Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts 1138084271, 9781138084278

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Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts

Over the course of the nineteenth century, most of the Theravada world of Southeast Asia came under the colonial domination of European powers. While this has long been seen as a central event in the development of modern forms of Theravada Buddhism, most discussions have focused on specific Buddhist communities or nations, and particularly their resistance to colonialism. The chapters in this book examine the many different colonial contexts and regimes that Theravada Buddhists experienced, not just those of European powers such as the British and French, but also the internal colonialism of China and Thailand. They show that while many Buddhists resisted colonialism, other Buddhists shared agendas with colonial powers, such as for the reform of the monastic community. They also show that in some places, such as Singapore and Malaysia, colonialism enabled the creation of Theravada Buddhist communities. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about colonialism both locally and regionally. Providing a new understanding of the breadth of experiences of Theravada and colonialism across Asia, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies, Asian History, Comparative World History, Southeast Asian Studies and Religious Studies. Thomas Borchert is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont. His research is focused on religion and politics in Theravada Buddhist communities in Thailand, Southwest China and Singapore. He is the author of Educating Monks: Minority Buddhism on China’s Southwest Border (2017).

Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism

Edited by Stephen C. Berkwitz, Missouri State University, USA Founding Editors: Charles S. Prebish, Utah State University, USA and Damien Keown, Goldsmith’s College, London University, UK

Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism is a comprehensive study of the Buddhist tradition. The series explores this complex and extensive tradition from a variety of perspectives, using a range of different methodologies. The series is diverse in its focus, including historical, philological, cultural, and sociological investigations into the manifold features and expressions of Buddhism worldwide. It also presents works of constructive and reflective analysis, including the role of Buddhist thought and scholarship in a contemporary, critical context and in the light of current social issues. The series is expansive and imaginative in scope, spanning more than two and a half millennia of Buddhist history. It is receptive to all research works that are of significance and interest to the broader field of Buddhist Studies. Editorial Advisory Board: James A. Benn, McMaster University, Canada; Jinhua Chen, The University of British Columbia, Canada; Rupert Gethin, University of Bristol, UK; Peter Harvey, University of Sunderland, UK; Sallie King, James Madison University, USA; Anne Klein, Rice University, USA; Lori Meeks, University of Southern California, USA; Ulrich Pagel, School of Oriental and African Studies, UK; John Powers, Australian National University, Australia; Juliane Schober, Arizona State University, USA; Vesna A. Wallace, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA; Michael Zimmermann, University of Hamburg, Germany Ethical Practice and Religious Reform in Nepal The Buddhist Art of Living Lauren Leve Early Buddhist Meditation The Four Jhânas as the Actualization of Insight Keren Arbel Birth in Buddhism The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom Amy Paris Langenberg Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts Edited by Thomas Borchert

Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts

Edited by Thomas Borchert

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Thomas Borchert; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Thomas Borchert to be identified as the author of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-08427-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11188-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of contributors Acknowledgments Note on diacritics and names

  1 Introduction: Theravada Buddhism in colonial contexts

vii viii ix 1

T homas B orchert

Part I

Colony/Nation

19

  2 To be Burmese is to be Buddhist: formations of Buddhist modernity in colonial Burma

21

J uliane S chober

  3 Interactions between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore

42

W enxue  Z hang

  4 A tale of two colonialisms: K. Sri Dhammananda and the making of a missionary monk

59

J effrey S amuels

part ii

Centralization in internal colonies

79

  5 Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization in late nineteenth to early twentieth century

81

R atanaporn S ethakul

vi   Contents   6 Shifts in Buddhist authority in Sipsongpanna under Chinese colonialism

101

T homas B orchert

part iii

Managing and governing Theravada Buddhists

119

  7 “Colonial governmentality”: legal and administrative technologies of the governance of Sri Pada temple in Sri Lanka

121

P remakumara de  S ilva

  8 The thathanabaing project: monastic hierarchies and colonialism in Burma

138

A lexey K irichenko

  9 The Institut bouddhique in Laos: ambivalent dynamics of a colonial project

162

G regory K ourilsky

part iv

Students of the empire

187

10 Beni Madhab Barua and the study of Buddhism in Calcutta c.1918 to 1948

189

G itanjali S urendran

11 Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia: a colonialist legacy?

206

I an H arris



Glossary Index

220 222

Contributors

Thomas Borchert is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. Premakumara de Silva is Head of the Department and Professor, Sociology and Anthropology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colombo, Columbo, Sri Lanka. Ian Harris was Emeritus Professor at the University of Cumbria, UK, and held several visiting positions at the University of Oxford, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, National University of Singapore and Dongguk University. Alexey Kirichenko is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University. Gregory Kourilsky is a Research Fellow of the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, based at the École française d’ExtrêmeOrient, Vientiane, Laos. Jeffrey Samuels is Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green Kentucky. Juliane Schober is Director of the Center for Asian Research and Professor of Religion at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Ratanaporn Sethakul is Former Associate Professor of History Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Gitanjali Surendran is Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Humanities at the Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonapet, Haryana, India. Wenxue Zhang is an independent scholar in Australia. He has been a Graduate Student Fellow at the National University of Singapore and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Acknowledgments

This volume grew out of a conference at the Nalanda-­Sriwijaya Centre (NSC) of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in 2010. I want to thank the contributing authors for their efforts in putting this volume together, and their patience over the course of a very long editing process. My colleagues at the NSC, Tansen Sen, Geoff Wade, Jayati Bhattacharya and Lucy Xi, were the ones who made this conference possible, and my six months at ISEAS a distinct pleasure. I would also like to thank ISEAS, and in particular Ambassador K. Kesavapany (former director of ISEAS), and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations for their support of the conference. There were a number of scholars at the conference who greatly enriched the conversation that led to the current volume: Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia, Leedom Lefferts, Tissa Kariyawasam, Pou Sovachana, P.P. Mishra, Lipi Ghosh, Bimalendra Kumar, Deepak Barua, Myo Myint, Alicia Turner and Prasenjit Duara. Special thanks are due to Alicia Turner and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst for help in thinking about the issues addressed in the introduction. Dorothea Schaefter and Lily Brown of Routledge have been extremely helpful (and patient) as the volume came together. I would also like to thank Stephen Berkwitz and the anonymous reviewer of the volume. Their insights and critiques have made this a better book. I suppose not all the mistakes that may remain are mine, but I should take responsibility as the last person to see everything. Finally, I would like to acknowledge and thank the late Ian Harris for his help in putting together the conference, and being a valued conversation partner for several years. His was a gracious and insightful presence in Singapore and the academic community is much the worse for his passing in 2015.

Note on diacritics and names

This book works across many different languages. Although Pali is a foundational language in the Theravada communities that are under consideration here, different national and vernacular languages appropriate and use these languages in different ways. In order to minimize possible confusion across the volume, I decided that it would be better not to use diacritics. This works against the trend within Buddhist Studies, where it has become increasingly easy to use diacritics, but it also made it easier for me to work across languages. Words like sangha we have kept in italics, despite their common usage throughout the book. However, when referring to a specific sangha (the Lao Sangha), we treat it as if it were a proper noun. Another challenge that we have faced here is the name to use for various places. Names change and colonizers and colonized sometimes use different names, or perhaps they use different names depending on the context. Some of these issues are straightforward—it’s easy to choose to refer to Siam before 1932, and Thailand after 1939. Others are more complicated. In Chinese, the language of the colonizer, the region that I discuss is referred to as Xishuangbanna. The people in the region are bilingual, and so they might use Xishuangbanna, or Sipsongpanna, the Tai equivalent. In general, we have tried to follow the usage that the people at the time might have been using internally, so for example, Sri Lanka, rather than Ceylon.

Monks and colonial officials, including Suzanne Karpelès, the French ‘Résident Supérieur’ in Laos, and the Lao sangharaja, Vat Si Saket, Vientianne, Laos, 1931. Source:  École française d’Extrême-Orient, fonds Fomberteaux réf FOML00007.

1 Introduction Theravada Buddhism in colonial contexts Thomas Borchert

The experiences of Theravada Buddhist communities within colonialism have never been fully visible to us. Scholars have long assumed that European colonialism played an important role in the development of modern forms of Buddhism, Theravada and otherwise. Indeed in one important narrative, colonialism provided a shock that led to massive changes that manifested in both anti-­ colonial movements, and in national Buddhisms of the post-­colonial states of South and Southeast Asia. This narrative tells part of the story in some parts of Asia, but it is limited. It does not show how Buddhists sometimes resisted, sometimes worked with, and even sometimes ignored the efforts of the colonial masters. It does not show how Buddhist agendas might overlap with colonial agendas, though sometimes only partially. It does not show regional patterns or influences. And it does not show us how Theravada Buddhist communities saw themselves, sometimes as Buddhists, sometimes as Theravada Buddhists, and sometimes as ethnic and/or nationalist subjects. Scholars have long known that Theravada Buddhism and colonialism have a complicated history, though these complexities tend to get lost, either in the generalities of speaking about Buddhism and colonialism in the singular, or in the specificities of particular nation-­ state and colony experiences. It is our hope here that this volume begins to make visible the ways that Buddhists experienced and lived through colonialism were and are multiple.

Colonial enterprises in Theravada worlds Colonialism in Southeast Asia has taken place over the course of several hundred years. European colonialism of the Theravada world began in the early sixteenth century, when Portuguese ships came to the island we now refer to as Sri Lanka.1 Over the course of the next 400 years, through several different waves of imperial movements, European states established direct political control over the vast majority of Asia. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, the only significant Asian polities that were not under direct control of European polities were China, Japan and Siam (now Thailand). Moreover, these are generally considered as semi-­colonized by European powers and the United States, in part because of the “unequal treaties” that colonizers forced these countries to sign,

2   Thomas Borchert and in part because many internal decisions were driven by defensive moves against the European forces (as Ratanaporn shows here). As is well known, most of the Theravada world was a part of the British empire, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the period during which most of this volume focuses on (the prevalence of British colonialism is reflected in the fact that six of the ten chapters in this volume are about Theravada communities that were a part of the British empire). British colonialism of Theravada communities began with their seizing control of the coast of Sri Lanka in the late eighteenth century, several decades after the East India Company first established control of the state of Bengal. It was not until 1815, however, that the last king of Kandy abdicated in favor of British control. At approximately the same time, the British defeated Bagyidaw in the first Anglo-­Burmese War (1825), taking control of Lower Burma (Upper Burma would maintain its independence until 1885). In both cases, the British asserted that they would not be involved in the management of the sangha (though as several of the chapters here demonstrate, this was not always straight forward, and in any case the British tended to follow this policy when it suited their interests). The British were simultaneously also taking charge of other parts of Southeast Asia that have not been so commonly associated with Theravada Buddhism, namely establishing Singapore (1819) and establishing control of the Malaysian Peninsula over the course of several decades (finalized in 1824 with the Anglo-­Dutch Treaty of that year). While these places have been more commonly seen as Chinese and Muslim, Theravada Buddhism came to both places through the labor and immigration policies established by the colonial government over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Zhang and Samuels in this volume). There were other colonial regimes in addition to the British. The French came to the region somewhat later, seizing control of Cambodia and Laos and incorporating them into French Indochina along with Vietnam in the late nineteenth century (1884 and 1893, respectively). As a part of this same process, the French-­Anglo Treaty of 1896 established the borders of the middle Mekong region, which largely mirror contemporary national boundaries. The politics of empire between these two European powers precipitated internal colonial formations as well. On the one hand, the 1896 treaty established a region known as Sipsongpanna as the southern border of Yunnan Province. While Sipsongpanna, a Tai region where Theravada Buddhism had been common for centuries, had long had tributary relations with China it had also had similar relations with Burmese kingdoms as well as occasionally Lanna (now Northern Thailand). The 1896 treaty formally deeded Sipsongpanna to the Qing, thus obscuring the colonization of Sipsongpanna by Chinese states. Moreover, as Ratanaporn discusses in this volume, British and French actions encouraged the Bangkok-­based Chakri dynasty to engage in centralizing policies that led to the internal colonization of Lanna into Siam. This recitation of dates, treaties, and regimes can be misleading. These are signposts and not necessarily conditions, and they can obscure the incompleteness of colonialism within the polities of Southeast Asia, both those that we

Introduction   3 n­ ormally associate with Theravada Buddhism and those that we do not, such as Singapore, Malaysia, India, and China. For example, just to look at the last example, while Sipsongpanna was formally made a part of the Qing empire (in the eyes of the international community in 1896), the region continued under its own political and cultural system well into the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, the region’s semi-­independent state, which persisted through the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic, only ended with the entrance of the People’s Liberation Army into the capitol of Jing Hong in 1953. While the contexts are very different, this case is reflective of comments made by Stephen Berkwitz about the colonial situation of Sri Lanka under the Portuguese during the life of a sixteenth century Sinhala poet: Although there was a colonial presence in Sri Lanka throughout Alagiyavanna’s entire life [the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries], the strength of this presence varied considerably. As such, there is no single, straightforward ‘colonial context’ that could be used to explain Alagiyavanna’s works. Such a fact reminds us that colonialism is not a singular phenomenon that impacts local culture in a coherent or uniform manner.2 There are several points to take from this. First, although it might seem obvious, when thinking about colonialism and Theravada Buddhism more broadly, it is necessary to recognize that there were several different colonial regimes that varied across Theravada communities throughout Asia. In this volume, for example, there are chapters that discuss British and French colonies, as well as Chinese colonialism and the semi-­colonized conditions in Thailand. Different colonial regimes conceptualized the relationship between the center and the periphery in different ways, particularly with regard to the management of religious communities. While the actual political interactions varied on the ground, the British regimes tended to understand a broad distance between the colonizer and the colonized. At the other end of the spectrum, Thai and Chinese states saw the peripheries such as Lanna or Sipsongpanna as very much a part of the nation-­state (and so would almost assuredly resist the designation of colonialism). The French tended to be between these, recognizing the civilizational superiority of the metropole, and yet understanding the colonial possessions as being fundamentally part of this. These differences manifested themselves more specifically in the management of religious institutions. Less obviously, different colonies with the same colonial master did not always have the same experiences of colonialism. For example, in Sri Lanka and Burma, the relationship between the sangha (the Buddhist community, but especially monks and novices) and the colonial government was marked, in the long run, by significant conflicts over the management of the sangha, and disagreements over responsibility for the sustaining of Buddhism.3 However, in Singapore and Malaysia, the conditions were quite different. Instead of the British replacing a local Buddhist king, the British were involved in importing Buddhism into the region, through

4   Thomas Borchert its labor policies. As both Samuels (Malaysia) and Zhang (Singapore) show here, this meant that while there were conflicts between Theravada Buddhists and colonial governments, the relationship had aspects of a partnership (for example in opposing Communists in Cold War yet still colonial Malaysia) and productive rather than oppressive (as in the interactions between Mahayana and Theravada monks in colonial Singapore). This unevenness of colonialism could be experienced even within a single colony. It is again worth stressing that colonialism of Theravada communities of Southeast Asia was not a singular event, but a series of polices and processes that were imposed upon the people of the region. There is perhaps a tendency to over emphasize the dates that started colonial regimes (as the discussion above does), but the treaties that marked the beginning of colonial regimes did not immediately produce changes in the societies under discussion here. As Owen et al. note, “The process of colonization, like other transnational ones that have affected Southeast Asia (Indianization, Islamization and modernization come to mind), was uneven, fragmented and contested, and its long-­run effects varied in scope and intensity from place to place.”4 Obvious examples of this unevenness include the fact that the national space that we now refer to as Myanmar was not immediately colonized, but only over the course of three different wars between 1825 and 1885. Moreover, the policies of the colonial state in Burma varied across time and place, even as they ostensibly were allowing internal management of the sangha. As Kirichenko shows when discussing changes to the position of thathanabaing (the leader of the sangha in Burma), the consequences of colonization into the administration of the sangha, as well as the religious lives of the people, varied over time, indeed reverberating across decades. Similarly, in Sipsongpanna, a tributary relationship at the end of the nineteenth century led to a century long incorporation as an internal colony of the People’s Republic, but as my chapter argues, it was only in the Reform era beginning in the early 1980s that the sangha becomes somewhat centralized. In other words, colonization of Theravada communities is not just a political event, but a long-­term process. Within these processes, it should be unsurprising that Theravada Buddhists responded to colonial projects of governance in a variety of ways. While it is probably a mistake to assume that colonial subjects ever fully recognized the legitimacy of colonial rule, it is equally a mistake to assume that all Theravada Buddhists suffered as a result of colonialism (of whichever community). Although there was certainly domination and resistance to this domination, as the chapters in this volume make clear, there was also working with, appropriation and simply ignoring colonial “masters.” Colonial governing projects opened up opportunities for locals (through education,5 through governing projects, through the intensification of the interactions across the Indian Ocean,6 and colonialism had the effect (whether intended or not) of creating new elites within Southeast Asian societies.7 This is perhaps most obvious in a place like Singapore, where the city itself was the product of colonialism, but it could also be seen in figures like Dr. Beni Madheb Barua who was an Indian scholar of Indian

Introduction   5 Philosophy, and a professor in a university system that was the product of colonial policies (see Surendran this volume), or the young monks of Lanna at the end of the nineteenth century, who entered into the Dhammayut-­Nikaya and served as missionaries of the Bangkok government in their efforts to neutralize the independence of northern Thai monks.8 There has perhaps been a tendency to see figures like these who worked within colonial structures in negative ways, as pawns of the colonial regime, or as weak figures. However, recent work by Anne Blackburn and Alicia Turner has made it clear that Theravada Buddhists who were colonial subjects were actors who could function on several planes— they worked within local logics and agendas, but they could also speak to, with and against colonial projects.9 Thomas DuBois has noted that “Rather than domination, the use of neologisms [such as “religion”] by native actors demonstrated an adaptation of nationalist movements to use the ideological weapons of the Europeans against them.”10 Indeed, as Kirichenko’s chapter on the thathanabaing in this volume persuasively demonstrates, monks or other Buddhist actors that look weak are sometimes in fact effectively using and appropriating colonial governance to their own ends. I am not suggesting here that all actions should be reread as resistance to colonialism. But rather that we should recognize that Theravada Buddhists lived in a complicated world with multiple agendas (only some of which were overtly and obviously Buddhist) and imperfect information and enforcement. We can assume I think that most actors sought to maximize what they saw as the good, or at least their good, but it is not always clear to us what that might have been (or indeed might be). The authors of The Emergence of Southeast Asia highlight the tendency to see colonialism as a “logical, almost inevitable process … its success was contingent on many local factors as well as on differing policies and actions of the colonial powers.”11 In the same vein, the chapters in this volume tell us a partial story about the experience of Theravada Buddhists within colonial projects, a set of experiences that have been relatively invisible up to this point, hidden behind powerful narratives of what colonialism meant.12 There are several different ways that the chapters in this volume complicate how scholars have depicted Theravada Buddhism under colonialism. One of the consequences of distinct colonial regimes and the dominance of the nation-­state is that it has been rare for scholars to examine the effects of colonialism beyond the range of a single colony or nation-­state. There has been much work done on the study of Theravada Buddhist societies and the colonial world in the last decade.13 While of significant value, the focus on single locations has made it more difficult to see Theravada Buddhism as a whole. Without trying to assert a coherent unity to the religious communities of Southeast Asia, it is instructive to view them together. Indeed, it is only in viewing them together that we begin to see patterns of response. For example, while anti-­colonial movements have been important in changes that have taken place in sanghas across Southeast Asia, equally striking are the ways that sanghas have changed in relation to the conditions created by the colonial states. These include utilizing British law to foster claims of authority in the temples (de Silva) or to attempt to centralize a sangha

6   Thomas Borchert (Kirichenko), or to take advantage of the centralizing forces of the colonial state (Borchert). In addition, while we most commonly associate colonialism with anti-­colonialism, in the case of Singapore (Zhang) and Malaysia (Samuels), colonial processes brought about the existence of Theravada sanghas that had not previously existed. Indeed, in reading the chapters in this volume, it becomes clear that it is necessary for us to think about Theravada Buddhist communities both comparatively and regionally, a practice that has been relatively uncommon since the late 1970s.14 This volume furthermore expands consideration to areas of the world that are not normally associated with Theravada Buddhism or colonialism. Singapore is generally seen as a Chinese city where Buddhism is present, but not necessarily a primary religious component. Malaysia is a Malay country with a Chinese minority (and hence of interest primarily to scholars of Islam) and Bengal is part of India where Buddhism was absent for approximately 800 years. However, both Singapore and Malaysia were (and are) homes to immigrants from mainland Southeast Asia that came to the island through British colonial policies and networks, bringing with them Theravada forms of Buddhism (as Zhang and Samuels discuss). While Theravada communities in Bengal were not the result of British colonial systems, as Surendran’s chapter shows, there were Buddhist castes in Bengal whose participation in intellectual institutions and networks was the result of British colonialism. Similarly, while we tend to think of colonialism within Southeast Asia primarily as an external phenomena, in at least two cases discussed here, the Thai incorporation of Lanna referenced above, and the Chinese annexation of a Tai region of Southwest China (Borchert’s chapter), it was an internal one. While it is important to understand that many people in both Thailand and China (not least the government) would object to the portrayal of Lanna as a colony of Bangkok and of Sipsongpanna as a colony of China, there are some good reasons to see them as such, even as they are distinct locations as well. Finally, the book seeks to complicate the standard view of Theravada experiences of colonialism by taking a longer view of the enterprises. Again, normally the period of colonialism of Theravada countries would probably be understood as the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Sri Lanka was partly colonized for a longer period than this, but it was in the beginning of the nineteenth century that the British took the island over. However, even if we no longer talk about the internal colonies of China and Thailand, the period of European colonialism lasted into the late 1950s, which meant that it overlapped with the Cold War. Particularly in Samuels’ chapter, we see the consequences of the Cold War in the development of the Theravada community in Malaysia, and the fear of ethnic Chinese following their mainland relatives and becoming Communist. Yet we also see the effect of the Cold War in the development of ecumenical Buddhist movements, both in Malaysia and Singapore. Moreover, as Harris shows in his discussion of a republican monk of Cambodia, the seeds of anti-­ monarchical republicanism were planted during the colonial period. Extending the discussion beyond what is classically studied as the colonial period, moreover, helps make visible the links between colonial and national-­formations.15

Introduction   7 It is somewhat anachronistic for us to use the term Theravada in this volume, since it is a name that would have not been in common usage for many of the communities discussed here. Theravada is of course the term that people often use to describe the Buddhist communities of Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, with their emphasis, among other things, on the importance of the “historical” Buddha, the words of this Buddha, written in Pali and the idea of the arahant as opposed to the bodhisattva. The term was brought into relatively common usage in the middle of the twentieth century during meetings of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, and was largely proposed as a replacement for the word “Hinayana,” the small(er) vehicle. Hinayana, was never a term used by the Buddhists of the region to refer to themselves, but rather was used by those following the Mahayana (great vehicle) in largely pejorative ways. The fact that the Buddhists of Southeast Asia never used the word “Theravada” to describe themselves either did not ultimately pose an insoluble problem for those that decided that Theravada was the best term to use here. The people of Southeast Asia have generally referred to their Buddhism straightforwardly as “the teachings of the Buddha,” and themselves as “the people of the teachings of the Buddha.” Even now in contemporary countries of Southeast Asia, while most people are familiar with the term Theravada, it is not necessarily the term that people use on an everyday basis.16 Despite the anachronism, I think that it is reasonable for us to use this term here. The practices and communities that we are studying here are a particular type of Buddhism, not Buddhism in general, and the sanghas of these regions had profound connections with one another over time. Part of what is interesting about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the history of the region is the ways that local Buddhists are coming to understand their location within a broader conception of Buddhism that has by now been naturalized. This changing perception was partially a result of networks created or intensified through the development of efficient travel within the region by the colonial powers.17 However the Buddhists of the region still tended to see themselves as having more natural ties to other Buddhists of the region than to the Buddhists of East Asia for example. Our use of “Theravada” in the title and throughout is meant to signal this, even as we acknowledge the potential problems. The discussion of “Theravada” underpins a broader problem of the categories of both religion and Buddhism. While Buddhists have clearly been aware of other Buddhists and Buddhist schools across time, it is not an exaggeration to say that “Buddhism” as a single, universal, transhistorical subject—a “world” religion—is very much the product of the consequences of the European colonization of Asia. In saying this, I emphasize that “Buddhism” as a coherent subject was conceptualized in the conversations, and negotiations between Asian Buddhists, European scholars and colonial officials, and the expanded sense of communication that emerged from the late eighteenth century, creating “wider opportunities” through which Buddhists could engage in conversations with one another.18 The emergence of Buddhism as something we call a religion in other words is part of a larger process of the development of the idea of religion as a discrete and specific sphere of life. Scholars have understood for several decades

8   Thomas Borchert that religion is an idea that does not have a single stable meaning, and that a genealogy of its usage can be formulated. More recently, Talal Asad has argued the necessity of understanding the idea of the secular in the same way. Although we exist in a context in which scientific knowledge is hegemonic, this is a transformation of the recent past. Perhaps more importantly, as Peter Gottschalk has shown in a recent discussion of science and religion, these forms of knowledge, and the authoritative divergence of science from religion is deeply entangled with colonial forms of knowledge.19 It is not irrelevant to the discussion here that the idea of Buddhism as a unified object of scholarly attention was being formulated at the same time that religion and the secular were also coming into being. In other words, Buddhism is not the product of European colonialism, but the development of the idea of Buddhism is deeply entangled with the colonial project, with the idea of religion and with proper forms of being (religious/Buddhist) within the modern world. One of the limitations of our current academic perspective is a certain occlusion of how “Buddhism” developed under “colonialism.” Because the idea of “Buddhism” is the product of the colonial encounter, it has become harder to see what Buddhists were doing in the midst of the colonial world.20 And what we see  here in this volume is that they were doing a number of different things— sometimes they were resisting colonial encroachments, sometimes they participated in aspects—particularly the civilizational aspects—of imperialism, and sometimes they ignored the colonial enterprise entirely (or at least as far as we can tell). In the long run, these ideas about Buddhism as a unified subject, and the proper ways of being a modern Buddhist have been taken up by Theravada Buddhist communities, but always partially and incompletely. Sometimes these ideas were imposed by colonial authorities, sometimes by national states, sometimes they were taken up by individual Theravada Buddhists or Theravada communities— for intellectual reasons, strategic ones or because this mode of understanding was becoming hegemonic in order to participate in privileged forms of the religion— always imperfectly and incompletely.21 Stephen Berkwitz reminds us that the projects of modernity on Buddhist communities have always been unevenly applied, appropriated and indeed felt;22 we should understand the experience of colonial projects in the same way.23 Following Blackburn, we can say that colonialism “emphatically marked” Theravada Buddhist communities, but the way in which this was done was far more interesting, complicated, and messy than is generally acknowledged or understood. Changes to Theravada Buddhist communities as a result of colonialism have entailed changes in the relationship of state-­religion, the organization of the sangha, as well as its management and also the development of new/old ways of seeing Theravada Buddhism in the world. Part of what this means is that we need to take care when telling the story of Buddhist history. While colonialism, European and otherwise, undoubtedly precipitated changes within Theravada Buddhist communities, and in some ways caused them, the chapters in this volume show that there were many different ways that Theravada Buddhists worked within colonial contexts. Indeed, there is no Theravada response to colonialism, but myriad responses. The history of

Introduction   9 Theravada Buddhists and colonialism is one that should not be told in the singular.

The organization of the book There are a number of different ways that the chapters in this book speak to one another, and they could have been organized and arranged in a number of different ways. I have arranged them according to several themes that highlight some of the dynamics of the issues raised above: “Colony/nation,” “Centralization in internal colonies,” “Managing and governing Theravada Buddhists,” and “Students of empires.”

Colony/nation In the previous narrative of the colonial experience of Theravada Buddhist communities, there was a tendency to view national communities relatively uncritically, and without much attention to how the world might be imagined through the lens of the nation-­state. It also meant that there was within the scholarship a certain failure to question how people saw themselves as Sinhala, as Thai, as Burmese and how that might have changed through time. This fit well with the impact-­response model of colonial history. One relatively coherent nation-­group took over the geographical space of another, and there was an obvious impact on the part of the receivers. In time those taken over responded by creating modern forms of their religion. Since this understanding of Buddhism and colonialism was formulated, though, the scholarly community has as a whole focused a great deal of attention on critically engaging with national forms, revealing how discourses of the nation work, as well as the disciplinary practices of states to create a certain type of citizenry/subject (whether colonial or national). As a result, scholars have been less likely to see the modern nation emerging “naturally” from the colony, and examining how colonial processes and disciplines enabled and created the conditions by which the nation could be imagined (and then naturalized). Religion (of whatever type) has often been an important part of the narrative, because it has been an important resource for anti-­colonial and/or national movements. However, I would argue that until quite recently, the way religion has been used has been like the nation 30 years ago, static and focused on implicit narratives of tradition and modernity. The chapters in this part provide fertile ground for understanding colonial complexes within Southeast Asia and the ways that Buddhism was lived both there and in the nations that were becoming imagined within them. Juliane Schober’s chapter, “To be Burmese is to be Buddhist” examines the development of several Buddhist movements over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century. While she shows a general development and radicalization of Buddhists during this period, from the relatively pro-­colonial position of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) to the strongly anti-­colonial positions of the monks of the General Council of the Sangha Semettgyi, this was not

10   Thomas Borchert a teleological development, but rather the messy politics of the contingent. Deploying Bruce Lincoln’s model for talking about the diversity of attitudes toward religion in society, Schober shows how for most of the Buddhists there was at the same time an emerging sense of the Burmese nation, and a clear conflation of the sense of nation-­hood and Theravada Buddhism. At the same time, however, she grounds her discussion in an explicit discussion of the wider Buddhist world being established through the intensification of trade and political networks within the world of the Indian Ocean. Wenxue Zhang’s chapter, “Interactions between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore,” provides a fascinating story of how the colonial context of Singapore—a key node in some of these networks—created the opportunities for interaction and cooperation between parts of the Buddhist world that had relatively few interactions until the colonial period. While it is not commonplace for Buddhists of all streams to interact with one another, and indeed to be seen as being part of the same religious community, this was not necessarily the case in colonial Singapore. In the course of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as different waves of people came to the island, some encouraged by colonial policies, some under their own auspices, they found it within their interests to work together within the colony. The narrative Zhang provides, which I would hazard is little known outside of Singapore, is not about the development of a national identity as we see in Schober’s chapter. Rather it shows how the models of inter-­religious and inter-­racial harmony so central to the contemporary Singaporean national ideology have certain parallels in earlier moments of the colonial experience. Jeffrey Samuel’s chapter, “A tale of two colonialisms,” examines the life and experiences of a Sinhala monk, Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda, who came to Malaysia in the early 1950s to minister to the Sinhala communities that had traveled along the colonial Indian Ocean networks to work in the tin mines and rubber plantations of colonial Malaya. Once there, though, Venerable Dhammananda found himself missionizing to the Straits Chinese, a community that came to the Theravada Buddhism of Sinhala monks through a shared knowledge of English. Venerable Dhammananda’s agenda as a monk working with and among ethnically Chinese communities fit well with the agenda of the British colonial government, which wanted to use religion to inoculate the Chinese communities of Malaya against the spread of Communism. By looking at Venerable Dhammananda’s experiences in both Sri Lanka and Malaysia, Samuels suggests we see the ways that local Buddhism was shaped by different configurations of colonial agendas.

