The Legacy of F. K. Lehman (F. K. L.

U Chit Hlaing) for the

Study of Religion and the Secular in Burma

Juliane Schober

Journal of Burma Studies, Volume 15, Number 1, June 2011, pp. 43-58 (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jbs.2011.0006

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/439136

[ Access provided at 24 Oct 2021 05:17 GMT from University of Yangon ]

The Journal of Burma Studies Vol. 15 No. 1 (2011), pp. 43–58 © 2011 Center for Burma Studies
Northern Illinois University
The Legacy of F. K. Lehman 43

The Legacy of F. K. Lehman

(F. K. L. U Chit Hlaing) for
the Study of Religion and the
Secular in Burma
Juliane Schober

Professor Lehman has written prolifically on Theravada

Buddhist civilizations, especially in Burma, and their
intersections with tribal societies located on the peripheries
of lowland kingdoms in Southeast Asia. He examines in his
essays the cultural intersections of religious and political
power among lowland and upland peoples from diverse
perspectives, enriching and nuancing our knowledge of
the processes through which the many variants of Hindu
and Buddhist statecraft in Southeast Asia were localized.
His work on religion, cosmology, and social rank is trans-
disciplinary in scope and combines theoretical insight,
linguistic facility, and rigorous ethnography with historical
detail. It also reveals an intellectual genealogy going back
to his own teacher, Robert von Heine-Geldern, who was a
founding figure in Southeast Asian ethnology and whose
classic essay on “Conceptions of State and Kingship in
Southeast Asia” defined the early parameters of a cultural
history of the region and its civilizations.
By choosing to focus my comments on Professor
Lehman’s contributions to the anthropology of religion
in Southeast Asia, I anticipated that my choices would
necessarily leave aside his contributions to the study of
ethnicity, history, kinship, linguistics, and cognitive theory. In

43
44 Juliane Schober

mapping out Professor Lehman’s arguments about Buddhist

cosmology, kingship, the institution of the monkhood
(sangha), doctrine, practice and belief, ritual, millennialism,
and spirit veneration, it became evident that he does not
restrict himself to one or two methodologies, but draws
instead on all bodies of knowledge at his disposal to make
his point: etymologies, texts, theorems, ethnographies, and
histories. In the discussion that follows, I trace Professor
Lehman’s arguments on the study of Theravada Buddhism
in Burma and conclude by considering the implications of
his work for a postcolonial study of religion and the secular
in contemporary Myanmar.

On Buddhist Civilizations
Professor Lehman’s profound influence on the literature
about religion in Southeast Asia is evident from countless
notes that acknowledge his careful contributions to the
anthropology of this region. His comments are generously
credited in Stanley Tambiah’s World Conqueror and World
Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against
a Historical Background (1976), Melford Spiro’s Buddhism
and Society (1970), Charles Keyes’ Golden Peninsula (1977),
Clifford Geertz’ Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth
Century Bali (1980), Michael Mendelson’s Sangha and State in
Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership (1975),
and, most recently, in James Scott’s The Art of Not Being
Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009).
Professor Lehman’s own work provides nuanced insights
into the political and religious complexities of the Buddhist
hegemonic polities of lowlanders and their tribal vassals
whose social organizations are closely tied to the structure of
kinship. Professor Lehman began to investigate these issues
in his own classic study, The Structure of Chin Society (1963)
and developed subsequently his thinking about them further
in an extended series of essays referenced below.
Indeed, Professor Lehman’s contributions were
conceptualized in conversation with the work of other
The Legacy of F. K. Lehman 45

