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Buddhism, Power, Modernity. Gatheringleaves and lifting words: Histories ofBuddhist monastic education in Laosand ThailandAnanda Abeysekara aa Virginia Tech, USA

Available online: 07 Dec 2011

To cite this article: Ananda Abeysekara (2011): Buddhism, Power, Modernity. Gathering leaves andlifting words: Histories of Buddhist monastic education in Laos and Thailand, Culture and Religion,12:4, 489-497

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REVIEW ESSAY

Buddhism, Power, Modernity

Gathering leaves and lifting words: Histories of Buddhist monasticeducation in Laos and Thailand, by Justin Thomas McDaniel, Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 2008, 392 pp., $24.69 (paperback), ISBN: 978-

0-295-98849-8

Seemingly belonging to the specialised area-studies subject of Buddhist monastic

education in Southeast Asia, this text by historian of Theravada Buddhism

McDaniel (2008) seeks to intervene in (and reorient) the broader debates and

questions about colonialism, power, post-colonial life and religion by making a

set of grand theoretical claims. The text critiques a presumed post-colonial

argument about the relationship between colonial power and vernacular

religion, and between elite power and non-elite (Buddhist) life. Central to this

critique is the conceptualisation of power in general and modern (colonial and

post-colonial) power, as something distinct from, and opposed to, some local

Buddhist monastic life in particular. This critique is based on the presumption

that elite power is never total (p. 18). This presumption more or less forms the

basis of the argument. Perhaps unaware of the well-known Foucauldian

productive notion of power, which does not negate, repress or control but

enables and authorises, the author understands power in a negative moralist,

repressive sense of being elite, separate from non-elite life. However, if power

is something only (colonial and post-colonial) elites exercise, elite power must,

by necessity, constitute an excess of life, in which power becomes something

abnormal and external to life. According to this logic, since non-elite Buddhist

monks do not have and cannot exercise power, they must be more normal and

ordinary than elites. And since elite power is not total, non-elite life then

constitutes the normal total life. Despite the frequent use of the term in the

humanities and popular discourse today, who can possibly determine what

constitutes an elite life, let alone elite power, unless one thinks of power in

terms of some excess of life such as violence? If so, non-violence, as opposed to

power/violence, would constitute the normalcy of life!

Governed by this moralistic sense of elite power, the author speaks of an

internal colonialism to refer to the supposed takeover (pp. 220, 292) of Buddhist

educational institutions by local Marxist and royal elites, who ultimately sought

to colonise and control non-elite life by way of specific monastic reforms in

Laos and Thailand. Given this sense of power, despite the texts claim to disavow

any sense of orthodox Buddhist life, non-elite life eventually becomes a form of

orthodox, historical life that must be separated and liberated from the violence of

ISSN 1475-5610 print/ISSN 1475-5629 online

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Culture and Religion

Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2011, 489497

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elite power. This orthodox, non-elite life is one in which local Buddhist monks

were creative agents (p. 18), who, though influenced, were not impacted by

powers external to local life. The practice of local monastic life was based on

their own traditions, histories and experiences, which changed on their own terms

over time. This creative monastic life involved the practices of lifting words

(yok sab) from Pali canonical and non-canonical texts and creatively engaging

with them (p. 7). We find this local monastic creativity in (pre-modern)

pedagogical texts such as vohara, nissaya and namasadda, which are

idiosyncratic lecture and sermon notes around the selected translation of

words and passages from individually chosen canonical and extra-canonical Pali

texts (p. 122; emphasis added). In a culture of translation unique to Lao and

Thai monkhood, the vernacular practices of learning and teaching Buddhism

have changed in modern times. This change is found in the shift from texts to

media-based approaches to learning Buddhism today. The modern study of

Dhammapada (verses), separate from their traditional commentarial narratives, is

one example; a similar change is seen in the way Abhidhamma texts are used for

ritual purposes. All this change reflects the dynamic agency and creative ways

in which monks expressed themselves (pp. 122, 168), even using trans-local

methods in modern times, without aping the West (p. 209). The Pali canon as

such plays no role in these practices of learning Buddhism. Some monks do not

even know Pali. What matters is the vernacular translation and manipulation of

Pali texts and words.