Centralization in internal colonies Colonial formations were central for the formation of national communities as well. It is easy to assume that national communities were the heirs of the Theravada Buddhist colonies of Southeast Asia, in part because colonial formations often led to anti-­colonial resistance (which led ultimately and inexorably if not

Introduction   11 inevitably to nation-­states), and in part because—pace Chatterjee 1993—national states often inherited the governing technologies of the colonial state. However, while this is certainly part of the story that must be told about the emergence of modern national communities in Southeast Asia, part of what we see in this volume are the ways that the national and the colonial are tied up with one another. While the Theravada Buddhist experience of colonialism was generally with European empires, as discussed above, there have also been colonial contexts that have taken place within the confines of nation-­states. The relationship between these “internal colonies” and the national communities of which they are a part is similar to the relationship between the other colonial relationships that are represented in this volume, being “predicated upon the unequal rates of exchange between the urban power-­centers and the peripheral, often ethnic hinterlands.”24 These processes are represented here by two different experiences of regional sanghas being incorporated into national sanghas through both coercive and non-­coercive means, the Lanna sangha of northern Thailand, and the Dai-­lue Sangha of Southwest China. In both cases, these were semi-­independent polities25 that were incorporated— i.e., colonized—into larger national communities as a result of outside colonial threats. For example, as Ratanaporn Sethakul shows in her chapter, “Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization in late nineteenth and early twentieth century,” while the Chiang Mai-­based kingdom of Lanna had a formal relationship with the Bangkok government, threats by the British in Burma to invade Lanna in order to “protect” their commercial interests inspired the government of Rama V to rearrange the relationship between the center and the periphery, centralizing the governance of the peripheries of Thailand. Ratanaporn examines the reaction of the sangha of Lanna, the region we now call northern Thailand, to the efforts of the Bangkok government to incorporate it into a national organization. The political centralization and incorporation into the emerging nation-­ state played out in very particular ways within the sangha of Lanna. As a source of authority independent of the local lords that were losing their own control, the sangha was a source of danger for Bangkok’s efforts to centralize. Ratanaporn shows how Bangkok used both coercive measures and also savvy actions on the part of the sangharaja of Thailand (a half-­brother of the king) to domesticate the Lanna sangha. My own chapter, “Shifts in Buddhist authority in Sipsongpanna under Chinese colonialism,” focuses on a Theravada minority of Southwest China. While long tributary to the Chinese and Burmese states, this region was colonized by the Chinese Communist state in the middle of the twentieth century (though the international community recognized China’s formal ownership of the region in 1896). Like Lanna with Thailand, Sipsongpanna was incorporated into the Chinese nation-­state, and so its form as a colony is somewhat different than those places colonized by Britain or France. In its “traditional,” meaning pre-­1953 form, the sangha of Sipsongpanna was closely related to the hierarchy of the local aristocracy, but in fact fairly decentralized. I argue here that the consequence of Chinese colonialism has been to centralize the sangha. Ironically,

12   Thomas Borchert this has led to a stronger Buddhist institution that, if it cannot resist the Chinese state, can certainly argue with state actors in fostering local Buddhist agendas. This suggests the necessity of seeing how state policies (colonial or national) get lived out on the ground by both the local state and local Buddhists.

Managing and governing Theravada Buddhists The chapters in this part explore the nitty-­gritty institutional contexts, their governance and their shifts within different colonial contexts. While the nationalist histories which shaped earlier understandings of Southeast Asian Buddhist experiences of colonialism tend to see the governance of religious communities in fairly stark, even binary, terms, the chapters here are generally much more ambiguous in the pictures they draw of the Buddhisms within colonial frameworks. Focusing on specific institutions or organizations, the chapters here are less about the moral dynamics of colonialism than they are about the consequences of certain decisions by Buddhist actors and/or colonial authorities: How do policies of colonial states affect the actual practice of Buddhism? What are the unintended consequences of these policies? What happens to Buddhist communities when they work within the strictures placed by the colonial government? Part of what we see here is that while Buddhists were generally in a weak position politically vis-­à-vis the colonial government, they were at the same time capable of resisting colonial projects, or—more intriguingly—appropriating them for their own ends. In “ ‘Colonial governmentality’: legal and administrative technologies of the governance of Sri Pada Temple in Sri Lanka,” Premakumara de Silva seeks to answer these questions by looking at how Sri Pada, one of the central pilgrimage sites in Sri Lanka and one revered by Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims, was managed over the course of the nineteenth century. While initially uninterested in regulating religious institutions, the British colonial state came to feel that it was necessary to do so (in Burma and India as well as Sri Lanka). Rather than governing them directly, however, they set up regulatory frameworks by which institutions such as temples should be managed. De Silva traces these regulatory technologies, showing how different local actors sought to utilize them to either gain control of the space, or use them to limit other actors’ control. These regulations were ultimately highly productive in creating new relationships over time to sacred spaces within Sri Lanka, and de Silva suggests that they show how we need to see “colonial governmentality” as a strategy that had multiples facets to it. A central dynamic within de Silva’s chapter is how actors seek to utilize colonial technologies. In Alexey Kirichenko’s chapter, “The thathanabaing project: monastic hierarchies and colonialism in Burma,” the agency of the Taunggwin Hsayadaw, the last thathanabaing (head of the sangha), is emphasized. According to Kirichenko, scholars have tended to see the thathanabaing as emblematic of the way that the British caused the breakdown of Burmese Buddhism. This head of the sangha was appointed by a king, a job that the British did not want

Introduction   13 to take on. When the British failed to maintain this responsibility, they failed to provide the key figure for the maintenance of strict Buddhism in Burma, and thus (unintentionally) brought about the fragmentation of the Burmese sangha. Kirichenko argues forcefully however, that this narrative is reasonable, but also wrong. The thathanabaing narrative assumes a unified sangha that probably never existed. Instead, he shows that the office of the thathanbaing was one that some Burmese actors sought to develop in innovative ways to foster the kind of Buddhist community they wanted in the context where the state did not serve to support Buddhism. At the same time, Kirichenko also suggests that rather than being the weak figure he is normally portrayed as, the evidence suggests that Taunggwin Hsayadaw was a savvy actor who made the most of a relatively weak hand. Gregory Kourilsky’s chapter, “The Institut bouddhique in Laos: ambivalent dynamics of a colonial project,” presents a situation that, like Kirichenko’s chapter, is rife with agendas that both compete and coalesce. It also demonstrates the need to examine colonialism and Theravada Buddhism regionally. Kourilsky examines a school that the French opened to foster the development of Buddhism in both Cambodia and Laos, the Institut bouuddhique. The French were not simply interested in development however; they also wanted to decrease the influence of Siam on Lao and Khmer Buddhism, in part by preventing Lao and Khmer monks from traveling to Bangkok for an education. Their efforts to build the Institut were aided by Lao royalty and monks who shared some of the French goal of producing an independent Lao Buddhism. However, there were limits to their shared work; Laotians who were involved with the Institut were critical of the French, in that they had swapped out domination by the Siamese for domination by the French and even the Khmer. Kourilsky suggests that ultimately the Institut had some impact on Lao Buddhism, though perhaps not as much as its Cambodian counterpart, particularly by establishing a pattern that would be taken up by post-­colonial Lao governments.

Students of the empire The last group of chapters focuses on the consequences of knowledge projects. It is well known that part of the process of empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to create knowledge about imperial subjects. This knowledge was put to use, for example, in controlling imperial subjects,26 but it also returned in a variety of circulations—to use Duara’s 2015 formulation—to shape society in Europe.27 Just as importantly, these knowledge projects had an impact on the ways that Southeast Asian actors understood themselves in the world, in relation to the empire and as local actors. While the majority of Asian Buddhists continued to study and work in “traditional” Buddhist institutions, some studied in schools whose curricula or models were based on European schools. Still others studied in the metropole (London or Paris, for example). The Theravada Buddhists who studied in non-­native institutions found themselves in complicated mediating roles, sometimes communicating European perspectives and values to

14   Thomas Borchert locals, sometimes informing colonial governments of the interests and needs of local communities (I am speaking here not just of the Theravada world, but colonized Asia more broadly). It is not easy to summarize the political positions of these figures, as they could be conservative or radical, supporters of colonial projects or opponents of them, civilizers or rebels. The two chapters in this part reflect this breadth. The first chapter, Gitanjali Surendran’s “Beni Madhab Barua and the study of Buddhism in Calcutta c.1918 to 1948,” focuses on a Bengali scholar of Buddhism who was himself a member of a caste that had been converted to Theravada Buddhism in the mid nineteenth century. Colonial knowledge of Buddhism has been a central part of the study of Buddhism in the colonial period, though this has more often been focused on the colonizers rather than on the colonized.28 Surendran examines a figure who in a sense combined both as part of what Surendran calls the “Indian discovery of Buddhism.” Barua advocated for knowledge of Buddhism as central to the study of Indian Philosophy, but also advocated for a modernist and universalist form of Buddhism. As Surendran argues, Barua was a part of an intellectual elite of Bengal whose views and ideas could circulate within the networks of colonial India (which included of course Sri Lanka and Burma). His view of Buddhism was both highly local, but also very much the product of the colonial world. Finally, Ian Harris’ chapter, “Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia: a colonialist legacy” examines the intellectual life of Khieu Chum, a monk who wrote strongly against the royal system in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Harris traces Khieu Chum’s writings and training, as well as the context of Cambodia from the 1930s forward. He argues that even as Khieu Chum was well trained in local Buddhist knowledge and Pali, he was also well read in the intellectual currents of France in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, many of his republican writings bear the traces and logic of both. In other words, Khieu Chum’s anti-­monarchist stance, while often couched according to traditional Buddhist arguments, was shaped an enabled by discourses from the colonial metropole.

Notes   1 There is no simple way of referring to the names of the locations discussed in this volume. Names changed over time, external colonial rulers chose to call a region one name, while it was referred to the inhabitants by another. Because this volume is directed at considering Theravada Buddhist communities and polities more widely, if not quite as a whole, and because we, hope to reach a broader audience, the decision was made to use the more common name for a given location. For example, while the British generally referred to Sri Lanka as Ceylon, when it is referred to in this volume, Sri Lanka is generally used. We acknowledge that there might be historical anachronisms nominally at least as a result of this decision.   2 Berkwitz, Buddhist Poetry, pp. 9–10.   3 See Schober this volume for discussion of Burma; see also Turner, Saving Buddhism.   4 Owen, The Emergence, p. 78.

Introduction   15   5 Turner, Saving Buddhism, notes that there were concerns over the decline of traditional forms of education, because parents were choosing to have their sons educated in schools that catered to careers in the civil service.   6 See Frost, “Wider Opportunities.”   7 Owen, The Emergence, p. 75.   8 This is not just about the creation of new elites. It is clear that while Thailand was never fully colonized, its semi-­colonial status benefited the kings of the Chakri dynasty in their efforts to centralize and reform the governance of Siam. See Ratanaporn this volume and Jory, Thailand’s Theory.   9 Blackburn, Buddhist Learning, Locations; Turner, Saving Buddhism. 10 DuBois, “Introduction,” pp. 7–8. 11 Owen, The Emergence, pp. 77–78. 12 Two examples of such narratives are the modernization thesis for Theravada Buddhism and the tendency to embed Theravada Buddhism in western historiographical models. For a critique of the latter, see Walters, Finding Buddhists. 13 Important recent examples include some of the work already cited here, such as Blackburn, Locations, Turner, Saving Buddhism, and Berkwitz, Buddhist Poetry, but would also include Hansen, How to Behave, and Schober, Modern Buddhist. 14 One important recent attempt is Collins and Schober, Theravada Buddhist Encounters. For attempts going back to the 1970s, see Smith, Buddhism and Legitimation. 15 It is not new to assert that there is a connection between colonial and post-­colonial governments, a point made clearly by Chatterjee in the early 1990s among others. However, because Buddhism would seem to be outside of politics, scholars of Buddhist communities have been slow to take up the connections between colonial, anti-­ colonial, and post-­colonial governments. 16 Much of what I have been discussing here is formulated in Skilling et al., How Theravada, and in particular the long essay there by Pereira, “Whence Theravada.” 17 Frost, “Wider Opportunities.” 18 King, Orientalism; Frost, “Wider Horizons”; Hallisey, “Roads Taken”; Blackburn, Locations. 19 Asad, Formations; Gottschalk, Religion. 20 Lopez, Curators, reminds us that the study of Buddhism was born in the same moment. 21 Moreover, as Hallisey, “Roads Taken,” Blackburn, Locations as well as Kirichenko this volume show, there were sometimes elective affinities between the interests of Buddhists and the interests of colonial states. 22 Berkwitz, “History,” p. 9. 23 Berkwitz, Buddhist Poetry, p. 25. 24 Gladney, “Internal Colonialism,” p. 2, quoted in Borchert this volume. 25 The relationship between these two polities and with larger polities in central Thailand, Burma, and China was itself complicated and changed over the course of centuries. Chiang Mai was founded 700 years ago by the grandson of one of the rulers of Sipsongpanna. 26 Anderson, Imagined Communities, ch. 10. 27 Duara, Crisis; See also Gottschalk, Religion. 28 See in this context the essays in Lopez, Curators, as well as Almond, British Discovery. See Jory, “Thai and Western” for a complicating viewpoint.

References Almond, Philip. The British Discovery of Buddhism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

16   Thomas Borchert Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991 (2nd edition). Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Berkwitz, Stephen. “The History of Buddhism in Retrospect,” in Buddhism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Stephen C. Berkwitz. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO, 2006. Berkwitz, Stephen. Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism: Alagiyavanna and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Blackburn, Anne M. Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Collins, Steven and Juliane Schober, eds. Buddhist Encounters with Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2017. Duara, Prasenjit. The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. DuBois, Thomas. “Introduction: The Transformation of Religion in East and Southeast Asia—Paradigmatic Change in Regional Perspective,” in Casting Faiths: Imperialism and the Transformation of Religion in East and Southeast Asia, edited by Thomas David DuBois. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Frost, Mark Ravinder. “ ‘Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo, 1870–1920.” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 937–967. Gladney, Dru. “Internal Colonialism and the Uyghur Nationality: Chinese Nationalism and its Subaltern Subjects.” Cahier d’Etude Méditerranée Orientale et le Monde Turco-­Iranien 25 (1998): 2–11. Gottschalk, Peter. Religion, Science and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hallisey, Charles. “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism” in Curators of the Buddha, edited by Donald S. Lopez, 31–62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Hansen, Anne Ruth. How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Jory, Patrick. “Thai and Western Scholarship in the Age of Colonialism: King Chulalongkorn Redefines the Jatakas,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 3 (2002): 891–918. Jory, Patrick. Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jātaka and the Idea of the Perfect Man. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016. King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the “Mystic East.” Oxford: Routledge, 1999. Lopez, Donald S., Jr. “Introduction.” In Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Owen, Norman G., ed. The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Schober, Juliane. Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies and Civil Society. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011.  Skilling, Peter, Jason A. Carbine, Claudio Cicuzza, and Santi Pakdeekham, eds. How Theravāda is Theravāda?: Exploring Buddhist Identities. Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 2012.

Introduction   17 Smith, Bardwell L., ed. Religion and Legitimation of Power in Thailand, Laos, and Burma. Chambersburg, PA: ANIMA Books, 1978.  Turner, Alicia Marie. Saving Buddhism: the Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Walters, Jonathan S. Finding Buddhists in Global History. Washington DC: Amer­ican Historical Association, 1998.

Part I

Colony/Nation

2 To be Burmese is to be Buddhist Formations of Buddhist modernity in colonial Burma1 Juliane Schober

Most scholars accept the premise that Burmese nationalism emerged in response to the presence of British colonial rule. Michael Mendelson,2 in particular, investigated the role of the Buddhist sangha in the decade before and after independence. This chapter seeks to nuance the different ways in which Burmese Buddhists—both monks and lay people—participated in the construction of an emerging nationalist sentiment and identity as a response to the challenges posed by colonial modernity. The narrative traces various conjunctures of Buddhism and colonialism to trace the formation of a Buddhist nationalist identity and underscore familiar themes in the colonial history of Theravada Buddhist cultures. Such themes include the waning authority of the sangha, its internal fragmentation, and the concurrent rise in the religious authority of the Buddhist laity. Factors that contributed to these developments in colonial Burma include the prolonged vacancy in the office of the Burmese monastic patriarch (thathanabaing) in upper Burma and efforts of internal self-­reform among so-­called Mindon sects that emphasized observance of the vinaya to ensure purity of monastic practice. Related changes included the growing popularity of meditation promoted by the Ledi Sayadaw3 and efforts to propagate Buddhism in Burma and abroad.4 The changing Burmese conceptions about Buddhist authority unfolded at their own pace in Lower Burma, where British colonial administration was established in 1825 and in Upper Burma which did not come under colonial rule until 1886. These formative developments of Buddhist modernity therefore accentuate regional and social differences in the Burmese engagement with colonial modernity and their constructions of colonial Buddhism. While secularist efforts eventually brought about independence from colonial rule, Buddhist formations responded to colonial modernity by envisioning and popularizing particular visions for the nation’s future and independence from colonial rule. The gradual expansion of the British Empire into lower and then upper Burma during three Anglo-­Burmese Wars (1824–1885) was a catalyst for profound and complex transformations in Buddhist institutions and practices. The advent of colonial administration created organizational and knowledge structures that fostered economic and political goals of the empire, the rationalization of the state and western education. This modern ethos also created transnational networks of

22   Juliane Schober communication and shaped various local and regional responses to colonial modernity among different Burmese social classes. Colonial modernity in Burma also transformed traditional Buddhist practices and institutions that had regulated social status and power through an economy of merit, thus undermining the cultural rationale for a traditional social structure and introducing secular avenues to power that drastically diminished Buddhist authority and values.5 These changes profoundly reshaped Buddhist practices throughout Burmese society. In separating secular power from its Buddhist foundations, the British followed a deliberate policy of non-­involvement in the religious affairs of the colony. Yet, colonial practice and policy did not succeed in disengaging colonial politics from religious contexts. Since the publication of Talal Asad’s seminal study, the secular domain has become the subject of much scholarly inquiry.6 This new departure acknowledges a genealogy of ideas rooted in western enlightenment and responding to a Christian view of the world. In this western, and also British colonial, view on how power is to be administrated, the public and political sphere is governed by a secular regime, while religion is relegated largely to the private domains of households and families. Scholars like Charles Taylor questioned the degree to which secular power is an inevitable result of modernity and thus “a-­cultural,” while others, including Saba Mahmood, argue for different kinds of secularisms that emerge in creative tension with and respond to the demands of particular religious genealogies, such as, for instance, diverse Christian, Muslim, and Buddhism secularisms.7 This chapter seeks to contribute to these debates by proposing that the early twentieth century in Burma witnessed the emergence of a particular Burmese Buddhist secularism in response to traditional Buddhist ideals of power and to the western, post-­enlightenment ideals of the British colonial regime that identified public sphere with secular politics and the private sphere with religion. The national debates that ensued shaped not only the decades leading up to independence from colonial rule, but also the decades that saw the formation of the new nation-­state, continuing in the contemporary Myanmar of 2011 and beyond. Burmese responses to British colonial rule played out differently in the regions of Upper and Lower Burma. Lower Burma had been under colonial administration for nearly a century, since 1825. During the early decades of British colonial rule, their impact was especially pronounced in Lower Burma and in the cosmopolitan capital of the colony, Rangoon, where the Buddhist sangha underwent considerable fragmentation in the absence of traditional sources of Buddhist authority, like Buddhist kingship (dhammaraja) and the office of a thathanabaing. Over the course of three or more generations, Burmese in Rangoon and its surrounding area participated in transnational networks in modern education, through cultural contacts with foreign travelers and through the influx of ethnic communities into Lower Burma. Although King Mindon sought to revitalize the sangha and renovate Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon in 1878, his efforts did not succeed in re-­establishing traditional Buddhist authority. The cultural and political authority of the sangha in Lower Burma gradually

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   23 waned as monks and monasteries were more or less orphaned from the authority of the thathanabaing who resided in Mandalay. Moreover, the British refused to appoint a successor to the Taungdaw Sayadaw who passed away in 1895 and who had served as thathanabaing since the reign of Thibaw. This vacancy in monastic leadership expedited the organizational decline of the sangha, which had been the only traditional cultural institution to survive the collapse of the Mandalay court in 1885 and the British annexation of upper Burma in 1886. In upper Burma, where the population was largely rural and traditional in its educational background, the experience of colonial rule differed vastly from the cosmopolitan interactions that characterized colonial Rangoon and the region of lower Burma. For people in Mandalay and its surrounding regions, the experience of modernity commenced with a sudden eclipse of traditional cultural values, institutions, and lifeways8 and a hastened restructuring of Burmese society through colonial forms of knowledge and classification.9 Apart from Sri Lankan and Thai monks seeking to export the ordination traditions of monks in upper Burma, the sangha and lay elites in Mandalay entertained only sporadic contacts with transnational Buddhist organizations and activists. After the conquest of Mandalay, the sangha initially hoped to collaborate with the British in order to remedy the ineptitudes of King Thibaw’s court. However, the British rebuked this conciliatory offer and communications between the monastic elite in Mandalay and the British deteriorated quickly. Although diminished in authority, the sangha in upper Burma eventually came to articulate an anti-­ colonial discourse objecting to the presence of a foreign power that refused the responsibility of the traditional state to protect the thathana and hence was seen as anti-­Buddhist. Although the colonial government’s policy after 1886 sought to avoid direct involvement in the religious affairs of the colony, it nevertheless was eventually confronted by Buddhist forms of resistance and forced to acknowledge Buddhist concerns. The British refusal to exercise the traditional responsibility of Buddhist kingship by appointing a successor to the office of the thathanabaing raised many questions among Burmese about the moral authority of a secular, colonial state. At the same time, the British permitted public gatherings only for religious purposes. British policy opened up a number of social spaces in which different forms of Buddhist dissent with colonial modernity could be articulated, allowing for Buddhism to become a refuge for an emerging nationalist discourse. During the late colonial period, increasingly hegemonic colonial policies galvanized Burmese nationalism. Many Burmese objected especially to the Craddock Scheme10 (1919–1923) and the period of Diarchy (1923–1935) it ushered in, when the number of elected members of the Legislative Council in Burma was ostensibly increased, while their ability to participate in Burma’s future was subordinated to the Government of India. In this emergent nationalist discourse, diverse Buddhist institutions, actors, and practices acquired new political relevance and gave rise to new organizations. Some of these organizations were national in scope, while others had regional or local spheres of influence. While resistance to colonial rule in Burma comprised many voices, including secular

24   Juliane Schober ones, an early nationalist discourse coalesced around modern Buddhist identities and mobilized the general public around such sentiments. Even as late as the 1930s, Saya San, himself a former monk, advocated a return to the status-­quo ante and to the social and political order of a traditional Buddhist polity. To be Burmese and to be Buddhist in upper Burma therefore represented largely a rejection of the modern, cosmopolitan life ways colonial rule harbored for lower Burma. A history of the social developments shaping colonial Burma must therefore provide a nuanced account of cultural interchanges and developments at regional, national and transnational conjunctures in order to situate this emergent Buddhist nationalism within the broader context of the British Empire.

Modern Buddhist identities in regional contexts Colonialism initiated social transformations that shaped the formation of modern Buddhist identities in Burma. Writing about the revival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Mark Frost notes important transformations in the public space that were brought about by modern print culture and the emergence of transnational networks in colonial Asia.11 At the turn of the twentieth century, Rangoon was a cosmopolitan city, well placed within transnational networks that extended across the British Empire and beyond. A frequent port of call for ocean liners traveling to destinations east and west, Rangoon enjoyed a booming economy that supported traveling merchants and immigrant laborers from India, China, Europe, and other places along colonial trade routes. Despite these social transformations and transnational connections, society in colonial Rangoon was divided along imperial, class, and ethnic lines. The fragmentation of colonial Burmese society was so pervasive that observers like Furnivall referred to “atomized” groups within Burmese society that shared few spheres of interactions. The social distance among these groups was further enhanced by the predominant use of different languages, namely English among the elite and Burmese among rural and service providing communities. Apart from superficial social interactions with Burmese that were born of necessity, most colonial administrators inhabited a social world vastly different from that of most Burmese. Prestigious colonial clubs like the Pegu Club admitted European members only and after the fall of the Mandalay court, thakin, meaning “master,” had become the general form of address for members of the Indian Civil Service.12 Access to western education and the modern ethos it perpetuated created social distance between the Burmese colonial elite and mainstream society, while also initiating profound cultural and political transformations. Western education therefore profoundly influenced the first generation of Burmese nationalists by exposing them to the secular politics of the Indian Congress Party and to other aspects of civil society within the British Empire.13 Many prospective students were persuaded by economic and social opportunities a university education afforded them. The early 1900s saw large numbers of young urban Burmese obtain a higher education at universities in Calcutta, India, and in

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   25 England and nearly all of the early Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) leaders shared the educational and cultural experience of studying abroad. This shared educational experience among Rangoon’s young social elite helped cultivate acceptance of secular political authority. In 1920, Rangoon College finally ceased to function as an extension of Calcutta University and the Rangoon University Act envisioned a residential college with high educational standards and in effect restricted access to university to a privileged class. This plan provoked a student boycott and colonial nationalists insisted that the university curriculum at Rangoon University include the study of Burmese language and literature as well as Pali, Pyu, and Mon. Contact with the west also brought greater ethnic and religious diversity to Burma and furthered contact with transnational communities. Beyond the early Portuguese and Italian Catholic missions that had had a presence in lower Burma since the seventeenth century, European Christians now also included British and Amer­ican missionaries. Muslim immigrants came from India and Bengal, as did members of various Hindu communities. Immigrants from China included Mahayana Buddhists, Daoists, and Muslim Chinese. By the mid-­1930s, one million Indians had settled in lower Burma to work for the Indian Civil Service as traders, laborers, or money lenders. Rangoon had become a predominantly Indian city. This created not only economic competition between immigrant and Burmese communities, but also engendered lasting ethnic and political tensions, especially for Indian immigrants, both Hindu and Muslim. In addition, the British established a separate but parallel administration for Burma’s ethnic groups, providing many of Burma’s numerous ethnic minority groups enhanced access to the resources of the colonial government. A significant number of indigenous ethnic groups converted to Christianity that also enhanced their access to western education through Catholic and Protestant missionary schools. The ways in which the Burmese Buddhist laity and sangha encountered modern challenges and secular power varied by region, social class, and the quality and extent of supra-­regional, national and, in a few instances, even transnational connections and organizations. Various modern Buddhist practices and organizations emerged in reaction to the cultural and religious disjunctures colonial rule initiated. Led by groups like the YMBA, lay people in general claimed greater religious authority under colonial rule than had been the case during dynastic times. Within the sangha, the reformist-­minded Mindon lineages sought to assert their monastic standing by emphasizing their vinaya oriented practice and emulating the ideals of world renunciation. They derived their authority and organizational hierarchies within their respective monastic lineages that they perpetuated independently from their monastic peers. In the absence of a centralizing force in the sangha, the monastic engagement with colonization and modernity was characterized by range of responses and by internal fragmentation. In contrast to the monastic power vacuum, a western-­educated Burmese elite felt increasingly motivated to define what it meant to be Burmese and to be Buddhist within the rapidly changing, cosmopolitan, and colonial society of lower Burma. Their pursuit to define a modern, national, and religious identity developed out

26   Juliane Schober of a new ethnic and religious diversity and simultaneously involved political, economic, and cultural challenges. Throughout the twentieth century, regional and local differences in the ways in which Burmese Buddhists engaged colonialism, transnationalism and modernity created and re-­enforced corresponding cultural differences between upper and lower Burma as well as between lay and monastic authority, respectively. The impetus to organize Buddhist interest groups that transcended the social boundaries of traditional society developed from an awareness of transnational connections and from a perceived need to mobilize people to safeguard Buddhist values, intuitions, and practices against the moral decline generated in the age of colonial modernity. By the turn of the century, several lay Buddhist societies had emerged throughout Burma that operated mostly independently from one another. Burmese monks and lay people started these organizations that perceived of their mission as propagating Buddhist teachings, thathana pyu thi, a central theme in the practice of Burmese Buddhism. In 1897, the Sasana Noggaha Athin (Mission Association) was founded in Mandalay. In 1905, the Ledi Sayadaw began to establish local chapters of the Abidhamma Thankait Association, the Foreign Mission Societies and the Thathana Hita Athin in towns throughout the colony. Although a few westerners became involved in Buddhist missionary activities, this development did not lead to enduring transnational linkages between Burmese Buddhist organizations and transnational or international Buddhist networks. Instead, transnational networks nurtured secular forms of nationalism in colonial Rangoon. Organizations like the student led Dobama (We Burmese) pursued predominantly secular strategies during the 1930s when the YMBA had long been submerged within groups that relied primarily on mobilization techniques used by the Indian Congress Party. While Burma’s independence was eventually achieved through the efforts of secular nationalists, the discussion here examines the intersections of Buddhism and the nationalist struggle during British colonial rule.

Civil Buddhism in a colonial context: the Young Men’s Buddhist Association In the early twentieth century the nationalist discourse focused on the presence of colonial rule and foreigners in Burma, on the need for modern education in support of a civil society, and on a popular desire for spiritual renewal among Buddhist communities. A Buddhist worldview continued to be integral to the Burmese cultural and political imagination in many ways. In the absence of royal patronage for monastic institutions, lay practice became a voice for reform and renewed Buddhist authority. “To be Burmese is to be Buddhist”14 was a slogan that voiced one of the earliest responses to colonial rule by members of the YMBA. This group began as a social welfare society and soon became a social club and grassroots organization that gained rapid popularity among urban elites in the colonial capital, Rangoon, who sought to emulate British colonial society.