scholars and many of his essays were conceived as a direct

response to specific points made by one or the other of them.
For instance, in his widely cited review of Melford Spiro’s
Buddhism and Society, entitled “Doctrine, Practice and Belief”
(1972), he critiques Redfield’s, and by extension Spiro’s,
theory that great religious traditions form a thin veneer over
pre-existing local traditions. His approach not only signaled
a departure from Redfield’s theoretical framework, but also
obviated lingering misconceptions in anthropology about
the presumed lack of Buddhist literacy among villagers as
an explanation for the differences between doctrine and
practices. Lehman used the occasion of this review to make
a larger point about the important role of interpretation in
Buddhist practice, doctrine and belief. Arguing against the
primacy of one aspect of religion over others (for instance,
text or doctrine over practice), he insisted that the practice
and understanding of Buddhist doctrines or texts is inflected
by situational interpretations within a larger worldview.
Long before critics of orientalism dismantled received ideas
about “original” Buddhist teachings, Lehman asserted that
local variations are constructed in reference to written and
oral literatures, thus dispensing with preconceptions about a
“pristine” Buddhism. His work thus opened the door to new
approaches to the study of Buddhist doctrine and practice in
Southeast Asia that was informed by cognitive anthropology.
Lehman draws on his command of linguistics and
languages, including Sanskrit, Pali, and several Tibeto-
Burman languages, as evidence for a broader argument
he intends to make. His expository argumentation begins
with the lexical explorations of key terms and proceeds
to illustrate their usages in specific historical and cultural
contexts. In his essay “On the Vocabulary and Semantics of
‘Field’ in Theravada Buddhist Society” (1980), he illuminates
differences in Burmese and Thai ethnography to show
how each cultural system accomplishes the containment of
Buddhist power in ritually bounded spaces or territory. He
contrasts the Thai concept of müang (town) with the Burmese
46 Juliane Schober

nain-ngan (state, territory under one’s control), taik (district,

or building) and compares Buddha-khetta (an unbounded field
or sphere where a Buddha’s power exists) with the bounded
vāstu (field).
In “Monasteries, Palaces and Ambiguities” (1987), a
contribution to a volume in honor of Stanley Tambiah,
Lehman extends his discussion of cosmological structures
and takes up the concept of a galactic polity as an ordering
principle in classical Southeast Asian kingdoms. Tambiah
defines this key concept in his own work as constituted by
hierarchical and concentric spheres of power that, together,
produce a “total social fact.” Lehman argues instead for
an approach that is premised on computational processes
that produce complex, rule-governed behavior. By way
of an example, he focuses on the ways in which Buddhist
cosmological ideas as expressed in the special organization
of Burmese palaces and monasteries. There, the seat of
power is not located at the center as the galactic polity model
would predict, but instead the royal or preaching throne
is located in front, or east, where the king or monk faces
his audience. Lehman argues that these ritually bounded
spaces constitute microcosms, repeated at many levels, in
which power is contained, but not necessarily located in the
center. He concludes that much “of any culture’s expression
[reflects] a constant attempt to work through the attendant
contradictions… and much of the ways in which a culture
uses its premises involves debate, argument, alternative
interpretation and the like” (1987, 185).
Several of Lehman’s essays focus on social hierarchy
and rank within classic Buddhist polities, where he takes
his departure from the work of a former student, historian
Michael Aung-Thwin on rank and social status in the Pagan
era. In his “Remarks on Freedom and Bondage in Traditional
Burma and Thailand” (1984), Lehman shows how relative
indebtedness to the crown determines social hierarchy.
Degrees of freedom and bondage are expressed in a lay
person’s ability to make merit, and thus acquire power, on
The Legacy of F. K. Lehman 47

