E

DITORIAL

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unicorn ‘early Buddhism’, changing only the name in the outdated linear model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

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 flaws, 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 artificiality
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 cultures—for example, the work of E´cole Franc¸aise d’
Extreˆme Orient (EFEO) on Cambodian literature surviving the Democratic
Kampuchea period, the Laos-German manuscript preservation project in
Vientiane, and the Social Research Institute at Chiang Mai University—look 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

Therav

~

ada 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 Therav

~

ada

Buddhist social history as Gombrich’s Theravada Buddhism: a social history from

ancient Benares to modern Colombo or Chakravarti’s The Social Dimensions of

Early Buddhism. Melford Spiro’s 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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KATE CROSBY

Here we see then, that in the case of so-called socio-karma—where 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
functions—certain 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 defined canon of Theravada, and that
true early Buddhism is essentially individualistic and asocial. Our minds naturally
turn to the possible influence 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 reflected
here (Weber 1958). And Weber is also shaping the agenda from another
perspective, through his influence on the way in which social anthropologists
set the framework within which they study Theravada society, not only on the
basis of Weber’s 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 influence in both textual and sociological
studies silences the significance of the kammic social context, and deflects
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 Choompolpaisal’s
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
influence 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 Christianity—in the context of the pervasive
relationship between Catholicism and the state in the recent, tumultuous
European history of the time—to 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 identified.

The struggle to shake off the shackles of these two authorities—a colonially

preselected canon and a western-derived social theory that involves assessing
religion in terms of macropolitics and macroeconomics—confronts 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 governmental—be they colonial, occupying, or national—and
non-governmental organisations is informed by these same preoccupations.

EDITORIAL

3

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 find 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 Crosby’s 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 ‘selfish’ 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 officially 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 significance given
Cambodian belief in the relationship between a failure to uphold Buddhist
morality and a loss of power, with the subsequent calamity and insecurity
exemplified 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 Marston’s
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 Mah

~

anik

~

aya) and the Thai (through the then newly

established Dhammayutikanik

~

aya) 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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KATE CROSBY

traditional forms of Cambodian Buddhism, based around the teacher – pupil
lineages of empowering meditation practices, kamma

_

t

_

th

~

ana, 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, what—that we cannot currently imagine—will we
learn? If we do not ‘do’ Weber, what will we see?

NOTE

1. Two new important works have appeared on these boran kamma

_

t

_

th

~

ana 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 Dhammaka¯ya temples.

REFERENCES

CROSBY, KATE

. 2000. Tantric Theravada: A bibliographic essay on the writings of Franc¸ois

Bizot and other literature on the Yog

~

avacara 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 Maıˆtres de kamma

_

t

_

th

~

ana, E´tudes et

pre´sentation de rituels de me´ditation dans la tradition du bouddhisme khmer.

Ph.D. diss., Institut National des Langes et Civilisations Orientales.

HALLISEY, CHARLES

. 1995. Roads taken and not taken in the study of Therav

~

ada

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 Therav

~

ada

Buddhist history. In Constituting communities: Therav

~

ada Buddhism and the

religious cultures of South and Southeast Asia, edited by John Clifford Hold,

EDITORIAL

5

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: [e-mail]

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KATE CROSBY