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   27 Their motto endured throughout the national history of the country now called Myanmar, but its popular interpretations assumed distinct meanings at various political moments in that history. Initially, it was a rallying call for YMBA members who sought to define for themselves and others in their western-­ educated, cosmopolitan circles what it meant to be Burmese and Buddhist within the British Empire at the start of the twentieth century. Their identification of Burmese national identity with Buddhism signaled the emergence of a modern attitude that harnessed religious sentiments to mobilize popular support for an early nationalism. It embodied both local and universal referents, identifying membership in a national community with religious practices and rapidly changing worldviews. The YMBA entertained modern, reformed visions of Buddhist practice and engendered grassroots (wunthanu) groups in cities and towns that actively propagated a new and populist Buddhist framework for spiritual and social renewal.15 This cultural idiom continues to be used in contemporary discourse and today denotes missionary efforts to promote the teachings of the Buddha. Buddhist responses to British rule ranged from minimalist perspectives seeking to accommodate colonial modernity to maximalist positions that aimed to remake the state according to religious principles. In lower Burma the YMBA initially articulated a Buddhist nationalism that envisioned a role for the Burmese nation within the British Empire. The civil Buddhism advocated by the YMBA is best described, in Bruce Lincoln’s terms, as “minimalist,” namely as interpreting religious and ethical values to work within the framework of the modern, secular state.16 Consequently, the YMBA began its operation with the explicit support of some members of the Indian Civil Service, such as J.S. Furnivall. As the first mass movement of colonial Buddhism, the YMBA was eventually submerged by other Buddhist nationalists who explicitly resisted colonial hegemony, viewed Buddhist identity as a means for political resistance and sought independence from the British rule. The turbulent decades of the nationalist struggle in the 1920s and 1930s marked the fragmentation of the YMBA and the rise of its successor organizations as Buddhist nationalism took a radical turn when the General Council of the Sangha Sammeggi (GCSS) came to dominate the nationalist movement in the 1920s. The GCSS harbored strong anti-­foreign sentiments and appealed especially to rural supporters and others who saw themselves in economic competition with Indian laborers. The GCSS represented sentiments that Bruce Lincoln calls “maximalist,” in that they sought to reconfigure the state in religious terms. The YMBA was the most influential Buddhist organization to develop within the transformed public sphere of the colony. It was founded in 1902 in Arakan where it maintained a youth hostel. When it was moved to Rangoon in 1906, the YMBA assumed a broader charge and began to function as a welfare-­oriented organization and as an umbrella structure for several Buddhist groups, including one at Rangoon College.17 In the course of the next decade, it developed into a populist movement that mobilized nationalist sentiments across lower Burma. Burmese Buddhist leaders assert that the initiative to organize the YMBA

28   Juliane Schober occurred independently from similar developments in Sri Lanka.18 However, it is difficult to document the extent to which its founding members were aware of similar organizations in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the Buddhist world. As U Maung Maung tells the story, the inspiration to establish the YMBA originated with a group of students at Rangoon College who were members of an ambitious, pro-­colonial Burmese elite.19 Several of them had studied law abroad in India or England. U Ba Pe is credited with founding the group, along with Dr. Thein Maung, the lawyer U Thein Maung and, among others, the “England-­ returned” barrister U May Oung who joined the YMBA in 1908. The Buddha Batha Kalyana Yuwa Athin (Association to Care for the Wholesomeness of Buddhism), as the YMBA was known in Burmese, was explicitly modeled after the organizational structure and social objectives of the Young Men’s Christian Association. In particular, its founders sought to imitate the YMCA’s modernist and missionary organization and its use of print media to mobilize the general public because they regarded mass education as “crucial to the development of a Burmese nationalist organization.”20 During its early years, the leadership of this colonial Buddhist society was sympathetic to British values and etiquette. While both emulating and reacting to the kind of secular politics British colonialism had introduced to Burma, the YMBA initially adopted a civil and religious charter that championed Burmese Buddhist values in contradistinction to the identity of the British elite. It aimed explicitly to create a national identity equal to and characterized by the same modern values as those of British members of colonial society who would join fraternities like the Pegu Club that were foreclosed to Burmese.21 The colonial government initially encouraged the formation of this urban Burmese elite and “let it be known that government servants might … join the YMBA.”22 With that, membership in the YMBA  suddenly became respectable and even fashionable. Anybody of account in Rangoon society, if a Burman or even an Indian, could be found in the roster of the association. Almost all Burman officers in government service, Burman brokers and traders, retired officials, teachers, Burman clerks, whether of business firms or government officers, avidly joined it.23 To avoid being labeled as a seditious or political organization, the YMBA demonstrated its loyalty to the crown by expressing its “servility.”24 According to Maung Maung,25 the YMBA viewed a British colonial presence in Burma as inevitable and showed “deep awareness of the need to express repeatedly loyalty to the British Crown as well as appreciation and thanksgiving for the blessing of the British administration of Burma.”26 To acknowledge the prosperity and pacification the country experienced under British rule meetings of the YMBA regularly opened with “God Save the King,” the Empire’s anthem, although “Buddha Save the King” soon superseded that allegiance to reflect the organization’s Buddhist religion.27 Similarly, the YMBA phrased its recommendations to the colonial government as “respectful demands” and “petitions” to remedy public affairs, voicing a

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   29 particular Burmese modern civility and demonstrating their competence and familiarity with colonial practices. They underscored a new kind of Burmese Buddhist identity that was of no lesser value or gentility than that which YMBA members perceived the British to convey. Their agenda also indicated their intention to reform traditional cultural practices, implicitly rejecting traditional cosmological Buddhism and many of its rituals. Implementing its charter to uplift Burmese society in religious, social, cultural, and economic ways, the YMBA formulated four major foci in its agenda: to strengthen the country’s sense of Race and National Spirit (amyo),24 to enhance National League and Literature (batha), to revitalize Buddhism (thathana) and to promote education (pyinnya). In both British and Burmese colonial thinking, race was an integral aspect of national identity. This view was also reflected in the YMBA’s agenda in which the race of its membership was identified as “Burman” and not with the ethnically more inclusive national designation of “Burmese.” As ethnic Burmans constitute the majority of the population, the YMBA’s vision of nationalism did not seek to include other ethnicities or religious groups within the national community they imagined for Burma. Instead, they worried about a loss of the Burmese identity and “deracination” expressed in their anxiety that Burman culture, civilization, and race needed to be revitalized. In the view of the YMBA and others, the loss of nationalist sentiments among the elites and the lack of a Burman national community precipitated an erosion of Burman ethnicity and culture.25 The causes for this perceived loss of identity were attributed to westernization, ethnic diversity, and to the political influence of indigenous minorities, particularly those who had converted to Christianity. Further, the fact that “knowledge of Burmese literature [had] almost died out among the educated Burmese classes and … Burmese speech tended to be confined to rural areas and the domestic sphere” helped rally support for a national language (batha) initiative.26 During the early twentieth century, the greatest number of Burmese students were studying in Europe, making English not only the language of instruction, but also of colloquial habit among the Burmese elite. In effect, people in upper and lower classes belonged to separate linguistic communities. The loss of a shared language also implied a significant decline of knowledge of classical Burmese literary traditions and Burmese language and literature were taught only to a limited degree in government schools. The colonial government valued literacy in Burmese mostly as a means for conveying imperial ideals to the Burmese population at large and did not include Burmese literature in the curriculum. Moreover, instruction in literary subjects had traditionally been located within monastic education, which was already in decline. To the YMBA, these facts contributed to the loss of Burmese identity and needed to be remedied. A cornerstone of the YMBA’s agenda and its petitions to the colonial government was therefore to integrate teaching of Burmese language and literature into the curriculum in government schools. The YMBA’s agenda for moral self-­reform among fellow Burmans is consonant with a transnational trend in Buddhist societies at the turn of the twentieth

30   Juliane Schober century when western-­educated elites were voicing their disenchantment with practices that developed as a result of popular exposure to modernity, secularism, and colonial culture. Its mission was initially characterized by a modernist and reformist stance on Buddhism (thathana). It discouraged villagers from ostentatious spending on ritual occasions like funerals, weddings, and novice initiations that traditionally consumed a relatively large portion of their income. Another practice the YMBA sought to reform was what they saw as the excessive consumption of intoxicants like liquor and tobacco. Specifically, they appealed to the colonial government to restrict the use of alcohol. Equally significant were their exhortations to fellow Burmese to engage in “moral self-­ reform.”27 They also petitioned the Government of India to exempt monastic land from taxation to ease the economic burden on already heavily taxed rural areas. Finally, the YMBA also sought to reform education (pyinnya) and promote a modern educational system that incorporated Buddhist fundamentals in its curriculum.28 Concerned about the pervasive influence of western education on Burmese national identity,29 it petitioned for the appointment of a Minister of Buddhist Affairs and for instructors (dhammakatika) to teach Buddhist fundamentals in public schools and advocated that the government support public schools in parity with its support for Christian missionary schools.30 The YMBA agitated for compulsory education at a national level and demanded that Burmese be the medium of instruction in public schools. It pressured the government to enforce educational standards, including examinations in mathematics, in rural areas.31 Aware of the declining relevance of monastic education in shaping Burma’s future, the YMBA pursued a position that emphasized religious and modern education, thereby at least implicitly distancing itself from traditional monastic education. In a speech about “The Modern Burman” in August 1908 at Rangoon College, U May Oung, then YMBA president, addressed all of these sentiments. The New Burman, he argued, had lost his pride of race, and with it nearly all feeling of community with his fellows. His nationality was not with him, as it was with other races, an ever-­present reality … a bond of sympathy between him and those around him. It was this lack of national feeling that kept him aloof from the people at large and made him even look down on his less-­cultured brothers. It was to a great extent this absence of communal sentiment that prevented him from forming commercial or even social combinations.32 He warned that unless Burmese prepared themselves to overcome the “not unmixed blessing of a western education,” and “ceaseless, ebbless tide of foreign civilization and learning, … their national character, their institutions, their very existence as a distinct nationality would be swept away, submerged, irretrievably lost.”33 He asserted that the fragmenting forces of modernization had disrupted the very cultural institutions that traditionally guaranteed that core values and

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   31 practices of being Burmese were inculcated and then expressed his hope for the possibility for the education of a Burmese boy who could enter English schools at a young age without becoming illiterate in his own language, religion, and culture. “If I were asked,” he continued, “ ‘What is a Burman?’ the answer I should make would be, ‘A Burman is a Buddhist’.” The mission of an association of young Burmese Buddhists was to compensate for the evils created by a lack of Buddhist values such as compassion and selflessness, a loss of humility, a lack of respect for traditional values and “to make the Modern Burman a distinct species from the simple, sincere Burman of old.”34 The YMBA was to mitigate these cultural realities and champion a modern Burmese Buddhist identity. The YMBA’s popularity and also its organizational reach grew rapidly during the 1910s, giving rise to the country’s first modern mass organization that shaped the national discourse and agenda. While the YMBA was less influential in upper Burma, it was nonetheless the first civic organization to reach beyond Rangoon’s social elite through mass mobilization and publications, raising awareness of national concerns among western educated Burmese and beyond. Local chapters of the YMBA met on a monthly basis, and national conferences convened annually starting in 1910. At its first national meeting, 22 local chapters and associations were represented. By 1917, at the fifth national conference in Pyinmana, the YMBA had grown to encompass 45 branches. Its membership included 400 local chapters, ten newspapers, three journals, and more than 30 national schools.35 It mobilized awareness through publications that focused on its nationalist agenda. First published in English in 1908, the Burman Buddhist Weekly presented a decidedly pro-­colonial perspective. The Sun (Thuriya), initially published in 1912, was a successful vernacular newspaper published three times a week by prominent YMBA leaders, U Hla Pe and U Ba Pe. It had an explicitly nationalist tone and went public in 1917. The Journal of the Burma Research Society, co-­founded by J.S. Furnivall and Duroiselle, began publication in 1910 to bring the academic study of Burmese culture and history to an English speaking audience. The initial success of the YMBA came to be tested by political events that contributed to its eventual fragmentation.36 Its decline was ushered in by a shift in the nationalist discourse that moved the political momentum from moderate and minimalist lay reformers like the YMBA to maximalist monks whose anti-­ colonialist stance subordinated the affairs of the state to religious principles. In 1916, the YMBA’s ability to shape a modern Buddhist nationalism was tested by the “No Footwear Campaign” that increasingly galvanized Burmese popular sentiments.37 At Shwedagon Pagoda a sign encouraged compliance from visitors with a prohibition against wearing shoes on sacred Buddhist grounds. Appended to it was an exemption for Europeans who generally did not remove their shoes.38 U Thein Maung, a lawyer and prominent YMBA member from Bassein, provocatively removed that portion of the sign. The fact that European visitors to pagodas generally did not remove their shoes was sacrilegious behavior in the eyes of many Burmese Buddhists and so, in an effort to deflect confrontations, British administrators generally announced in advance their visits to sacred ­Buddhist sites.

32   Juliane Schober In the same year, The Sun published an incendiary report on a British couple visiting Shwedagon without removing their shoes that focused accountability for the lack of compliance on Burmese pagoda trustees who were also prominent YMBA members. Thein Maung’s populist agitation mobilized Burmese public opinion and transformed what was initially a religious concern into one that was political, anti-­colonial, and nationalist. Rooted in the ritual practices of traditional, cosmological Buddhism, the desecration of sacred space was offensive to traditionalists and modernists alike. In 1917, the venerated Ledi Sayadaw (1846–1923) subsequently published a treatise in Burmese entitled “On the Impropriety of Wearing Shoes on Pagoda Platforms” which lent religious authority to the protest.39 The colonial government soon banned public discussion of the issue in an effort to diffuse mounting public tensions. It also withdrew its public support of the YMBA and began to monitor more closely the movements of its members. In an effort to resolve the “foot wearing” issue, the colonial government ruled in 1918 to delegate to local monastic authority any final decision to implement a general prohibition against wearing shoes on pagoda grounds. At the same time, the colonial government ordered schools to expand instruction on loyalty to the British Crown which met with strong resistance from the YMBA.40 Negotiations for Home Rule that had been granted to India, but refused to Burma, also exacerbated political tensions within the YMBA leadership, leading to a rift between older, conservative members and a younger, radical faction that eventually took control of the organization.41 U May Oung and many of his peers resigned from the YMBA. Several of these individuals accepted positions of judicial authority within the colonial administration. The attrition of many original members to governmental careers contributed to the political shift within the YMBA. This attrition in turn led to a fragmentation of leadership, which precipitated reorganization at the eighth national conference of the YMBA, which was held in Prome on October 29–31, 1920 and ushered in a moment of subversion at the height of the organization’s popular success.42 At this conference, the YMBA officially merged with the General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA), an umbrella organization that also included village-­level nationalist organizations (wunthanu athin) and the National Schools Movement. While the GCBA initially aimed to include Indian and Christian minorities in the nationalist movement, under the powerful influence of the sangha, that organization was soon renamed the General Council of Buddhist Associations. Within a short time, it transformed itself again into the General Council of the Sangha Samettgyi (GCSS) by ceding control to another faction comprised of Burma’s “political monks.”43 These developments in the history of the YMBA cascaded to a turning point as Burmese nationalism became increasingly anti-­British and anti-­colonial in the aftermath of these campaigns. The popular interpretation of what it meant to be Burmese and Buddhist shifted from its initial social context among urban elites who were friendly toward the colonial government to nationalist and anti-­colonial agendas that increasingly focused on other concerns.

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   33

Trajectories of Buddhist maximalists In response to the Diarchy (1919–1923), which denied Home Rule to the Burmese, public opinion galvanized against colonial rule. Initially, the GCBA was composed of modern Buddhists and secularists who had a shared interest in promoting Burma’s nationalist struggle. Some factions within the GCBA encouraged grassroots communities to promote nationalist sentiments in villages and boycott colonial taxation. Its demands included a boycott of foreign consumer items, tax exemption for religious land and extending the authority of the thathanabaing’s office in Mandalay to include all of lower Burma. The educated urban lay elites tended to support those members of the GCBA who identified with the sort of secular, nationalist struggle advocated by the Indian Congress Party. From 1921 to 1923, the GCBA worked with the Council on National Education to establish a national university at a Shwegyin monastery in Rangoon. Others, with rural constituencies that were less educated in the canons of colonial knowledge envisioned that Burma would return to Buddhist kingship in the future. Interwoven in the history of Buddhist nationalist organizations are the biographies of monks who came to assume important political roles in the struggle for independence. Intersecting with the decline of the YMBA was the rise of U Ottama (1879–1930), a peripatetic monk who traveled widely in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. His charismatic sermons during the 1920s stressed the decline of Buddhism under colonial rule and inspired monks and lay people to join the nationalist struggle. His anti-­colonial agitation and civil disobedience in protest of colonial rule triggered his imprisonment several times between 1921 and the end of his life. He made sophisticated use of the print news media and collaborated within the networks of the YMBA and later the GCBA to accomplish his objectives. With the backing of the more radical young leaders in the YMBA, he eventually succeeded in rallying Burmese nationalist sentiments. In 1919 U Ottama resided at the publication offices of the vernacular newspaper, The Sun, in Rangoon as a protégé of the YMBA. His reliance on the YMBA’s reputation, audiences, and organization of mass media allowed him eventually to mobilize nationalist opinions. As the economic crisis worsened in lower Burma, politically active monks like U Ottama advocated a popular boycott of the colonial government modeled after Gandhi’s principles of economic self-­reliance and boycott.44 The narrative of his life, however, illustrates the eclipse of the initial nationalist movement among pro-­colonial lay elites in cosmopolitan Rangoon and the concurrent rise of an increasingly radicalized sangha that sought to fashion Burma’s future from the tattered robes of traditional culture. U Ottama had ties with the YMBA and its emerging umbrella organization, the GCBA, and had also been instrumental in the founding of the GCSS in 1921. Despite his intersecting sympathies with the Burmese General Council and the political and Buddhist transnationalism that shaped his life, U Ottama’s ties to the Burmese sangha appear to have been fragmentary. When the Ninth Conference of the GCBA was held in Mandalay in 1921, it was attended by record numbers as 10,000 delegates and more than 100,000

34   Juliane Schober v­ isitors from all regions of the country made their way to the city. At this conference, U Chit Hlaing of the GCBA granted significant concessions to GCSS monks in order to preserve the GCBA and his position as its president, giving them influential positions on the central committee of the GCBA. This move eroded the power of the GCBA and deferred control over its affairs to the monastic General Council of Sangha Sammeggi, which had usurped the leadership of the GCBA by 1924.45 The GCSS also gained control over electoral strategies of GCBA candidates at local levels. Many GCBA candidates seeking election to the National Assembly collaborated with local monks who would preach their message in public sermons. The election of these politicians to local and national GCBA offices depended often on the support of their monastic allies, many of whom were members of the GCSS. This conjuncture proved to be pivotal in the development of civil institutions and the electoral process whose discourse depended greatly on Buddhist, and not secular, sources of legitimacy. The limits of the electoral process as a modern form of government were thus circumscribed by Buddhist authority among organizations in the anti-­colonial struggle. The influence of the sangha expanded to become its dominant voice and eventually controlled the GCBA altogether. As a result, the political strategies and religious motivations of the anti-­colonial movement changed as the influence of moderate Buddhists and secularists diminished in favor of the maximalist, monastic GCSS. Within a few years, various splinter groups emerged from the volatile GCBA that included the Hlaing-­Pu-Kyaw faction (1924), the 21 Party (1922), the Nationalist Party (1923), the Home Rule Party (1926), the Su GCBA and Soe Thein GCBA (1925), which eventually came to support the Saya San Rebellion.46 These new leaders found themselves empowered by popular support and by considerable funds collected from the ranks of a rapidly growing, populist movement that responded eagerly to nationalist sentiments and neglected the need to regulate the organization. At the same time, the position of monks in the anti-­colonial struggle was increasingly political. However, in contrast to modernist monks such as U Ottama and U Wissara, the majority of the GCSS were less forward-­looking and embraced traditional and local orientations.47 Initially, the GCSS comprised two separate councils, in upper Burma and lower Burma, respectively, but they soon merged into a single organization. Following the trial of U Ottama in Mandalay, the organization developed its own momentum and took up an agenda of self-­ reform and self-­governance, which included observance of monastic discipline and the Five Precepts, the training of dhammakathika, and sponsorship of monastic examinations.48 Monastic participation in the GCBA’s agenda began when monks assumed teaching positions as dhammakathikas in the National School Movement. Lay politicians and the dhammakathikas shared a common interest in including Buddhist education in public schools. Other conjunctures of lay and monastic collaboration developed in the anti-­colonial struggle, and thus their agendas began to extend beyond a Buddhist curriculum in national schools. As young and energetic teachers, dhammakathikas were trained in the modern

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   35 methods of Indian political activism and in English-­language instruction. They effectively became the political tutors of the lay members of local wunthanu athin chapters. The dhammakathikas took an oath of loyalty to these nationalist organizations and carried identity cards. Their numbers reached 12,000. Trained rigorously to agitate the population according to Gandhi’s model of colonial resistance, they were ready to face the colonial police, military, and prison.49 As their political agitation become more prominent, the colonial government moved to imprison many GCBA members. The arrest and imprisonment of monks in robes deeply offended many Burmese, who saw this as civil disrespect for monastic law and status. Maitrii Aung-­Thwin observed that the legal tensions during this period increasingly led to a criminalization of traditional cultural practices in which monks and GCBA members were described as “undesirable” people defiant of colonial authority.50 In prison, these monks continued to fight for the right to wear robes, rather than secular prison clothes that stripped them of their monastic status. U Wissara, a monk who lost his life to hunger strike in prisons, continued to be revered for his martyrdom of this cause. This struggle against the secular authority of colonial law in favor of the Buddhist authority of monastic law continues to inspire a genealogy of Buddhist resistance against the secular state up to the present. The GCSS was firmly opposed to colonial diarchy and interpreted the call for “Home Rule” as an opportunity to revitalize a Buddhist kingdom.51 During the 1920s, Buddhist maximalists succeeded in capturing the anti-­colonialist momentum. The movement that eventually was known as the Saya San Rebellion commenced on December 22, 1930 as civil acts of resistance cascaded through the Tharrawaddi District, lower Burma, and eventually reached in Amarapura, upper Burma, in August 1931.52 The resistance had been sparked by a colonial refusal to grant tax relief, fueled by a lack of moderate leadership, and fanned by the imagination of traditionalist revivalist sentiments. Its hero, Saya San, was a former monk who had studied alchemy and Ayurvedic practices and who eventually crowned himself king. During his service as an elected representative of the GCBA, he had documented 170 cases of government mistreatment of villagers.53 His reputation among traditionalist villagers helped him mobilize quickly and secretly an army of fighters who identified themselves with their tattoos of the mythical bird galon (Garuda), the arch enemy of the naga (dragon) that symbolized the British.54 In response, the colonial government launched “peace missions” with 11,000 British forces and Indian reinforcements to defeat the rebellion of Buddhist maximalists.55 Saya San was executed on November 28, 1931. The attempt to return to a traditional polity had precipitated the coercive assertion of colonial power. The potential for monastic participation in communal riots was realized during the colonial period at two conjunctures. In 1932 and 1938 anti-­colonial Buddhists, including monks, participated in violent riots aimed at foreigners. Mendelson, Cady and Ikeya speak of the assault, arson, and murder monks committed in anti-­Muslim riots.56 Well-­known monks published inflammatory articles in nationalist newspapers like The New Light of Burma and The Sun,

36   Juliane Schober which called for “urgent action against the enemies of Buddhism.”57 Foreign influence, the presence of Muslims and Indians, and the economic power they had acquired through banking, mortgaging and even competing for low-­wage porter jobs became flashpoints at which violent confrontations occurred. The Yahan Pyo Apwe (Young Monks’ Association; YBA) was among the most militant voices in the sangha speaking out against the cultural, economic, and political influence of foreigners in late colonial Burma.58 In the late 1930s this organization began to agitate the public against Indian Muslims.59 On the streets of Rangoon, YBA monks would confront women and men wearing western-­ style clothing. Some of these monks came to be seen as martyrs when they were shot by the colonial government during the riots. Through their collaboration with the charismatic hermit U Khanti, for whom they administered profitable pilgrimage sites, including Mandalay Hill, the YBA had acquired considerable financial wealth and political power. The organization managed to retain its strong influence through most of the post-­independence era and sided with Ne Win’s military faction when the U Nu government collapsed in 1962. It was reconstituted as an infrastructural conduit during the 1988 uprising against the socialist government but was officially banned soon thereafter.

Conclusion The nationalist struggle of the 1920s agitated many segments of Burmese society. The range of voices among anti-­colonial Buddhists included western educated lay people who resided predominantly in urban areas, but also traditional laity and monks who had been swept up in the wunthanu movement in smaller towns and villages. The history of this period makes it evident, however, that although many nationalist organizations sprang up during this time none was sufficiently institutionalized to withstand fragmentation within their own ranks. While the founding of the YMBA and its history were rooted in local developments, the impetus for conceptualizing a Burmese Buddhist form of nationalism emerged within multiple transnational contexts. Perhaps the greatest impact can be traced to the impact of colonial education, such as government and national schools, Christian missionary education, and education abroad in India and England. These conjunctures clearly shaped the views of the pro-­ colonial elite in the early decades of the twentieth century. Ambitious and talented, the careers and challenges the first generation of YMBA leaders faced upon their return home from living and studying abroad propelled them to envision an identity for themselves that broke with a traditional past and affirmed the changing contexts of Burma and the British Empire.60 Transnational connections informed these processes of self-­definition in other arenas of public life, including the rapidly changing ethnic compositions among expanding immigrant populations from India, China, and Europe. In addition, the changing social matrix of the colonial empire heightened awareness of religious diversity in Burma.

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   37 Interpretations of what it meant to be Burmese and Buddhist during the first decades of the twentieth century were fluid and colored by national, regional, and even local characteristics. The presence of transnational connections in lower Burma and their relative absence in upper Burma created important differences in the social histories of these regions that came to be defined by their respective contrasts: predominantly urban versus mostly rural; accommodating modern power structures versus resisting colonial rule; embracing the empire and a modern state versus cultural traditionalism; increased lay authority in shaping religious outlooks versus monasticism as the locus of Buddhist authority; and so forth. The decade of the 1930s witnessed the rise of a revisionist and traditionalist understanding of what it means to be Burmese and Buddhist and shifted the focus of events upcountry, away from transnational connections and toward a hope for a millennial return of the past. Multiple historical conjunctures account for the “dawn of nationalism” among members of the YMBA. Broader social and structural changes like the impact of print capitalism during the late colonial period clearly affected the development of modern Burmese Buddhism. It is striking, however, that the most influential transnational connections these young nationalists engaged in were political, rather than religious, and focused on India and Britain. Western educated Burmese looked mostly toward India and Europe for models of political activism and constitutional reforms. Ultimately, it was the secular nationalism of the Thakins that won independence from colonial rule. While the emergence of early nationalist sentiments was shaped by modern Buddhist practices in lower Burma, religiously inspired nationalists did not seek out transnational, pan-­Asian or international organizations to the same degree as their secular counterparts, which further contributed to the regional formations of modern Buddhist nationalism in Burma.

Abbreviations GCBA GCSS YBA YMBA

General Council of Burmese Associations General Council of the Sangha Sammeggi Young Monks’ Association Young Men’s Buddhist Association

Notes   1 Portions of this chapter were published in a different form in my book, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar (University of Hawai’i Press, 2011).   2 Mendelson, Sangha and State, pp. 173ff.   3 Braun, Birth of Insight.   4 Turner, “Colonialism.”   5 Taylor, The State, pp. 112–115.   6 Asad, Formations.   7 Taylor, Secular Age; Mahmood, Religious Difference.   8 Than Myint, Making.   9 Cohn, Colonialism; Furnival, Colonial Policy; Moscotti, British Policy.

38   Juliane Schober 10 Sir Reginald Craddock was a British governor of Burma from 1918–1923 and much disliked for his plans to diminish Burmese national aspirations. Known as the Craddock Scheme, his reforms envisioned limited opportunity for the Burmese to shape their political future and relegated Burma to the status of a province within British India. Diarchy, or the dual-­government reform implemented between 1923 and 1935, recognized Burma as a province of British India. Although this reform increased the number of elected members of the Legislative Council in Burma nominally, it fueled the intensity of Burmese nationalist sentiments. 11 See Frost, “Wider Opportunities,” on the ways in which Sri Lankan Buddhists constructed a transnational Buddhism to contest colonial hegemonies. 12 By 1936, Aung San, U Nu and others began to refer to themselves with the title thakin to voice the anti-­colonial sentiment of the young nationalist leaders. 13 In her essay on the Intellectual Life in Burma and India under Colonialism (1991), Aung San Suu Kyi indicates the absence, in Burma, of an intellectual renaissance that, by contrast, had enabled the intelligentsia in India to integrate more successfully modern values with aspects of traditional culture. 14 Bouddha batha bama lou myo, literally “we Burmese are Buddhists.” To be Burman and to be Buddhist was a way of distinguishing the majority of Burmans from others groups along ethnic, religious, and political lines. In general, I use the terms Burma, Burmese and Burman interchangeably in this chapter and reserve the designation Myanmar to those historical periods when the term is in official use. 15 Turner, “Colonialism.” 16 Lincoln, Holy Terror, p.  70, distinguishes between minimalists, who are content to separate religion from the goals of the state, and maximalists, who seek to have religious concerns reflected in the foundation of the state. 17 Taylor, The State, p. 177. 18 In 1898, C.S. Dissanayake collaborated to found the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in Sri Lanka as an off-­shoot of Olcott’s Buddhist Theosophical Society. Frost, “Wider Opportunities,” p. 953 mentions in passing the view held among members of the Sri Lankan YMBA that the Burmese YMBA was a branch of its own organization. In Burma, however, the Burmese YMBA is seen as entirely independent of and unrelated to its Sri Lankan namesake. 19 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 2. 20 Taylor, The State, p. 162. 21 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 4. 22 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 3. 23 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 4. 24 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 4, 15. 25 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. xi. 26 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 4. 27 Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds, p. 13. 28 The Burmese concept of amyo predates the advent of colonial theories of race in Burma, Nonetheless, it has similar connotations of an inalienable identity or being of a certain “kind” on account of one’s ethnic identity or race. 29 J.S. Furnivall who worked for Indian Civil Service was often critical of colonial policy, which he viewed as obstructing Burmese national goals. He advocated nationalism as a way to overcome class divisions within a highly fragmented Burmese colonial society and thus create a “plural society” in Burma (see Furnival, Colonial Policy). He succeeded in gaining some support for his agenda from Clayton’s Committee on the Imperial Idea that was charged with muting popular unrests and developing a pacified, prosperous colony within the Empire (Pham, “Ghost Hunting,” pp. 245–249). 30 Becka, The Role, p. 399; Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds, p. 108. 31 Becka, The Role, p. 401.