his own accord and give property (people and things) to the
sangha. Householders who are considered athi discharge their
debt to the crown through taxation and ritual obligations.
They do not inherit a status of servitude and are therefore
not under the direct control of the crown. By contrast,
royal servants (kyun) and pagoda slaves (hpaya: kyun) are
hereditary ranks of indenture to the crown that are unable to
make merit on their own accord or to become ordained into
the community of monks. Similar restrictions are incumbent
upon those who belong to the royal regiment (ahmudan:).1
Professor Lehman elaborates further on hereditary social
rank and kingship in Pagan in his essay “On the Relevance
of the Founders’ Cult” (2003). There, he compares kingship in
Thailand and Burma to account for divergent developments
of political administration and show how the Pagan dynasty
obviated limitations inherent in the Thai articulation of
the devarājika cult. In Thailand, where conceptions of royal
power were modeled more closely on Angkor, the system of
manpower and resources at the local level fostered hereditary
nobility. In the case of Burma, the ritual subordination of
districts to the central court legitimated the rights of founders
to land use and manpower and enabled the monarchy to
centralize the administration of the polity. The court at Pagan
(849–1287 CE) developed a ritual strategy that enabled the
kings of this and later Burmese dynasties to implement,
at least in principle, a centralized imperial monarchy in
which control over local regions was affirmed by annual
royal appointment. Kyanzittha (1084–1112 CE) was the
first Burmese king to advance a dual claim to kingship. On
the one hand, he embodied the divinity (devarāja) of the
Hindu god Vishnu. On the other hand, he also claimed the
Buddhist title of a dhammarāja as the “Glorious King within
the Dhamma of the Three Worlds” (Sri Tribhuvanāditya

1 Lehman’s most detailed exploration into Burmese historiography

(1991) was occasioned by his review of William Koenig’s The Burmese Polity:
1752–1819 and presented a critical appraisal not only of Koenig’s book, but
of scholarship on Burmese historiography more generally.
48 Juliane Schober

dhammarāja) and identified himself as a Buddhist sovereign

who ruled over other kings (ekarāja) (Lehman 2003,
26). Burmese kingship was seen as a venue to future
Buddhahood (min: laun, hpaya: laun), which furnished the
Pagan monarchy and later Burmese kings with a powerful,
semi-divine status that transcended both the religious and
hence political aspirations of local rulers. Lehman argues
that the combination of the ritual system of spirit lords as
well as the claim to being a future Buddha empowered the
subordination of local districts to a central court. Together,
these ritual systems constituted a critical difference between
Thai and Burmese conceptions of royal power. In Thailand,
a class of hereditary nobility in time drained the power of
the central monarchy, whereas in Burma, the king relied on
a ritual system of local spirit lords to counteract claims to
hereditary rights and ranks that might constitute a potential
challenge to the central court.
In time, the Burmese dhammarāja system submerged
the ritual functions of the devarāja cult in the veneration of
the Thirty-Seven Royal Lords (nat). The most powerful of
these lords, Mahagiri Nat, who inhabited Mount Poppa to
the southeast of Pagan, was identified with the Indian god
Indra, thus mapping the system of the Thirty-Seven Royal
Spirit Lords onto a Hindu-Buddhist cosmos and its presiding
deity. In the ritual system that constituted the veneration
of the Thirty-Seven Lords, the court annually affirmed the
authority of each lord over a local palace, retinue, and region
from which they were permitted to extract annual tributes.
The cult of the Thirty-Seven Lords thus replicated a system
of ritual obligations owed to local and ancestral spirits at a
microcosmic level that was also enacted in rituals at the royal
court. The king, in turn, renewed annual appointments and
allowances to support the spirit lords, their palaces, and local
officers. The ritual supplication of the Burmese Thirty-Seven
Lords remains a popular practice in contemporary Burma,
where spirit veneration and nat mediums serve as a cultural
location for negotiating political power and control over
The Legacy of F. K. Lehman 49

resources. This ritual complex thus perpetuates a hegemonic

logic of Burmese court culture more than a century after
the demise of the last Burmese dynasty. In contemporary
Myanmar, spirit mediums continue to perform the ritual
roles of ministers and queens, emulating at least a truncated
version of court ritual and political structures.

