EDITORIAL 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studies often continue to equate Theravada with that dogmatic unicorn early Buddhism, changing only the name in the outdated linear model that sees Buddhist history in terms of consecutive Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana phases.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

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 aws, 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 articiality 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 culturesfor example, the work of Ecole Francaise d me Orient (EFEO) on Cambodian literature surviving the Democratic Extre Kampuchea period, the Laos-German manuscript preservation project in Vientiane, and the Social Research Institute at Chiang Mai Universitylook 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 ~ Theravada 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 Theravada Buddhist social history as Gombrichs Theravada Buddhism: a social history from ancient Benares to modern Colombo or Chakravartis The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism. Melford Spiros 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)

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Here we see then, that in the case of so-called socio-karmawhere 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 functionscertain 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 dened canon of Theravada, and that true early Buddhism is essentially individualistic and asocial. Our minds naturally turn to the possible inuence 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 reected here (Weber 1958). And Weber is also shaping the agenda from another perspective, through his inuence on the way in which social anthropologists set the framework within which they study Theravada society, not only on the basis of Webers 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 inuence in both textual and sociological studies silences the signicance of the kammic social context, and deects 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 Choompolpaisals 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 inuence 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 Christianityin the context of the pervasive relationship between Catholicism and the state in the recent, tumultuous European history of the timeto 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 identied. The struggle to shake off the shackles of these two authoritiesa colonially preselected canon and a western-derived social theory that involves assessing religion in terms of macropolitics and macroeconomicsconfronts 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 governmentalbe they colonial, occupying, or nationaland non-governmental organisations is informed by these same preoccupations.

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 nd 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 Crosbys 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 selsh 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 ofcially 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 signicance given Cambodian belief in the relationship between a failure to uphold Buddhist morality and a loss of power, with the subsequent calamity and insecurity exemplied 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 Marstons 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 Mahanikaya) and the Thai (through the then newly ~ established Dhammayutikanikaya) 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

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traditional forms of Cambodian Buddhism, based around the teacher pupil ~ lineages of empowering meditation practices, kammat thana, 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, whatthat we cannot currently imaginewill we learn? If we do not do Weber, what will we see? NOTE
~ 1. Two new important works have appeared on these boran kammat thana 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 Dhammakaya temples.

REFERENCES
CROSBY, KATE. 2000. Tantric Theravada: A bibliographic essay on the writings of Francois
~ Bizot and other literature on the Yogavacara 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 Matres de kammat thana, Etudes et __ sentation de rituels de me ditation dans la tradition du bouddhisme khmer. pre Ph.D. diss., Institut National des Langes et Civilisations Orientales. ~ HALLISEY, CHARLES. 1995. Roads taken and not taken in the study of Theravada 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 Theravada ~ Buddhist history. In Constituting communities: Theravada Buddhism and the religious cultures of South and Southeast Asia, edited by John Clifford Hold,

KATE CROSBY Jacob N. Kinnard, and Jonathan S. Walters, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 9 39. WEBER, MAX. 1958. The religion of India: The sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Edited and Translated by H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, (Originally published 1923.)

Kate Crosby, Department of the Study of Religions, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London, WC1H OXG, UK. E-mail: Kc21@soas.ac.uk