, all I saw of this family network was a large house at the back of a larger compound on a side street at the edge of town, backed up to the post office and the neighborhood monastery of Wat Ko. Mae Daeng had a vegetable garden and an outdoor kitchen, and in the evenings a seemingly never-ending cycle of friends and family would gather to grill pork and vegetables and eat in front of the fire for a few hours, the same fire Goy’s father had died in front of the year before I had first come to Mae Jaeng.

Mae Daeng was smallish, round, and cheerful compared to her daughter’s tall, quiet demeanor. She talked nonstop in the Northern Thai dialect, kam muang, about whatever was on her mind. Mae Daeng and I got along well, though we didn’t always understand each other, and not just because of language difficulty. The first day I moved into the house, Mae Daeng showed me to my room and said, “When Goy’s friends come to visit from Bangkok they can stay in here with you too and share the bed with you.”

I was taken aback at the prospective loss of the little vestige of privacy I had thought I would have. I recalled the anthropologist Jean Briggs’s ethnographic account of living in a tent with an Inuit family for a year, and the struggles she had in trying to maintain her own space (Briggs 1970). I figured I had to take a stand early to avoid problems later: “No …” I told Mae Daeng, as definitively as I could while still being mindful of the fact that I was the recipient of someone else’s hospitality. Neither Mae Daeng nor Goy had asked for money for my stay, laughing and telling me I was their daughter and sister when I had offered and saying I could help out here and there by bringing home vegetables for dinner or doing little things around the house instead. I didn’t want to seem territorial in the face of their kindness, but I also didn’t want to share a room. “I need my own space,” I went on, “just for me. With a lock on the door when I’m out and no one else coming in.” She agreed, but was perplexed.

That night she stopped by the doorway to my room again in her nightgown. “Don’t forget to take a shower before you go to bed,” she told me.

“I’m OK,” I replied. “I took one this morning, and I haven’t moved around a lot, so I don’t need to take one tonight.”

Mae Daeng and I looked at each other for a moment, and she smiled uncertainly and said good night. No one in Thailand avoids taking showers at night. Months later, skipping an evening shower would come to seem almost unthinkable, but at the time the two of us gazed at each other curiously across the door of my room as if from two different worlds.

Goy and her mother had an easy camaraderie, with Goy making most of the decisions in the household. They came and went, a bit like roommates who cared about each other and happened to be related. Unlike the instant bond I forged with Goy, her mother and I took time to grow on each other. Soon, however, we were inseparable. On outings to the wat or to events around town she had me accompany her everywhere, almost like a pet. Goy was glad—I later realized she had invited me to stay at her house partly to keep Mae Daeng company while she was at work and her brother was away in the city—and her mother and I were glad too. Mae Daeng’s constant comments on the people and events around her filled up my field notes, and provided a much-needed sense of support and security in what was still a strange place to me.

In the evenings, Goy and Mae Daeng and I would, like most people, find our way home from the fields to sit for dinner in the front of the house. Throughout Mae Jaeng, families sit outside, grouped on mats eating dinner: spicy vegetable dishes and fish with sticky rice and sometimes lao, the local rice whiskey. By 9 p.m. it’s bedtime, and all the lights in town go out under the luminous expanse of the night sky. In the early morning, while it was still dark, Mae Daeng would head out to the canopied local market down the road by the river, where she and about fifty other vendors sell vegetables and other goods at their market stalls. Vendors line the bridge across the river as early as 4 a.m., while the moon is still out and the morning still quiet, spreading out their goods across their mats. People living in the villages up in the hills come down to town at this time, too, to buy goods to take back for the day. Customers from the hills were mostly ethnic Karen, but there were also members of the Hmong, Lahu, and Lisu communities; they crowded into the market area, with embroidered local dress and their own histories and languages. Everyone seemed to be up early; even Aung, a friend of Gaew and Sen who liked bright makeup and went to party at the discos in Chiang Mai when she could, woke up well before dawn every morning to slaughter the pigs she had raised in the shed behind her house, and bring them to the market to sell before the sun rose.

I on the other hand slept in almost every morning, waking up at what I later learned was the audaciously late hour of 7 a.m. “Especially for women,” Gaew’s brother Sen told me, laughing, “they should be awake really early.” Mae Daeng would stop by the house around eight to take a break from her work at the market and cook Goy and me some vegetarian nam prik, a spicy Northern Thai dish of vegetables and chilis from the family garden and sticky rice from the fields. Goy and I ate breakfast together if we were around at the same time, and talked about how her business was going at the stationery store, or about the traditional Northern Thai children’s music group she was putting together to promote Northern Thai culture, or her work as a DJ for Mae Jaeng’s local radio station, or my experience getting to know people around town. After breakfast Goy would go to her store or to garden at her plot of land. Sometimes she would head back to the shed behind her house and get on the airwaves to broadcast the radio program she ran, playing traditional Northern Thai music interrupted occasionally with news and comments on community events.¹ I would leave for the day, too, after breakfast, mostly at first just to wander around and talk to people and get to know the area. I spent a lot of time exploring Mae Jaeng, chatting with neighbors and looking around the village and fields at the edges of town, where groups of neighbors would take turns planting and harvesting one another’s land. At the fields of people I knew I sometimes joined in, my back starting to ache almost immediately from bending in the sun to plant little bunches of rice plants in the watery field, but more often I would find a hut in the field instead, where the farmers sit for breaks from the midday, to sit down in and read. In the huts at midday, everyone opened dishes of food that had been prepared at home, lounged and chatted for a bit about the land and their families. I would join them, or would sit alone at an empty hut and read books about Buddhism. I read about theories of karma and dependent origination, set out in abstract phrases that seemed to refer to another time and place.