Here, following the lead of other historians of Buddhism such as Anne

Blackburn and Anne Hansen, McDaniel accuses other scholars of being

orientalist for trying to remove creative agency from monastic life. The

prejudice for the original true meaning or original intention over the living,

evolving traditions still plagues much of the early and Theravada Buddhist

scholarship and does not acknowledge the creative work of individual Lao

monastic teachers and scholars. The preference for Pali has caused the Lao

vernacular and Buddhist-inspired literature and ritual to be overlooked (p. 178).

Tradition evolves; what evolves lives; what lives becomes creative. Creativity

supposedly becomes the internal essential condition of Buddhist monastic life

that resists and overcomes the impact of external elite power. Indeed, creativity

becomes its own condition and predicate. Monks were creative because they were

motivated to be creative (pp. 51, 84, 122). This becomes one of several

tautological arguments that occur repeatedly in the text. One wonders about

individual Buddhist monks who fail or are not motivated to live a Buddhist

life of creativity, since every individual monk, like every human being, cannot be

creative, inventive or expressive! Consider living a life always trying to be

creative, inventive and expressive. This is why Nietzsche (2002) argues that one

often mistakes inventing (Befindung) for discovering/finding (Erfindung).

This is also why Heidegger (1996) argued against an entire Western tradition,

that life is not something one lives by way of being creative or expressive; rather

one finds oneself in life/existence (Befindlichkeit), into which one is thrown

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(geworfen). And compare this with what Asad (1993) has called disciplinary

practices that constitute religious life. One can find no creativity to life, much

less any individually chosen expression of it, in such disciplinary practices of

life.

These questions of life/existence/practice are lost on the author as he is too

quick to supplement Buddhist life with a Western secular attribute like individual

creative agency, the very Western attributes from which the text ironically seeks

to liberate Buddhist monastic life. This liberal sense of Buddhist life remains at

work throughout the texts moralistic conception of power, which in turn

translates into a number of other moralistic distinctions and divisions: canonical

Buddhism vs. non-canonical Buddhism, Western modernity vs. non-Western

modernity, discourse vs. power, internal life vs. external force and central state

vs. vernacular life. These distinctions and divisions are continuously and

repetitively asserted throughout the text even as it claims to do away with them.

Despite the authors occasional attempts at qualifying a few terms by way of

putting quotation marks around them, these distinctions remain decisive to the

text. However, this repetition, by way of the logic of determination if it can be

called a logic is presumed to pass for a historicalempirical actuality about the

difference in and divisibility of human (Buddhist) life in general.

The author of course wants to tell us otherwise: the story he tells is

supposedly based on a complicated Buddhist history that he locates on the

ground, undermining trendy scholarly orientalist presumptions about modern

power.

There is a trend in Southeast Asian studies to focus on the rupture between thepresent and the past, the early modern and the modern, the precolonial and thepostcolonial, the preprinting press and printing press periods. For the Buddhisthistory of Northern Thailand, the question of when modernity began is complicated.Northern Thailand was only tangentially colonized, although there was influencefrom American Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, and from British,Dutch, and French traders and travelers as early as the sixteenth century.Industrialization, global advertising, and tourism did not seriously impact the regionuntil the late twentieth century. Marking the advent of modernity with the arrival ofthe Westerners in the region reveals an orientalist Eurocentric perspective, however.Can one talk about modernity without talking about the West? (p. 97; emphasisadded)

Here, the questions of who/what (the West) influenced, and who/what did

not seriously impact whom and until when, are quite boldly and self-evidently

determined. This is ultimately an attempt to determine the innate difference and

opposition between the West and the East. Once qualified with quotation marks,

the influence of the West is acknowledged, as if one cannot escape it and as if it

is something that merely passes or flows by. But the influence (of the West) on the

East is denied the seriousness of an impact. There is flawed logic here: An

impact becomes an impact by virtue or shall we say the law? of it being

serious. That is, an impact is something that can be determined because it does

not merely pass by; an impact stays around, long and visibly enough for the

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scholar to determine its presence, its actuality. This logic comes by way of the

following repetitive, tautological claim: an influence was not an impact because

said influence had only little effect or little lasting effect; or said influence had

no effect, lasting effect, or no long-term or widespread effect (pp. 27, 48, 56,

90, 105, 110, 113); or more simply, the actual effects of [elite] control were

minor (p. 110). Thus, for an impact to be an impact, said impact must have an

effect (p. 201). In plain tautological terms: the influence of colonial and post-

colonial elite power did not have an impact because it had no effect! The claim is

repeated so frequently that one loses count.

