The Buddhist Art of Living in Nepal

Ethical Practice and Religious Reform

Lauren Leve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317308911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Bouddhisme

Theravada Buddhism has experienced a powerful and far-reaching revival in modern Nepal, especially among the Newar Buddhist laity, many of whom are reorganizing their lives according to its precepts, practices and ideals. This book documents these far-reaching social and personal transformations and links them to political, economic and cultural shifts associated with late modernity, and especially neoliberal globalization.

Nepal has changed radically over the last century, particularly since the introduction of liberal democracy and an open-market economy in 1990. The rise of lay vipassana meditation has also dramatically impacted the Buddhist landscape. Drawing on recently revived understandings of ethics as embodied practices of self-formation, the author argues that the Theravada turn is best understood as an ethical movement that offers practitioners ways of engaging, and models for living in, a rapidly changing world. The book takes readers into the Buddhist reform from the perspectives of its diverse practitioners, detailing devotees' ritual and meditative practices, their often conflicted relations to Vajrayana Buddhism and Newar civil society, their struggles over identity in a formerly Hindu nation-state, and the political, cultural, institutional and moral reorientations that becoming a "pure Buddhist"—as Theravada devotees understand themselves—entails.

Based on more than 20 years of anthropological fieldwork, this book is an important contribution to scholarly debates over modern Buddhism, ethical practices, and the anthropology of religion. It is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Religion, Anthropology, Buddhism and Philosophy.

1
Introduction

Seeing things as they are

The change that results from Buddhist knowledge is similar to the process of making clarified butter (ghee). At the beginning, our minds are thick and dense, like butter. But when apply heat, the buttermilk and the froth separate, leaving only the pure ghee. Like this, when we apply Buddhism [to ourselves], the result is pure wisdom.

(A. Tuladhar, Kathmandu, 2001)

To be religious is not to live well. It is to take the question of living well seriously.

(William Cantwell-Smith, 1991)

A thing to develop your mind

On a clear autumn morning in October, 1990, I sat in the courtyard of a Theravada Buddhist monastery on the edge of a hill just outside Kathmandu, talking with a young, ochre-robed monk about Buddhism in Nepal. As we looked out across the Valley, over terraced green rice fields to the densely clustered rooftops of the city beyond, Bhikkhu Suganda¹ outlined a history of Buddha dharma in his native land—from Siddhartha Gautama’s birth at Lumbini and the early flourishing of the dhamma in the Kathmandu Valley to the laicization of the once-celibate monastic order and the putative corruption of the original teachings under the impact of Hindu rule. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the narrator, the story culminated in the twentieth-century revival of the orthodox Theravada tradition and the purification of Nepali Buddhist thought and practice which Theravada reformers like himself were striving to bring about.

As he described the events of the movement’s earliest years, he interrupted his narrative for a moment to reflect. In fact, he said, propagating Theravada dharma was much easier for his own generation than it had been in the past. When the first bhikshus (monks) and anagarikas (nuns) began to preach in Kathmandu, Nepali people had no knowledge—nor even any memory—of the true dhamma, he said. Indeed, the Buddhism practiced by most Buddhists in the Kathmandu Valley at that time was so corrupted by Hinduism that, in some cases, what the new Theravada practitioners knew to be fundamental Buddhist rules actually conflicted with local religious norms. Even now, more than fifty years later, he continued, many Newar Buddhists still didn’t realize that the rituals they practiced were not authentic Buddhism. They did as they had learned from their parents and grandparents and they assumed that they were doing right. But in truth, he informed me, their practices bore little relation to the universal truth that the Shakyamuni Buddha had discovered. Real Buddhism is not about making offerings to deities or priests—whether Buddhist or Hindu, he said. It is not the rote performance of lifecycle or calendrical rituals, nor the divinely sanctified reproduction of a caste-based cultural order, as his ancestors had believed and many of his neighbors still did. Rather, he asserted, it is something very different: a practical knowledge that leads from pain to happiness—“a philosophy to light your life”:

The Buddha’s original intention was to show people how to develop their wisdom. But due to practical, political circumstances, Buddhism adapted to society in Nepal and intermingled until it became part of the cultural tradition. The form of practice changed from Theravada to Mahayana and, especially, to Vajrayana, which depicts the dhamma only symbolically…. When older people do Vajrayana pujas, they are preserving the culture. But the young aren’t interested [in this]. Young people are educated and they are attracted to modern, scientific-thinking. They demand examples that they can see applied and prove in modern life. So the Buddhism they are familiar with from their parents seems useless to them.