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   39 32 Cady, A History, p. 179, writes that in 1891–1892, government-­recognized monastic schools numbered 4,324 compared to 890 lay schools. The numbers were: 3,281 monastic to 1,215 lay in 1897–1898; 2,208 to 2,653 in 1910–11; 2,977 to 4,650 in 1917–1918. Lay schools were obviously taking over. 33 To a considerable degree, the flight toward government or Christian schools was motivated by the economic benefits of a modern colonial education. This trend also developed in reaction to a malaise that had befallen monastic education, where a refusal to integrate scientific subjects, particularly geography and mathematics, into the curriculum was matched by a decline in levels of performance and a general retreat from centers of civilization to rural areas (Schober, “Colonial Knowledge”). 34 Singh, Growth, pp. 30–31. 35 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 5. 36 May Oung, “The Dawn,” pp. 5–6. 37 May Oung, “The Dawn,” p. 2. 38 May Oung, “The Dawn,” p. 7. 39 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 21. 40 The YMBA has been resurrected at various junctures since the 1920s and currently continues to function in Rangoon as a social and religious organization that is very much at the service of the present regime. 41 Singh, Growth of Nationalism, p. 33, reports that popularization of this issue involved the YMBA’s collaboration with the Burma Provincial Congress Committee that was formed in 1908 and supported by Indians in Burma. He indicates that there was considerable collaboration between Burmese and Indian nationalists until 1917. 42 Singh, Growth, p. 32. 43 In 1911, the Ledi Sayadaw was awarded the Agga Mahapandita title by the Government of India. He authored numerous commentaries and was a popular preacher throughout Burma (Keyes, “Buddhist Economics,” p.  374). Lubeigt, “Introduction,” argues that later biographers attributed to the Ledi Sayadaw a nationalist stance which, according to Lubeigt, was absent from the Ledi Sayadaw’s public preaching. He may well be correct in his observation as the Foot wearing Debate, in which the Ledi Sayadaw eventually did take a public stance, emerged only near the end of his life. 44 This colonial reform also led to the establishment of Rangoon University as a residential institution with strict educational standards. The opening of Rangoon University in December of 1920 was followed immediately with a general university-­wide strike during which the YMBA launched its National Schools Movement led by U Ba Lwin (Cady, A History, pp. 217–221). 45 This includes the Craddock Reforms of 1919–1923 and the refusal to grant Burma increased authority in the determination of Home Rule. 46 Von der Mehden, Religion, p. 32, reports that the activities of the YMBA languished between 1910 and 1912 because most of its leadership was studying abroad. 47 In Schober, Modern Buddhist, I argue that the designation of “political monks” constitutes a hegemonic and colonial discourse. 48 The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 clearly made an impression upon Burmese nationalists. However, their focus remained primarily on the activities of the Indian National Congress. 49 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 37, does not hide his disappointment with the loss of the secularist cause to the sangha. 50 Relations between Soe Thein and Saya San must have been complex, for Saya San was part of a faction of monks who opposed Soe Thein’s leadership of the GCBA in 1926, as Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 59, points out. 51 Maung Maung, From Sangha, 199–205.

40   Juliane Schober 52 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 24. 53 Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 25. 54 Aung-­Thwin, “Genealogy”; Maung Maung, From Sangha, p. 42. 55 Diarchy envisioned the separation of Burma from India under colonial rule. The plan was to award India greater rights of self-­determination, while withholding them from Burma. The nationalist struggle during the 1920s and 1930s took issue with the administrative reforms, mentioned above, that Sir Reginald Craddock advocated. See note 2 above. 56 A series of millenarian Buddhist revolts against British presence that fostered expectations of the imminent appearance of a universal monarch (setkya) developed in upper Burma in 1906, 1910, and 1916. It finally culminated in the Saya San Rebellion of the 1903s (Becka, The Role, p.  397; Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds). Maitrii Aung-­Thwin (“Genealogy”) examines British portrayals of the Saya San Rebellion and encourages us to rethink this rebellion. His study reveals colonial preconceptions about Burmese cultural practices that misrepresented this rebellion and its leader and criminalized many practices of traditional Burmese culture. Aung-­Thwin also suggests that these insurgencies may have been caused by cross-­border mobilization by Bengali independence fighters with whom U Ottama was acquainted. 57 Mendelson, Sangha, p. 99; Aung-­Thwin, “Genealogy.” 58 Aung-­Thwin, Return of Galon, p. 67. 59 Becka, The Role, p. 175. 60 Mendelson, Sangha and State, pp.  211ff; Cady, A History, p.  395; Ikeya, “Gender, History,” pp.  158, 159. Ikeya writes that in 1938, 200 deaths and 926 injuries were reported due to the riots. 61 Mendelson, Sangha and State, p. 211. 62 Ikeya (“Gender, History,” pp. 166–167) discusses the anti-­modernist activism of the Yahan Pyo monks in the 1920s and 1930s who, for example, confronted in public women dressed in western clothes. This monastic organization is known for its nationalist orientation and for its support of the Ne Win coup in 1962. 63 I explore the ways in which monks in Burma have been both victims and perpetrators of violence (Schober, Modern Buddhist, pp. 46–61). 64 One might be reminded, in this regard, of Gandhi’s exasperation with his own professional trajectory, when after returning to India from Britain, he describes his role as “Arjuna in a small claims court,” (Rudolf and Rudolf, Gandhi, pp. 25–29).

References Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular, Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Aung-­Thwin, Maitrii. “Genealogy of a Rebellion Narrative: Law, Ethnology, and Culture in Colonial Burma.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2003): 393–419. Aung-­Thwin, Maitrii. The Return of Galon King: History, Law and Rebellion in Colonial Burma. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. Aung San Suu Kyi. “Intellectual Life in Burma and India under Colonialism.” In Freedom from Fear and Other Writings, pp. 82–139. New York: Viking Press, 1991. Becka, Jan. “The Role of Buddhism as a Factor of Burmese National Identity in the Period of British Rule in Burma (1886–1948).” Archiv Oriental 59, no.  4 (1991): 389–405. Becka, Jan. Historical Dictionary of Burma. London: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Braun, Erik. The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Cady, John F. A History of Modern Burma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958.

To be Burmese is to be Buddhist   41 Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1996. Frost, Mark Ravinder. “ ‘Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo, 1870–1920.” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 937–967. Furnival, J.S. Colonial Policy and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. Ikeya, Chie. “Gender, History, and Modernity: Representing Women in Twentieth Century Colonial Burma.” PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2006. Keyes, Charles. “Buddhist Economics and Buddhist Fundamentalism in Burma and Thailand,” in Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance, edited by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, pp. 367–409. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terror; Thinking about Religion after September 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Lubeigt, Guy. “Introduction of Western Culture in Burma in the 19th Century: From Civilian Acceptance to Religious Resistance” Fourth Euro-­Japanese Symposium on Mainland Southeast Asian History, 1999, unpublished manuscript. Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age, A Minority Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Maung Maung. From Sangha to Laity: Nationalist Moments of Burma, 1920–1940. Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1980. May Oung, U. “The Dawn of Nationalism in Burma.” Journal of Burma Research Society 33, no. 1 (1950): 1–7. Mendelson, Michael E. Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Moscotti, Albert D. British Policy and the Nationalist Movement in Burma, 1917–1937. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1974. Pham, Julie. “Ghost Hunting in Colonial Burma: Nostaligia, Paternalism and the thoughts of J.S. Furnivall.” Southeast Asia Research 12, no. 2 (2004): 237–268. Rudolf, Susanna Hoeber and Rudolf, Loyd I. Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. Sarkisyanz, Emanuel. Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965. Schober, Juliane. “Colonial Knowledge and Buddhist Education in Burma” in Buddhism, Power and Political Order, edited by Ian Harris, pp. 52–70. New York: Routledge, 2007. Schober, Juliane. Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies, and Civil Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011. Singh, Prasad S. Growth of Nationalism in Burma 1900–1942. Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Ltd, 1980. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007. Taylor, Robert H. The State in Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987. Than Myint. The Making of Modern Burma. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Turner, Alicia. Buddhism, “Colonialism, and the Boundaries of Religion: Theravada Buddhism in Burma, 1885–1920.” PhD dissertation, The Divinity School, University of Chicago, 2009. Von der Mehden, Fred R. Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia: Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963.

3 Interactions between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore Wenxue Zhang

Introduction Since its early existence, colonial Singapore enticed a seemingly ceaseless flow of immigrants from various neighboring areas such as the Malay peninsula, China, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand. This was due to the colony’s convenient location in Southeastern Asia, its policy of free trade and free duty, its imposing of inexpensive port charges, and its prospective future to be an entrepôt of the area.1 Most of these countries were known to have either Theravada or Mahayana Buddhist ethnocultural origins2 and thus both schools of Buddhism were brought into the island with the transnational flow of immigrants.3 Generally speaking, Theravada Buddhism in Singapore had its origin from Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand, which were known as home to Theravada Buddhists.4 In contrast, Mahayana was mainly disseminated into Singapore from the southeastern part of China, especially Hokkien-­speaking areas of Fujian province, as well as Kwangtung province.5 Thus, these two different schools of Buddhism historically converged in Singapore. There are a few points about the different schools of Buddhism that need to be made in order to think about Buddhism in colonial Singapore. First, this chapter uses Theravada and Mahayana as short hand ways of talking about Buddhism that came from Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia and China respectively. As the introduction notes, the term “Theravada” was not common until the middle of the twentieth century, and the people in Singapore probably did not use the term when referring to Buddhism from Sri Lanka for example. Moreover, while Buddhism from China can be accurately called Mahayana, as discussed below, it is also mixed with lots of different types of religious forms. Sometimes the mixtures of Chinese, Mahayana Buddhism with other religions is clear from newspaper accounts in colonial Singapore, and sometimes it is not. Second, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists had relatively few interactions in history. There are lots of reasons for this that are beyond the scope of this chapter to talk about, but there are significant philosophical differences in terms of salvation and practices. Sometimes these led to criticism between different types of Buddhists, as when Mahayana Buddhists criticized Theravada Buddhists for eating meat as a lack of compassion. Some of the differences have

Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore   43 been the product of developing (and leaving) India at different times, while others are the result of merging with different local cultures.6 This situation changed under the special social contexts of colonial Singapore in the twentieth century, and the two schools of Buddhism finally interacted with each other and cooperatively contributed to the development of Buddhism in Singapore. This chapter will explore the specific social contexts of colonial Singapore in the nineteenth and the first half of twentieth century by restoring the historical picture of the two Buddhist communities moving from few interactions to significant interactions through fieldwork and literatures and investigate how the very colonial social contexts of Singapore enabled and facilitated those interactions. In contrast to places such as Burma or Sri Lanka where colonialism created significant conflict for Theravada Buddhist communities, in Singapore, colonialism provided its grounds for existence, as well as key sources of cooperation with Mahayana Buddhist communities.

Colonial Singapore and the policy of religion When Stamford Raffles disembarked in Singapore on January 19, 1819, Singapore was only a small fishing village with a tiny population of 150 including 30 Chinese people. Shortly afterwards, Raffles signed a temporary contract with Temenggong of Johor, the local chieftain, deciding to make Singapore a British trading post, marking the beginning of colonial Singapore. Messages of appealing policies such as free trade, free duty, little port charges were sent to Malacca to attract traders and supplies.7 Many immigrants from Penang and Malacca were attracted by the new opportunities in Singapore. In Raffles’ correspondence to the Duchess of Somerset, he wrote: “We have only been established four months and it has received an accession of population exceeding five thousand, principally Chinese, and their number is daily increasing.”8 Many of the early settlers attracted to Singapore were established and prosperous people from Nanyang district, many of whom were Nanyang Chinese. They brought a lot of wealth into Singapore and established new warehouses, factories, and plantations which demanded a large number of laborers.9 The ever-­growing need for laborers stimulated the constant flow of immigrants from neighboring countries, with the largest number of immigrants to Singapore coming from the southern provinces of China, where people were severely plagued by natural disasters and a shortage of arable land. Immigrants were also from Sri Lanka, Burma, and other parts of mainland Southeast Asia. Immigrants from different ethnic background created in Singapore multi-­racial, multi-­religious, and multi-­cultural social contexts. In order to maintain stability and attract more laborers, the British colonial government administration adopted a neutral, and tolerant attitude toward different religions. Freedman and Topley clearly stated their view: The Government of the Colony imposed no state cult and saw no link between political order and religious orthodoxy. It left the Chinese completely free to

44   Wenxue Zhang organise their religious groupings and express their religious beliefs in any way they choose, manifesting an indifference to religion which amounted to a tolerance not provided in the Chinese homeland.10 Freedman also explored this from a legal perspective: during the first 7 years of Singapore’s existence the Chinese population was under loose British supervision through a capitan system in which local leaders ruled in the name of the British. This allowed the British to control the colony politically while securing financial benefits.11 It also allowed significant religious freedom. Later, in 1826, the British government strengthened its control by introducing the “Charter of Justice” from the Penang court. The Charter clearly stated that it “secures to all the native subjects the free exercise of their religion, indulges them in all their prejudices, pays the most scrupulous attention to their ancient usages and habits.” Subsequent revisions of this Charter preserved this tolerant attitude toward religious freedom.12 The role of religion in the governance of both the United Kingdom and its colonies is complicated, but in general, colonial officials seemed to prefer to avoid religion when possible, though this was not always possible. When Christian missionaries were useful as a way of transmitting western culture favorable to the colonial projects, the colonial government supported them with funds and land resources; however, when missionaries caused problems, such as when they preached to Muslim communities, the colonial government was not supportive.13 The colonial government treated religions according to their influence on governance. In the long term, this attitude facilitated the development of Buddhism in the region, because it enabled Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist communities to interact and develop freely without much interference from the British colonial government. The British colonial government took this attitude toward Buddhism in Singapore: respect if Buddhism did not hinder colonial governance, or suppression if Buddhism caused negative impacts. For example, one of the important early Buddhists in Singapore was a monk from China, Venerable Zhuandao (ChuanToh 转道, 1872–1943). This monk was an eminent and pioneering yet “forgotten” monk who transmitted Chinese Buddhism to Singapore. During his missionary work in Singapore, Zhuandao founded two prominent monasteries, Singapore Phor Toh See Monastery (Xinjiapo Putuo Si 新加坡普陀寺) and Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery (Guangmingshan Pujue Si 光明山普 觉寺), and established three lay Buddhist associations, the Chinese Buddhist Association (Zhonghua fojiaohui 中华佛教会), the Singapore Buddhist Lodge ­(Xinjiapo fojiao jushilin 新加坡佛教居士林) and the Buddhist Union (Fojiao hui 佛教会), all of which became central to the propagation of Buddhism in Singapore both within and outside the overseas Chinese community. Monks like Venerable Zhuandao were generally not seen as a threat by the colonial government. Most Chinese were also not seen as a threat because they were influenced by Chinese syncretic religions. Their views toward religions tended to be inclusive, and religion was more about prospective fortune and benefits gained from praying and worshiping, rather than about governance.14 One time where the

Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore   45 colonial government did feel like Buddhists were a threat was when they forced the dissolution of the Sin Chew Buddhist College established by Venerable Zhuandao in Johor Bahru on August 1, 1930. The reason for the suppression of the Sin Chew College was a fear of Communism. The colonial authorities found flyers about Communism distributed in the College on this day, which happened to be the anniversary of the Nanchang Uprising led by the Chinese Communist Party. This led to the suspicion that the College had Communists among its members. As a result, the establishment of the Buddhist College was discontinued and forced to close by colonial government.15 Despite this, Buddhism did not have many negative impacts on the Singapore society and was outside of colonial politics.16 In contrast, the British colonial government took a different attitude toward Buddhism in Burma. Although the British government also claimed to impose no interference over Buddhism, they did not officially recognize Buddhism. One example was that the traditional Buddhist monastery education system for Burma people was not recognized by the new education system introduced by the British government either.17 Moreover, after the first British and Burma War, Arakan became one of the British colonies. In order to reduce local resistance, British colonial government introduced many Muslims from Bangladesh to Arakan. According to the recollections of one Amer­ican, there were around 8,000 people living in Arakan and most of them were introduced from Bangladesh; out of the total population only 20 to 30 were Buddhists.18 During the British governance over Burma, Buddhists often had a difficult time with the colonial authorities. One possible explanation for this is that the colonial authorities regarded Buddhist monks as potential rebels against them, which determined their decision of suppressing Buddhism, which was at the core of Burma traditional religion and cultures, in order to clear resistance and establish their colonial law and order. British colonists purposely broke Burmese Buddhist traditions, for example, wearing shoes into monasteries, depriving Buddhist monks’ judicial power, purposely differentiating and dividing monk class, and limiting the monopoly over education held by the Buddhist sangha. (Further discussions about the status of Buddhism in relation to the colonial government can be seen from the chapters by Schober and Kirichenko in this volume.19) From the above analysis, we can see the different relationship between Buddhists and the British colonial government in Burma and in Singapore. In Burma, Buddhism had been closely tied to the pre-­colonial ruling system and so was a threat, potentially, that the colonial government had to address. By contrast, Buddhism was brought to Singapore by immigrants and was never directly affiliated with the control of the island. Buddhists (Mahayana and Theravada) followed the policies and rules issued by the colonial government without too much resistance. Therefore, in this first British colonial governance, the British colonial government was at peace with Buddhism in Singapore. While not quite a colonial regime, it is worth mentioning the Japanese occupation of Singapore, which began in February 1942. The Japanese army cruelly persecuted local residents, especially those of Chinese origin. After the war,

46   Wenxue Zhang Japan admitted that they had killed more than 5,000 Singaporeans, yet the real figure was estimated by local people to be three times more.20 This was revenge for Chinese immigrants’ help with the anti-­Japanese war in mainland China. Generally speaking, the Japanese army still treated Buddhists relatively nicely. This is reflected in a Japanese administration document which clearly stated that the army should respect local cultural and religious traditions and should be extremely careful when they treated Buddhism or other religions harshly.21 Since Buddhism was also an important part of Japanese culture, the Japanese army did not suppress Buddhism too much, instead Buddhist monasteries and organizations were used to provide assistance to the restoration of the order in Singapore, for example, providing social welfare for local people. The Japanese army treated Buddhists much better than local civilians, and some monasteries even gained funds and assistance from the Japanese army.22 Therefore, many people joined Buddhist groups to avoid persecution and seek protection.23 Some Buddhists were also persecuted by the Japanese occupiers. For example, Venerable Puliang, the abbot of Shuanglin Monastery, was arrested in 1944 and never seen again. The root cause of this arrest was that in 1939 Shuanglin Monastery was the registration office for people to join in the anti-­Japanese war. Though it was only three years later that the British government regained Singapore, the Singaporean people had totally lost their trust in the British colonial government and its ability to protect them. Anti-­colonialist movements sprang up in Southeast Asian areas, including Singapore. Residents including Buddhists realized that they should strive for more rights, and they asked the colonial administration for more freedom.24 The British government understood their days of empire had gone, and the purpose of their post-­war colonial governance in Singapore and Malyasia was to manage its orderly withdraw and decolonization.25 Therefore, they did not suppress or interfere with religious affairs in Singapore too much. In 1959, the People’s Action Party won the election and Singapore began the internal self-­governing status. In 1963, Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia. But only two years later, it left the federation and declared the founding of The Republic of Singapore.

The early years of Buddhism in colonial Singapore In the early years of colonial Singapore, from about 1819–1900, there was little contact between Mahayana and Theravada groups. The primary reason for this was because in the nineteenth century colonial Singapore, both Mahayana and Theravada were quite feeble and underdeveloped. There were few people who identified themselves solely as Buddhists, and they did not have any independent institutions, and so they did not have adequate power to communicate or interact with one another. There were several obstacles to the development of independent Buddhist institutions. In the nineteenth century, though the majority of Chinese migrants were from southern China, they broke up into several different dialect groups. Language obstacles hindered communications among people, confining them to

Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore   47 their own communities. Religion brought from their place of origin, which not only served as a spiritual support but also as a connection with homeland and town-­fellows in the new environment, became very important in their lives. However, even in the same dialect group, there was a real diversity of religious beliefs; people believed in a number of different religions or deities. Many of these were highly syncretic in nature, mixtures of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism which catered to different people’s needs and the different needs of people.26 A good example of this would be Tian Hock Keng Temple, built in 1839, where all three religions were blended together.27 Tianfei (Matsu), the goddess who bestowed safety to sailors, voyagers, and travelers was worshiped in the main hall. In the back hall, the Buddha, Confucius, and other gods from the three religions were venerated. Several but not all of its abbots were Buddhist monks, including Venerable Zhuandao. Therefore, at this period of time, the Mahayana Buddhism brought by Chinese immigrants was mixed with various deities, doctrines and practices from other religions. It was part of a syncretic folk belief, neither independent nor systematic. It had not been subjected to the purification and reforms that were common among modernizing monks. During the colonial period, the growth of Singapore as a free trade port and as a stopover in Southeast Asia also appealed to immigrants and visitors from Theravada countries like Siam, Burma and Sri Lanka, enhanced as well by British labor policies and the naval highway of the Indian Ocean. The majority of those immigrants returned home after finishing their business in Singapore and so the number of Thais, Burmese, and Sinhalese in Singapore remained small. In the nineteenth century, Sinhalese numbered only a few hundred and there were no significant Thai or Burmese communities in Singapore.28 Therefore, the population of Theravada Buddhists was very small. In addition, records on early Theravada monasteries and temples show that there were very few Theravada monasteries in nineteenth century Singapore. The only one clearly recorded was the Burmese Buddhist Temple at Kinta Road,29 built in 1878 by a Burmese immigrant30 who was a folk medicine practitioner. This temple was passed to the founder’s wife and sons after he died.31 Most Theravada temples in nineteenth century Singapore were rough and small in size and scale.

Foundations of the Theravada–Mahayana relationship By the twentieth century, the social context of colonial Singapore had changed greatly and a number of conditions emerged which were favorable for the different forms of Buddhism. The most important condition for the interactions is that both of them became independent and strong enough to interact with one another. This was especially the case with Mahayana Buddhism. For instance, in 1898, Shuanglin Monastery was built,32 marking a break from the other “three religions,” Taoism and Confucianism, and becoming the first independent, self-­ consciously Mahayana Buddhist temple in Singapore. The prosperity of Mahayana in early twentieth century Singapore can be seen as the result of three

48   Wenxue Zhang factors. First, between the nineteenth century and twentieth century, a great number of Chinese immigrants sought refuge in Singapore from famine in their hometown or from the chaos surrounding the final decades of the Qing Dynasty.33 The significant increase in the immigrant population brought an endless stream of pilgrims to the monasteries. Second, some eminent monks came to Singapore for diverse reasons, such as Venerable Zhuandao, Venerable Taixu (太虚, 1889–1947)34 and Venerable Yuanying (圆瑛, 1878–1953).35 These monks became central pillars in the development and prosperity of Mahayana in Singapore both through their temple building and advocacy. Third, numerous prominent Chinese immigrant leaders, philanthropists, and well-­educated Chinese immigrants were very supportive of Mahayana. Two of the most prominent were Aw Boon Haw and Lee Choon Seng. Aw, whose family came from Fujian, was born in Burma and came to Singapore in the 1920s built up his fortune through the development of Tiger Balm. He was also a devout Buddhist and provided substantial financial support for the building of the Phor Kark See Temple.36 Lee was a successful businessman who had come to Singapore when he was 17. He was one of the founding members of the Singapore Buddhist Lodge, the first Buddhist society that exclusively served Buddhist laymen in Singapore. At first, they had to hold activities in Buddhist monasteries, until Lee Choon Seng donated the two-­storey house. During the same period of time, conditions also emerged for the development of a more stable Theravada Buddhist community. Along with the establishment of the Federated Malay States in 1896, new rubber estates were founded and the contribution of roads and railways increased, which encouraged people from countries like Sri Lanka to come to Singapore as migrant labor.37 Along with these laborers came another group of English-­educated professionals, businessmen, and clerks who were from Theravada countries. And those migrants needed an organization to meet and give mutual support. For this reason, a Sinhalese Fraternal Association was founded in 1914. In 1923, this Sinhalese Fraternal Association was replaced by the Singapore Sinhalese Association (SSA).38 The premises of the SSA were used for community gatherings and as a boarding house for Sinhalese immigrants.39 The SSA did not have a Sinhalese temple under its management until 1939.40 The SSA overlapped in some ways with the Singapore Buddhist Association which included a Sinhalese Buddhist section and Pali Buddhist section.41 With the growth in the immigrant population and the establishment of Theravada Buddhist organizations, pioneering Theravada monks came to Singapore in the 1930s. The earliest one of these was Venerable M.M. Mahaweera MahaNayaka Thero. With his efforts, in 1939, Outram Road Temple was built and a Sunday Dharma School was started. One of the important dynamics of these early Theravada monks was that they quickly began to preach to not just the immigrant communities, but also to the Peranakans, the long-­term ethnic Chinese community of Singapore. In fact, it was a Peranakan woman, Madame Chew Quee Neo, who donated the land so that Venerable MahaNayaka Thero could expand the Outram Road Temple in the 1950s. Theravada Buddhism thus became more organized and the Theravada Dharma became

Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore   49 more accessible to the Peranakans, the Sinhalese and Siamese communities in Singapore.42 The experience of Venerable MahaNayaka Thero and Madame Chew highlights an important demographic dynamic of Theravada Buddhism in Singapore. Vivienne Wee pointed out that the Sinhalese form of Buddhism is associated with the Sinhalese community and some of the Chinese; and among the latter, it is particularly associated with the Babas and Nonyas (the Peranakans) who were often English-­educated. There was no Thai or Vietnamese community of any significance in Singapore, so that, even though there were Thai and Vietnamese Buddhist temples manned by Thai and Vietnamese monks respectively, these centers of Buddhism catered to Chinese laity, to the same extent as did Chinese Buddhism and the Chinese syncretic religions. Thus, Buddhism in all its variety was a religious phenomenon primarily associated with different Chinese communities, differentiated in part by language.43 Looking at Theravada in Singapore from this angle, its small immigrant population determined that the dissemination of Theravada had to take the Chinese community into account.44 Partnership with Mahayana became indispensable for the development of Theravada communities in colonial Singapore. As a multi-­national immigrant colony, Singapore boasted people of diverse nationalities and backgrounds who demanded different religions. For this reason, it was inevitable that the religious composition of colonial Singapore was extremely complicated. All kinds of religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Taoism competed for adherents in this small colonial island, especially for Buddhism and Christianity. These religious groups often had debates in their own publications, especially Buddhism and Christianity. Under this circumstance, the unification between Theravada and Mahayana was needed to enhance the competitiveness of Buddhism in colonial Singapore. Therefore, the interaction between Theravada and Mahayana was just a concrete measure of their adaptation to the local conditions and a positive response to the unique colonial Singapore social context. One factor that contributed to good relations between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists in Singapore was that a number of Mahayana monks were rather familiar with Theravada Buddhism. According to the history of Shuanglin Monastery, between 1892–1898 Venerable Xianhui and his family members went on a pilgrimage to Sri Lanka and spent six years cultivating themselves according to Buddhist doctrines in Mount Lanka before they came to Singapore and built the Shuanglin Monastery.45 Living in a Theravada country for six years would surely make him and his successor familiar with Theravada Buddhism. A number of other monks also paid pilgrimage to Buddhist holy sites in Sri Lanka and India.46 Venerable Zhuandao brought some Buddha relics from India while he traveled there for study and represented Singapore at the World Buddhist Conference in Burma in 1929. Venerable Tao Chiai initiated the reconstruction of the Chinese Buddhist Temple at Sarnath, Benares, India, which received great support from many Mahayana Buddhists including Lee Choon Seng etc., and this cause was eventually completed by his disciple Venerable Teh Yue. The

50   Wenxue Zhang familiarity with Theravada Buddhism by Mahayana Buddhists helped to support the interaction between Mahayana and Theravada.

Interaction and influence The period of strongest interactions between Mahayana and Theravada communities was in the last several decades of the colonial period and was marked by several different aspects: mutual recognition and respect between Mahayana and Theravada monks, allied organizations, and financial support for the building of temples. A number of Mahayana monks went on pilgrimage to predominantly Theravada countries, such as Venerable Xianhui, Venerable Zhuandao, and Venerable Tao Chiai mentioned above. Furthermore, some Mahayana monks were initiated into the monkhood in Theravada countries, such as Venerable Yan-­ben who was initiated into the monkhood in Burma. Venerable Yan-­ ben first came from China to Singapore in 1932 and stayed in the Singapore Buddhist Lodge. He took as his teacher Venerable Teh Yue, a monk from Fayuan Monastery in Beijing who was living in Singapore at the time. Venerable Yan-­ben shaved his head while staying at the Buddhist lodge, but he received the full ordination as a Theravada monk in Burma. As a monk, he practiced Mahayana, Theravada and esoteric forms of Buddhism, and later served as an advisor of the Singapore Buddhist Association and the Buddhist Lodge.47 Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists also worked together to build some allied institutions, for example the Buddhist Union. The predecessor of the Buddhist Union was the English Section of the Singapore Buddhist Association. It was initially suggested by Venerable Narada Thera,48 a famous Theravada missionary monk from Sri Lanka, who was then in Singapore on his journey to Cambodia. The idea received a warm welcome among some ardent Buddhists, and one of them was Mr. Tan Keng Lock (who became Venerable Dhammasukha), a Peranakan born in Malacca. Although Mr. Tan Keng Lock initially learned his Dharma from Theravada Buddhists, he was very interested in Chinese culture and had a close personal relationship with Venerable Zhuandao, who was one of the most prominent and influential Mahayana monks in Singapore, and the leader of the Chinese Buddhist Association. Venerable Zhuandao agreed that it was important to organize an English-­speaking group to propagate the Buddha-­Dharma to English-­speaking Chinese who could not read Chinese sutras. With the help and encouragement from both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist communities, Mr. Tan Keng Lock started this English Section of the Singapore Buddhist Association on November 19, 1938 and became its first president. It functioned as an independent body since its founding, and three years later in 1941, it officially changed its name to the Buddhist Union. As its first patrons, both Venerable Zhuandao and Venerable Narada Thera were regarded as advisors to the Union. At times, Venerable Narada preached Buddhism in English to Peranakans who did not understand Chinese. In other words, the Buddhist Union was a result of cooperation by Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists in colonial Singapore.49

Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore   51 In addition to founding institutions together, Mahayana laymen were also generous in their financial support of Theravada Buddhist Temples. One prominent example was Madame Chew, the benefactor of the Outram Road Temple founded by the Sinhala monk Venerable MahaNayaka Thero. There were others, however, such as the Sakaya Muni Buddha Gaya Temple on Race Course Road, completed in February 1931. According to the field work of Vivienne Wee and Wong Yuan Lee,50 the Sakaya Muni Buddha Gaya Temple was a Theravada temple built by a Thai monk, though it had a Burmese architectural style. A prominent feature of the temple is the statues of a tiger and a leopard at its entrance. The temple construction was financed by the brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, mentioned above, which explains the presence of the statues at the temple’s entrance. The resident monk was Venerable Krang Vutthissara, who was from Thailand.51 As interactions increased, monks and laymen from Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist communities participated in activities together. One of the early examples is the first Vesak Celebration held at the Ramakrishna Mission Hall, Singapore on May 2, 1939. It was a symbolic gathering with Lim Boon Keng as the Chairman and several speakers with different religious backgrounds, Hindu Mahayana (Chinese), and Theravada (Singhalese). Among the speakers were Swami Bhaswarananda, Venerable Guangqia (KwongHiap 洽, 1900–1994), Venerable Hong Chong (Hong Chuan 船, 1907–1990), and Bhikkhu Narada.52 Another visual proof was a group photograph of the Buddhist Union shot in the year of 1939. The picture shows some Mahayana monks, some Theravada monks and a number of laymen, youth, and children sitting orderly together with Venerable Zhuandao in the center.53 This picture was taken after the opening ceremony for the new English Section building at 731 Geylang Road on June 4, 1939. The opening ceremony was presided over by Venerable Zhuandao, who also led the first chanting, and the offering of fruits and flowers for worship, and then another Mahayana Buddhist monk Venerable Guangqia, and other monks and nuns from India and Sri Lanka took turns to lead the chanting.54 More than 120 people were present at the ceremony including Bhikkhu Narada and other priests.55 In addition, on June 25, 1939, one of the lay disciples of Venerable Zhuandao, Mr. Zhuang Duming was invited to give a Dharma talk in the English Section.56 Last but not least, on April 12, Venerable Taixu from China gave a famous speech in the English Section entitled “The Prospects of Buddhism in Southeast Asia” with an audience of around 200 people, most of whom were Sinhala or English-­ speaking Peranakan.57 A less official example of these interactions can be seen in the case of an Amer­ican, Robert S. Clifton, who was ordained in Laos in 1957, taking the name Venerable Sumangalo. Although he was only ordained in 1957, in 1959, he was offered an honorary abbotship at Poh Ern Monastery (九华山报 恩寺 also known as the Temple of Thanksgiving). This monastery had been founded in 1954 by a Singapore Chinese Buddhist and co-­founder of the OCBC bank, Lee Choon Seng. It was dedicated to Kshitigarbha, one of the four main Bodhisattvas in Chinese forms of Buddhism. Tellingly, Venerable Sumangalo aided in translating the Kshitigarbha Sutra from Chinese to English.58