Thus, the text makes the seriousness of determining an actual impact

seemingly more serious by saying that it must have an effect. But, as Nietzsche

argued in many instances, what constitutes an effect cannot be determined by the

most discerning, without the impossible task of determining what supposedly

gives rise to an effect, the effect of all effects, the origin of origins, if you will, the

cause (Ursache). The task of determining an effect and its origin/cause becomes

more serious for the text because it is an attempt to determine an effect across an

expanse of time and (geographical) space in Laos and Thailand. (Recall that the

text assures us that the West had no long-term or widespread effect on the East.)

Here, since the question of effect is always a question of origin, the text

reproduces the same problem of being concerned with original true meaning

or the original intention over the living. Also, as it seeks to understand Buddhist

living/life in terms of the question of cause/effect, the text becomes implicated in

a long Western logocentric problem. Again it is an irony that a text that claims to

talk about [Eastern] modernity without talking about the West already

subsumes Eastern lives into a Western problematic.

The author ostensibly resolves this problem by providing a history of the

traditions of vernacular Buddhist monastic education. Here this history, followed

by conjectures and suspicions, becomes the medium through which the

relationship between cause and effect is presumably determined. He tries to

position these vernacular traditions against, and separate them from, the efforts

(by both colonial and local royal [precolonial] and post-colonial individuals and

states) to reform monastic education. The story here becomes redundantly

familiar. In Laos, French colonisation had little impact on how the local Buddhist

monks taught, learnt and practiced Buddhism. There were Western travellers and

missionaries who made pejorative, derisive (p. 34) and condescending (pp. 26,

45, 58) commentary on what they saw as the great pomp, ritual and ceremony of

Buddhist monastic life. Even the French administrators spent more time setting

up coffee plantations, mining tin and cutting trees, and less time building schools,

hospitals and roads (p. 27). The French administrators of course sought to

separate secular schooling from religious. However, once again: Generally the

French separation of secular schooling from ritual, festival, and community

religious life made little impact on monastic approaches to education (p. 27).

This is so because much of it was mere rhetoric that did not amount to making a

real impact: There is a difference between the rhetoric of modernity and the

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ideology of reform and initiation and implementation of reform on the ground

(p. 22; emphasis added). (An effect is also determined by way of

implementation! After all, to implement something is to put something into

an effect! No socialpolitical discourse would have any impact until it is

implemented). Further examples of the lack of such effect/implementation are

given. Some French scholars of Buddhism came to Laos (from Cambodia) to

promote the study of Pali because of the general attitude that Pali was the

original and superior language of learning (p. 40). They even established

institutions such as the Institut Bouddhique and the Pali school; The Pali school

was one small part of the hopes of the French linking Cambodia and Laos

culturally as well as economically and politically (p. 43). But again none of this

made any real impact/effect because there certainly seems to be little direct

colonial influence on Lao monastic education (p. 42). After all, the colonisers

never forced (pp. 4851) monks to study Pali; they did not oppress or

discourage the monastic education (p. 31). Rather, the French encouraged the

monks to study (p. 39); so there was no explicit oppression (p. 63).

The absence of this explicit colonial oppression in Laos leads to a new

perspective on the nature of colonialism:

The Lao case presents a new perspective on the nature of colonialism andOrientalism. There was not an overwhelming and internally consistent colonialideological machine that attempted to change all modes of Lao intellectual andreligious expression. The motivation of many EFEO scholars was not simplyorientalist. That is, they were not simply trying to discount the local . . . (p. 42;emphasis added)

Here, I need not remind the reader of the vast amount of literature

demonstrating why colonialism never was or never had to be internally

consistent in any colonised place. But what needs to be noted is the texts logic

of understanding colonialism: colonialism made no impact because there was

neither direct implementation nor motivation; nor was there an over-

whelming and internally consistent colonial machine to change local

Buddhist expression. An impact is also then to be determined by the consequence

of it being overwhelming and internally consistent. Here, the bar is set very

high for colonial power to do anything to produce an impact on local life.

However, the sense of thinking that supposedly denies colonial power having an

impact on local life ironically grants that colonial power unlimited freedom. By

this logic, colonial power can do almost anything and everything and still not

count as having impacted or changed the local Buddhist culture. Given the

unlimitedly broad and expandable senses of the words, no action would ever

qualify for the criterion or the consequence of being overwhelming and

internally consistent. True to the definitions of the words, even if colonialists

did overwhelm an entire Buddhist local culture if such a thing were possible

such action still would not qualify for being overwhelming since it must be

internally consistent as well. That is, for an action to be internally consistent,

it must meet the impossible criterion of being unchanging over a period of time.

