Buddhism, Modernity, and the State in Asia

Forms of Engagement

P. Kitiarsa, J. Whalen-Bridge, P. Kitiarsa, J. Whalen-Bridge

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137326171
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Leading scholars working on Buddhism and politics in South and Southeast Asia add to current discussions regarding 'Engaged Buddhism' and the recent work on protests. The writers have mostly established themselves in their fields, offering a diverse approach and country-by-country coverage.

PART I

DEPENDENT ORIGINATIONS AND CHANGING DESTINATIONS

1

BUDDHISTS CONFRONT THE STATE

Charles F. Keyes*

Denis Grey, the Bangkok bureau chief for Associated Press, wrote in an article that appeared in the Seattle Times on March 30, 2008, under the headline of “Buddhist No Shrinking Violets,” that scenes of “Buddhist monks hurling rocks at Chinese in Tibet, or peacefully massing against Myanmar’s military . . . run counter to Buddhism’s philosophy of shunning politics and embracing even bitter enemies” (n.p.). Grey expressed a view that is widely held among non-Buddhists, a view that is, in fact, belied by the 2500-year history of the religion that Grey alludes to. Fundamental to the teaching of the Buddha is the recognition that although it should be the goal of his followers to seek ultimate transcendence of the world, following the path to Nirvana (Nibbāna) has to take place within the world. This has meant that Buddhists from the very beginning of the religion have had to engage rather than shun politics.

Even more significantly, Buddhists have always lived within states or kingdoms. There is no concept in Buddhism comparable to the Islamic ummah, or community of all believers, or to the Christian Catholic in its basic sense of a universal church. Buddhists have, however, lived and still live within very different types of states. In this chapter, I will examine how Buddhists have confronted modern states in which they constitute the majority of the population but in which the character of such states poses fundamental problems of legitimacy based on Buddhist understandings of power. Before examining such confrontations, it is first necessary to understand the evolution of Buddhist relationships to premodern states.

MONARCHY AND THE DHAMMIC STATE

Buddhism begins with the life of the Buddha. Most followers of Buddhism accept that Prince Siddhartha was born in 623/624 BCE and after achieving enlightenment in his early thirties died in 543/544 BCE, the later date being taken as the beginning of the Buddhist era. The consensus of Buddhist scholars today, however, is that he was born and died in the fourth century BCE (Bechert, 1991–1997; also see Cousins, 1996). Although the Buddha taught a way, the dhamma¹, that was to make it possible for human beings to gain transcendence of the suffering (dukkha) inherent in being in the world (lauikiya; sa

sāra), and to realize the “otherworld” (lokotarra) of Nibbāna, he also taught that while traversing the path humans must still remain in the world. Thus, the question of what stance the Buddha and his followers should take toward the world is a fundamental one to the religion.

As Gokhale, in by far the best analysis of early Buddhist ideas of the state based on a systematic study of the oldest Buddhist scriptures—notably, the Agañña sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya, has observed: “The Buddha and his disciples were subjects of the state in the areas [in which] they lived and worked and they could not ignore, much less defy, the power of the state with impunity” (Gokhale, 1966, p. 732). The Buddha’s teachings, as Gokhale demonstrates, contain a theory of the relationship between Buddhism and power. In this theory, a fundamental distinction is made between the dhammacakka, the “wheel of the law” as taught and exemplified by the sangha, and the ā

ācakka, the “wheel of command” as practiced by the rulers of a state. According to this theory, a state’s rulers are necessary to provide the order within which monks and laypeople alike could undertake to follow the Buddha’s teachings. Although the rulers of a state were not forbidden by these teachings from using violence to maintain order—“the horrors of war are duly recognized but no decisive or overt effort seems to be made to insist on outlawing war itself” (Gokhale, 1966, p. 734)—they were, nonetheless, expected to heed the ethical advice of the sangha, the exemplars of the dhamma.

The theory that it takes two “wheels”—that of the Buddha’s dhamma and that of the ruler’s ā

ā—for an order to exist in which Buddhism can thrive was most developed by King Aśoka, the great emperor who extended his authority over much of India in the third century BCE. Several Greco-Bactrian rulers, whose kingdom included northern Afghanistan, parts of central Asia, and Pakistan, followed Aśoka as the ruler of the first truly Buddhist polities. These kingdoms disappeared in the wake of the conquests by Muslim rulers. Buddhism became a rapidly declining minority religion. Contemporaneous with the expansion of Islam in central Asia, Buddhism also declined in India in part as a consequence of the rise of Hinduism. By the twelfth century, Buddhism had also been relegated to a religion followed by a very small minority in India.

In China in the first centuries of the Common Era, Buddhism found royal patrons and many monasteries were founded and the sangha expanded. While some Tang rulers strongly embraced Buddhism, others considered it antithetical to the homegrown traditions of Taoism and Confucianism. In 845, the Emperor Wuzong (r. 814–846) launched a full-scale attack on the Buddhist sangha that might well be seen as the forerunner of the Cultural Revolution. “The suppression was far-reaching: 40,000 shrines and temples—all but a select few—were closed, 260,000 monks and nuns were returned to lay life, and vast acreages of monastic lands were confiscated and sold and their slaves manumitted. The suppression was short-lived, but irreparable damage was done to Buddhist institutions. Buddhism had already begun to lose intellectual momentum, and this attack on it as a social institution marked the beginning of its decline in China.”² Although Buddhism remained a significant part of Chinese (and later Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese) religion, it has since the ninth century been unequivocally subordinated to the state and subsumed within a religious syncretism.

