Buddhism in the Modern World

David L. McMahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415780155
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136493485
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Buddhism in the Modern World explores the challenges faced by Buddhism today, the distinctive forms that it has taken and the individuals and movements that have shaped it. Part One discusses the modern history of Buddhism in different geographical regions, from Southeast Asia to North America. Part Two examines key themes including globalization, gender issues, and the ways in which Buddhism has confronted modernity, science, popular culture and national politics. Each chapter is written by a distinguished scholar in the field and includes photographs, summaries, discussion points and suggestions for further reading. The book provides a lively and up-to-date overview that is indispensable for both students and scholars of Buddhism.

Part one

Buddhism in
its Geographical
Contexts

1

Modern
Buddhist
Conjunctures in
Southeast Asia

Juliane Schober

Introduction

The emergence of Buddhist modernity in colonial contexts

Genealogies of resistance: the Saffron Revolution and the discourse on political monks

Genealogies of alliance: commodification of Buddhism in global contexts

Introduction

Contemporary forms of Buddhist modernity in Southeast Asia are inflected in ways that are specific to the historical and cultural contexts from which they emerged, preempting any attempt to describe modern Buddhist practices in this region in general and comprehensive ways.¹ This is due to the cultural diversity within the region and the different ways in which Buddhist traditions have been appropriated and mediated by local cultures and vernacular languages. It is also the result of the fragmented social and intellectual condition of modernity which, as Theodore Adorno (2005: 218) reminds us, ‘is a qualitative, not a chronological category.’ Thus, this essay can only provide a partial commentary on selective attitudes, habits, and practices as they are articulated in modern Buddhist reforms, institutions, roles and in the interactions of modern Buddhists with economic, social, and political patterns of circulation.

Southeast Asia is a region known for its religious and cultural diversity. It is home to Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist traditions that developed over the course of centuries. Buddhist monks, texts and practices migrated to Southeast Asia from India, Sri Lanka, central Asia and China by land and sea routes. Buddhist civilizations began to flourish there as early as the second century CE, as indicated in the archeological record of a Mahāyāna center near present-day Hanoi, Vietnam. The earliest inscriptions that indicate the presence of a Pāli Buddhist tradition in Southeast Asia date to the fifth to seventh centuries CE in the kingdom of Śrīkşetra near Prome in lower Burma, and to the sixth to eighth centuries in the ancient kingdom of Dvāravatī located in the lower Chao Phraya River basin in Thailand (Skilling 1997: 94). Buddhist practices profoundly shaped the history, cultures and institutions in those regions of mainland Southeast Asia that today make up the countries of Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In contemporary Vietnam, most people practice some form of Mahāyāna Buddhism, while Theravāda Buddhism is the dominant religion of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

Historians point to multiple locations from which a Theravāda tradition emerged in Southeast Asia. Over the course of more than a millennium, the Pāli Imaginaire (Collins 1998) shaped many Buddhist civilizations in the region, informed monastic lineages, and inspired the construction of grand monuments. Integrated into a regional network of trade routes, traditional courts functioned as civilizational centers that cultivated an intellectual elite of monks (saṅgha) engaged in the production, proliferation and transmission of Buddhist texts. The patronage of the Buddhist court over the saṅgha supported the production of knowledge repertoires in the Pāli Imaginaire. While the textual tradition of Theravāda Buddhism proclaims that its sacred texts contain only the pristine teachings of the Buddha, studies in history and anthropology have shown that this religion encompasses notable diversity in the disciplined practices of monastic lineages and their lay supporters as well as in texts transmitted in Pāli and in vernacular languages (Collins 1990). This diversity is amplified by the presence of non-Theravādin traditions in the region. François Bizot (1992) and more recently Kate Crosby (2000, 2009) have underscored the pervasive presence of Tantric Buddhist texts in the region, many of which were composed in Pāli. Furthermore, we know that Sanskrit Buddhist texts had reached the Mon and Bagan kingdoms by the middle of the first millennium.