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This is an impossible thing to decide. No one can ever decide what is internally

consistent in terms of the scope, reach and expanse of time. Here, time becomes

an excess of itself that can never be determined as it can expand itself infinitely.

More simply put: How much time would count for something to be internally

consistent? How much time should something have had to qualify for having

remained unchanged for a consistent period of time: 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 or

many more years? But ironically it is this impossible thing that the text claims to

know and determine when it uses the above language, to decide what did and did

not cause an impact/effect. I point out the decisive importance of this flawed

choice of language to the text because this is a work by an author versed in many

languages who claims to be attentive to the complex use of languages in terms of

languaging that goes into monastic practices of lifting words from texts.

This so far is the upshot of understanding power in moralist terms.

Unchanged by (underwhelming) colonial power, monks educated themselves

in Buddhism, without much interest in the study of Pali or canonical texts of

Buddhism. After all, Laos is the only Theravada country where there is no

complete Pali canon. Most monasteries have no canonical texts. Even if there

are canonical texts, they remain dusty and unopened (p. 66). The monastic

curriculum is one in which Pali is not taught except through gloss and

explanation of Pali words in sermons (p. 67). This creative task of lifting words

from the texts and commenting on and explaining them in sermons is the

languaging of Pali. Again, these creative monastic agents were hardly

impacted by external efforts to standardise the monastic curriculum in Laos,

either by the colonial state or by the Marxist regime. Despite decades of

French, American, Russian and Thai influence, Lao monastic education has

developed and maintained its own, unique curriculum (p. 67). Even the Marxist

state could have no impact on monastic practice: Marxists who came to control

the monastic institutions not only encouraged monks to get involved in politics,

but they also forced the monks to attend indoctrination seminars aimed at

demonstrating the relationship between Marxism and Buddhism, trying to

dismantle their power base and structure (p. 58). Note in particular the

comparison/contrast here: like the French, the Marxists encouraged monks;

but unlike the French, Marxists forced monks. Force ultimately belongs to the

native Marxists, not to the French colonialists. Even the force of the Marxists

had no impact because the Lao Sangha has had a long tradition of overcoming

reform, repression, economic and demographic declines, and government

interference (p. 63). The Buddhist monastic life is ultimately not affected by

elite power. The effect of monks own uniqueness is the effect of their own

history of overcoming reform.

All this does not mean that Buddhism is apolitical by nature in Laos or other

places; indeed it is often highly political and revolutionary in many Buddhist

countries and cultures (p. 63). However, Buddhism is not political in Laos as it is

in other places because there is simply no evidence that links Buddhism to

rebellion (p. 63). There is no evidence because there was no large-scale or

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consistent rebellion (p. 63). The author writes with familiar logic: In short, Lao

monastic educators have never fostered large-scale or consistent rebellion

against king, colonialist, or communist (p. 63). In this definition of what

constitutes political Buddhism, the very idea of the political/politics is strangely

equated with rebellion (Based on this logic, think how large scale any action

by any person or group must be to ever be considered to qualify as political, as it

must involve consistent rebellion! By the same logic, the so-called religious

right in the USA would never be considered as political since it has never

engaged in rebellion? By the same logic, Buddhist monks in other places like

Sri Lanka, who are inevitably different from the uniquely Laotian apolitical

monks, must be political/rebellious). Now my point here is not that Buddhism is

political. Rather, the very idea that Buddhism is not apolitical makes possible

the separation between Buddhism and politics in the first place. The idea is part of

the general secular story that religion can be politicised. That story, as we know,

has broad and sinister implications, particularly when it concerns questions of

Islam today. The idea that religion is or can be political in turn makes possible

questions (comparativist or otherwise) about which religion/religious life at

which time is or is not political. In such questions, political/politicised religion

not to mention the politicised lives of those who supposedly live it can become

an object needing rectification. Given the texts equation between political

religion and rebellion, political/rebellious religion then can face whatever

(necessary, legal or military) force of rectification, a force that can decide not

only what counts as rebellion but also if rebellion is large scale or consistent,

warranting the force of law. Thus, the notion that Buddhism is not apolitical is

not an innocent or an isolated academic gesture. It reinforces the force of law to

decide what does and does not constitute political Buddhism. The force of law is

always a force of decision.