In the past, the monk continued, religion and culture had been fundamentally intertwined. Most people were farmers, he said; literacy was low. And while uneducated people had great devotion, he said, they were unlikely to ask the monks to teach them the “real dharma,” which would lead to wisdom. Rather, they visited temples and holy sites to give dana and earn merit toward better rebirths. For their children and grandchildren, however, things were different. This generation came to viharas (Theravada Buddhist temples)² to listen to the Buddha’s teachings and hear them explained. They realized that dhamma was not a socially mandated set of ritual duties, but a profoundly transformative universal knowledge. At a time of broad cultural change and intense instability, Bhikkhu Suganda explained, the true Buddha Dhamma offered a guide to human life and the natural laws that govern it which brought timeless truth to bear on immediate human problems. “Religion,” he told me, “is not about preserving culture…. Religion is a thing that will develop your mind.” And by transforming individual practitioners from the inside out, he promised, the true Buddha Dhamma would rebuild society. This, he explained, was the reality behind the modern rise of Theravada Buddhism in Nepal.

The Theravada turn and global modernity

This is a book about Buddhism and ethical practice in the age of modernity. In particular, it is an ethnographic study of the Theravada Buddhist turn in Nepal and the far-reaching mutations of Newar Buddhists’ (and, increasingly, other ethnic Nepalis’) sensibilities and subjectivities that it has helped bring about and with which it is associated. Since the first Nepali Theravada monks began to preach their reformist agenda in the Kathmandu Valley in the early part of the twentieth century, Newar Buddhists have engaged in a powerful debate over truth, culture, and how to live in a changing world that has been focused around, and on, what Buddhism is and how to practice it. In this book, I document the powerful social and personal transformations associated with these contested conversations and practices, and link them to widespread political, economic, and cultural shifts that have taken place in Nepal over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including, most recently, neoliberal globalization.

As I will explain below, I approach the movement and the life practices of the people involved as a type of ethical practice that reveals much about the challenges and changes of contemporary life in a place that is famously imagined as peripheral and remote, but which is very much part of global modernity. Debates over dharma—over what teachings are true and how one should live given that reality—are certainly not new to Nepal or to Buddhism.³ Yet, the Theravada-inspired reform of Newar Buddhism has taken place under distinct conditions that have influenced it in specific and important ways. Scholars of modernity, and of “modern Buddhism”—that is, of the particular forms that Buddhism has taken in the context of, and in dialogue with, colonial and postcolonial modernity—have identified common themes in Buddhist thought and practice that are clearly visible in the case I describe. Yet, as illuminating as it can be to identify core features of (what gets called) modernity—Buddhist or otherwise––it is also important to recall that modernity has achieved its (already diverse) aims unevenly across space and time, and that modern forces have brought forth unexpected and highly contradictory outcomes, as events that have led scholars to reflect on our current “post-secular” moment demonstrate.

Joel Robbins has suggested that the moral domain may be a privileged space “where change comes to consciousness” at moments of cultural transition (2004: 14). And indeed, Nepalis have seen enormous changes in the past few decades—changes that, while uniquely Nepali in their on-the-ground forms, reflect political technologies and economic arrangements which became internationally dominant in the wake of the Cold War. And with this reformulation of public life has come heterogeneous new experiences of personal identity. Like so many others across the globe, modernist Theravada Buddhists in Nepal look to religious knowledge and discipline as a way of living well in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, this is what they mean when they insist that Buddhist knowledge must be “applied” and the reason they call it “the best dharma for today.” This, then, is not a book only about Buddhist reform in Nepal. The Theravada turn there offers a window onto ongoing reformations of religious practice and personhood that are also happening elsewhere, if not uniformly or in identical ways.