52   Wenxue Zhang There is evidence to show that Mahayana and Theravada communities mutually promoted each other’s development. This was especially true for Mahayana aid of Theravada Buddhism in Singapore. As has already been discussed, some Mahayana Buddhist laymen provided financial support to the building of Theravada temples. Some Theravada monks’ ordination ceremonies were presided over by Mahayana monks. For instance, Mr Tan Keng Lock, mentioned above when talking about the building of Mahayana and Theravada allied institutions, took Mahayana master Venerable Kong Hiap as his teacher when he converted to Buddhism. He took Venerable Seck Hong Choon as his teacher when he became a monk.59 But later he was ordained as Venerable Dhammasukha in Thailand in 1958, the first Straits-­Born Chinese to be ordained as monk, in a “noble yellow robe.”60 Though ordained as a Theravada monk, he held no discriminatory views toward Mahayana and Theravada. To him, “Buddhayana” was the Order to which he belonged.61 This reflected that Mahayana and Theravada communities were not hostile to each other and there was not a strict division between the two schools and followers could switch between the two schools without causing hostility among his companions. Even in cases where there was conflict between the different types of Buddhists, they were effective at resolving these issues. In 1956, for example, Mahayana and Theravada monks disagreed over what day to celebrate Vesak Day. The colonial government initially chose a day that reflected the desire of the Mahayana Buddhists. However, ultimately, the two factions were able to come to a compromise, celebrating the holiday on a day that was agreeable to both. This was doubly important because it was part of efforts by Buddhists to get the colonial government to recognize Vesak as a public holiday.62 Mahayana Buddhist monks’ participation in Theravada activities, or Theravada monks’ participation in Mahayana activities did undoubtedly expand the momentum and dimensions of the activities and strengthen their influence. The interactions also strengthened the sense of togetherness and thereby unifying the power of the Buddhist circles and making them more influential in the society. For instance, during the Japanese occupation of Singapore, due to the relatively tolerant policy on Buddhism adopted by the Japanese colonial administration, both Mahayana and Theravada organizations and monasteries took part in the refugee relief activities which saved a great number of lives and provided spiritual support for the residents to get through the harsh rule of the Japanese colonial government. Many residents of Hougang sought refuge in Pu Ti Temple. Similarly, Seeh Low See Monastery became a place of refuge for people living in Bukit Timah. Another example was the Hai Inn Temple in Bricklands Road. During the occupation period, it provided shelter to more than 100 people. The Singapore Buddhist Lodge also undertook the task of providing island-­wide relief. It set up a relief organization with its headquarters in Chong Ann Girls School (near Tian Hock Keng Temple). The Sinhalese community also made their contributions to help with the refugee work during Japanese occupation. The Buddhist Temple at Outram Road sometimes served vegetarian meals and gave alms to the poor. “About three hundred of the city’s poor were

Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore   53 each given a wholesome meal at No.  2 Short Street, yesterday, the occasion being the celebration of Wesak festival (Lord Buddha’s birthday).”63 According to statistics, across the whole island, there were 27 refugee centers set up which were based in monasteries.64 Their charitable deeds likely attracted more residents to believe in Buddhism. At the end of the colonial period, the purpose of British governance was to withdraw their power from colonies in an orderly way which was in contrast to the governance during the first British colonial period when British government was ambitious to expand its overseas colonies.65 In the face of the nationalist movement waves in the 1950s and 1960s in Southeast Asia, the high level of harmony constructed between Mahayana and Theravada helped to boost the peace between Chinese immigrants and immigrants from Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, and so on, thus contributing to the stability of Singapore society at that time. The interactions between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism in the colonial period not only helped ensure equality between the different forms of Buddhism but also laid a solid foundation for their future cooperation. In 1965, there was a proud and arrogant Theravada monk who was so naïve that he wanted to be the sangharaja of Singapore (king of the monks). His act aroused the dissatisfaction of Buddhists from both Theravada and Mahayana communities. With those Buddhists’ joint effort, the attempt of the proud monk to be sangharaja failed.66 In 1966, the two major Buddhist sects got together and unified the Singapore Buddhist Sangha into one supreme body, the Singapore Buddhist Sangha Organization. It aimed at propagating the sublime solidarity and brotherhood among members of the Sangha and laity.67 So the interaction facilitated their dealing with troubles, keeping equality, and maintaining harmonious development. Therefore, the process of interaction was by and large positive and fruitful.

Conclusion The development of Theravada Buddhism in Singapore has been inseparable from the colonial history and immigrant history of Singapore. Interactions between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist communities were one of the concrete measures of localization and they were a positive response to colonialism in Singapore. It was a colonialism that provided opportunities for Buddhism in Singapore to have significant developments, including both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist communities. British colonists exploited the small island of Singapore and developed it into a free trade port that attracted a large number of immigrants there, thereby laying the preconditions for Mahayana and Theravada to take root. The highly competitive multi-­religious social context served as a stimulus to drive Theravada and Mahayana to make progress together. While the small population of immigrants from Theravada countries was an impediment to Theravada development, Theravada institutions made some adjustments, and cooperated with more populous Mahayana Buddhist institutions. Meanwhile, Mahayana Buddhism in Singapore was closely related with Buddhism in

54   Wenxue Zhang domestic China, and Singapore was once regarded as a stopover for modern Chinese monks to develop an ecumenical Buddhist movement and establish relationships with foreign monks in all parts of the world. Therefore, they were very willing to communicate and cooperate with Theravada Buddhists in Singapore.68 The interactions included the assistance from Mahayana monks with doctrines and the teaching of Dharma, the financial support from Mahayana laymen, and the acceptance of Bodhisattva which was worshiped widely by Mahayana Buddhists, so as to win over more Chinese followers. Along with the development of its own strength, the status of Theravada was strengthened and it attracted more followers. Whether in the period of Japanese occupation or in the post-­war struggle for more autonomy, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist communities cooperated to fight for common benefits. In addition, thanks to tolerant religious policies adopted by the colonial administration, the tolerant character of Buddhist doctrines and the steady growth of both Mahayana and Theravada, Theravada made its interaction with Mahayana and thus strengthened the sense of togetherness and enhanced their impact. As a result, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism mixed together in Singapore,69 but this allowed them to survive and prosper in colonial Singapore. Furthermore, the interaction experienced under colonialism set a good example for Buddhism in modern society where harmony is the main religious goal of the Singapore government. Interaction is a win-­win strategy!

Notes   1 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, pp.  11–14; Freedman and Topley, “Religion and Social Realignment,” pp. 3–8.   2 Veidlinger, “When a Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures,” pp.  406–408; Kitiarsa, “Buddha-­izing a Global City-­State,” pp. 258–260.   3 Kitiarsa, “Buddha-­izing a Global City-­State,” pp. 259–260.   4 Veidlinger, “When a Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures,” p. 405.   5 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, pp.  79–85; Freedman and Topley, “Religion and Social Realignment,” pp. 4–6.   6 Smith, The World’s Religions, pp.  121–122; Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People, pp. 132–138.   7 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, pp. 1–32.   8 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, p. 12.   9 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, pp. 14–16; Freedman, “Colonial Law,” p. 94. 10 Freedman and Topley, “Religion and Social Realignment,” p.  12; Turnbull, The Straits Settlements, p. 109. 11 Freedman, “Colonial Law,” p. 94. 12 Freedman, “Colonial Law,” p. 94. 13 Chen Qiuping, Yimin yu fojiao, p. 99, 102. 14 Comber, Chinese Temples in Singapore, pp. 45–81; Wee, “Buddhism in Singapore,” pp. 144–151; Chuanfa, Xinjiapo, p. 53. Chen Qiuping, Yimin yu fojiao, pp. 130–136. 15 Zhuandao, Fohai weiyan, pp.  55–57. On Buddhists and colonial anti-­communist efforts, see Samuels this volume. 16 Blackburn, “Ceylonese Buddhism in Colonial Singapore.” 17 Zhang Mantao, Dongnanya fojiao, pp. 182, 188–189. 18 History of Burma, www.myanmarol.com/History/Item/152, July 8, 2014.

Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore   55 19 Also see Fu Xinqiu, “Miandian fojiao de lishiyange,” pp. 48–49. 20 Turnbull, A History of Singapore, p. 194. 21 Benda, Southeast Asia, p. 222. 22 McDougall, Buddhism in Malaya, p. 36. 23 Di Guan, “Liushi nian,” p. 8. Di Guan remarks that “After the second world war, the number of monasteries in Singapore doubled and the population of adherents also increased daily.” 24 Zhang Wenxue, “Lun xinjiapo hanchuanfojiao yu zhiminzhengfu de guanxi,” pp. 93–96. 25 Pham, Ending “East of Suez”, p. 1. 26 Freedman and Topley, “Religion and Social Realignment,” pp. 169–172. This syncretic form of religion is relatively unique to Singapore. Though there was also syncretic religion, a combination of Buddhism and Taoism existing in nineteenth century imperial China, because of its active opposition to the state for ideological reasons, it was severely repressed in China. When people came to Singapore in the nineteenth century, they found themselves in a brand-­new political system where their religious activities were subject to state scrutiny only when they caused an obstruction in the traffic or made too much noise. 27 Comber, Chinese Temples, pp.  45–81; Freedman and Topley, “Religion and Social Realignment,” pp. 9–12; Wee, “Buddhism in Singapore,” pp. 144–151; and Chuanfa, Xinjiapo, p. 53. 28 Ong, Buddhism, p. 53. 29 Ong, Buddhism, p. 57. 30 Hue, “Buddhism in Singapore,” pp. 84–87. Hue Guan Thye argues that both the location of the temple and Buddhist statues worshiped there shows it is a traditional Theravada temple. 31 Wee, “Buddhism in Singapore,” p. 138. 32 This temple was built by Mr Low Kim Pong (1837–1909), a wealthy merchant who was from Fukien Province and was then a Chinese leader in Singapore. He built the temple in order to urge Venerable Xianhui to stay in Singapore. 33 Freedman, Chinese Family, p. 17. According to demographic statistics, in 1860, the number of Chinese people in Singapore was 50,043, accounting for 61 percent of the total population. During the twentieth century, the percentage of Chinese people in Singapore kept on rising. In 1921, the number became 317,419, about five times that of 1860, and taking up 75 percent of the total population. 34 Venerable Taixu was born in Zhejiang. His first visit to give Dharma talks in Singapore was in 1926. He made great contributions to the development of Mahayana Buddhism in Singapore. For example, the initiation of Chinese Buddhist Association was related to his advocacy of the unification of all Buddhists in Southeast Asia. 35 Venerable Yuanying was Hokkien. He visited Singapore during 1922 to 1938 to give Dharma talks and collect donations. He was invited by Venerable Zhuandao to preach in Singapore and this was the start of the trend that Chinese monks traveled to the Nanyang area to transmit Buddhism, which promoted the dissemination of Buddhism in Singapore. 36 Phor Kark See Temple was built in 1921 at Bright Hill Drive. Venerable Zhuandao initiated the idea of building this temple. Mr Tay Woo Seng endowed the land and Aw Boon Haw donated the money. Phor Kark See Temple was the among the earliest Buddhist temples in Singapore and it was the biggest Mahayana Buddhist temple there. 37 Some immigrants to Singapore were attracted by the opportunities of a better life and a prospective future in Singapore, while there were also some immigrants consciously brought into Singapore by the colonial government to help construct the railroad and maintain order. 38 Blackburn, “Ceylonese Buddhism in Colonial Singapore.”

56   Wenxue Zhang 39 Singapore: The Encyclopedia 2006, p. 505, cited in Blackburn, “Ceylonese Buddhism in Colonial Singapore.” 40 Ong, Buddhism, p. 54 The SSA was only able to establish a temple 16 years after its founding mainly due to the limited resources they could pull together from the limited Sinhalese population. 41 Blackburn, “Ceylonese Buddhism in Colonial Singapore”; Ong, Buddhism, p. 82. 42 Ong, Buddhism, pp. 53–59. 43 Wee, “Buddhism in Singapore,” p. 131. 44 Hue, “Buddhism in Singapore,” pp. 82–83. 45 Xie Mingfei, Xinjiapo miaoyu gailan, p. 31. 46 Li, Yindu; Chuanfa, Xinjiapo fojiao; Yu, Zhongguo jinxiandai; Ong, Buddhism. 47 Singapore Buddhist Lodge, Xinjiapo fojiaojushilin jiniantekan. 48 Born in 1898 at Kotahena, a suburb of Colombo, Venerable Narada Thera received his first ordination at the age of 18 and was later a Patron and religious advisor of Sri Lankaramaya Temple. 49 As another example, the second leader of the Buddhist Union was another Peranakan who lived as a Theravada novice and as a Mahayana monk. Buddhist Union, Golden Anniversary, p. 4. See also http://thebuddhistunion.org/venerable-­seck-kong-­poh/. 50 Wee, “Buddhism in Singapore,” pp. 130–162. 51 Ong, Buddhism, p. 59. 52 The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, May 3, 1939. 53 Please refer to the picture in the Buddhist Union, Golden Anniversary 1987, p. 44. 54 Nanyang Siang Pau, June 5, 1939. 55 The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, June 5, 1939. 56 Nanyang Siang Pau, June 25, 1939. 57 Taixu, Taixu dashi quanshu, p. 267. 58 Piyasilo, Charisma; Ong, Buddhism, p. 75. 59 Chuanfa, Xinjiapo fojiao, p. 105. 60 Buddhist Union, Golden Anniversary, p. 129. 61 Buddhist Union, Golden Anniversary, p. 129. 62 Singapore Buddhist Lodge, Xinjiapo fojiaojushilin jiniantekan; Ong, Buddhism, p. 89. 63 The Syonan Sinbun, May 20, 1943. 64 Ong, Buddhism, p. 64. 65 Pham, Ending “East of Suez,” p. 1. 66 Chuanfa, Xinjiapo fojiao, p. 103. 67 Buddhist Union, Golden Anniversary, pp. 129–131. 68 Pittman, Toward a Modern. Pittman points out that Taixu began to think about organizing an ecumenical Buddhist movement on a global scale and bringing together progressive-­minded monks and laypeople from many nations who were prepared to commit themselves to a global Buddhist mission. 69 Wee, “Buddhism in Singapore,” p. 136.

References Benda, Harry J. The World of Southeast Asia. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Piyasilo Bhikkhu. Charisma in Buddhism. Petaling Jaya: Dharmafarers Enterprises, 1992. Blackburn, Anne M. “Ceylonese Buddhism in Colonial Singapore: New Ritual Spaces and Specialists, 1895–1935.” ARI Working Papers Series, No. 184 National University of Singapore, 2012. Chen Qiuping 陈秋平. Yimin yu fojiao 移民与佛教－[Immigration and Buddhism]. Malaysia: Southern College, 2004. Chuanfa 传发. Xinjiapo fojiao fazhan shi 新加坡佛教发展史—[A History of the Development of Buddhism in Singapore]. Singapore: Singapore Buddhist Lodge, 1997.

Theravada Buddhism in colonial Singapore   57 Comber, Leon. Chinese Temples in Singapore. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 1958. Di Guan 谛观. “Liushi nian lai zhi xinjiapo huaqiaofojiao (yi)” 六十年来之新加坡华侨 佛教（一） [Singapore Chinese Buddhism in the last 60 years]. Nanyang fojiao 南洋 佛教 47, no. 3 (1973): 5–8. Freedman, Maurice. Chinese Family aced Marriage in Singapore. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1957. Freedman, Maurice. “Colonial Law and Chinese Society.” In The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman, Selected and Introduced by G. William Skinner, pp. 93–139. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979. Freedman, Maurice and Topley, Marjorie. “Religion and Social Realignment among the Chinese in Singapore.” The Journal of Asian Studies 21, no. 1 (1961): 3–23. Fu Xinqiu 傅新球. “Miandian fojiao de lishiyange” 缅甸佛教的历史沿革 [The Historical Transformation of Burma Buddhism]. Around Southeast Asia 东南亚纵横 5, (2002): 46–50. Golden Anniversary 1987. Singapore: The Buddhist Union, 1987. Granet, Marcel. The Religion of the Chinese People. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975. Hue Guan Thye. “Buddhism in Singapore: Propagation, Evolution and Practise.” M.A. thesis, Center for Chinese Language & Culture, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 2005. Kitiarsa, P. “Buddha-­izing a Global City-­State: Transnational Religious Mobilities, Spiritual Marketplace, and Thai Migrant Monks in Singapore.” Mobilities 5, no. 2: 257–275. Li Juncheng (Lee Choon Seng) 李俊承. Yindu gufoguo youji 印度古佛国游记—[Travels in Buddhist country of India]. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1940. McDougall, Colin. Buddhism in Malaya. Singapore: Donald Moore Press Ltd, 1956. Nanyang Siang Pau. “Xingzhou fojiaohui yingwenbu huisuo kaimu you zhuandao fashi lifo songjing zhuchiren wei fojiao bingfei duoshenjiao” 星洲佛教会英文部会所开幕 由转道法师礼佛诵经主持人谓佛教并非多神教 [The New Building Opening Ceremony of the English Section of the Singapore Buddhist Association Presided Over By Venerable Zhuandao, Who Claimed Buddhism Is Not Polytheism]. June 5, 1939. Nanyang Siang Pau. “Xingzhou fojiaohui qing Zhuang Duming jiangyan foli ding jinri xiawu bashi juxing” 星洲佛教会请庄笃明讲演佛理定今日下午八时举行 [Zhuang Duming Invited to Give a Dharma Talk at 8 PM Today in the English Section of the Singapore Buddhist Association]. June 25, 1939. Ong, Y.D. Buddhism in Singapore—A Short Narrative History. Singapore: Skylark Publications, 2005. Pham, P.L. Ending “East of Suez” The British Decision to Withdraw from Malaysia and Singapore, 1964–1968. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pittman, Don Alvin. Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu’s Reforms. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Smith, Huston. The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991. Taixu 太虚. Taixu dashi quansh 太虚大师全书 (第三十二卷 杂藏·文丛二)—[Master Taixu’s Works] Vol. 32. Beijing: Religious Culture Press, 2005. The Syonan Sinbun, May 20, 1943. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser. “Buddhists and ‘The Cry For Peace’,” May 3, 1939. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser. “New Home of Buddhism in Singapore,” June 5, 1939.

58   Wenxue Zhang Turnbull, C.M. The Straits Settlements, 1826–67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony. London: The Athlone Press, 1972. Turnbull, C.M. A History of Singapore 1819–1975. London: Oxford University Press, 1979. Veidlinger, Daniel. “When a Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Mahayana Influence on Theravada Attitudes towards Writing.” Numen 53, no. 4 (2006): 405–447. Wee, Vivienne. “Buddhism in Singapore.” In Understanding Singapore Society, edited by Ong Jin Hui, Tong Chee Kiong, and Tan Ern Ser, pp. 130–162. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1997. Xie Mingfei 谢鸣非. Xinjiapo miaoyu gailan 新加坡庙宇概览—[Chinese Temples of Singapore]. Singapore: Nanfeng Commercial Press, 1951. Singapore Buddhist Lodge. Xinjiapo fojiaojushilin yinxi jiniantekan 新加坡佛教居士林 银禧纪念特刊—[The Special Issue of Commemorative Book of the Singapore Buddhist Lodge] Singapore, 1965. Yu Lingbo 于凌波. Zhongguo jinxiandai fojiao renwuzhi 中国近现代佛教人物 志—[Modern Chinese Buddhist Figures]. Beijing: Religious Culture Press, 1995. Zhang Mantao 张曼涛. Dongnanya fojiao yanjiu 东南亚佛教研究—[Studies of Buddhism in Southeast Asia]. Taibei: Mahayana Culture Press, 1978. Zhang Wenxue 张文学. “Lun xinjiapo hanchuanfojiao yu zhiminzhengfu de guanxi” 论 新加坡汉传佛教与殖民政府的关系 [Relations between Singapore Chinese Buddhism and Its Colonial Governments]. The Religious Cultures in the World 世界宗教文化 79, no. 1 (2013): 93–96. Zhuandao 转道. Fohai weiyan 佛海微言—[Brief Introduction of Buddhism]. New Men Cooperative, 1930.

4 A tale of two colonialisms K. Sri Dhammananda and the making of a missionary monk Jeffrey Samuels

In her book, Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka, Anne Blackburn offers a different way to approach the study of colonialism and its impact. Using a micro-­history of one Buddhist monk, Blackburn provides an alternative to previous studies that have tended to focus on local responses against colonialism and Christianity. Through her study of Venerable Hikkaduve Sumangala, Blackburn explores  spheres of intellectual and social activity in a historical context emphatically marked by the presence of colonial rule instead of looking at intellectual and social responses to colonialism … [that is], an alternative line of vision on a scale small enough to recognize intellectual and social logics and strategies as well as local relationships of care and obligation.1 Blackburn’s study of Venerable Sumangala illustrates how small-­scale histories may be used not only to highlight an individual’s sense of problems and possibilities, but also to focus on connections that exist between such concerns and wider social processes: economic, social, institutional, political, and so on. In this chapter I wish to test Blackburn’s approach by moving across the Indian Ocean and focusing on Venerable Kirinde Sri Dhammananda: a Sri Lankan monk who played an important role in the propagation and development of Theravada Buddhism in Malaysia during the twentieth century. By situating Venerable Dhammananda within two different social, intellectual, political, and geographical contexts—Sri Lanka and Malaysia—I not only seek to uncover wider social processes that shaped Venerable Dhammananda and the Theravada traditions in colonial and post-­colonial Malaysia, but also wish to explore how competing local logics, strategies, and relationships intersect and play out in the shaping of Venerable Dhammananda as a transnational Buddhist missionary. Venerable Dhammananda is, I believe, an ideal figure to test Blackburn’s thesis as he not only confronted two very different colonial contexts, but also used the unique environments of those contexts to further his goal of propagating Buddhism and serving society. Before turning to the early life of Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda, however, a brief discussion of Malaysia’s colonial

60   Jeffrey Samuels h­ istory—including the factors that led to the arrival of Sri Lankan migrants as well as the founding of Sri Lankan temples on the peninsula—would be helpful.

Colonial Malaya and the Sinhalese diaspora The British had political and commercial interests in Malaya during the early to mid-­eighteenth century. The late eighteenth to mid-­nineteenth centuries, however, saw a more rapid expansion of British influence when the Straits Settlement was created after the British took over control of Penang (1791), colonized Singapore (1819), and—with the signing of the Anglo-­Dutch Treaty—acquired administrative control of Malacca (1824). The signing of the Pangkor Engagement or Treaty in January 1874 between the Sultan of Perak and the then-­governor of the Straits Settlement, Sir Andrew Clarke, allowed for an expanded British involvement in the Peninsular states. The Engagement provided the British access to the hinterlands and with that the possibility of developing the country, with attention first given to the states of Perak and Selangor. To develop what was, up until then, thick jungle, the government of the Straits Settlements needed immigrants, particularly those who could build and manage a much needed infrastructure. Looking westward, Sri Lanka was an important place from where recruits could be sent as their knowledge of English and, more importantly, familiarity with the British colonial machinery made them an invaluable workforce.2 With the development of Malaya and the tin industry came the need for a system of transportation. The British, turning to their own civil servants already working abroad, asked J.W.W. Birch to move from Sri Lanka to Malaya in the 1870s. With him came two divisions of the Ceylon Pioneer Corps who were charged with building the first rail line in Malaya. That line was completed in 1884, and linked the tin town of Taiping in Perak to Port Weld on the Larut River. More Sri Lankans came to work on the railway after 1891 when C.E. Spooner, a man who would later become the first General Manager of the Malay States Railway, arrived in Malaya from Sri Lanka. Like Birch, Spooner brought with him a large numbers of Sri Lankan Sinhalese and Tamils from the Ceylon Public Works Department where he previously worked. Along with continuing work on the railway, Spooner—and his so-­called “Spooner men”—devoted themselves to developing the state of Selangor by designing and constructing the Klang Water works, Pudu Gaol, and the government building in Selangor. Many Sri Lankans were recruited through the colonial offices in Sri Lanka and Malaya. Along with them, Sri Lankan traders and businessmen—tempted by stories about the El Dorado or the Land of Gold (Svarnabhumi) lying just ­eastward—continued to make it over on their own accord. Attracted to what they saw as opportunities for wealth, many Sinhalese immigrants gravitated toward the port city of Penang and Singapore as well as the larger cities of Taiping, Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur, Melaka, and Klang. These cities experienced rapid growth during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and there was ready employment in a number of different occupations.

A tale of two colonialisms   61

Sri Lankan Buddhist temples in Malaya Through fostering immigration from Sri Lankan to Malaysia, the British administration in Malaysia directly contributed to the growth of Theravada monastic institutions there.3 The first Sri Lankan temples were established in Malaya during the late nineteenth century; they were built to serve the religious and social needs of Sri Lankan immigrants who chose to remain permanently in the “Land of Gold.” The decision not to return to Sri Lanka brought new sets of challenges, particularly finding comfort during more difficult times when a sense of uncertainty and meaninglessness overwhelmed the minds and hearts of the diasporic community. We read in the history of the Buddhist Maha Vihara in Kuala Lumpur that The pioneer Sinhala Buddhist immigrants also faced many shortcomings in Malaya in the early days particularly with regard to the performance of their religious obligations. There were no Theravada Buddhist temples and no monks. Cases had occurred where certain Sinhala Buddhists had died and were interred without even the proper last religious rites being administered.4 Following the establishment of the first Sinhalese Buddhist temple in Malaya in 1889—Bodhi Langka Ram Vihara in Taiping, Perak—a second temple was built to serve the growing number of Sri Lankans living in Kuala Lumpur. The location chosen for the temple—Buddhist Maha Vihara—was the cosmopolitan section known as Brickfields, an area of Kuala Lumpur where the Public Works Department factory was located and where a number of Sri Lankan Sinhalese and Tamils civil servants lived.5 As the community did not have sufficient funds to buy, outright, a piece of land, it was decided that they would petition the colonial government. The Sri Lankan community sent their request to the British government through C.E. Spooner, the State Engineer from the Public Works Department. He supported their petition. Spooner’s hope, as indicated by his letter, was that a Sri Lankan temple in Kuala Lumpur would encourage other Sri Lankans to emigrate to Malaya.6 The foundation stone for the shrine room at the Brickfields temple was laid on August 25, 1894; however, it was only completed “some time during the first decade of the 20th Century.”7 Prior to that, modest living quarters were built to house the first incumbents—Venerable Patthalagedera Dhammananda Thera and his student, Venerable Godagama Sobhita Thera—who arrived from Sri Lanka in May 1895. It would be another 57 years before Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda would arrive in Malaysia to take over the incumbency of the Brickfields temple. Before we turn to his arrival to Malaysia, it may be worthwhile to outline briefly Dhammananda’s early years in Sri Lanka in order to ascertain, more completely, the political, social, and religious contexts that would come to shape his work as a missionary monk in Malaysia.

62   Jeffrey Samuels

The early life of K. Sri Dhammananda8 Venerable Dhammananda, or “The Chief ” as he came to be affectionately known in Malaysia after 1965,9 was born in Kirinde, Matara on March 18, 1919. He entered the monastic community or sangha at the age of 12 after his uncle, the head monk of the village temple in Kirinde, asked his sister to give her son over to the sangha. Although Venerable Dhammananda’s father was reluctant to hand over his eldest child, the boy’s mother agreed and, after convincing her husband, both parents allowed their son to become a Buddhist novice.10 Like many other monastics in Sri Lanka, Venerable Dhammananda was trained and educated in several monastic colleges or pirivenas. After attending Sri Dhammarama Pirivena in Ratmalana, Dhammananda studied at Vidyavardhana Buddhist Institute in Colombo. From there he went to one of the premier monastic colleges of the time, Vidyalankara Pirivena in Kelaniya. Dhammananda’s early life and career as a student in Sri Lanka was affected by the on-­going Buddhist resurgence there in which monks and laypeople sought to defend the tradition against criticisms leveled by Christian missionaries. Even though British rulers in Sri Lanka vowed to support Buddhism with the signing of the Kandyan Convention in 1815,11 that changed when British administrators in Sri Lanka, under pressure from missionary bodies in England, indirectly shifted their support to the Gospel rather than to “heathenism,” by passing education reforms and other policies. By the middle of the nineteenth century, for instance, the British had withdrawn all support from Buddhism and Buddhist institutions; a number of missionaries (many of them Wesleyan) also published books and tracts that sought to undermine the Buddhist tradition (e.g., David de Silva’s Man Has an Immortal Son [1840] and Is Buddha All-­Wise? [1852], Daniel John Gogerly’s Kristiyāni Prajñapti [The Evidences and Doctrines of Christianity] in 1949, as well as Benjamin Stark’s The Folly of Image Worship [1852] and The Vain Hopes of Buddhists [1852]).12 The hopes of most Buddhists involved in the resurgence was to restore the tradition to what they saw as its rightful place in the country. Early attempts at defending the tradition against what many felt was a direct onslaught from Christianity and the British colonial government already occurred during the mid-­nineteenth century with the publication of Buddhist tracts and debates held between Buddhist and Christians (the most famous of which was between Mohoṭṭivatte Gunananda and David de Silva in Panadura in 1873). It was the Panadura debate, however, that was regarded to be the most effective in “producing lasting effects on the Buddhist society in Colombo … to recover Buddhist confidence lost during the previous decade.”13 The debate came to be seen as being one of the key factors behind the so-­called Buddhist resurgence of the late nineteenth and early to mid-­twentieth centuries spearheaded by such well-­known figures as Mohoṭṭivatte Gunananda, Bulatgama Sumanatissa, Hikkaduve Sumangala, Anagarika Dharmapala, and Walpola Rahula. It was the latter figure—with whom Venerable Dhammanananda crossed paths while at Vidyalankara Pirivena—who wrote The Heritage of the Bhikkhu (1946), a text

A tale of two colonialisms   63 that “has influenced the monkhood more than any other in the recent history of Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism” and that “defined the vocation of the monk as social service.”14 What is also key to note about Venerable Dhammananda’s monastic training at Vidyalankara Pirivena is how that institution came to play an important “role in the propagation of Buddhism abroad.”15 By the time Dhammananda left Vidyalankara with a diploma in Buddhist studies (Tripitaka Dharmaya) and linguistics, he had already internalized Vidyalandara’s outward-­oriented worldview along with, according to one biographer, “the relevant knowledge and skills in missionary techniques.”16 The courses that Venerable Dhammananda pursued at Vidyalankara (including secular subjects such as English, history, hygiene, and psychology) would come to have a significant impact on his ability to reach out to new constituents in the decades after his arrival in Malaysia. Between his degree at Vidyalankara and coming to Malaysia, Venerable Dhammananda would take one more step that would further shape his outlook and path: pursuing a master’s degree at Benares Hindu University (BHU). At BHU, Venerable Dhammananda studied alongside other Sri Lankan monastics whose sights were set far beyond their own native countries: Dr. H. Saddhatissa (who later became the head of London Buddhist Vihara) and Dr. U. Dhammaratana (who later became the General Secretary of the Mahabodhi Society). While in India, Venerable Dhammananda also associated himself with the Mahabodhi Society, a nonethnic and nonsectarian institution that was viewed as being “the first Buddhist organization in the history of modern Buddhism to begin a propaganda for the dissemination of the Dhamma in non-­Buddhist lands.”17 Soon after completing his studies at Vidyalankara Pirivena and an M.A. degree in India, Venerable Dhammananda began turning his attention to “social service” while working at the Sudharma Buddhist Institute in Kotawila. Through that institution, Venerable Dhammannada tended to “the educational, welfare and religious needs of the villagers.”18 Moreover, using the Institute’s journal, Sudharma, Dhammananda began propagating Buddhism to those Sinhala-­ speaking Buddhists who—unable to read the many tracts about Buddhism and its rational outlook written in English—had “little knowledge” of their own religion. While at Sudharma Insitute, the then head monk of Vidyalankara Pirivena, Venerable Kiriwattuduwe Sri Paññasara, received a letter from the Malaysian Sasana Abhiwurdhi Wardhana Society, the Buddhist organization that was responsible for building and managing the Buddhist Maha Vihara Temple in Brickfields, requesting a Sinhalese monk to administer the temple. Venerable Paññasara—who happened to be the signatory of the Declaration penned by Venerable Pragnasara and Venerable Walpola Rahula that became a key part of the latter’s The Heritage of the Bhikkhu—asked Dhammananda to travel to Malaya. The latter accepted his teacher’s request as he believed that his training— both in Sri Lanka and India—had prepared him well for this new opportunity.

