CHANGING THE LANDSCAPE of theravada studies.pdf

E DITORIAL

CHANGING THE LANDSCAPE

OF THERAVADA STUDIES

Kate Crosby

A rift divides the academic study of Theravada, marking two landscapes not

obviously linked. These landscapes are at root surprisingly similar, yet in the context

of competitive academia are often in a state of diplomatic tension. On the one side

stretch the principalities of philology and textual criticism, which sprang up from

early colonial attempts to extract from quasi-Biblical textual authorities the essence

of the religious traditions beating at the heart of the new and unfamiliar worlds that

European powers strove to master. On the other side of the rift range social

anthropological studies. These too have their origins in the colonial adventure,

plotting the framework of interconnected arteries and the fundamental power

dynamics that embodied the societies European powers sought to manipulate.

More recently scholarship has developed ways of thinking that help to

undermine such power dynamics: postcolonial, gender and subaltern studies all

guide us not only to question the dynamics of the relationship between

interpreter and interpreted in any representation, but to ask whose narratives we

can hear and to whose we listen. Moreover, the power relations that set these

patterns have long since shifted. Suspicion has increasingly been replaced with

appreciation, even emulation. Yet even with changing attitudes and developing

safeguards, the shared ancestral genes that shaped these two main areas of

Theravada studies are still manifest.

Textual scholarship has continued its plan to decoct the essence of a canon

that it has itself selected, often with little reference to social or experiential

context. Textual studies often continue to equate Theravada with that dogmatic

unicorn ‘early Buddhism’, changing only the name in the outdated linear model

that sees Buddhist history in terms of consecutive Hinayana, Mahayana and

Vajrayana ‘phases’. The textual, religious, geographic and human developments

and diversity that characterise the past two millennia of Theravada remain largely

ignored.

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 9, No. 1, May 2008

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/08/010001-6

q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940802361607

2 KATE CROSBY

Social anthropological studies, on the other hand, have continued to focus on

socio-political and socio-economic power structures, taking the nation-state as

their true object of study. The parameters of this study are set by the concerns of

western societal analysis rather than the priorities and authorities of the traditions

and people under scrutiny. Pioneering attempts to assess modern Theravada in

relation to its own authorities combined these ﬂaws, dismissing the validity of

priorities, beliefs and practices that fail to match their outsiders’ decocted essence

of the very partial canon that these same outsiders had selected as authoritative,

and ignoring the vast wealth of texts, both written and otherwise, transmitted

within different forms of Theravada.

In recognition of these problems with the study of Theravada, some

anthropological and textual scholars have begun to develop greater sensitivity to

the priorities and diversity of Theravada. Recognising the problematic artiﬁciality

of textual studies, summarised by Charles Hallisey (1995) just over a decade ago,

scholars have worked on representing the social life of texts, the local functional

canonicities in a context of regional and chronological diversity. Recent projects to

survey and catalogue textual cultures—for example, the work of ´ cole Fran¸ aise d’

Extrˆ me Orient (EFEO) on Cambodian literature surviving the Democratic

Kampuchea period, the Laos-German manuscript preservation project in

Vientiane, and the Social Research Institute at Chiang Mai University—look set

to transform further the horizons of Theravada textual scholarship.

Yet still this common ancestry between the two main branches of

Theravada studies can leave some astonishing gaps in the representation

of Theravada, gaps so yawning that we may look straight into them without

seeing that they are there. Jonathan Walters has pointed out one such gap. Noting

repeated discussion of kamma (Sanskrit/English karma) by Theravada Buddhists,

particularly discussion of how kamma affects and binds individuals within their

society, Walters observed a stark contrast between this and western scholarly

attitudes to kamma. He demonstrates that even when textual scholars are

confronted by repeated evidence of the importance of social kamma in texts, they

still dismiss it. Walters notes that anthropological studies of kamma do the same:

By the same token, karma plays almost no role in such seminal collections on

Therav ada Buddhist society as the edited volumes on Religion and Legitimation

of Power in Sri Lanka, Religion and Legitimation of Power in Burma, Thailand and

Laos, and The Two Wheels of Dhamma, nor in such narratives of Therav ada

Buddhist social history as Gombrich’s Theravada Buddhism: a social history from

ancient Benares to modern Colombo or Chakravarti’s The Social Dimensions of

Early Buddhism. Melford Spiro’s Buddhism in Society, which makes its explicit

project to determine the relationship between ‘kammatic Buddhism’ and

society, fails to recognize any but mundane socio-karma and therefore can

portray karma as at best an obstacle to economic development and public

charity. (Walters 2003, 16)

EDITORIAL 3

Here we see then, that in the case of so-called socio-karma—where the interests

of Theravada textualists, sociologists and Buddhists would appear to coincide in

seeking to analyse the core of Theravada Buddhists’ beliefs about how society

functions—certain presuppositions are forcing scholarship to deny Theravada its

proper representation. The presuppositions at play here are the notion that true

Theravada is the same as early Buddhism, that this early Buddhism has been

accurately characterised from the western deﬁned canon of Theravada, and that

true early Buddhism is essentially individualistic and asocial. Our minds naturally

turn to the possible inﬂuence of Max Weber, the nineteenth-century German

scholar attributed with the invention of sociology, whose views on the

individualistic and life-denying nature of Buddhism seem to be reﬂected

here (Weber 1958). And Weber is also shaping the agenda from another

perspective, through his inﬂuence on the way in which social anthropologists

set the framework within which they study Theravada society, not only on the

basis of Weber’s understanding of Asian Buddhism (which in a perverse irony

they tend at least partially to reject) but also on the basis of his understanding

of European Calvinism. Weberian inﬂuence in both textual and sociological

studies silences the signiﬁcance of the kammic social context, and deﬂects

scholars from themes central to practitioners and communities towards the

extremes of assumed individualism, on the one hand, and macro-politics, on

the other.

It was the discord between published scholarship on, and his personal

experience of, Sri Lankan Buddhism that led Walters to point out the central but

denied importance of socio-karma. Similarly it was Phibul Choompolpaisal’s

experience of not recognising the representations of his own Thai religious

background in Buddhist Studies in the West that led him to trace the pervasive

inﬂuence of Weberian ideas throughout social anthropological studies of

Theravada. Once pointed out it seems questionable, to say the least, that we have

been content to allow a nineteenth-century Prussian analysis of a late form of one

branch of European Protestant Christianity—in the context of the pervasive

relationship between Catholicism and the state in the recent, tumultuous

European history of the time—to shape representations of Theravada society

today. As Choompolpaisal points out in his article in the present issue, the result

is that social anthropological depictions of very different Theravada cultures all

look the same. Armed with the increased awareness that Choompolpaisal gives us,

we can surely look forward to other soon obvious, but currently invisible, gaps in

our representation of Theravada being identiﬁed.

The struggle to shake off the shackles of these two authorities—a colonially

preselected canon and a western-derived social theory that involves assessing

religion in terms of macropolitics and macroeconomics—confronts not just

academics seeking to represent Buddhist societies, but also Buddhists living in

those societies as well. The ongoing relationship between hegemonic social

theory and both governmental—be they colonial, occupying, or national—and

non-governmental organisations is informed by these same preoccupations.

4 KATE CROSBY

This dual impact on the lives and representation of Buddhists can be seen in the

other contributions to the present issue.

All four articles examine what it is that individuals and local Buddhist

communities seek from their kammic relationships with the temples that serve

them. In his study of the emotional, aspirational and aesthetic motives and

responses involved in making offerings to monks in modern Sri Lanka, Jeffrey

Samuels replaces outmoded scholarly approaches to merit-making, which sought

to contrast a mechanistic attitude on the part of donors with the supposed early

ideal apparently represented in the canon. By taking the experience of practitioners

as his starting point, Samuels then shows that we can ﬁnd corroborating support for

such views in the very same canon. An ongoing model of Buddhism dating back to

Weber and other scholars of his day had previously misdirected our textual

selection. Kate Crosby’s article also confronts preselected canonicity and

assumptions of a mechanistic approach to kamma. The role of temples at the

forefront in enabling communities to recover from trauma is in direct contradiction

of the continuing perception of Theravada monasticism as an essentially

individually oriented, other-worldly ‘selﬁsh’ concern, a model that pervades

Weberian-based studies.