Buddhism in the Southeast Asian Borderlands

Professor Lehman has credited social anthropologist
Edmund Leach with putting the study of Burma on
the anthropological map by investigating it a system of
interethnic relations (2008). Leach’s work on the Kachin
was the first to examine the social dynamics of multiple
social systems in this region, linking the fluctuating social
structures of tribal societies—that are generally stateless and
without writing—to the hegemonic centers of the lowlands.
Lehman takes up similar concerns in an essay (2009) that
results from his most recent fieldwork in Ruili and Kunming,
in Southern Yunnan Province in China, and in Myitkyina
and Lashio in northern Burma. In this project, he takes up
the cultural location of the Wa within the interethnic trade
networks to promote multiple cultural exchanges throughout
the peripheral zone the Wa inhabit and create a situational
hegemony among the Shan, Thai, and other groups in the
Burma-China border region.
Specifically, Lehman investigates Wa Buddhist practice
in the context of interlacing Theravada and Mahayana
Buddhist traditions in these borderlands. By focusing on
cultural practices in Wa monasteries and their relations to
donors and to other Buddhist groups, Lehman explores
the cultural interstice between “Theravada” civilizations of
Southeast Asia and “Mahayana” institutions of East Asia. In
doing so, he calls upon his readers to interrogate categorical
distinctions in the history of Buddhist studies, which has
long relied on these categorical distinctions to denote major
differences in practice, texts and religious institutions.
In this region that straddles southern China and
50 Juliane Schober

northeastern Burma, the Shan hold an intermediary position

between lowland Buddhist kingdoms and upland tribal
groups that border themselves on larger social systems.
The Shan, who claim a dynastic history and produced a
Theravada Buddhist literature in their own script, served
as a conduit for the introduction of Buddhist institutions
among some Wa groups.2 While other Wa groups reportedly
remained involved with headhunting as late as the mid-
twentieth century, most contemporary Wa practice a form
of Buddhism that reflects their marginal location in the
borderlands between Theravada and Mahayana traditions.
While nominally Theravada, Wa monasteries generally do
not observe the complex rules for monastic conduct (vinaya),
a practice in which many lowland Theravada lineages take
pride and use as a marker of differentiation from other
monastic groups that are seen as permitting lax behaviors.
Instead, Wa monks residing in a monastery generally abide
by a far simpler set of Buddhist precepts (sīla). They do not
conduct full ordinations and their monasteries usually lack
an ordination hall (sīma) on the grounds. Among mainstream
Theravadins, ordination rituals are conducted in the
consecrated space of a sīma and are traditionally considered
constituting membership and ensuring continuity of monastic
lineages. In addition to these significant transformations in
monastic practice among the Wa, another marked difference
emerges from their ethnography. Wa generally believe
that the merit (bun) of householders is “owned by local
monasteries, by the Buddhist religion and its institutions”
(2009, 22). This practice among the Wa and others concerned
with adhering to a stricter interpretation of vinaya rules and
ordination rituals depart considerably from the Theravadin
traditions the Wa received from their Shan neighbors and
resemble more closely formations characteristic of Mahayana

2 Critical appraisals of categories that inform the scholarly discourse

on Buddhist ethnography among the Shan are taken up in the productive
scholarship by Nancy Eberhardt (2007) and Kate Crobsy (2000, 2010) and
on the Dai-lue by Thomas Borchert (2007).
The Legacy of F. K. Lehman 51

institutions among their Chinese neighbors. Continuing

scholarly attention to cultural interactions with ethnic groups
located between spheres of influence of diverse Buddhist
civilizations will produce new insights into the processes of
transmission, adaptation and institutionalization of Buddhist
traditions throughout Asia (and the West).

Reflections on the Secular in Buddhist

Southeast Asia
In his essays, Lehman also comments on secular functions
within the religious realm of Southeast Asian polities.
Exploring the conceptual structures that underpin Buddhist
civilizations in traditional Southeast Asia, Professor Lehman
notes that, in general, “[e]very religious system carries with
it, sometimes only tacitly, a large set of more or less secular
background assumptions about the phenomenal world”
(2006, 127). Recent debates in the anthropological literature
on the secular (Cannell 2010) invite further explorations of
the idea of the “secular” in traditional and contemporary
Theravada society which Lehman describes primarily as
functions of kingship and lay responsibilities. I allude
here only to three trajectories of importance to a study of
the secular in Buddhist civilizations and focus specifically
on traditional, colonial, and contemporary contexts.
Commenting on secular articulations in traditional Buddhist
polities, Lehman underscores that the Buddhist Law
(dhamma) has both secular and transcendent interpretations
that apply to traditional Buddhist kingship in Burma (2003,
26). While encompassed by a Buddhist rationality, secular
activities do not generate religious merit that leads toward
enlightenment. In Lehman’s discussions, the secular demotes
a mundane reality with a this-worldly, temporal orientation
and does not further a path leading to transcending the
cycle of rebirth. Lokiya matters simply perpetuate worldly
concerns about practical and administrative domains
of responsibility and governmental functions. They are
52 Juliane Schober