Buddhist courts acted as pivotal nodes in an extensive network of ritual exchange and thus could exert some hegemonic influence on the formation of Theravāda insitutions and disciplined practices. Emulating a ritual model of Buddhist kingship attributed to the Mauryan emperor Aśoka (304–232 BCE), Buddhist kings in southeast Asia extended their ritual and material patronage to selected monastic lineages. This system of ritual exchange and reciprocal legitimation shaped preferential relations between the court and some monastic insitutions. For lay people, this economy of merit determined one's social rank and proximity to the Buddhist court, while validating the religious achievements of monks and their proximity to transcendence (nibbāna). The Buddhist court perpetuated this ritual economy of merit through donations to the saṅgha and through the construction of large-scale religious monuments such as those in Bagan, Dvāravatī, and Ayuttiya. These traditional kingdoms functioned as regional centers or, in the words of the eminent anthropologist of Buddhism, Stanley J. Tambiah, as galactic polities that rose to and eventually faded from power due to the expansion of competing kingdoms (Tambiah 1975). Traditional mainland Southeast Asia was thus a region with multiple civilizational centers located in fertile river valleys and sustained by wet rice agriculture. Neighboring tribal groups generally were vassals who maintained fluctuating allegiances with these Buddhist courts in order to gain access to their power and prestige and emulate their ritual practices (Lieberman 2003). Thus, long before its encounter with modernity, local Buddhist forms in mainland Southeast Asia comprised heterogeneous institutions and practices that developed through multiple lineages of monastic transmission of the dhamma across Asia.

The emergence of Buddhist modernity in colonial contexts

For most people in Southeast Asia, contact with modern practices, institutions, and worldviews developed in the course of European colonization. Portuguese, Dutch, French, British and Japanese colonial regimes in the region initiated enduring cultural changes that eventually contributed to a crisis of religious authority and profoundly re-shaped modern Buddhist practices and institutions. Portuguese explorers were the earliest Europeans to settle in port cities along the coastlines of Southeast Asia in the sixteenth century. In response to the encroaching presence of European powers along the coast regions of the Andaman Sea, the Burmese reoriented their polity toward inland trade and relocated their capital upcountry to Ava in 1635. Two centuries later, the British colonized Myanmar in the course of three Anglo-Burmese wars between 1824 and 1886 and retained control until the country gained independence in 1948. France, the other European power on the southeast Asian mainland, gradually colonized Cambodia (Edwards 2007) after 1863 and, over the next three decades, absorbed all of French Indochina (roughly encompassing Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). While Thailand was not under direct colonial rule, it was forced to make some territorial concessions to Britain and France under Chulalongkorn (r. 1868–1910). Historians (Winichakul 1994, Loos 2006) conclude that modern Thai religion, culture, and history were deeply affected by the effects of colonization in the region that resulted in sweeping economic, political, and social changes.

Colonial rule in Southeast Asia reshaped Buddhist communities and practices and precipitated a gradual erosion of traditional values and the fragmentation of traditional institutions. The British conquest of the Konbaun court marked the collapse of traditional Buddhist kingship and the decline of cultural values and lifeways in Upper Burma. The colonizers transformed Mandalay Palace into Fort Dufferin, exiled King Thibaw (1878–86), and moved the polity's cosmic center, the Lion Throne, from Mandalay to Rangoon and eventually to Calcutta (Mendelson 1975). While the saṅgha was the only traditional institution to survive Burma's colonial transformations, its organization and cultural relevance were greatly diminished. The collapse of traditional institutions hastened the restructuring of traditional society through colonial forms of knowledge and classification (Cohn 1996). The gradual decline of monastic institutions precipitated a Buddhist crisis of authority (Keyes et al. 1994) in Southeast Asia.

The French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour (1993: 10, 11) proposes that the work of modernity proceeds through translation and purification. While translation allows for the creation of hybrid cultural forms, purification divides humans and things into separate ontological zones in order to define modern human agency. In the course of Buddhist reforms during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the work of purification constituted an internal response to a growing colonial presence in Southeast Asia. Modernizing Buddhist reforms were initiated in the Buddhist polities of Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia by Buddhist kings (dhammarāja) who governed in accordance with the ten rules of good governance (desa rāja) and the Universal Buddhist Law (dhamma). While these reforms affected many areas of life within the Buddhist polity, they were conducted within a Buddhist worldview and ideology, and Buddhist practices and institutions became eventually themselves the object of rationalizing and centralizing reforms.

The reforms centralized the administration of the saṅgha through a bureaucratic hierarchy and sought to standardize monastic education, texts, and disciplined behavior. They demythologized traditional cosmological forms of Buddhist practice, but continued to embrace the ritual patterns of exchange based on an economy of merit. They laid the foundation for those forms of Buddhist practice that scholars characterized as ‘state Buddhism’ (Swearer 2009), those forms of Buddhist practice sanctioned by the state and the institutions it supports.