64   Jeffrey Samuels

Arrival in Malaya and the Malayan Communist insurgency Venerable Dhammananda set sail to Malaya on January 2, 1952; he arrived in Penang three days later. Before traveling on to Kuala Lumpur, Venerable Dhammananda spent several days with Venerable Kamburupitiye Gunaratana, the third incumbent monk of the Sri Lankan Mahindarama temple in Georgetown, Penang. Venerable Gunaratana was a popular Buddhist figure in Malaya at the time and frequently reached out beyond his temple’s Sri Lankan patrons by preaching in both English and Hokkien.19 During Dhammananda’s short stay at Mahindarama, he was briefed on the state and status of the Sri Lankan communities in Malaya,20 various Malayan Buddhist societies and associations that had come to play a role in the history of Buddhism there, and the current political situation. After flying from Penang to Kuala Lumpur, Venerable Dhammananda began the arduous work of “refurbishing the temple, preaching in Sinhala, counseling people, and establishing a Sunday school” to cater to the Sri Lankan families there.21 Within a period of only several months, however, Venerable Dhammananda was transformed from a monk primarily focused on serving the Sri Lankan diasporic community in Malaysia into a missionary or dharmaduta22 monk. When Venerable Dhammananda arrived in Malaya, the country was in a state of political turmoil, largely due to the insurgency being led by the Malayan Communist Party. The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was formed in 1930 out of the dissolution of the China-­affiliated Nanyang Communist Party. At first, the relationship between the British and members of the MCP was not antagonistic. Along with the presence of British sympathizers within the MCP (most notably Lai Teck, the Secretary General), the British had backed the MCP, particularly during the Japanese occupation (1941–1945). With support from the British, the MCP was able to form their own army, the Malayan People’s Anti-­Japanese Army (MPAJA). As the British began setting up a new Civil Administration after the Japanese surrendered, the MPAJA continued strengthening itself. They were soon seen as a real threat to the British colonial administration. Within the first several years after the Japanese handover, the MCP was in a position to seize power from the British who had yet the chance to reorganize themselves completely.23 In response to the growing communist threat, the British set up a military government, the British Military Administration, which forced the MCP underground. Under the direction of the new Secretary General of the MCP, Chin Peng, the MCP recruited Chinese squatters living in the jungle and began an armed revolt against the Federation Government, including those who were believed to be colonial sympathizers. Shortly after three European plantation managers were killed on June 16, 1948, the British declared a country­wide state of emergency. The Malayan Emergency, as it was called, lasted from 1948–1960; it was aimed at eradicating the MCP. Rather than solely going head to head with the MCP militarily, the British under the direction of High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney, engaged themselves in a propaganda war aimed at weakening the MCP’s lure. With the implementation of

A tale of two colonialisms   65 the Briggs Plan—named after the Director of Operations, Sir Harold Briggs—on June 1, 1950, the British sought the upper hand by weakening the people’s support for the MCP through resettlement schemes and by providing people with a greater sense of security. It was hoped that by giving away land and economic resources, the New Villages would attract the jungle squatters who had been prime recruitment targets of the MCP.24 On October 6, 1951, Sir Henry Gurney was murdered at the hands of members of the Malayan National Liberation Army. Gurney’s successor, Sir Gerald Templer, was elected High Commissioner in January 1952 and arrived in Malaysia in February 1952, one month after Venerable Dhammananda. Templer continued implementing the Briggs Plan, working even more ardently to secure Malaya by winning over the hearts and minds of the rural Chinese. Templer continued developing the New Villages (which grew rapidly in size during the early 1950s),25 through improved police protection, and fulfilled the residents’ basic economic and social needs. Templer sought to instill in the hearts and minds of the Chinese the belief that life in the New Villages, though not perfect, is much better than anything they had. To improve the residents’ lives, Templer implemented a 15-point plan that ensured that the residents have some land, an adequate and safe water supply, a village council, at least one school to accommodate their children, a village community center, and a place or places of worship.

Templer and Dhammananda: reaching out to new communities Whereas Dhammananda’s years in Sri Lanka were shaped by a more antagonistic relationship between the British colonial administration and the monastic community or sangha, his time in Malaysia was marked by a much more cooperative one. Learning of Venerable Dhammananda’s recent arrival, Templer sought to elicit his help in the government’s propaganda war against the insurgents and their sympathizers.26 In March 1952, Templer requested a meeting with Venerable Dhammananda to ascertain the degree to which communism and Buddhism were related.27 Describing his encounter with Templer, Venerable Dhammananda said how he explained to Templer that: “Communism introduce [sic] violence. Buddhism introduce [sic] peace, harmony, understanding. Therefore Buddhist do not contribute anything for communist [sic] to create violence.”28 After that meeting, Venerable Dhammananda was “invited to aid the Government in the psychological war to win the hearts and minds of the people through Buddhism.”29 Templer hoped that by Venerable Dhammananda teaching Buddhism to the residents of the New Villages, they would become less inclined to support the insurgents and less willing to engage in acts of violence. Venerable Dhammananda accepted Templer’s offer.30 According to several of Venerable Dhammananda’s biographers, however, Dhammananda’s decision to help Templer by preaching to the inhabitants of the New Villages did not imply

66   Jeffrey Samuels becoming a tool or puppet of the state; his decision was more religious than political: Venerable Dhammananda had only one motivation when he visited the New Villages—to impart the message of the Buddha to the villagers so that with a proper understanding of Buddhism they could live a life of peace, happiness and goodwill. He believed that his prime duty as a Buddhist monk is to teach Buddhism to more people.31 Drawing on the help of the Selangor Buddhist Association, the World Fellowship of Buddhists (Selangor Branch),32 and the Malaysian Chinese Association (all of which were made up, almost exclusively, of English-­speaking Chinese Malaysians), Venerable Dhammananda began his career as a missionary or dharmaduta monk in a country that would soon be called Malaysia.33 Venerable Dhammananda was sent to Malaysia to cater to the religious and social needs of the Sri Lankan communities living there. Accepting Templer’s invitation to preach to the residents of the New Villages provided Venerable Dhammananda with the incentive to reach out to new audiences and, over the next several decades, dramatically change the demographic makeup of his temple. The launching of his new career as a dharmaduta monk in Malaysia provided Venerable Dhammananda and the temple he was sent to administer with new avenues for development. No longer relying almost exclusively on the Sinhalese Buddhist community, Venerable Dhammananda began engaging new communities, institutional networks, technologies, and streams of economic capital to address what he and others perceived to be problems facing Malaysia’s Buddhists. It was also his contact with local actors working in an environment marked by the presence of colonialism that partially shaped Venerable Dhammananda’s activities as a missionary monk in Malaysia.

Colonialism across the Indian Ocean: Venerable Dhammananda’s defense of Buddhism In Sri Lanka, the British administration was viewed as colluding with Christian missionaries. By passing educational reforms and changing the medium of education from Sinhala to English, the British were seen as undermining the traditional system of Sinhalese education that had been largely under the control of Buddhist monks.34 In Malaysia and Singapore on the other hand, the British administration were not generally viewed as subverting-­Christian religions there, as is evident in Zhang’s discussion in this volume. Indeed, historical accounts of the Buddhist Maha Vihara both during Venerable Dhammananda’s tenure and during the temple’s early history suggest a close working relationship with, and support from, the colonial administration in the form of land grants to new temples and religious organizations. Moreover, whereas the use of English as a national language and the primary medium of education was seen as subverting Buddhist monks and monastic institutions in Sri Lanka, the use of English in

A tale of two colonialisms   67 Malaysia actually fostered the growth of Theravada Buddhist institutions by indirectly creating a new clientele for monks such as Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda: namely English-­speaking Chinese Buddhists who had been—in the words of Lee Yu Ban (the founder of the Malaysia Theravada E-­group)—cut off from sources of information related to Buddhism.35 The more supportive stance of the British toward Buddhism in Malaysia did not mean that Chinese and Sinhalese Buddhists felt unthreatened by Christian missionary efforts. Like several of his counterparts in Sri Lanka, Venerable Dhammananda believed that his dharmaduta activities in Malaysia were necessary to stem the tide of Christian conversions; he worked “almost alone in defending Buddhism against the onslaught of Christian Missionaries during the 1950s.”36 As the new head monk of the Buddhist Maha Vihara, he was first concerned about the conversion of a number of Sri Lankan families; as his missionary work spread to other communities, his concern broadened to include English-­speaking Chinese Malaysians. Discussing Venerable Dhammananda’s work in Malaysia, Venerable Omalpe Sobhita, a former Jathika Hela Urumaya parliamentarian and supporter of the anti-­conversion bill in Sri Lanka,37 wrote that Dhammananda warned of the disharmony of family and society posed by proselytizing groups who lure people away from their traditional religion through blatant false propaganda and bribes and called for positive action against such unethical conversions.… He called on genuine members of other faiths to speak up against their own kind and for Buddhists to make every effort to urge them to do so.38 In responding to the perceived increase in Buddhists converting to Christianity, Venerable Dhammananda drew on the methods employed by a number of his Sri Lankan predecessors—particularly Vens. Bulatgama Sumanatissa Thera, Hikkaduve Sumangala Thera, and Mohottivatte Gunananda—as they challenged the incorrect views about Buddhism propagated by Christian missionaries. As Venerable Dhammananda believed that Christian conversion was largely the result of Buddhists’ ignorance about their own religion, he “realized that the only way to prevent the young, educated Chinese from being converted was to ensure that they understood the proper teachings of the Buddha.”39 To accomplish his goal, Venerable Dhammananda began an active routine of teaching and preaching at his temple and at other Buddhist societies and institutions throughout the peninsula. One of the key methods that Venerable Dhammananda employed to spread Buddhism in Malaysia was print culture. While Dhammananda brought with him from Sri Lanka the concept of publishing short tracts about Buddhism to propagate the religion in Malaysia,40 it is also worth noting that he was also influenced by local Malaysian monks who had already been spreading Buddhism through print culture prior to Dhammananda’s arrival. This includes publications issued through the Phor Tay Institute in Penang, as well as those from the

68   Jeffrey Samuels Penang Buddhist Association which, for example, printed and disseminated 5,500 copies of a comprehensive dhamma book for free distribution in 1952.41 Printing and disseminating Dhammananda’s message—in the form of lectures, dhamma talks, pamphlets, short books, and the Society’s periodical (The Voice of Buddhism)42—was largely the responsibility of his Buddhist Missionary Society, which he established ten years after the publication of the comprehensive dhamma book issued through the Penang Buddhist Association. Using English as the primary medium, the Society was also able to reach English-­ educated Chinese Buddhists in and around Kuala Lumpur. Through such efforts, Venerable Dhammananda was able to increase the patronage of Chinese Malaysians at his temple from four to five Chinese families in the 1950s, to over 95 percent Chinese in the subsequent decades.43 Realizing that the future of Buddhism in Malaysia depended on Malaysian youth, Venerable Dhammananda also began a youth section of the Buddhist Missionary Society in 1963. In many ways, the youth group that he established in Malaysia mirrored some of the ways in which Sinhala monks were reaching out to young Buddhists in Sri Lanka (e.g., through the Young Men’s Buddhist Association and by establishing a network of Buddhist Sunday schools). At the same time, Venerable Dhammananda’s youth groups were also shaped by Malaysian contexts and actors, particularly Venerable Sumangalo, an Amer­ican Buddhist monk who focused much of his time on Malaysia’s Buddhist youth. Indeed, eight years before Venerable Dhammananda established his Buddhist Missionary Society Youth Section, Venerable Sumangalo—who also disseminated Buddhism through several publications including Buddhist Stories for Young and Old (1960) and Buddhist Sunday School Lessons (1960)—had already established a Youth Circle at the Mahayana-­affiliated Penang Buddhist Association.44 Employing some of the same techniques as Venerable Sumangalo (e.g., youth camps, music, and dramas), Venerable Dhammananda began reaching out to Malaysian youth in innovative ways.45 Through his temple’s Sunday school, the public talks he gave throughout the country, and his work with students at a number of universities and colleges (which were also modeled on Venerable Sumangalo’s efforts), Venerable Dhammananda was further able to offset the inroads made by Christian missionaries. As a further way of promoting Buddhist education, particularly among Buddhist youths, a Buddhist Monks’ Training Centre and a novitiate program were established at the Brickfields temple. Through training courses and annual temporary ordination ceremonies—which Venerable Dhammananda conducted as a response to temporary ordination rituals regularly held at Thai temples in Malaysia—Venerable Dhammananda hoped to give young men and women a brief taste of Buddhism and monastic life. What is important to mention in assessing Venerable Dhammananda’s activities in Malaysia is how effective his packaging Buddhism was for his dharmaduta agenda. By portraying the tradition as a logical, rational religion, Venerable Dhammananda was able to captivate the attention of many English-­ speaking Chinese Malaysians. Through his writings, Dhammananda sought to

A tale of two colonialisms   69 present a tradition that is compatible with science and modernity and, as such, make the tradition palatable to young English-­educated university students who had begun to question the use and meaning of the Buddhist cum Daoist “rites and rituals”46 practiced by their parents and grandparents. Indeed, like the monks in Sri Lanka who challenged the Christian missionaries’ views of  Buddhism as nothing more than superstition,47 Dhammananda sought to portray—through such publications as Religion in a Scientific Age, Buddhism and the Free Thinkers, Is Buddhism Practical Today?, You are Responsible, Buddhism for the Future, as well as his most popular publication, What Buddhists Believe—a Buddhism that was rational and in consonance with modern science. Venerable Dhammananda’s Sri Lankan heritage certainly influenced the manner in which he dealt with what he and others perceived as a growing rate of Christian conversions among Malaysian Buddhists. At the same time, he also drew on a number of techniques and strategies employed by Malaysian Buddhist monastics and laypeople to spread the teachings: creating Buddhist youth groups, holding regular temporary ordination ceremonies, re-­packaging Buddhism as a scientific religion, and publishing short tracts and books on Buddhism.

Local repertoires: Buddhist non-­sectarianism, inter-­religious Unlike those involved in the Theravada Buddhist resurgence in Sri Lanka, Venerable Dhammananda remained open to different Buddhist religious traditions in Malaysia. Reflecting back, in the late 1980s, on his success as a missionary monk in Malaysia, Venerable Dhammananda said: On doing the missionary work, we have to adopt our approach to suit the people here and do not force them to following our way. According to my way of introducing Buddhism in Malaysia, I did not introduce the Sri Lankan tradition. I think that is the secret of my success.48 It was the indirect result of travel networks and immigration spurred by the British colonial administration, as well as a direct result of Dhammananda’s encounter with monks and lay leaders who imbibed a much more nonsectarian outlook, that led Venerable Dhammananda to adopt a spirit of Buddhist ecumenism. Indeed, he often invited representatives from Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions to his temple and continually emphasized the need for Buddhists to be united and refrain from being divided over the Mahayana and Theravada labels. His famous argument—reminiscent of the ekayana or one vehicle ideology found in the Lotus Sutra—was that the Buddha only taught the Dharma—he did not teach Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana.49 Conversations with several leading laypeople responsible for the creation of pan-­sectarian Buddhist groups (such as the Buddhist Gem Fellowship) during the 1980s pointed to the role that Venerable Dhammananda’s nonsectarian outlook played in their group’s openness to the different Buddhist traditions.

70   Jeffrey Samuels Venerable Dhammannada’s more inclusive approach was, in many ways, a product of local strategies and relationships, including the relationship between the British colonial administration and Buddhist institutions and leaders. Three years before Venerable Dhammananda arrived in Malaysia, for instance, Vesak—the Buddhist celebration commemorating the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha—had been made a public holiday. The idea of declaring Vesak a public holiday in Malaysia appears to have originated with the Sri Lankan head monk that Venerable Dhammananda first met at Mahindarama Temple in Penang, Venerable K. Gunaratana. In March 1949, a meeting—attended by over 500 people representing 31 Buddhist temples and “all races and nationalities in the Settlement of Penang”—was held at the Penang Buddhist Association, a Mahayana Buddhist institution where Venerable K. Gunaratana frequently preached. At that time, a three part resolution was put forth and agreed upon: (1) to adopt Vesak Full Moon Day as the Buddha’s Birthday, (2) to request the Government to grant a Public Holiday on that occasion, (3) to form “The [V]esak Holiday Committee, Penang” to carry out item 2. That same year, the British High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, gave his support to the idea and the committee was then requested “to take the matter up with each State or Settlement separately as public holidays were, legally under the control of each State and Settlement.” Thus, in 1949, the states and settlements of Penang, Malacca, Kedah, and Perak approved Vesak as a public holiday; other Malaysian states soon did likewise. Finally, on January 3, 1962, it was announced that “the Federation Government had declared [V]esak Full Moon Day a Federation-­wide holiday with effect from 1962.”50 The effort that led to the declaration of Vesak as a national holiday is somewhat remarkable. Although there were previous instances of different ethnic communities coming together to celebrate Vesak,51 the story of declaring Vesak a public holiday reveals the first concerted effort of different ethnic Buddhist communities working together to fulfill a common Buddhist aim in Malaysia. Indeed, a look at the 15-person Vesak Holiday Committee illustrates that while the majority of members were Chinese (including the Chairman, Secretary, and Correspondent), the committee also included Thai (Nai Deng Sararaks and Nai Wan Charasvirochana), Sinhalese (W.A. Ariyadasa and M.B. Jinadasa), and Burmese (Maung Swee Nee and Maung Swee Dong) representatives, as well as an Indian (Mr. M. Saravanamuttu) as the Adviser. A closer look at the events that led up to declaring Vesak a national holiday reveals the role that the colonial administration indirectly played in drawing different sectarian and ethnic communities together. According to Lim, after Venerable K. Gunaratana put forth the proposal to declare Vesak a public holiday in Malaysia, a division arose along ethnic lines concerning the actual day for the celebration. Lim explains that when the opinions of leading Buddhists including monks were sought … [the] Chinese Buddhists wanted to celebrate the occasion on the 8th Day of the

A tale of two colonialisms   71 Chinese 4th Moon, but the Southern Buddhists (Singhalese, Siamese and Burmese) insisted on the orthodox day[,] i.e., the [V]esak Full Moon Day.52 The colonial administration, however, inadvertently brought the different communities together. Realizing that the Governor General at the time, Mr. Malcolm McDonald, would only agree to making Vesak a public holiday after the communities settled their dispute, a deal was brokered through Khoo Soo Jin and Khoo Soo Ghee, and the Chinese community agreed to celebrate the holiday on Vesak full moon. It was only when they realized that they had to stand together and speak in one voice in order to accomplish their aim that a committee representing the different ethnic Buddhist communities was established. It was groups such as the nonsectarian and multi-­ethnic Vesak Holiday Committee, other instances of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist monks and laypeople (such as Venerable K. Gunaratana) preaching and working alongside one another before and after 1949, as well as his own ties forged with Chinese associations (such as the Selangor Buddhist Association and the Malaysian Chinese Association) that led Venerable Dhammananda to begin de-­emphasizing his native Sri Lankan and, subsequently, Theravada identity. In the decades following independence, Venerable Dhammananda became less interested in propagating Theravada or even Sinhalese Buddhism and more committed to bridging the divide between Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhist communities. It is worthwhile to note that Venerable Dhammananda’s nonsectarian approach was not merely confined to Buddhism. While it is true that Venerable Dhammananda sought to stem the tide of Christian conversions by propagating Buddhism through his countless talks and publications, it is important to bear in mind that he also worked alongside Christian and other religious leaders to promote religious harmony and ensure religious freedom for all Malaysians. Even though the two inter-­religious organizations in which Venerable Dhammananda was active—the Malaysian Inter-­Religious Organization and the Malaysian Consultative Council on Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Sikhism—were founded after independence, it may be argued that his spirit of working alongside other leaders grew out of the social logics and strategies that emerged from a period marked by the period of colonialism, as well as from relationships he forged with local leaders in Malaysia.

Conclusion: a tale of two colonialisms Venerable Dhammananda grew up and lived in two very different colonial contexts. The first part of his life was spent in Sri Lanka, a county where colonial rule was generally viewed as being unsupportive or even inimical toward Buddhism. Whereas Buddhism in Sri Lanka was held to be inviolable in the years immediately following the signing of the Kandyan Convention, it was soon threatened by colonial policies that sought to expand colonial interests, as well as those of the church. Through enacting educational reforms, withdrawing support from Buddhist institutions, and changing the medium of education from

72   Jeffrey Samuels Sinhala to English, it was believed that the British were both directly and indirectly supporting Christian institutions. For many involved in the Buddhist resurgence during the late nineteenth century, the growth of Buddhism was very much tied to the recovery of national pride, to anti-­western sentiments, and to Sinhalese nationalism. By the first half of the twentieth century, the resurgence was inherently interconnected with independence. The context in Malaya, under which Dhammananda found himself, was quite different. Relationships between the British and Buddhist leaders and institutions in Malaya were more supportive. To develop the country following the creation of the Straits Settlements, the British encouraged migration from other colonies (most notably India, Sri Lanka, and Burma). The British also sought to fulfill those communities’ religious, cultural, and linguistic needs through the support of ethnic and language associations as well as religious institutions. Finally, in order to fight a psychological war against the insurgents and their sympathizers following the end of the Japanese occupation, the British encouraged the practice and development of a plethora of religions. For Buddhists, it resulted in the establishment of Theravada temples and societies as well as in the creation of pan-­Buddhist organizations and associations. While Venerable Dhammananda’s experiences under colonialism in Sri Lanka and Malaysia were quite different, focusing specifically on his responses to colonialism in both or either country provides only a partial understanding of the strategies he employed in propagating Buddhism, as well as an incomplete conception of the local relationships with which he was involved. Looking specifically at Malaysia, a view that only sees Dhammananada reacting to colonialism would, perhaps, fail to see how his work with Templar and the British administration shaped him as a missionary monk there, as well as how colonialism contributed—both directly (e.g., land grants) and indirectly (using English as a medium of education)—to the growth of Buddhist institutions in general, and Theravada Buddhist institutions in particular. Indeed, focusing on the historical contexts marked by colonialism in Malaysia reveals a panoply of factors that shaped Venerable Dhammananda and the Buddhist traditions there, including their tendencies to be more ecumenical and nonsectarian.

Abbreviations BHU MCP MPAJA

Benares Hindu University Malayan Communist Party Malayan People’s Anti-­Japanese Army

Notes   1 Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism, p. 201.   2 It may also be argued that the migration of Sri Lankans to Malaya was politically-­ motivated as it counter-­balanced what some people, such as Sir Frederick Weld (governor of the Straits Settlements from 1880–1887), believed to be an overwhelming

A tale of two colonialisms   73 number of Chinese immigrants in Malaya. Indeed, in one dispatch from the Settlements to the Secretary of State in England, Weld wrote that  I am anxious for political reasons that the great preponderance of the Chinese over any other race in the Settlements and to a larger marked degree in some of the Native States, under our administration, should be counter-­balanced as much as possible by the influx of Indian and other nationalities. (Dispatch from Straits Settlements to Secretary of State, No. 307, September 24, 1887; cited in Raja Singam, A Hundred Years, pp. 29f.)   3 The same could be said of the Burmese Theravada communities in Malaysia. In the history of Dhammikarama Temple in Penang, the founding of the temple in 1803 was attributed to the Burmese who were brought by the British to serve as land surveyors and as security forces (Ong, History of Dhammikarama, p. 11).    4 de Silva, 100 Years, p. 23.   5 Baxstrom, Houses in Motion.   6 De Silva, 100 Years, ch. 3.   7 Ibid., p. 96.   8 Dhammananda’s biography sketched below come from three sources: a video recording titled, Lim, Chief, Liow, ed., K. Sri Dhammananda, and Liow, “K. Sri Dhammananda.”   9 The title “chief ” refers to Venerable Dhammananda’s appointment as the Chief High Priest (Sangha Nayaka) of Malaysia and Singapore. This title is given by the Malwatta Chapter of the Siam Nikaya in Sri Lanka. As such, the title does not mean that he is recognized as the chief monk by all Buddhists or ethnic communities in Malaysia and Singapore. 10 This tendency of head monks recruiting their nephews is quite widespread among monastics of the Siyam Nikaya in Sri Lanka. 11 According to the Convention, “the religion of the Budhoo professed by the chiefs and inhabitants of these provinces is declared inviolable and its rites, ministers and places of worship are to be maintained and protected” (Vimalananda, Buddhism in Ceylon, p. 89). Along with drafting the convention, Sir John D’Oyly, the British civil servant who was Resident of Kandy and Administrator of the Kandyan provinces is noted to have said that “We are not come to this Country to destroy the Religion of Buddha and the Gods, which have prevailed from ancient Time in this Country, but to protect and promote it” (Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, p. 111). 12 These are cited in Kularatne, History of Printing, p. 157. 13 Kularatne, History of Printing, p. 170. 14 Seneviratne, The Work of Kings, p. 135, 136. 15 Kemper, “Dharmapala’s Dharmaduta,” p. 34. The intellectual climate of Vidyalankara Pirivena, immediately prior to and during Venerable Dhammananda’s time there, is well documented in Seneviratne, The Work of Kings. 16 Liow, “K. Sri Dhammananda,” p. 32. 17 Dharmapala, Return to Righteousness, p. 732. One of the principal aims of the Mahabodhi Society is to rescue and revive Bodh Gaya, the site where the Buddha is purported to have gained enlightenment. After Dharmapala took part in the World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, the Society began to take an even more outward-­oriented perspective with the hope of resuscitating Buddhism in India and Sri Lanka, as well as disseminating the teachings beyond through its numerous branch societies and publications (e.g., The Mahabodhi and the Sinhala Bauddha). For a discussion of the Mahabodhi Society and its place within a wider national awakening in Sri Lanka, see Frost, “Wider Opportunities.” 18 Liow, “K. Sri Dhammananda,” p. 32. 19 Venerable K. Gunaratana held the position from the temple’s third chief incumbent and from 1933 to his demise in 1964. He came to be regarded as one of the most highly respected Sri Lankan monks in the country and, in 1955, was conferred the

74   Jeffrey Samuels title of Chief Monk of Malaya and Singapore (Indaratana et al., Mahindarama, pp. 33–42). 20 The Sinhalese community in Malaysia is the focus of Arseculeratne’s important study: Sinhalese Immigrants (see also Raja Singam, 100 Years). 21 Kemper, “Dharmapala’s Dharmaduta,” p. 40. 22 Theravada Buddhism is normally based on Pali, but Malaysia is a place where there is Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. It is more common to use “dharmaduta” rather than “dhammaduta.” 23 More moderate members of the MCP (including the British sympathizer, Lai Teck) decided that an outright attack on the British would be too risky, thus letting slip any real chance for an MCP takeover. 24 Stubbs, Hearts and Minds, pp. 100–107; see also Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda. 25 Prior to Templer’s arrival, the government had been unable to provide for all of New Villagers social and economic needs as a result of the high number of people flocking to the New Villages (Stubbs, Hearts and Minds, p. 103ff.). Although the government had been expecting between 500–1,000 families to relocate to Johor each month, between June 1, 1950 and April 30, 1951, an average of 8,000 people were resettled there per month. Moreover, while it was expected that fewer than 300,000 squatters would be relocated, by the end of 1954 that number reached 570,000. 26 This was not the first time that a head monk of Buddhist Maha Vihara supported the British colonial administration. In the wake of the British return to Malaysia following the surrender of the Japanese, the then head monk of Buddhist Maha Vihara, Venerable Dhammadassi, in conjunction with the Selangor Buddhist Association, organized and jointly participated in a “Religious Service of Thanksgiving” at the Brickfields temple (Malay Tribune, September 10, 1946). 27 Liow, “Exemplary Missionary,” p. 5; cited in de Silva, 100 Years, p. 235. 28 Lim, Chief; see also Yeoh, “Buddhist Icon,” and Mapa, “Saga.” 29 De Silva, 100 Years, p. 236; see also Liow, “K. Sri Dhammananda,” p. 36. 30 Although it is worthwhile to reflect on the degree to which Venerable Dhammananda’s involvement in the intellectual climate of Vidyalankara may have predisposed him to accept Templer’s offer to work with him in winning the hearts and minds of the Chinese, one should bear in mind that Venerable Dhammananda sought to separate himself from politics in Malaysia. 31 Liow, “K. Sri Dhammananda,” p. 36. 32 The World Fellowship of Buddhists was established in 1950 in Kandy, Sri Lanka with the goal of promoting unity among diverse groups of Buddhists around the world. One of the goals of the Fellowship is to educate people (Buddhists and non-­Buddhists) about Buddhism, thus propagating the religion worldwide. 33 Although it would still be several years before Malaya would be referred to as Malaysia, from this point onward in my chapter, I will use the latter term. 34 de Silva, 100 Years, p. 116. 35 Using himself as an example, Lee Yu Ban explained that Chinese Malaysian have been Buddhist in the traditional sense of the word. They had access to [the] teachings from Taiwan, China, and so on. But, the English-­ educated Malaysian who could not read Mandarin or could not understand Chinese were cut off from that source of information. So for a long time before Chief Reverend came, we did not have any access to Buddhist teachings and many of us strayed to other religions. But when Chief came here and started teaching largely in English … [we] then found this readily available information of Buddhism. I think that is why it is an historical phenomenon that a lot of Theravādin Buddhists are English-­speaking. (Personal communication, July 2009) 36 Liow, “K. Sri Dhammananda,” p. 37.