A little more background

How did I come to be at that temple on that day, with a notebook, a tape-recorder, and a prearranged interview? Less than three months earlier, I had arrived in Kathmandu with the name of a Theravada Buddhist nun and the approximate location of the vihara she had founded, hoping to investigate her work and its impact on the broader Buddhist community. I had studied anthropology in college and planned to begin graduate school the following year. In the meantime, however, I was interested in studying the Nepali language, trying my hand at ethnography, and learning more about Newar Buddhism and the Theravada reform.

I knew that Theravada Buddhism—or “the doctrine of the elders,” as the name connotes—is the dominant form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Thailand (where Bhikkhu Suganda was trained), Burma/Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. And while there is evidence of Theravada personages and institutions in early Nepal, its defining institution, a celibate sangha, had disappeared by the twelfth century. Since then, ethnic Newar Buddhists have evolved a unique form of Mahayana/Vajarayana Buddhism, preserved in the person and practices of a hereditary caste of married householder monks (known as Shakyas and Vajracaryas) and in the Sanskrit texts that made up that Canon. Newar Buddhism has been nurtured by active trade links with Tibet and embodied in the social structure in inherited patron–client relationships, in ritual relations between high-caste Buddhist families and Buddhist temple sites that tied priests to practitioners to property, and in numerous devotional activities, collective observances, and lifecycle rites.

To a budding anthropologist with a strong interest in Buddhism, the rebirth of a Theravada sangha in Nepal in the twentieth century seemed to pose a host of interesting questions. What had made this revival possible, and what made Theravada compelling to its new devotees? Had conventional Newar Buddhism changed as a result of Theravada’s re-establishment in the religious landscape? What did it mean that this was happening in a constitutionally Hindu kingdom at a time when Hinduism was being challenged, in the name of democracy, by a growing number of ethnic and religious minorities from across the civil spectrum? Could the Theravada revival be considered a kind of social movement, I wondered? Could it be considered a kind of resistance? The limited academic literature on the topic available in English at that time suggested intriguing connections to Newar ethnonationalist identity.⁴

At the start, then, I had little idea that my research would lead me to questions about ethics and globalization, about Buddhism as a form of knowledge, or the challenge of making sense of, and navigating, an increasingly rationalized, yet chaotic, social world. I knew from early on that I was dealing with a transnational movement that self-consciously aimed to reform Newar Buddhist practice and understanding, but I was far from prepared to understand everything that I saw and heard. Like the Newar lay Buddhists of whom Bhikkhu Suganda spoke, I too needed to break from culture and tradition. Albeit in a different—or perhaps not so different way—my mind also needed developing.

On fieldwork with changing people in changing times

To write this book, I have drawn upon over five years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and over two decades of engagement with Nepal. During this time, I have seen children born and watched them grow up into ways of life that their parents struggled to prepare them for and their grandparents could hardly have imagined. I have seen monks and nuns depart for advanced Buddhist education abroad and return home again; begin and end projects; ordain and disrobe. I have worried about my friends and the state of the country, celebrated public victories and private successes, and mourned as some have grown sick, aged, and died.

Significantly, all this has taken place at a time when the structures and norms of Nepali public life have themselves been undergoing dramatic changes. Since 1990, the country has legally recast itself from a Hindu kingdom to a secular republic. It has moved from repressing ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity to the formal recognition of minority cultures. This political liberalization has been echoed in the economic domain as well, transforming an import substitution-based economy—within which almost everything sold in Nepali markets was produced in India or China, and the single television station and radio broadcasting corporation were state-owned and run—to a globalized, market-led economy that has flooded shops and homes with goods, images, and ideals from all over the world.