In contrast to its neighbors to the east and west, modernizing reforms during the reign of Thai King Rama I (r. 1782–1809) were instituted much earlier than similar reforms elsewhere in the region. These reforms continued under Rama IV (Mongkut, r. 1851–68) and Rama V (Chulalongkorn, r. 1868–1910) and centralized the administration of the polity and of the Buddhist saṅgha. After ascending the throne, King Mongkut favored the reformist and discipline-oriented Thammayut lineage he had founded during his years as an ordained monk. Mongkut's support closely allied this lineage with the court, and Thammayut monks were instrumental in implementing his reforms. By the time the Burmese King Mindon (r. 1853–78) convened the Fifth Buddhist Council (1868–71) to revitalize Buddhism and shore up its institutions, British colonization of Lower Burma had already been under way for more than half a century. Several reformist vinaya-oriented lineages emerged during this time. In particular, Shwegyin monks distinguished themselves through their emphasis on disciplined practice and they continue to be viewed as an elite monastic group in contemporary Burma. In Cambodia, initial attempts to reform the saṅgha commenced under King Ang Duong (r. 1841–4 and 1845–60), who had been installed by the Thai (Hansen 2007, Harris 2005). These efforts, which continued during the French administration of ‘Cambodge,’ sought to purify texts, ethical conduct and teachings (sāsana) (Edwards 2007). The Khmer response to colonial modernity exemplified a general desire among Buddhist monks and lay people to reinterpret Buddhist teachings and rules for ethical practice in light of a rapidly changing experience.

The emphasis on disciplined monastic behavior as a pure source of merit for lay people was a pressing concern of the Buddhist reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the process, the Thai reformist Thammayut monks distinguished themselves from the monastic majority of Mahānikāy whose practice was generally considered more lax. Similar distinctions formed in Burma between the reformist Shwegyin and the majority of Thudhamma monks, and in Cambodia, between reformist Dhammakāy and Mahānikāy monks. While they reconstituted the purity of Buddhist practice, free from the corruptions of the modern age, they also reaffirmed a ritual separation between ordained monks and their lay supporters, whose primary religious activity was still defined in terms of making merit through donations.

Concurrent with these reform efforts focused on monastic discipline, a new awareness of belonging to the larger Theravāda tradition emerged in response to colonial interventions and against the background of modernizing reforms through which monastic lineages reinterpreted disciplined practices, texts, and teachings. In the Burmese discourse on religion, a rhetorical shift occurred in the understanding of religion as thathāna, the Buddhist dispensation, to Theravāda, the Teachings of the Elders (Kirichenko 2009). This modern transformation of Buddhist self-awareness is also reflected in Todd Perreira's (2011) observation that the term ‘Theravāda’ first appeared in the western literature in 1836. The development of a modern, transregional identity of Theravāda Buddhism as focused on the practice of monastic discipline is also accompanied by the fragmentation of monastic lineages and a decline of monastic authority that accompanied the formation of Buddhist identity in the face of colonial modernity.

During the nineteenth century, European scholars also reconfigured their conception of the Orient as the ‘mystic East’ (King 1999). They invented Buddhism as a world religion, as Philip Almond (1988) and Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) argue, by collecting, classifying, translating, and archiving Buddhist texts. A significant part of this project was undertaken by the German philologist Max Müller (1823–1900), who founded Indology as an academic discipline in the West, and by Thomas W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922) who taught Pāli at the University of London and founded the Pāli Text Society in 1881. Rhys Davids was especially keen to reconstruct the historical biography of the Buddha and, assisted by his conversations with Theravādin monks in Sri Lanka, sought to recover the pristine teachings of the Buddha from the accretions acquired in the course of history. Colonial scholars in Southeast Asia, including Paul Bigandet (1813–94), Vicar Apostolic of Ava and Pegu, Burma, and Adhémard Leclère (1853–1917), an administrator in the French Protectorate of Cambodia, who worked ‘to retrieve and reorganize’ the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Buddhism in the Modern World
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction - David L. McMahan
• Part one: Buddhism in its Geographical Contexts
• Part two: Buddhism and the Challenges of Modernity
• Index