In Tibet, Buddhism also competed with a local religion, bon. Some of the early rulers of Tibet supported Buddhism, others did not. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, Tibetan popular religion was strongly Buddhist, but it would not be until the period of Mongol domination from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries that the foundations were laid for a distinctive Buddhist polity. In the seventeenth century, religion and politics were united under the fifth Dalai Lama. In the Vajrayana tradition as developed in Tibet, some Buddhist masters (lama) are believed to be the reincarnations of bodhisattvas who have foregone entry into Nirvana in order to use their compassion to help humans within the world. One such incarnation, the Dalai Lama, the master whose compassion is as wide as the ocean (dalai in Mongolian), was accorded special recognition by Mongol emperors. In the seventeenth century, the fifth Dalai Lama established a separate Buddhist polity in Tibet with himself as both spiritual exemplar and mundane ruler. As Harris (1999, p. 13) has observed: “Rule by incarnation has proved a useful means of stifling dissent since it is very difficult to challenge the authority of a high-ranking lama who is considered to be the embodiment of a celestial being.” The Tibetan model was not adopted by any other Buddhist society and it has proven to be deeply problematic in the modern period because of the insistence of the Chinese state that Tibet is subordinate to it.

The Aśokan model of a Buddhist polity was by far the most significant one in the premodern period as it was adopted by the Theravāda Buddhist societies of Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia in the period from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. Theravāda Buddhism has its origins in Sri Lanka well before the thirteenth century, but it was not until the period from thirteenth to sixteenth centuries that it became the fundamental basis for political orders in both Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. It was in this period that Buddhist monks led a “revolution” that transformed the religion into a popular religion. This was done in two fundamental ways: first, the sangha was established in villages as distinct from centers of power; second, the dhamma was represented in vernacular literatures and embodied in rituals.³

To understand fully the development of Theravāda Buddhist polities it would be necessary to trace the history of both the sangha in the societies in which this religion became the popular religion and the history of monarchy in these countries. I cannot undertake this larger task in this chapter. Instead, I wish to focus on the most distinctive characteristics of these two institutions.

Most Theravādin kings were like kings in other countries who have gained power because they are legitimate descendents of previous rulers. The legitimacy of Theravādin kings was not, however, based only on genealogy. Through the influence of theories of kingship first developed in India, Theravādin kings made claims to legitimacy on the basis of their role as cosmocrators and as dhammarājas. The first entailed the king being seen as a deity—in Southeast Asia identified with Rāma, the hero of the epic Rāmāyāna, who was an avatar of Vishnu—whose actions ensured that the world they ruled enjoyed order and prosperity. In this role, kings built stupas that were both reminders of the Buddha and, more importantly, microcosms of the cosmos. They also performed elaborate rituals, officiated at by Brahmins, which were articulated with agricultural cycles and human fertility. In the second role, kings were deemed to have inherited bārāmī, or great Buddhist charisma, from previous existences. In ensuring their legitimacy in Buddhist terms, they had, in the present life, to accept the moral guidance of monks and to serve as the chief patron for the sangha.⁴

The realm that a Buddhist king claimed authority over was very much not the whole of the Buddhist world. On the contrary, Buddhist kings competed for control over people with other Buddhist kings. Tambiah (1976, chapter 7; 1977) has characterized the premodern Theravādin as “galactic polities,” a term that he intended to reflect the Hindu-Buddhist notion of mandala, a spatial arrangement of a central polity surrounded by dependent principalities. Because of continual struggles during the premodern period between the major Buddhist polities, these galactic polities were “pulsating”—that is, they expanded and contracted depending on the ability of kings to mobilize armies to attack or defend control over the territories and the people they claimed. As a consequence, the premodern Theravāda Buddhist world was divided into numerous states and statelets.

In contrast to the principle of the transmission of authority through genealogical descent that was fundamental to kingship, transmission of authority in the sangha occurred through links that were established by ordination. In theory, any male who met the basic criteria of being “fully male,” of proper age, and not constrained by legal obligations to the state or family could be ordained into the sangha as a novice (before the age of 20) or as a bhikkhu (when 20 and older). While some other criteria were also added—especially in Sri Lanka—the fundamental characteristic of the sangha is that it is a meritocracy. Those who exercise authority in the sangha are senior monks (thera) who have been in the monkhood for at least ten years and have demonstrated that they embody the dhamma through strict adherence to the discipline (vinaya) and that they share their understanding of the dhamma by mastering the Pali literature and explicating this literature through vernacular sermons and teaching.

Given the contrastive characteristics of monarchy and sangha, it is hardly surprising that there were many points in the history of Buddhist polities where the two “wheels” did not work in tandem. There were a few cases—such as in Siam in the late eighteenth century—where monks or ex-monks attempted to lay claim to a throne on the basis of their presumed high Buddhist charisma. A few kings claimed to be bodhisattvas, but such claims were very rare and were, as in the cases of Alaungpaya (r. 1752–1760) of Burma and Taksin (r. 1768–1782) of Siam, made by men who were not of royal lineage and, thus, sought to bolster their legitimacy by making such a claim. In both cases these claims were strongly disputed by high-ranking members of the sangha. More commonly, when weak kings ruled, the sangha had great influence at the local levels. Despite the fundamental tension between monarchs and monks in the premodern period, the Aśokan model for Buddhist polities was not fundamentally challenged until the expansion of colonial power from the late eighteenth century on.

COLONIALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE ILLEGITIMATE STATE

Beginning in Sri Lanka and lower Burma in the early nineteenth century, and throughout the nineteenth century in the remainder of the region, Theravādin traditions began to be challenged by new p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Dependent Originations and Changing Destinations
• Part II The Political Role of Sacred Things
• Part III Monks, Nuns, and . . . Trees
• Notes on Contributors
• Index