Alexandra Kent and John Marston both examine developments in

Cambodian Buddhism following the trauma of the Democratic Kampuchea

period, and in particular since the freeing up of explicit state control since the

reforms of 1989 and the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1991. In spite

of religious institutions being ofﬁcially released from the assumption that their

function was to support the ruling party, Kent shows how the introduction of

multiparty democracy has led to the increased weight of macropolitical

processes on temples and individuals, as the ruling elite seek to control the

newly established rights of individuals to vote over who holds high-level

power. This interference in the traditional relationship between a community

and its temple has serious implications for the free choice of Cambodians to

pursue security through Buddhism. This is of particular signiﬁcance given

Cambodian belief in the relationship between a failure to uphold Buddhist

morality and a loss of power, with the subsequent calamity and insecurity

exempliﬁed not only by the Democratic Kampuchea period, but also by the

current fragility of Cambodian society. Cambodia perhaps more than anywhere

else illustrates the multivalent problems of an imposition of social theory on

both representation and practice of Buddhism, as shown in John Marston’s

assessment of the problems that Cambodian society presents for classical

theories of civil society. This is particularly pertinent given the successive

marshalling of religion by a centralised state from the Thai and French colonial

struggles for dominance of Cambodia onwards. Both the French (through the

modernising wing of the Mah anik aya) and the Thai (through the then newly

established Dhammayutikanik aya) patronised a reform Buddhism based on a

notion of a pristine and universally uniform Theravada tradition derived from

the Pali canon itself read through a secularising lens. In that context, the

EDITORIAL 5

traditional forms of Cambodian Buddhism, based around the teacher – pupil

lineages of empowering meditation practices, kammatthana, and the personal

authority of monks thus empowered, were seen as boran (‘ancient’/’traditional’)

in contrast to modern. 1 Marston examines the ways in which, following the

disruption of the Democratic Kampuchea and socialist periods, people

understand boran more broadly, and not to the exclusion of modernity, in

their search for a return to the authenticity of the past in their quest to

re-establish community.

All four articles see that the implications of the doctrine of kamma and

understandings of what it means to have merit are central to Buddhist social

dynamics. To accept this insight has broad implications. Kamma and how it ties an

individual to their context is currently largely ignored not only by scholars of

Theravada, but by non-governmental organisations and in therapeutic applications

even where they seek otherwise to incorporate Theravada doctrine. If we have the

courage to test new parameters, what—that we cannot currently imagine—will we

learn? If we do not ‘do’ Weber, what will we see?

NOTE

1. Two new important works have appeared on these boran kammatthana practices

since the summary of related academic studies presented in Kate Crosby (2000).

The most extensive study of these practices is de Bernon (2000). Catherine Newell

(2008) examines the Thai temples that have preserved these practices since

before their adaptation by the modern Dhammak ¯ ya temples.

REFERENCES

CROSBY, KATE . 2000. Tantric Theravada: A bibliographic essay on the writings of Fran ¸ ois

Bizot and other literature on the Yog avacara tradition. Contemporary Buddhism

1(2): 141 – 98.

CROSBY, KATE . 2005. What does not get translated in Buddhism and the impact on

teaching. In Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable?, edited by Lynne Long.

Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 41 – 53.

DE BERNON, OLIVIER . 2000. Le Manuel des Maˆtres de kammatthana, ´ tudes et

pr ´ sentation de rituels de m ´ ditation dans la tradition du bouddhisme khmer.

Ph.D. diss., Institut National des Langes et Civilisations Orientales.

HALLISEY, CHARLES . 1995. Roads taken and not taken in the study of Therav ada

Buddhism. In Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism,

edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 31 – 61.

NEWELL, CATHERINE . 2008. Monks, meditation and missing links: Continuity and authority

in the Thai Sangha. Ph.D. diss., SOAS.

WALTERS, JONATHAN S. 2003. Communal Karma and Karmic community in Therav ada

Buddhist history. In Constituting communities: Therav ada Buddhism and the

religious cultures of South and Southeast Asia, edited by John Clifford Hold,

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