Let me be more specific. In the spring of 1990, just months before I arrived in Nepal, a popular democratic movement rose up against the King and party-less system of governance. Their efforts led to the establishment of a multiparty electoral system and constitutional monarchy, and set in motion a process of democratic change that continues even to this day. The first years of democracy were extraordinarily volatile. No fewer than ten governments formed and dissolved in as many years as parties and individuals jockeyed to lead. The turbulence increased following the 1996 declaration of a Maoist People’s war, as the armed group’s promises of social justice (including women’s and minority rights, and ethnically sensitive political autonomy) proved compelling to people who felt ill served by the state. The resulting decade-long civil war pitted neighbor against neighbor, damaged or destroyed much of the rural development infrastructure, and, in a country of under thirty million people, left over 15,000 dead.⁵ Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people abandoned their rural villages for the relative safety of urban areas, transforming the character and landscape of both the capital city and the now-empty villages they left.

The 2001 massacre of the then-king, Birendra (purportedly by the suicidal Crown Prince), and a subsequent coup by Gyanendra, who succeeded his brother to the throne, united the Maoists and mainstream political parties against the Crown, opening the possibility of an end to the war. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement that was signed in 2006 committed the country to secularism, republicanism, and a federal structure that would empower historically marginalized ethnic communities, as well as elect a Constituent Assembly (CA) to draft a new constitution. Yet, despite CA elections in 2008 and, again, in 2013, political infighting has continued unabated. Indeed, the promised constitution was only delivered and promulgated in September 2015, following the April earthquake. Many of its terms have proven highly controversial, including provisions related to religious freedom, womens’ rights, and the ethnic composition of new federal states. As this book goes to press, protests and negotiations are continuing.

On the social and economic fronts, change has been equally dramatic if differently challenging. Until the late 1980s, Nepal followed the lead of India and other non-aligned countries in seeking to protect its domestic markets and implement progressive economic policies. The result was a tightly regulated, state-led, agrarian-dominated economy. Stiff tariffs on many consumer items limited citizens’ access to what the state considered to be luxury items, particularly goods produced outside of India and China. Major industries—including banking, health, education, media, and telecommunications—were government owned and tightly regulated. Prices for basic items like rice, sugar, and kerosene were set by the state.

In the wake of the 1990 democratic revolution, however, and under pressure from international development agencies, Nepal initiated a far-reaching set of policy reforms that reflected the reigning neoliberal ideology: its markets were opened and its industries privatized. Currency controls were lifted, encouraging the freer circulation of both people and capital. With the help of consumer loans and foreign remittances, the many people who moved to Kathmandu in the 1990s and 2000s have built houses and bought cars, paving over the paddy-fields and overwhelming the roads. The cost of land has increased many times over. Those who can afford it send their children to English medium schools and later to private colleges. New malls are now filled with a dizzying array of consumer goods, even as hundreds of TV and radio stations, the Internet, and diversified migratory patterns internationalize citizens’ expectations, aspirations, ideals, and trajectories. These changes inspire self-reflection, and feed old and new anxieties.

I will discuss this at greater length throughout the book. What is important to understand now is that all of these events shaped the opportunities, interests, and sensibilities of the people with whom I worked. And they did so in real time. Thus, the state of public life at any given moment also figured dynamically into the way I conducted my research, affecting the conversations I have had, the events I have observed, the questions I have asked (or not), and the friendships I have made—in short, the relationships from which the ethnographic knowledge presented here derives.

All this underscores the complexity of studying Buddhism in practice. The broad shift from religion-as-culture to religion-as-knowledge that Bhikkhu Suganda ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: seeing things as they are
• 2 “A garden of every kind of people”: Newar Buddhists in Hindu Nepal
• 3 Buddhist modernism and the revival of “pure Buddhism”
• 4 What makes a Theravada Buddhist?
• 5 Becoming “pure Buddhist” (Part 1): practices of personhood
• 6 Becoming “pure Buddhist” (Part 2): vipassana meditation and the Theravada care of the self
• 7 The best dharma for today: post-Protestant Buddhism in neoliberal Nepal
• 8 Conclusion: the Buddhist art of living, in Nepal and elsewhere
• Glossary
• Note on italicization
• Note on naming and identity
• References
• Index