concerned with the applications of power and governance

that further this-worldly goals. Lehman employs the concept
of the “secular” to refer to pragmatic functions of kingship
and the management of power and describes it as a part of
the governance of this-world (lokiya), namely a microcosm
ruled by kings, lay people and “commoners in secular
society”(kyun taw) (1984, 234) that constitutes part of a larger
Buddhist universe. Writing about Buddhist fields of power,
Lehman explains that “the Hindu gods, such as Indra, serve
in Buddhist cosmology as a paradigm of or for secular order
and power.” A secular domain in the traditional Buddhist
polities of Southeast Asia is conceptually subordinated
to an overarching Buddhist cosmology. Government and
subjectivity are constituted through a Buddhist rationality
that subsumes secular or practical concerns.
Elsewhere, Lehman uses the term ‘secular’ more broadly
to denote the religious responsibilities of kings and lay
people. He writes, for example, that “kings try to achieve
secular control over the Order of monks” (1987, 171); that
images provide a “secular focus of attention in Buddhism”
(1987, 181); and that “pagodas are mainly for the secular
community” (1987, 181). In those contexts, the ‘secular’ tends
to stand in creative tension with the religious orientation
of the monastic community that is ideally engaged in the
practice of a path that leads to transcendence of a temporal
world.3 Lehman has critiqued Max Weber’s characterization
of Buddhism as ‘otherworldly,’ arguing that the processes of
publicly legitimating the status of monks and their donors are
central to the social structure of Theravada societies.
While Professor Lehman does not specifically address
the ways in which modern formations inserted themselves
into traditional Buddhist civilizations, anthropologists and
historians of religion have turned their attention to the

3 Charles Taylor and others argue that modern society circumscribes

the secular in creative tension with a discourse about religious truth
and therefore tends to define the secular as a category in tension with a
particular religious rationality or worldview.
The Legacy of F. K. Lehman 53

secular as an historical category that emerges from colonial

and modern contexts. Anthropologists like Robert Hefner
(2010) and Fenella Cannell (2010) argue against a mistaken
presumption of an inevitable secularization of modern
societies in Southeast Asia and in modern contexts more
generally. Cannell distinguishes the secular as “a historically
produced idea, a theory about how things are or could be,
and not an inescapable or inevitable process or fact” (2010,
86). Other scholars also identified the emergence of a secular
sphere in public culture as a historical process that is linked
to the colonial project and the emergence of modernity. In
this body of scholarship on religion in colonial contexts, we
find a different understanding of the ‘secular.’ The colonial
project sought to administer newly conquered territories
through a secular mechanism of the modern nation state
in which access to power was negotiated not on religious
grounds, but on the basis of access to the pillars of modern
nation states, such as colonial education, economic networks
and civil administration as viewed by a liberal agenda of
colonial Europe. For instance, Tomoko Masuzawa writes
in the Invention of World Religions (2005) on the colonial
construction of a taxonomy of world religions that was
derived from a colonial understanding of language, religion,
and nationhood. This understanding of religion presumed a
conceptual hierarchy of multiple world religions, including
Christianity, Buddhism, and other world religions.
In Burma, the colonial insertion of the ‘secular’ into
traditional culture, institutions and popular lifeways proved
to be immensely disruptive. The expansion of British
mercantile networks led to the first of three Anglo-Burmese
Wars in 1825 and the initial colonization of Lower Burma.
Access to secular power and economic wealth increased
in commensuration with the expansion of the colonial
project in Burma. When the Konbaun dynasty fell in 1885
and the palace in Mandalay was invaded by British troops,
the new lifeways also became irrevocably established in
Upper Burma. The colonization of Burma submerged
54 Juliane Schober