Sometimes a farmer would stop by, surprised to see a foreigner on his or her land, and even more surprised that I spoke Thai. We would then proceed to talk about farming for a while before he or she would walk away with a machete in hand to continue with work in the fields. By the early afternoon I would have returned to town for lunch at the som tam (papaya salad) stand near home. This started as a solitary ritual, but as time went by I would take my meal to Gaew and her brother Sen’s shop house to share with them. Gaew and Sen lived a few hundred meters from the main intersection of town, in a two-story place with three storefront sections open to the street. The siblings Gaew, Sen, and Noi, along with Gaew’s husband Pan and their parents Mae San and Paw Nui, all lived upstairs from the shop. The shop sold everyday goods, from cosmetics to snacks, and served as a kind of gathering place for friends and neighbors around town. I spent most afternoons at the shop working on my Thai language skills with Gaew or Sen, teaching them English in exchange. At first I tried to make sense of the system involved in the operation of the store, but I quickly realized it was run informally: Gaew, Sen, or their mom or dad would work the counter, often for a few hours at a time, until one of them would stop by to say “I’ve got this now,” or “Go get something to eat,” and take over. Sometimes Noi would sit with them, though at eleven years old he wasn’t quite ready to manage the desk himself. I would sit on the bench next to Gaew or Sen, chatting with customers and doing as they did, putting things in bags and handing out change, unloading ice from the delivery truck or going to get drinking water from the natural well. The family atmosphere was casual, jocular, quiet, and relaxed. Gaew was chatty and friendly, while Sen was more reserved, with a charismatic smile that I came to look forward to seeing. He drank while we were out at night, but while I was getting to know him in those early days he seemed fine. In the evenings I returned home to have dinner and watch what the royal family was up to that day on television with Mae Daeng, who liked to watch the nationally broadcast royal family show when she wasn’t out at a monastery event around town.

Special occasions came up often around town, usually in association with a Buddhist event of some sort. Once a week, Mae Daeng went to her neighborhood’s wat, Wat Ko, around the corner from our house, for wan phra (in Northern Thai wan sil), the weekly “Buddha day,” where she and our neighbors made offerings and paid respects to the monks near the thousand-year-old stupa while they chatted and socialized. It seemed like festivals of some kind or another were always taking place: for the building of a new monastery, a merit-making fund-raising festival for some community project, an ordination, funeral, sporting event, or some other national or local holiday. Mae Daeng and her friends would sit listening to monks, practicing rituals like pouring popped rice into bowls of incense, tying white strings at Buddhist ceremonies, or proceeding through town in dancing, often drunken parades.

Figure 3 A wat festival parade; the author is being invited to participate as local women dance on their way to the monastery. Photo by Rosalyn Hansrisuk.

I wanted to know about Buddhism and its influence on Goy, Mae Daeng, Gaew, Sen, and the others I was getting to know. I wanted to know about emotion especially, because emotion seemed to be implicated in talk about anicca. But from learning about anicca I realized that it wouldn’t work to just expect people to articulate Buddhist ideas and ideals in abstraction, nor to assume if people didn’t articulate them that way that the ideas were not relevant for them. Real life is, of course, much more complex.

I was hesitant to push for a certain way of talking or seeing things in the people around me. Instead of jumping into interviews or talking about Buddhism explicitly I just generally hung around early on, participating in and observing local practices. I played ping-pong and bocce ball (“the queen’s favorite sport!”) with Mae Daeng’s young niece Wan, Wan’s mother P’Dao, and others at the side of the river at dusk, continuing to play until what seemed to be late into the night. I laughed with them when they stated their disbelief that a government agency called the Fulbright Foundation from my home country was actually paying me to be there and play games with them. I got to know people and people’s gossip; I got to know that Goy was considered unusual in her serious outlook on Buddhist teachings (“If Goy were a man,” I overheard Gaew whispering to her friend Aung one afternoon, as Goy’s voice on the radio announced another wat festival, “… she’d be a head monk!”). I got to know that Mae Daeng’s twin sister Mae U lived in a “bad part of town,” even though that part of town was only a few hundred meters down the road and seemed to me to be virtually the same as Mae Daeng’s neighborhood. I learned about more interpersonal gossip than I could keep up with in my journals, including neighbors’ romantic escapades (the man across the street from Gaew’s got his mistress pregnant and was now living with her and his wife!); I learned about relatives’ adventures, and the sordid details of acquaintances’ lives. I listened and explored as much as possible, scribbling in my notebook by day and typing up the scribbling into field notes at night. To learn more I started volunteering at the local branch of Thai Rak, an environmental NGO from Bangkok, and teaching English to novice monks at Wat Pah Ded, one of Mae Jaeng’s three monastery schools that the novice monks from the other wats in the valley would attend. For the most part, though, I worked at getting used to the pace and tone of life in the community.

I wanted drama, the kind that seemed “anthropological” somehow, with conflict, tension, striking rituals of magic or healing, rowdy festivals or fights. I wanted the Balinese cockfights of Geertz (1973a), the superstitions of Malinowski’s Trobriand Islanders (1922), or the headhunting and rage of Rosaldo’s depictions in the Philippines (1984). But nothing much seemed to happen. There were a lot of rituals and festivals, and I went to as many as I could and wrote about them all in my notebook, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of emotional encounters or outpourings of feelings. People didn’t seem to get angry, or sad, or full of joy, or excited, as far as I could tell. I didn’t encounter these or any of the other emotions that, as I had been taught in my psychology classes, were universal and cross-culturally basic to human experience. On television the news from Bangkok sometimes showed people riled up about the latest political scandal, but it was looked at by people around me literally as if from another country.² According to the Oxford English Dictionary, emotion is “any agitation or disturbance o...