The story of Sangha life continues in the ensuing discussion of pre-colonial

Thai (Siam) royal and post-colonial attempts to reform monastic study in

Thailand. Thailand has a long history of efforts by royal powers to reform the

monastic life and curriculum, which this text traces from the sixteenth century

onwards. Among them, the Sangha Act of 1902 sought to introduce sweeping

changes into monastic life including standardising the monastic curriculum and

making monks sit for particular examinations. But once again these efforts had

little effect outside the capital and did not fundamentally change the lives of the

urban and the rural poor. The new Buddhist education created by the elite has

had little commerce among the vast majority of monks and novices in Thailand

today (p. 105). To demonstrate further how none of this had any effect, the

author also gives statistics of a vast number of monks who did not take

the royally mandated examinations. Number becomes important in determining

the lack of elite impact on poor monks as it decides between vast and small,

and between majority and minority. Even though a small number (some 3%)

of monks took the examinations, that small number does not simply count as a

real impact/effect. The author takes this to be a self-evident fact, even as he

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doubts that statistics provide an entirely actual account. I cannot get into all the

problems associated with this statistical sense of majority/minority, which

scholarship has discredited. The privileging of statistics/number to determine an

impact is symptomatic of the separation that the text makes between discourse

and power. In so doing, the text reduces the idea of reform to a difference

between what is done and what is said, and between what is actual and what is

rhetoric and ultimately between writing and speech itself (On this view, any

monk who talked about these reform efforts would not count as having been

affected by them, as what they said does not appear in and is irrelevant to real

statistics). But we know that this separation between discourse and power is not

tenable. And this is why some of us (Abeysekara 2002) have argued that reform

is not a feature of a determinable reality but a feature of a discourse. Discourse

is power irreducible to a determinable effect manifesting in number. Imagine

saying that a discourse like racism has no effect/power because it is mere

rhetoric and not an implemented law. But given the texts above sense of

effect/reality, nothing becomes real unless it is really implemented, on a large

scale and in internally consistent ways. And since even implemented things

like the Sangha Act eventually ended up having no real effect on monks, it

seems that nothing (external) ever makes an impact/effect on monastic life.

However, that nothing has an effect on monastic life is ultimately the effect of a

more original cause, which is the monks own, internal history of overcoming

reform. The effect becomes its own cause. Nietzsche (1968) would say that this

happens when a habit confuses a consequence for a cause.

I am not denying at all any of the monastic practices that the text presents.

To some of us who are at least familiar with Buddhist monasticism in other

places, there is of course nothing new, vernacular or dynamically creative about

some of these practices. We know that in places like Sri Lanka, for example,

many poor and even wealthy monks do not have a Buddhist canon or

canonical texts; they too lift or take words from texts in their sermons and

writings. Also I am not suggesting that the texts argument is flawed because we

should see such monastic practices as effects of a larger context of political

reforms discussed here. Rather, the kinds of logic employed above make it

impossible to think of monastic practices/lives in ways other than the

problematic divisions into which they are inserted. These divisions are not real;

the text decides them to be real because it simply assumes them be opposed to

each other. The truth of what really happened (i.e. what did and did not affect

what) is then determined from such opposites. Needless to say, we hardly learn

anything new about these monks or these oppositions apart from the

assumptions on which they are based. In some instances, such divisions are

merely the product of the misreading of works of well-known figures. For

example, in one final touch, the text tries to reiterate a widely criticised notion

of hybrid modernity (p. 249) i.e. Western modernity is not the same as

modernity everywhere only by misconstruing a short eight-page

interview/article by Asad (1996) on modern power. Asads entire body of

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work is precisely against such a division of modernity, the division that remains

central to this texts organising normative sense of power.

References

Abeysekara, A. 2002. Colors of the robe: Religion, identity, and difference. Columbia, SC:University of South Carolina.

Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianityand Islam. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Asad, T. 1996. Interview: Modern power. Stanford Electronic Humanities Review 5, no. 1:18.

Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY.McDaniel, J.T. 2008. Gathering leaves and lifting words: Histories of Buddhist monastic

education in Laos and Thailand. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Nietzsche, F. 1968. The will to power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale.

New York: Vintage.Nietzsche, F. 2002. Beyond good and evil: Prelude a Philosophy of the future, trans. Judith

Normann. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ananda Abeysekara

Virginia Tech, USA

E-mail: ananda@vt.edu

q 2011, Ananda Abeysekara

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