traditional culture and values in which status and wealth

were seen as functions of a Buddhist economy of merit
and precipitated the demise of traditional values, political
power and social rank that had all been underpinned by
a Buddhist worldview. The colonial project in Burma also
opened up new venues for negotiating power through
access to economic wealth and to a colonial education. 4
The British government refused to assume the traditional
responsibilities of kings to ensure the welfare of Buddhist
institutions. In the views of many Burmese, the stance of the
colonial administration on religious matters undermined its
political authority. Moreover, while the British prohibited
political groups to meet in public, they permitted religious
assemblies. This policy encouraged contestations of the
colonial government and its policies to be voiced in Buddhist
terms and strengthened a popular suspicion among Burmese
that secular power was not legitimate and devoid of Buddhist
ethics.
In the intellectual history of the Christian west, the
emergence of the secular is linked to the Protestant
Reformation which set the stage for the displacement
of religion form the public domain and its eventual
submergence into the private spheres of and interior lives of
modern citizens. Weber argued that the particular forms of
privatization of religion that encouraged the development
of a Protestant ethic were unique to the Christian West and
unlikely to be repeated in the same way in other religious
and cultural contexts (Connell 2010, 86). Weber’s caveat
notwithstanding, many social scientists hypothesized during
the second half of the twentieth century that the privatization
of religion in modern society would inevitably lead to
secularization and predicted the eventual disappearance of
religion from public life. Current scholarship on modern
Buddhist formations invites us to rethink critically the

4 I present a detailed analysis of the impact of the colonial project on

modern Buddhist formations in Burma in Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in
Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies and Civil Society (2010).
The Legacy of F. K. Lehman 55

‘secular’ in the contexts of a modern sāsana and a modern,

independent nation state in Burma/Myanmar. Since
independence, the modern state in Burma has produced
many different articulations that combine the state’s political
power with processes of Buddhist legitimation. They
include the charismatic revival of Buddhism under U Nu,
the stringent reforms of Buddhist monastic institutions
under Ne Win and the appropriations of Buddhist ritual
power during the SLORC regime. Indeed, the authority of
secular government in Burma continues to be profoundly
challenged and contested as the events of the so-called
Saffron Revolution in 2007 and their aftermath have so clearly
demonstrated (Schober 2010: 119–45). What emerges from
the recent developments is a renewed Buddhist engagement
in society based on an ethical understanding of the “here-
and-now” (lokiya). This most recent form or restating the
policies of the modern state was empowered by the sangha’s
commitment to ameliorate social and economic injustice
in this world. It points to a significant transformation in
the social orientation of modern Buddhist practice and its
location in the everyday lives of many Burmese. Especially
for young people, the affirmation of personal religious
practice became a voice for resisting the political power
of the state. In these most recent contestations of secular
state power, modern articulation of an encompassing
Buddhist worldview asserted their involvement in the public
negotiation of social and economic justice.
The work of Professor Lehman merits a careful reading
and rereading for its rich insights into the ways Buddhist
civilizations in Southeast Asia have shaped cultural realties in
the past and continue to do so in contemporary contexts. His
essays on religion, culture and history and their intersections
with secular power in Burma and mainland Southeast Asia
more generally are particularly instructive. Future scholars
in the anthropology of religion in Burma and beyond will
continue to draw on this exceptional body of work developed
in the course of many decades.
56 Juliane Schober

Juliane Schober is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her

research focuses on religions in Southeast Asia, particularly Theravada Buddhism
in Burma/Myanmar, and on emerging traditions in the modern Theravada world.
Her recent book is entitled Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural
Narratives, Colonial Legacies and Civil Society (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010). She
also edited Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast
Asia (University of Hawai’i Press, 1997) and co-edited, with Steven Berkwitz and
Claudia Brown, Buddhist Manuscript Cultures (Routledge, 2008). She can be reached
at J.Schober@asu.edu.

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