A tale of two colonialisms   75 37 The Jathika Hela Urumaya or National Heritage Party is a political party made up of monks seeking to restore Buddhism and Sinhala culture to its “rightful” place in Sri Lanka. The party is discussed in Deegalle, “Politics.” 38 Sobhita, “Remembering Venerable.” 39 Liow, “K. Sri Dhammananda,” p. 37. 40 The impetus behind the founding of Buddhist presses that would publish short tracts portraying Buddhism as a rational religion was the belief that “if a press were to be established, the Buddhists would be able to show the ‘fallacies’ of Christianity and the baseless nature of charges made against Buddhist by missionaries,” then they would be able to recover a level of “confidence lost during the previous decade” of colonial rule (Kularatne, History of Printing, 170). 41 Penang Buddhist Association, Jayanti, p. 27. Lye, “Nuns, Zhaigus,” p. 13 sheds light on the role that Puti Xueyuan (known in Penang as Phor Tay Institute) played in the education of young Chinese girls. As Lye notes, Originally a group dedicated to the studying of core canonical texts of Chinese Buddhism promoted by key reformist monks and lay leaders of the late Qing/early Republican period, Puti Xueyuan quickly developed into an impressive Straits Chinese temple, a residential facility for female residents, … an orphanage for girls, and a kindergarten and primary and secondary schools for Chinese Malaysian girls.… In establishing Puti Xueyuan, Fanglian articulated three goals (1) to propagate the Buddha’s teachings, (2) to care for orphans and (3) to establish Buddhist education in Malaya. 42 Due to publication costs, Voice of Buddhism was discontinued as a quarterly magazine and is now being printed as an annual issue (de Silva, 100 Years, p. 263). In order to extend his reach to further regions, Dhammananda initiated a 12-lesson correspondence course which, 1 year after its 1979 launch date, had 500 registered students. 43 Yan and Gee, “Malaysian Buddhist,” p. 47. 44 Venerable Sumangalo subsequently set up Youth Circles in the states of Melaka (1958), Kedah (1958), Trengannu (1958), Johor (1959), Perak (1960), Selangor (1960) and Kelantan (1961). 45 While Venerable Sumangalo is still regarded as the father of the Malaysia youth movement, it is important to recognize that his predecessors at the Penang Buddhist Association began catering to young Malaysians even before 1955. According to the Jayanti Souvenir history of the Penang Buddhist Association, in June 1942 Rev. Hwa Tee was appointed head monk of the Association and, “realising the importance for young children to take up an interest in Buddhism, Rev. Hwa Tee organised a Chanting Class for them” (Penang Buddhist Association, Jayanti, p.  24). Reverend Hwa Tee’s successor, Venerable Beow Seang, continued reaching out to young Malaysians through the Penang Buddhist Association by teaching them Buddhist hymns and discourses (Penang Buddhist Association, Jayanti, p. 27). 46 The majority of Chinese Malaysians in their forties and fifties mentioned to me that while they grew up in “Buddhist” homes, their parents and grandparents were more likely to be Daoist than they were to be Buddhist and, at home, practiced Daoist “rites and rituals.” They also mentioned that through Dhammananda’s talks and publications, they came to understand what Buddhism really was and, as a result, came to identify with the tradition as their own. 47 During the nineteenth century, a number of missionaries (many of them Wesleyan) published books and tracts that sought to undermine the Buddhist tradition: David de Silva’s Man Has an Immortal Son (1840) and Is Buddha All-­Wise? (1852), Daniel John Gogerly’s Kristiyāni Prajñapti [The evidences and Doctrines of Christianity] in 1949, as well as Benjamin Stark’s The Folly of Image Worship (1852) and The Vain Hopes of Buddhists (1852). See Kularatne, History of Printing, for more information. 48 Yan and Gee, “Malaysian Buddhist,” p. 47.

76   Jeffrey Samuels 49 Liow, “K. Sri Dhammananda,” p. 51. 50 Lim, “Wesak Public Holiday.” 51 Blackburn, Locations, p. 15. 52 Lim, “Wesak Public Holiday.”

References Arseculeratne, S.N. Sinhalese Immigrants in Malaysia and Singapore 1860–1990: History through Recollection. Colombo: K.V.G. De Silva and Sons, 1991. Baxstrom, Richard. Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Blackburn, Anne M. Location of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. de Silva, H.M.A. 100 Years of the Buddhist Maha Vihara (1895–1995). Kuala Lumpur: Sasana Abhiwurdhi Wardhana Society, 1998. Deegalle, Venerable Mahinda. “Politics of the Jathika Hela Urumaya Monks: Buddhism and Ethnicity in Contemporary Sri Lanka.” Contemporary Buddhism 5, no. 2 (2004): 83–103. Dharmapala, Anagarika. Return to Righteousness, a collection of speeches, essays and letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala, edited by Ananda Guruge. Colombo: Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, 1965. Frost, Mark Ravinder. “ ‘Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo, 1870–1920.” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 937–967. Indaratana, Venerable Elgiriye, C. Witanachchi and Lilianne Lim. 2004. Mahindarama Buddhist Temple: 85 Years of History (1918–2003). Penang: Mahindarama Dhamma Publications, 2004. Kemper, SteVenerable 2004. “Dharmapala’s Dharmaduta and the Buddhist Ethnoscape.” In Buddhist Missionaries in the Era of Globalization, edited by Linda Learman, 22–50. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kularatne, Tilak. History of Printing and Publishing in Ceylon, 1736–1912. Dehiwala (Sri Lanka): SriDevi Printers, 2006. Lim, Kooi Fong, Producer. Chief: The Life and Work of K. Sri Dhammananda. A True Sense Production. Kuala Lumpur, videorecording, n.d. Lim, Teong Aik. “Wesak Public Holiday.” The 25th Anniversary, Malaysian Buddhist Association Magazine: 1959–1984. Liow, Benny [Woon Khin], editor. K. Sri Dhammananda: A Pictorial Retrospect. Kuala Lumpur: Buddhist Gem Fellowship, n.d. Liow, Benny. “An Exemplary Missionary Monk.” Dharma Digest no. 1 (1988). Liow, Benny. “K. Sri Dhammananda: In the Footsteps of the Buddha.” In K. Sri Dhammananda Felicitation: Essays in Honour of his 80th Birthday, edited by Khin Benny Liow Woon, 25–58. Petaling Jaya (Malaysia): Buddhist Gem Fellowship, 1999. Lorrillard, Michel. “Quelques données relatives à l’historiographie lao.” BEFEO 86 (1999): 219–232. Lye, Hun Y. “Nuns, Zhaigus and Educators in Nanyang: Puti xueyuan and Chinese Buddhist Modernism in British Malaya.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d. Malalgoda, Kitsiri, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society 1750–1900: A Study of Religious Revival and Change. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Mapa, U. “Saga of a Missionary Monk.” Daily News (2006).

A tale of two colonialisms   77 Ong, Ewe Teong, ed. History of Dhammikarama Burmese Buddhist Temple. Malaysia: The Dhammikarama Burmese Buddhist Temple, 1992. Penang Buddhist Association Youth Circle. Jayanti Souvenir: Being a History of the Penang Buddhist Association. Penang: The Penang Buddhist Association Youth Circle, 1955. Raja Singam, S. Durai. 1968. A Hundred Years of Ceylonese in Malaysia and Singapore (1867–1967). Petaling Jaya (Kuala Lumpur): Raja Singam. Ramakrishna, Kumar. Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds, 1948–1958. Richmond: Curzon, 2002. Seneviratne, H.L. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Sobhita Thero, Venerable Omalpe. Remembering Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda. Available from www.4ui.com/eart/211eart1.htm (accessed January 13, 2012). Stubbs, Richard. Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948–1960. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989. Vimalananda, Tennakoon. Buddhism in Ceylon Under the Christian Powers, and the Educational and Religious Policy of the British Governement in Ceylon 1797–1832. Colombo: M.D. Gunasena, 1963. Yan, Cornelius Koh Beng and Yeoh Kia Gee. “Malaysian Buddhist Cultural Heritage Progress Report,” No.  3. Kuala Lumpur: Young Buddhist Association of Malaysia, 1989. Yeoh, Oon. “Buddhist icon Dhammananda dies at 87.” News Today (2006).

Part II

Centralization in internal colonies

5 Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization in late nineteenth to early twentieth century Ratanaporn Sethakul

The nineteenth century was a transitional period from traditional to modern Siam.1 While never fully colonized, throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, Siam was under significant pressure from both British and French colonizers. King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) realized that political centralization was not adequate to unify the new modern nation-­state. The Phya Phap rebellion in the 1880s and the bloodier Shan rebellion that occurred in the Northern tributary or Lanna states in the 1900s are pertinent cases in point. He viewed education as an efficient means to assimilate the people of the North (Tai Yuan or Khon Muang as they called themselves) into Thai society and to make them good citizens of Siam. During his visit to the Lanna states in 1906, Prince Vajirawut, (later King Rama VI) noticed conflicts between the northern people and the southern people, particularly the Bangkok officials, lurked underneath a seemingly peaceful surface. He reported to his father that “to tame the Lao (Lanna people), we must put their children in (Thai) schools.”2 Once the national integration was needed, education reform was initiated as one of the most important reforms for modern Siam, aimed at building political awareness of the nation-­ state that would unify all the people in Siam. However, educational reform needed the support and effort of the monks, as the sangha was the strongest social organization within the Lanna kingdom. The sangha was then utilized as a significant means to integrate the Lanna people into the new Siam. As unpaid teachers, preachers, and social leaders, the Siamese government wanted to change the Lanna sangha to serve their own interests and started by changing their organization and utilized them to change the khon muang into Thai citizens. This chapter aims to examine the result of Western colonialism and Bangkok colonization on Lanna Buddhism. It argues that Western colonialism was a catalyst for the full colonization of the North into Siam. The Lanna states were under Burmese rule for over two centuries. In the late eighteenth century, local elites fought hard with strong support from the Siamese army under King Taksin and succeeded in casting off the Burmese yoke. The Lanna elites voluntarily recognized Siam as their suzerain but retained strong autonomy in their own states. To wipe out this privilege was not easy but King Chulalongkorn shrewdly imposed the method of internal colonization in the

82   Ratanaporn Sethakul form of provincial reforms to incorporate the Lanna tributary states into Siam proper.3 While there were political and military aspects to this secondary colonialism, the author focuses on the cultural aspects of colonization, in particular the effort by authorities in Bangkok to use the sangha in Lanna as a tool to ease political colonization. By examining the sangha reforms of the early twentieth century and the reaction of the Lanna sangha, this chapter shows that the success of Bangkok’s colonization of Lanna was due in part to the strategic use of compromise and soft power by the political and monastic authorities in Bangkok, and in part to the fact that much of the resistance from the Lanna sangha was about changes in culture, more than politics.

From buffer state to political integration: the Bangkok internal colonization of the Lanna states In the late eighteenth century, the Lanna states4 were brought under the suzerainty of Bangkok kings. While this was part of the process of establishing Bangkok as the center of the polity after the destruction of Ayuthaya in 1767, the relationship established Lanna as a buffer state, in case of another Burmese invasion from the North. The Burmese threat encouraged a friendly relationship between Siam and her Lanna tributary states. During the first five reigns of the Chakri dynasty (1782–1868), the Bangkok government allowed significant latitude to the Lanna royalty (jaonai). Beyond their duty to watch over the border and keep Siam informed of the Burmese movements, these states were generally left alone and showed their allegiance to Bangkok by sending tribute once every three years. The jaonai enjoyed complete autonomy until the mid-­nineteenth century when the British successfully forced Siam to open its door by enforcing the Bowring Treaty of 1855. This treaty satisfied the demand of British subjects to travel to and invest in the Lanna states as part of Siam. The more economic interest the British subjects showed in the Lanna states, the more concerns the British government had in this area. The frequent conflicts between the jaonai of Lanna and the British subjects scared the Bangkok government, because they provided a potential pretext for a British takeover of the region.5 The British consul general in Bangkok even threatened to ignore the Siamese government and deal with the Lanna states by himself if his demands were not responded to promptly.6 The British implicitly warned Siam that to solve the problems incurred by the inefficient administration of the jaonai, the Lanna states must be governed directly by Siam. British demands for good governance and better treatment of their subjects thus put pressure on Bangkok and also provided an incentive for the government to bring the Lanna states more fully into their direct control.7 To claim suzerainty over the Lanna states, Siam was to take responsibility for all the problems in those states according to the Chiang Mai Treaty of 1874. Provincial reform or Siamese centralization that brought direct rule to the former tributary states was an unavoidable means to escape the British colonization. But to impose it on the autonomous states, Siam colonized these states internally.

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   83 Bangkok’s colonization of Lanna took place over several decades, with the initial process taking place from 1874 to 1900. The Chiang Mai Treaty of 1874 established an International Court to deal with legal cases of the British subjects and appointed a Bangkok official to be a judge stationed in Chiang Mai; this was the first step in establishing direct control over the Lanna states. The second Chiang Mai Treaty of 1883 strengthened its influence even further by allowing the British to set up its consulate in Chiang Mai to oversee the International Court run by the Siamese judge and to deal with the British subjects after the British annexation of Upper Burma and the Shan States in 1886. During this period more Bangkok officials, including the members of the royal family, were appointed as commissioners to represent the Bangkok government and impose reforms they deemed to be necessary. Bangkok claimed that the colonization, or perhaps better the incorporation of Lanna into the emerging nation-­state, was necessary to forestall British annexation. During the period of political centralization (1874–1900), the Bangkok government concentrated much more on the jaonai as the political leaders than the monks who were the social leaders. The time was very appropriate since the new jao luang was weak and relied on the Siamese commissioner to deal with the British authority who ruled half of Burma and stayed very close to Lanna. The Bangkok government imposed many reforms justified by the British colonialism to strip the power of the jaonai who heavily depended on Siam when it was time to negotiate with the British. Moreover, they financially relied on Siam for a large sum of money to redeem the British subjects who won legal cases. A new administrative system was initiated at first as a dual system in which the jaonai shared power with the Bangkok officials but still kept their interests and privileges. Tax reform was considered very crucial since Siam needed income to pay for its increasing administrative costs. The new tax system imposed in Lanna affected the commoners more than the jaonai and led to the rebellion of Phaya Prap in 1889, the first peasant rebellion of Lanna.8 It was suppressed easily but a subsequent 1902 rebellion was bloodier. The Shan who lived in Lanna were abused by the Siamese officials and staged a rebellion that resulted in serious casualties of Siamese officials and their families. Many government buildings were burned down and property was taken away. A modern army from Bangkok was sent to suppress the Shan rebels right away. The Bangkok government learned that even though the Lanna people did not join the rebellion physically, they supported it spiritually. At the final stage of Bangkok reforms, the jaonai strongly felt upset with more Siamese officials in administrative positions and reduction of their interest. They lost not only political power but also economic interest and social prestige when the Bangkok government abolished the forced labor system in 1900. This last reform finished the Bangkok centralization. The Lanna states were fully colonized by the government in Bangkok and for the first time in Thai history Lanna was directly administered by the central government in Bangkok.9 The achievement of political control did not mean that the Lanna states were totally unified into Siam. The Lanna people looked at Bangkok officials as

84   Ratanaporn Sethakul f­ oreigners who invaded their hometown to rob them. New taxes imposed by Bangkok impoverished them. Though the abolition of the forced labor system seemed to free them from the jaonai’s exploitation and allowed them the freedom to engage in other economic activities to be able to enrich themselves, it caused significant problems initially. Siam freed them from their former rulers but its new demands for more taxes in cash, military duty, and government work were excessive. Moreover, they felt their new bosses from Bangkok looked down on them since they spoke, acted, and lived differently from the people of Lanna, a point noticed by Rama VI when he visited Lanna as crown prince in 1906. There was, in other words a big gap between the rulers and the ruled. Once the Bangkok authorities realized that political centralization was not enough to forge national unity, they penetrated into the spiritual sector of Lanna by attempting to restructure the sangha organization and sangha education by imposing the Sangha Administration Act of 1902.

The traditional Lanna sangha before the Bangkok centralization The traditional Lanna sangha was an independent social institution. It practiced its own traditions that could be traced back to the period of the Lanna kingdom (1296–1558), and it followed local traditional guidelines and laws in the monastic rules (vinaya). Its minimal sociological structures were built on the basis of seniority, charismatic qualities, and lineage, i.e., the relations of teachers and ordained students. Villagers in particular privileged a notion of “tradition and custom” (hiet kong) as the foundation of Lanna Buddhism. People who lived under this idea of hiet kong believed that anything different from what they had done in the past would lead to disasters in society (a factor which resulted in resistance to the Bangkok reforms, discussed below). Moreover, the sangha was supposed to be free from the direct control of the state. However, while kings had often interfered in the sangha organization, in order to “purify” the religion,10 and local rulers regularly played a crucial role as patrons of the sangha and supporters of religious affairs and monastic education, they also relied on Buddhism as an important source of their support. While the sangha in central Bangkok was under the direct rule of the state, particularly after the reforms of the early nineteenth century, in Lanna, the sangha was both more decentralized and independent. There was no single leader of the sangha throughout Lanna at the state level. According to Pranee Sirithorn Na Phatthalung, there were seven sangharajas appointed from the revered monks in Chiang Mai province, mostly being the abbots of well-­known or royal temples in the cities. However, the sangharaja appointed in Chiang Mai governed the sangha affairs in Chiang Mai only, not in other provinces. One of these was appointed to be chief and called the “head of the sangha” (sanghanayok), but his powers were limited.11 The village sangha was an important part of village communities and was strongly supported by the communities. The inter-­communal relationship of the village monasteries called the leader of the

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   85 monastery group (hua muat wat), and played a crucial role in governing the sangha in the locality and made a strong sangha network. Above this figure was another, the hua muat ubosot, who was responsible for a district of about ten monasteries or more. Monks from within this district would attend the Buddhist ceremonies in the central ordination hall (ubosot) on important Buddhist days. These hua muat ubosot performed the ordination for the villagers who lived in the territory of their hua muat wat.12 The Lanna sangha was put under this hierarchical order through the relationship of the teacher or preceptor (uppatcha) and ordained students. Even though the jaonai did not control the sangha directly and totally, their patronage of the sangha was evident and important at the top of the Lanna sangha. Old and abandoned temples and religious buildings were renovated by the jaonai and villagers after successive wars with the Burmese. Religious and spiritual ceremonies were performed widely, showing the important roles of the sangha as well as the strong faith of the people.13 A number of sangharajas were appointed in Chiang Mai and other cities, and the leader of the Lanna sangha was appointed by the great ruler or chief (jao luang) of the principal Lanna states. From the Chronicle of Chiang Mai, it is clear that there was a rudimentary official organization in place for the sangha in the early nineteenth century, and that appointments to high positions were at least sponsored by the jaonai through the sponsorship of ceremonies (for example at Wat Phrasing) that confirmed monks in various positions (though the Chronicle of Chiang Mai does not clearly specify the different duties and authority of these offices).14 While the sangha organization was overseen by jao luang, the jaonai also depended on the sangha. There is no record of the qualifications required for the appointed monks. The jao luang seemed to choose the monks who were widely respected and well recognized in term of Buddhist knowledge, appropriate behavior, reserved manners, and good relationship with the jaonai and villagers. Those monks who stayed long in robes kept strict monastic behavior and possessed high Buddhist knowledge were normally revered and given the title of khruba (venerated teacher).15 For example, the abbot of Wat Faihin at the base of Doi Suthep outside of Chiang Mai, was called Khruba Faihin by the people without any official appointment. The Lanna people admired and respected khrubas for their strict Buddhist practice that, they believed, led to their sacredness. They even believed that some khruba could perform miracles and protect the people from natural disasters as we will see from the case of Khruba Sriwichai, discussed below.16 Education in traditional Lanna society was also highly decentralized and informal. It was the ideal that Lanna men would all ordain for at least three months and study in the monasteries, becoming “cooked” (khon suk) in the process. The amount of time and topics, both religious ones like Pali and the vinaya of Buddhism as well as secular fields such as astrology, carpentry, medicine, sculpture, and so forth, depended on the interests and skills of the particular monk or novice. Most of these were highly practical, and of use to the village.

86   Ratanaporn Sethakul There was no formal examination system to evaluate students and no degree was granted to show the ability of the person. Traditionally, monks were judged as respectable by their behavior, and their attention to hiet kong.17 Service in monasteries revealed the status and roles of the sangha as ritual performers, educators, and social workers. Villagers had very close relationships with the monks and always respected them. Being a monk thus upgraded the phrai (commoners) status and allowed social mobility. The learned monks who left monasteries were frequently recruited to work for the jaonai and were exempted from corvée labor.18

Restructuring the Lanna sangha into the Siam sangha The effort to use the sangha as a part of internal colonization in Lanna had two prongs, both of which were oriented to standardizing the sangha and bringing it more tightly under the control of Bangkok. The first was the administrative side, which is seen most clearly in the Sangha Administration Act (Phraratchabanyat Laksana Kanpokkhrong Khanasong R.S.  121), which was issued in 1902 (the same year, coincidently, as the Shan Rebellion in Lanna). The new act was aimed at structuring the sangha organization all over Siam to be under the Supreme Sangha Council (Mahathera Samakhom; MTS), which was put in charge of the sangha affairs and sangha education. In the capital, the Supreme Patriarch (Phra Sangharaja) was the head of both the Mahanikai and Thammayut sects, the two main Buddhist sects in Siam. Under him were three monks with the title of Somdet, who were in charge of the North, South and Central Mahanikai regions, and the fourth one was responsible for all the Thammayut monks throughout the country. Each Somdet had a deputy for a total of eight monks. This group of administrators comprised the Maha Thera Samakhom that ruled the sangha.19 In each administrative unit (monthon) after the reform, the sangha was restructured into a hierarchical administrative system. The chief monk of the monthon (jao khana monthon) was appointed by the Supreme Sangha Council. From 1906 to 1963, the responsibility of the jao khana monthon was in four areas that he had to delegate to his subordinates, namely sangha administration, education, propagation of the religion and public welfare. The jao khana of all levels could appoint a staff or retinue of assistants, two for the district level and up to six at the provincial level. In the village level, there was an abbot, associate abbot, monks, and novices. This formal state controlled structure of the sangha, which paralleled the political administration of the emerging nation-­state,20 showed King Chulalongkorn’s determination to control the sangha all over the country in order to strengthen and facilitate his political and social centralization policy. In essence and in theory, the system applied in the provinces was centralized to be under the absolute control of Bangkok. This centralization of sangha administration was to bring about several significant changes to the North. First, the Lanna sangha was to be governed through the official rules of the Bangkok authority, particularly the MTS all of whom

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   87 Table 5.1  Comparing the state and the sangha administration in the provincial level King

Sangharaja (Supreme Patriarch) (appointed by the king)

Council of the Senabodi (ministers)

Mahatherasamakhom (Council of Elders)

Khaluang Monthon Governor of the provinces

Jao Khana Monthon Chief Monk of the provinces

Khaluang Muang Governor of the Muang

Jao Khana Muang Chief Monk of the Muang

Nai Amphor District officer

Jao Khana Amphor District Chief Monk

Nai Ban or Phu Yai Ban Chief of the village

Jao Awat Chief Monk of the temple

were senior monks from temples in Bangkok. Second, the Sangha Act sought to shift leadership within Lanna, away from authority based on traditional teacher-­ student relationships to a hierarchical and bureaucratic relationship, with the MTS at the top. Third, the Act sought to take promotion and punishment of monks out of the hands of local monks and embed it in the different levels of jao khana. Local monks were to follow the rules and orders from Bangkok rather than observing the hiet kong of Lanna. Finally, the centralization efforts brought the Thammayut sect to Lanna, dividing the previously unified sangha into the Mahanikai and the Thammayut. This fostered competition between the two sects for the people’s patronage. It also produced significant conflict where Mahanikai monks refused to work with the Thammayut monks, which was to require the intervention of Bangkok. The second part of the centralization of the sangha was in the realm of education. The authorities in Bangkok felt it crucial to educate the Lanna monks with the same curriculum as in Bangkok, to assimilate them into a single, unified sangha. The Bangkok-­style monastic education that was to be implemented included a focus on the textbooks written by the Supreme Patriarch and brother of Rama V, Somdet Phramahasommanachao Kromphraya Wachirayanwarorot (hereafter Prince Wachirayan), and a series of examinations to determine ranks and offices within the sangha. This system rewarded young and enthusiastic monks, and there were incentives for those who studied hard. From the reign of King Mongkut, the monks who passed the Pali examinations with honors or with the highest grade would be given monthly stipends and later on received the highest appointments in the sangha hierarchy. In the early twentieth century, Prince Wachirayan engaged in the examination of monks regularly and established the Mahamakut Royal College as a new educational institution of monks and children which at that time catered to the sons of aristocratic families. Formal education for common people was also started but due to the limitation of qualified lay instructors to teach in the schools and a shortage of teaching

88   Ratanaporn Sethakul s­ upplies, temples were requested to provide the places to teach children and monks were among the first groups of teachers. The Act of the Sangha Organization R.S. 121 in 1902 assigned the abbots to support local education.21 Consequently, Prince Wachirayan was appointed to be in charge of the education of the young boys all over the kingdom.22 From the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the sangha was used to build up the nation-­state and became the de facto “public relations” arm of the Siamese government through education. This meant the effort to centralize education was not simply about a desire to control the sangha, it was also concerned with sustaining the nation. This could be seen in two ways. First, Siam exempted monastics from military conscription. This presented a problem, however in that the government had to discern real monks and novices from “fake” ones who simply wanted to avoid conscription.23 Prince Wachirayan developed a test, later called soep naktham, the test of the Dhamma learners, to evaluate the fundamental knowledge of the novices (determining if they were “real”). Monks were also exempted from the military draft if they fulfilled this examination or possessed monastic titles. Second, education policy was not only aimed at assimilating the Lanna people into Siamese culture but also preventing young children from being Christianized in the missionary schools (which were increasingly common in the North). To counter this, between 1907 and 1910 many new schools were founded in district centers. With only a few exceptions, all such schools were established in the monasteries, primarily staffed by monks.24 Over several decades, these administrative and educational reforms gave monks in Lanna and throughout the country an opportunity and incentive to participate in the systems established by Bangkok authorities. In order to implement these policies in Lanna, the monastic authorities in Bangkok brought a number of monks to study in the capital, with the goal that they would bring the new educational forms back to Lanna. Chief among these was Phra Maha Ping, one of the first Thammayut monks from Lanna, who became an important focus of the centralization efforts. There were others, though, who came from Chiang Mai to be trained as teachers at Wat Boworniwet in Bangkok. Among them was Maha Mun, who became a well-­known Lanna historian.25 Phra Chayananthamuni, a native Nan monk, returned from Bangkok with three other monks and a couple of lay students and took over the supervision of the two existing schools in the city and founded a teacher training unit at one of them.26 Schools were also founded in three other districts of Nan, manned by monks or laymen who had returned from Bangkok with Phra Chayananthamuni. It was a significant foundation for the development of modern education in the area.27 Despite this, these reforms were not always easy and straightforward to implement. In particular, there were both structural and cultural impediments which delayed the reorganization of the Lanna sangha.28 Among the most important was the impact of language differences on the implementation of the reforms. Though the Siamese and Lanna languages come from the same Tai-­ Kadai language family, there were (and are) differences in vocabulary, such as

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   89 the fact that Siamese has many more loan words from Pali, Sanskrit and Khmer than does Lanna Thai, and that Lanna has its own script, which is completely different from the Siamese script. This difference meant that it was difficult for the Lanna people to use Siamese language. When the 1902 Sangha Act was announced it could be applied effectively only in provinces where the Siamese language was widely used. Its implementation was delayed in the provinces which were cultural and linguistically distinct, such as the regions of the North,29 where Thai was not widely spoken. The governments in those provinces thus started to fully implement this act much later in 1923, toward the end of the reign of King Rama VI. Sangha reform was also obstructed by cultural and religious factors. Most important was that the Lanna sangha relied on a traditional accounting of seniority. Traditionally, monks recognize seniority through the number of years since ordination, not years of age. However, because most of the learned monks in Bangkok who supported these reforms were junior to the senior monks in Lanna, the MTS could not easily send its monks from Bangkok to reform the provincial sangha. The best example of this was Phra Maha Ping, a young Lue monk who was sent from Chiang Mai to Bangkok to be trained at Wat Boworniwet30 in the 1880s. After his training in Bangkok, Phra Maha Ping was appointed to be the head of the Chiang Mai sangha (jao khana muang Chiang Mai) according to the new act, and it was his job to reorganize the Lanna sangha and to introduce the new sangha education. However, as will be shown below, very few senior monks in Chiang Mai and throughout Lanna supported him because of his ordination age and his being a Thammayut monk (it was Thammayut monks who were largely behind the reform efforts).31

Resistance and compromise Colonizing Lanna politically resulted in rebellions; incorporating the sangha also entailed resistance from several important monks, as well as compromising efforts on the part of Bangkok authorities. While Vachara Sindhuprama has suggested that the religious order in late nineteenth century Lanna was rather conservative and stagnant, I would argue that the persistence of traditional Buddhism in Lanna was more likely a result of their deep rooted hiet kong than political factors. The first major case of resistance took place before the Sangha Act of 1902, and was focused on Khruba Faihin (1832–1913), one of the most renowned monks of Chiang Mai. This khruba was a very knowledgeable monk who had set up a sangha school in Chiang Mai, which was very popular not only among the Lanna monks from other cities but monks from as far away as Keng Tung.32 Being a teacher of monks, Khruba Faihin was widely respected and obeyed. For this reason, he was appointed as the first sanghanayok of Muang Chiang Mai in 1895 by the jao luang of Chiang Mai.33 Khruba Faihin was not a humble and passive monk, but a strong leader with a distinct personality. He played the role of the well-­educated monk who had a large number of students and people follow him. Moreover, he had a close

90   Ratanaporn Sethakul r­ elationship with the jaonai of Chiang Mai. He even showed confidence and bravery when confronting the governor from Bangkok when it was time to protect the monks and novices from military conscription. After the discussion with the governor, the khruba successfully stopped the conscription of monks and novices.34 In this case, the governor seemed to be compromising because the Sangha Administration Act of 1902 was not fully applied in Monthon Phayap yet. As mentioned above, language was a heavy barrier for the Bangkok sangha education, the monks in Lanna also were not prepared to take the examination in Bangkok due to their lack of Thai language proficiency and modern sangha educational background. Consequently by this time, the strict qualification on the knowledge of monks to be exempted from military conscription was impossible to apply to them.35 Khruba Faihin also came into conflict with the monks who sought to reform the sangha. When Phra Maha Ping came back to Chiang Mai from Bangkok in the 1900s, he eagerly and actively introduced the Thammayut sect to the monks and people and simultaneously tried to initiate the new sangha organizational and educational systems. He met with the kind of resistance noted above. At the time the Lanna Mahanikai monks saw themselves as distinct from Thammayut monks. There were only two temples that accepted Thammayut monks at the time. The Thammayut monks wore their robes according to the Mon style, making them different from the Lanna monks. Moreover, the Lanna monks identified themselves as phra pa (forest monks) while they called the Thammayut monks phra ban (village monks).36 It was also possible that Maha Ping did not observe hiet kong traditions such as the tradition of seniority in Lanna. For these reasons, his reform efforts upset the local monks, and he was popular only among the jaonai and the elites in Chiang Mai (they were impressed by his knowledge, his style of preaching and strict behavior). Instead of successfully establishing the Thammayut sect in Lanna and reorganizing the sangha, Maha Ping caused antagonism among the local monks. Most of the local monks strongly showed their recognition and loyalty to Khruba Faihin and other administrative monks.37 Not able to reform the Lanna sangha according to the desires of Bangkok, Maha Ping reported to Bangkok and blamed Khruba Faihin as the cause of his failure. The khruba was ordered to go to Bangkok to meet with the Supreme Patriarch in 1906. At that time, Khruba Faihin was 73 years old and travel was very difficult. A rumor circulated in Chiang Mai and surrounding cities that he was to be arrested and executed, causing unrest among the local monks. Khruba Faihin calmed down his disciples, ordering them to keep hiet kong and to resist any new regulations within the sangha. In Bangkok, Khruba Faihin was addressed by King Chulalongkorn who asked him about the sasana in the Lanna states and tested his knowledge of Buddhism. The king was satisfied with the khruba’s answer. Because this occurred just a few years after the Shan rebellion, and the Bangkok government did not want to stir up resentment in Lanna, the king shrewdly appointed Khruba Faihin as chief monk in Chiang Mai, to minimize the conflicts between the Thammayut and Mahanikai, who represented the

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   91 majority of monks in Lanna. This flexible policy and recognition from the Bangkok authorities softened the khruba’s attitude toward the sangha organization of Bangkok and subsequently resulted in his cooperation. As long as the MTS in Bangkok did not interfere in the local Buddhist hiet kong, the khruba and his students would be satisfied with the development of sangha education and the control of monastic behavior.38 The Bangkok sangha reform could restart with the cooperation of the khruba, thus no resistance from other local sangha. Later on, many of Khruba Faihin’s students were appointed chief monks in the new sangha hierarchical order.39 While King Chulalongkorn played an important role in Khruba Faihin’s case, Prince Wachiriyan, from his notes, letters, and reports to the king and other officials, displayed his thoughtfulness in dealing with the sangha and applied a soft policy to impose the Sangha Act in Lanna province. In the early days of trying to reform the Lanna sangha, he advised Maha Ping to stop interfering in any sangha affairs in Chiang Mai and to act only when he was asked for help or advice.40 Later, he took a journey to Lanna in 1914 as part of the effort to incorporate Lanna into the wider national Sangha. This trip was widely seen as a success. The only Lanna state that he visited was Phrae, the last station on the rail line and the base area of the Shan Rebellion in 1902. There seemed to be no relic of the rebellion that had occurred a decade earlier, and the Prince-­Patriarch was met by officials, such as the governor of Chiang Mai and the commander of the army of the North. He was also met by the jao khana of Muang Phrae, along with 17 other monks from around Lanna: five from Chiang Mai, three from Nan, three from Lamphun, four from Lampang and two from Chiang Rai. He and his entourage offered blessings to the people with good things in the places he visited. He made holy water and gave it to the people he met, a practice the people loved. He established a good relationship with the provincial monks who were happy to meet him and to join the religious activities that could be considered a great honor for them. His idea was to provide them an opportunity to learn what he considered the appropriate ways of Buddhist rituals and ceremonies performed in the capital.41 His understanding and sympathy toward provincial monks gave a good impression and generated cooperation in return. The Lanna monks felt deeply impressed to meet with the sangharaja who was also the member of the royal family but behaved humbly and generously to the monks of Lanna. The Prince also appreciated their effort in traveling difficult roads to Phrae to welcome him and he hoped that their coming would benefit them. He could take this chance to advise those administrative monks to achieve their works. Meeting not only with him but also with other monks from Bangkok and other places, he believed, would encourage unity among the monks who could learn from each other. Some of these monks traveled with him to Bangkok to learn the sangha administration. The Prince wanted the monks in the countryside to get to know and make friends with the monks in Bangkok.42

92   Ratanaporn Sethakul

Resistance or maintaining culture? While the resolution of Khruba Faihin’s case and the use of compromising influence by Prince Wachariyan seemed to indicate that the Lanna sangha had been brought under Bangkok control, the case of Khruba Sriwichai (1878–1939) revealed that sangha reform and incorporation was not so easily resolved. Unlike the case of Khruba Faihin, which was a conflict between local monks and the Bangkok sangha organization, in the case of Khruba Sriwichai, the local sangha was already under the supervision of Bangkok, Khruba Sriwichai was faced with the imposition of new rules on the Lanna sangha by local monks that were appointed by the Bangkok authority. His case occurred a decade after the Bangkok driven reforms of the sangha in Lanna had begun (and three years after Prince Wachirayan’s visit to Phrae). At this time, central control was well established in the top ranks of the Lanna sangha, but not closer to the ground. In this, it was like the political administration, where the Bangkok government controlled the provincial level but not the village one. Lanna people including the monks still felt themselves to be different from the Siamese and practiced their own local culture. It was these feelings that brought Khruba Sriwichai into conflict with the sangha hierarchy.43 Khruba Sriwichai was not renowned for his knowledge in Pali texts. His education started in a small village temple in Muang Li, Lamphun province. At first he preferred studying astrology and then changed his focus to meditation, vipassana, and accumulating merit. His distinctive characteristics were his humbleness and strictness in monastic discipline. He is remembered as having avoided killing animals or eating meat from a young age. Lanna people preferred to make merit with monks they believed were pure and meritorious, and they believed they would benefit from following this khruba. Once the khruba became increasingly well-known, he received a lot of money and gifts (dana) from the people who followed him. Predictably, Khruba Sriwichai refused to keep this dana but gave it away to poor people or spent it on the religious buildings all over Lanna. His spreading the benefit of the dana showed his preference to avoid human desires but, ironically, it enticed more people to come to him interrupting his own meditation practice). Unlike other Lanna monks who accommodated themselves with Bangkok’s religious reform, Khruba Sriwichai existed as a symbol of Lanna traditional Buddhism. He followed hiet kong closely and resisted new practices from Bangkok. Sometimes, he seemed to be ignorant of new regulations imposed on the sangha. His first case occurred in 1917 when he was accused of ordaining monks and novices without official permission. The khruba insisted that he had followed the rules and had sent a letter asking for permission but did not get any reply. He felt he could not wait any longer to ordain novices because the ordination period was about to conclude. While this brought him into conflict with the regulations in the Sangha Act, it showed that Khruba Sriwichai valued the traditional relationship between teacher and student more than new regulations. He claimed that in the traditional practices of the Lanna sangha he was given

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   93 p­ ermission to ordain novices and monks by his teacher. Moreover, because his temple was far away from the city, it was not clear that the new rule that required the preceptors to get permission from the chief monk of the district before performing the ordination had been properly publicized. However, many people believed that the charges against him were the result of the jealousy of the chief monks in Lamphun. The chief monk of Muang Li where his temple was located ordered him to come to Lamphun for investigation. This order helped reveal the khruba’s popularity among the local people but upset the chief monks. While he was confined at Wat Phra That Hariphunchai, thousands of people came to visit him and made merit with him. Wherever he traveled, people carried him and were always around him. The district chief monk and the district officer considered his popularity a threat to the security of the local polity. Beyond violating the ordination rule, they also accused him of boasting to the people that he possessed magic and God Indra gave him a magical sword. After two years of confinement in Lamphun and Chiang Mai, the khruba was sent to Bangkok for investigation in 1919. He met with Prince Wachirayan who appointed a committee of senior Bangkok monks to examine his case and found him guilty only in case of violating the ordination rule; they found no evidence of any political mobilization, so he was released and sent back home. Prince Wachirayan paid much attention to this case. He commented that the punishment Khruba Sriwichai received was too excessive and unfair. From his point of view, punishing Khruba Sriwichai was counter-­productive, because it would stir up the sympathy from the people who admired his virtue and respected him more.44 Despite these accusations, as Prince Wachirayan predicted, the khruba’s charisma increased so much that many people wanted him to be the preceptor (phra uppatcha) of their sons.45 The more novices and monks he ordained the more students and followers he had and the stronger his relationship with the village communities. This might explain why he received enthusiastic support from many people of different ethnic groups and social classes. This support was essential in his work renovating old temples and building new ones without the support of the government. Indeed he is most famous for having mobilized the local people to build a road up to the top of Doi Suthep, a job that had proven impossible for the secular authorities. He accomplished this simply through mobilizing the people to make merit and commit their labor to the project.46 On April 30, 1935, the impossible road was opened to traffic, but the tremendous support he received from the local people who helped building the road to Doi Suthep undoubtedly worried the government. At this time, he was again accused of violating sangha rules. During the building of the road, he ordained a number of monks on the request of the people but without permission from the religious authority. Moreover, monks in the Li district where the khruba’s temple was located, refused to take orders from the chief monk of the Li district. They listened to the khruba only. There were 50 temples from ten districts where the monks resigned from the Bangkok rule of sangha and requested to be under Khruba Sriwichai. This movement frightened the government as it had

94   Ratanaporn Sethakul never ­happened in the history of Thai sangha. The khruba was accused of violating the sangha rule and was sent again to Bangkok for another investigation and training to be a well-­disciplined monk who learned to recognize and strictly follow the sangha rules imposed by the central authority.47 Sending him to Bangkok, however, was a measure to stop the monks’ resistance in Lanna since the government considered allowing him to stay in Monthon Payap would strengthen the anti-­Bangkok sangha administration movement of the local monks which prevailed not only in Chiang Mai but in the other provinces of Lanna. It was potentially a separation movement of the local sangha using Khruba Sriwichai as its symbol of Bangkok resistance. They refused to observe the sangha rule and to obey the order of the jao khana appointed by Bangkok. They excluded themselves from congregation with monks from other sects. Importantly and most scary for the Bangkok government was they appointed the uppachaya by themselves and did not recognize the rules of ordination, as they claimed to follow Khruba Sriwichai.48 The government’s response and suspicion of the khruba was understandable. The traditional political and social system of Tai states was focused on controlling manpower, and Khruba Sriwichai’s ability to mobilize the populace would naturally be seen as a threat (during the reign of King Rama III, Prince Rakronnarat was executed because of this accusation49). Moreover, in both Lanna and Isan (the northeast), there was a concept of a person who possessed great merit (bun), that enabled him to save his followers from evils in this world and leading them to heaven. This concept, ton bun in Lanna, and phi bun in Isan, was the basis for rebellions, particularly in the northeast. In addition to his ability to organize people in construction, there were many rumors about Khruba Sriwichai, such as his skill in divination. Poor farmers believed that he could protect them from floods or droughts. In other words, he fit the model of a ton bun, and the Bangkok authorities considered that he might be a threat to national security, and they brought him to Bangkok again to be placed under temple arrest. The government did not find him guilty of conspiracy, as in the case of the Phi Bun rebellions in the northeast. Khruba Sriwichai seems never to have taken advantage of the faith and respect that the people gave him. Despite mobilizing the people, he did not mobilize them on a political campaign to fight the government. At the same time, however, when he was under investigation and arrest in Bangkok, the government took advantage of his absence. They investigated monks who seemed to be against the Bangkok sangha administration, and ­disrobed many monks, also installing new abbots who were more loyal to Bangkok.50 The last case was Khruba Sriwichai’s well-­known disciple, Khruba Khao Pi (1888–1974). This khruba suffered more than Khruba Sriwichai: he was consistently suspected by the government for sedition and was arrested and disrobed three times. As a boy from a very poor family in the rural area of Lamphun province, when he was 15 years old he moved to live in Wat Ban Pang (Ban Pang temple) with Khruba Sriwichai and was ordained there. Besides learning

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   95 ­Buddhism, the boy was trained to be a carpenter building houses, monks’ quarters, assembly halls, pagoda, and Buddha images. His achievements included building and renovating many temples in Lamphun, Lampang, Phayao, and Tak provinces. However, in the year 1923 he was accused of avoiding the military conscription and did not report himself to the military conscription unit. He argued that when he was called he was 25 years old, which was over the age required for conscription. He was arrested and sentenced to a six-­month imprisonment. He was forced to disrobe before going to prison. Unable to wear yellow robes, Khruba Khao Pi wore a white robe that was the symbol of purity and Buddhism. Thus, people called him the white-­robed khruba.51 The government was quite concerned as his case could be an example for other young men who wanted to avoid military conscription, the new requirement for men after the abolition of the forced labor system and the provincial reform. It could be a serious challenge to the power of the Bangkok government. Since the case of Khruba Khao Pi was about five years after Khruba Sriwichai came back from Bangkok (the first time), people were inclined to think that the real reason was his close relationship with Khruba Sriwichai, as well as Khruba Khao Pi’s own increasing popularity among the rural people. He could be an example to threaten other young men who dared to think of escaping from military conscription. After his release, he went back to Khruba Sriwichai and was reordained, but troubles with the government and senior monks tended to follow him. Khruba Khao Pi was always successful at fundraising and building or renovating religious buildings, even successfully renovating a hospital while he had been under arrest!52 When he was forced out of Wat Ban Pang due to conflicts with the chief monk of the district, he traveled to other rural areas where he organized the rural people to build and renovate many temples. While they offered him great respect, this raised the suspicion of the government. He was arrested while raising funds for a temple in Tak province and the chief monk of the district ordered him to disrobe. He was later arrested while traveling with a large group of lay followers because there were rumors that the khruba and his group carried 1,000 guns. Police found this to be false (there was one properly registered gun with the group), however they still arrested him on the pretext that he had not paid an education fee. Rumors, in other words, dogged Khruba Khao Pi, and caused him many problems with the government and senior monks. He stayed as the pha khao (religious people who wear white robe) for the rest of his life.53 From these three cases, we can see that the reaction of the Lanna sangha came from two main groups. One was the well-­educated and high ranking city monks, appointed by the jaonai, who saw the Bangkok sangha reform as interference in their realm. They used the hiet kong as a justification to oppose changes from the center. However, after the case of Khruba Faihin, they gradually accepted Bangkok’s compromises when they saw the impressive sangha educational development and were ensured that their prestigious status would be maintained and promoted. This group was so satisfied that they became the main apparatus of the Bangkok authority to control and keep the Lanna monks under

96   Ratanaporn Sethakul the same order. Those who were in the Mahanikai sect were able to keep their places in the Buddhist society while those who followed the Thammayut sect were free to preach their “New Buddhism” to the Lanna people. The Bangkok government recognized the social and educational roles of the sangha and saw that they could be used to empower the new nation-­state by serving as the carriers of standard Thai culture to Lanna, and to help produce good Thai citizens out of the Lanna people. In short, they escalated the Bangkok cultural influence in Lanna society. The second group was the rural monks who lived far away from the central authority. This group continued the traditional hiet kong which caused them problems. Although they were very popular among the people of all walks of life, they did not use their popularity to mobilize people to oppose the government. Jaokhun Phra Wimon Yannamuni, the former chief monk of Lamphun, described Khruba Sriwichai as a person with strong leadership, determination, and persistence but not a ton boon that would rebel against the government.54 Neither he nor Khruba Khao Pi were a threat to anyone; there is no evidence to show that they encouraged people to oppose the state in its colonization of Lanna. These monks avoided confrontation and kept themselves humbly in their communities. They accepted changes that did not violate their Buddhist concepts and practices and won the hearts of the people. The people of Lanna continue to hold these monks in great respect, seeing Khruba Sriwichai as a symbol of a meritorious man who fought peacefully to protect hiet kong, and Khruba Khao Pi as deeply devoted to helping the people in rebuilding temples. As for Prince Wachirayan, his opinion on the Khruba Sriwichai case was both interesting and in my opinion wise. He decided that Khruba Sriwichai had not done anything wrong. The accusation on the khruba’s neglecting to celebrate the coronation day was considered wrong. He said there was  the official announcement to have the monasteries beating drums and lighting candles to celebrate the coronation day but Phra Sriwichai did not follow (the announcement).… Lighting candles and beating drums were things one should do willingly. The announcement was an encouragement, not an obligation. To force the people to do (what they don’t want to do), will hurt the prestige of the king. Phra Sriwichai did not do and thus should not be at fault.55

Conclusion This was a highly transitional period for Lanna Buddhism. Influenced by the Bangkok sangha and curriculum, the Lanna sangha gradually cooperated with the authorities in Bangkok in changing traditional Lanna Buddhism to the “New Buddhism” as developed by the Thammayut sect. Phra Phaisan Visalo points out that the Siamese Buddhist reforms started by King Mongkut while he was a monk in the reign of King Rama III brought to Buddhism an important change as a response to modernization and perhaps even colonization. There were many

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   97 new interpretations of Buddhist teachings that minimized traditional and “unscientific” beliefs, particularly the belief in the Three Worlds (Traiphum). Buddhism was sanitized and rationalized and was utilized to fulfill the worldly interests of the Siamese state. The organization of the sangha was restructured under the national and centralized control that supported the idea of a modern nation-­state.56 Changes in the sangha organization of Lanna, which were a centralization of the sangha and a kind of colonization, did not bring serious conflicts for two reasons: the cautious policy and flexibility of the Bangkok government, and that the leading Lanna monks had no ambition to gain power in the national sangha. However, these changes brought the end of traditional Lanna culture. Political centralization did not affect Lanna culture as much as religious centralization, particularly the sangha reform. From the fall of the Mangrai dynasty to the period of Bangkok rule, Lanna was a tributary state of Burma but it still retained autonomy, politically and culturally. Amid western colonialism, Siam lost many of her tributary states to the European colonial powers. Though the Lanna jaonai insisted on their autonomy in their own states, the Bangkok government implemented the internal colonization policy in the form of political centralization, claiming the threat of British encroachment as an excuse to take over Lanna states. In other words, the jaonai faced either external colonization by the British or internal colonization by Siam. While provincial reform or Bangkok centralization was an internal colonization in terms of politics, the sangha reform was the cultural one. The Lanna sangha was put under the direct control of the Supreme Sangha Council in Bangkok and was promoted by outside organizations, not by the local people who preferred the hiet kong. The Lanna sangha could have perpetuated the hiet kong through the traditional education they provided to the people if they had stayed untouched. The reforms, however, changed the monks who were the traditional backbone of Lanna culture, into a significant and effective tool of Bangkok to replace Lanna culture with the mainstream culture of Siam. The Lanna script was neglected because sangha education was taught in Siamese. In schools, Lanna language and literature were wiped out from the curriculum. This resulted in the gradual disappearance of Lanna worldviews and values. With its internal colonization policy, Bangkok achieved its goal of assimilating the Lanna people into Siam politically and culturally.

Abbreviation MTS

Mahathera Samakhom

Notes   1 Prior to the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, the official name of Thailand was Siam. Changing the name of the country to Thailand was and remains controversial. Because the material in this chapter is prior to 1932, I will use Siam to refer to the nation.

98   Ratanaporn Sethakul   2 National Archives, R.5 M.58/44 “The Report of administration in Monthon Phayap,” August 11, R.S. 124.   3 It should be understood that internal colonialism is different in important ways from the external colonialism present elsewhere within the Theravada communities of Southeast Asia. A principal difference is that the colony is a part of a nation-­state formation, rather than being a distant colony. See introduction and Borchert in this volume for more discussion of this issue.   4 After the fall of Mangrai dynasty in the late sixteenth century, the Lanna kingdom became a vassal state of Burma and Siam respectively and was never again a unified, independent kingdom. The name Lanna refers to the principal states or Muang of Lanna, consisting of Chiang Mai, Lamphun, Lampang, Phrae, and Nan, which were separate and relatively autonomous during the nineteenth century.   5 Details in Phornphan, “Koraniphipat.”   6 U.K., Schomburgk to King Mongkut, F.O.69/42, April 4, 1865.   7 Ramsey, “The Development of a Bureaucratic Polity,” p. 59.   8 Ratanaporn, “Political, Social and Economic Changes,” p. 281.   9 Ratanaporn, “Political, Social and Economic Changes,” pp. 212–228. 10 Ratanaporn, Economic and Cultural History, pp. 171–175, 180–182. 11 Pranee, Phet Lanna, p. 182. 12 Yupin, “Sathaban Song,” pp. 71–75. 13 Prachakitkorachak, Pongsawadon Yanok, p. 475. 14 Wyatt and Arunrat, The Chiang Mai Chronicle, p. 183. 15 Khaimuk, “Kan Plianplang,” p. 59. 16 Sanguan, Khon Dee, pp. 331–333. 17 Vachara, “Modern Education,” pp. 29–30. 18 Ratanaporn, Economic and Cultural History, p. 188. 19 Ferguson and Shalardchai, “Monks and Hierarchy,” p. 179. 20 Ratanaporn, Economic and Cultural History, p. 222. 21 Khana Kummakan, Kan Patirup Kan Suksa, p. 79. 22 Suchao, Somdet, pp. 23–24. 23 Phraratchabanyat Kaenthahan R.S. 124 exempted novices from conscription. 24 National Archives, R.5 ST 51.10/16, 20, and 21, Schools in Phayap Circles, 1905. Cited in Vachara “Modern Education,” p. 99. 25 Sanguan, Khon Dee Muang Nue, pp. 426–427. 26 National Archives, R.5 S 12/46, Report of Phra Chayananthamuni, February 26, 1905. 27 The Thammayut sect’s monks were not just admired in Lanna, but in Keng Tung as well. Phra Thep Molee was a Thammayut monk educated at Wat Boworniwet who was invited to go to Keng Tung by the Prince in 1923. Sommai, “Buddhism in 700 Years,” p. 451. 28 National Archives, R.5, S.12/8, “The Note of Chaophraya Wichitwongwutthikrai, the Minister of Thammakarn Ministry to Phraya Surisiwisitsak,” December, R.S. 125. 29 Monthon Payap consisted of the current eight provinces in the northern part of Thailand namely Chiang Mai, Lamphoon, Lampang, Phrae, Nan, Mae Hongson, Phrayao, and Chiang Rai. 30 Phrakhru Adulsilakit et al., Prawatsart Putthasasana, p.  169. Wat Boworniwet was the first formal educational institute for monks established by the Prince-­Patriarch Wachirayanwarorot. 31 Khaimuk, “Kan Plianplang,” p. 79. 32 Sanguan, Khon Dee, p. 492. 33 Sanguan, Khon Dee, p. 493. 34 Pranee Sirithorn, Phet Lanna, p. 187. 35 For more details see Maha Mongkut, Phra Prawat, pp. 171–205. 36 Khaimuk Utthayanwalee, “Kan Plianpleng,” p. 83.

Lanna Buddhism and Bangkok centralization   99 37 Sanguan, Khon Dee, p. 497. 38 It is also worth noting that after returning to Chiang Mai, Khruba Faihin sent several of his students to Bangkok to observe the administration and religious affairs there. Several of them were ultimately appointed jao khana of Chiang Mai. Sanguan, Khon Dee, pp. 500–503. 39 Pranee Sirithorn, Phet Lanna, pp. 186–187. 40 Wachirayanwarorot. Neel Phraratchadumri, pp. 90–92. 41 Prince Wachirayanwarorot, Nangsue Thiraruok, p. 188. 42 Prince Wachirayanwarorot, Nangsue Thiraruok, p. 196. 43 Sopha, “Khruba Sriwichai,” pp. 79–80. 44 Prince Wachirayan, Phra Maha, pp. 301–307. 45 Sanguan, Khon Dee, pp. 319–333. 46 Cheochan, Sisipsong Phansa, pp. 152–156. 47 Sanguan, Khon Dee Muang Nue, p. 388. 48 Cheochan, Sisipsong Phansa, pp. 106–107. 49 Thipphakorawong, Phraratcha Phongsawadan, p. 131. 50 Cheochan, Sisipsong Phansa, p. 128. 51 Sanguan, Khon Dee Muang Nue, pp. 568–569. 52 Sanguan, Khon Dee Muang Nue, pp. 560–570. 53 Sanguan, Khon Dee Muang Nue, pp. 572–576. 54 Sanguan, Khon Dee Muang Nue, p. 336. 55 Sommai, “Buddhism in 700 Years,” p. 452. 56 Phra Phaisan, Thai Buddhism, pp. 2–3.

References Cheochan Suwitchano. Sisipsong Phansa Tai Rom Kasawapat, Khrubachao Sriwichai (42 Years in Monkhood, Khruba Sriwichai). Chiang Mai: Suriwong Book Center, 2014, pp. 152–156. Ferguson, John P., and Shalardchai Ramitanondh. “Monks and Hierarchy in Northern Thailand,” in Chris Baker (ed.), The Society of Siam: Selected Articles on the Siam Society’s Centenary. Bangkok: The Siam Society, 2004. Khaimuk Utthayawalee. “Kan Plianplang Dan Kan Suksa Khong Khana Song Nai Muang Chiang Mai Nai Raya Khoenglang Khong Phutthasattawat Thi 25,” (The Changes of the Education of the Sangha in Chiang Mai City in the Second Half of the 25th Buddhist Century), M.A. thesis, Chiang Mai University, 1994. Khana Kummakan Umnouykan Chat Ngan Chalearm Phrakiet Phrabat Somdet Phra Chulachomkhao Chao Yuhua. Kan Patirup Kan Suksa Nai Ratchakan Phrabat Somdet Phra Chulachomkhao Chao Yuhua (The Educational Reform in the Reign of King Chulalongkorn). Bangkok: Khuru Sapah, 2003. Maha Mongkut Ratchawitthayalai Foundation, Phra Prawat Somdet Phramahasammanachao Kromphraya Wachirayanwarorot. Bangkok: Maha Mongkut Ratchawitthayalai. National Archives of Thailand. R.5. M.58/44. “The Report of Administration in Monthon Phayap,” August 11, R.S. 124 (1906). National Archives of Thailand. R.5, S.12/8. “The Note of Chaophraya Wichitwongwutthikrai, the Minister of Thammakarn Ministry to Phraya Surisiwisitsak,” December, R.S. 125 (1907). National Archives of Thailand. R.5. S.12/46. Report of Phra Chayananthamuni, February 26, 1905. National Archives of Thailand. R.5. S.12/46. Phra Thamwarodom to Chaophraya Wichitwong, February 18 and 23, 1907.

100   Ratanaporn Sethakul National Archives of Thailand. R.5. S.12/46, Phra Aphaisaratha to Phra Thamwarodom, July 26, 1908. National Archives of Thailand. ST.51.10/16, 20, and 21, Schools in Phayap Circles, 1905. Phra Phaisan Visaro. Thai Buddhism in the Future. Bangkok: Komon Khimtong Foundation, 2009. Phornphan Chongwatthana, “Koraniphipat Rawang Chao Chiang Mai Kap Khon Nai Bangkhap Ankrit An Pen Het Hai ratthaban Thai Khao Khuabkhum Kan Pokkhrong Monthon Phayap,” (The Dispute of the British Subjects against the Chiefs of Chiengmai Resulting in the Siamese Government Taking Over the Administration of North West Siam, 1858–1902). M.A. Thesis, Chulalongkorn University, 1974. Phrakhru Adulsilakit et al. Prawatsart Putthasasana Nai Lan Na Chabab 635 (History of Buddhism in Lan Na). Chiang Mai: Saengsiln, 2006. Prachakitkorachak. Phongsawadan Yonok. Bangkok: Phraephitthaya, 1972. Pranee Sirithorn Na Phatthalung. Phet Lanna (The Jewels of Lanna). Chiang Mai: Northern Printing, 1995. Prince Wachirayanwarorot (Somdet Phramahasommanachao Kromphraya Wachirayanwarorot Sadettroetkan Khanasong B.E. 2455–2460). Nangsue Thiraruok Nai Kanphraratchathanpleongsop Phraphrommuni, Wat Thaepsirinthrawat, Bangkok, June 10, 1994. Prince Wachirayanwarorot. Neel Phraratchadumri Tang Kan Khana Song. Bangkok: Maha Mongkut Ratchawitthayalai, 1991. Ramsey, James Ansil. The Development of a Bureaucratic Polity: The Case of Northern Siam. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1971. Ratanaporn Sethakul, “Political, Social and Economic Changes, Resulting from the Chiang Mai Treaties of 1874 and 1883,” Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1989. Ratanaporn Sethakul, Economic and Cultural History of the Chiang Mai-­Lamphoon Basin. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2009. Somdet Phramahasommanachao Krom Phraya Wachirayanwarorot. Phra Maha Sommana Winichai. Bangkok: Maha Mongkut Ratchawitthayalai, 1992. Sanguan Chotsukharat. Khon Dee Muang Nue (Good People of the Northern Land). Bangkok: Odeon Store, 1972. Sommai Premchit, “Buddhism in 700 Years of Chiang Mai: Past and the Trends of the Future,” Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Thai Studies, Themes VI. Chiang Mai, Thailand, October 14–17, 1996. Sopha Chanamoon, “Khruba Sriwichai ‘Ton Boon’ Haeng Lan Na (B.E. 2421–2481),” M.A. thesis, Thammasat University, 1991. Suchao Ploychom. Somdet Phramaha Sommanachao Krom Phraya Wachirayanwarorot Bangkok: Maha Mongkut Ratchawitthayalai, 1998. Thipphakorawong. Phraratcha Phongsawadan Krung Rattanakosin Ratchakan Thi 3. Bangkok: Khurusapha, 1963. Vachara Sindhuprama, “Modern Education and Socio-­cultural Change in Northern Thailand, 1898–1942,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawai’i, 1988. Wyatt, David K. and Arunrat Wichienkeo. The Chiang Mai Chronicle, Second edition. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2000. Yupin Khemmuk, “Sathaban Song Kap Kan Muang lae Sangkhom Lan Na, B.E. 1954–2101,” (The Sangha and Politics and Society of Lan Na, Buddhist Era 1954–2101), M.A. thesis, Silapakorn University, 1988.

6 Shifts in Buddhist authority in Sipsongpanna under Chinese colonialism1 Thomas Borchert

In July 1999, the Buddhist Association of Sipsongpanna ratified a list of rules for the monks of Sipsongpanna, a Theravada Buddhist minority region of Southwest China. These rules are fairly unremarkable, dealing with issues such as matters of advancement (i.e., how to become a novice, how to go from novice to monk and monk to khuba), as well as a modified form of the training rules that suggest how novices and monks should act in public. There are other aspects of the rules that we could think about. They assert the responsibility of monks to follow the law and assist in carrying out government policies (though they do not talk about the need to follow the Communist Party or the Unity of the Nationalities of China (something other comparable rules do).2 They are also bilingual, in both Chinese and Dai-­lue, and while the two versions are largely the same, there are some minor differences of tone. The Chinese version is rather flat and straightforward, while the Dai-­lue version more exhortatory, suggesting that monks and novices should follow these rules in order to preserve and foster Buddhism. While these differences are important, before considering their import, it is necessary to think about their very promulgation. These rules were printed out on large metal sheets that were distributed to all the temples in the region and hung in semi-­public spaces, such as outside the residence dormitories of a temple’s monastics. While I did not visit all 500 plus village temples in the region in 2001–2002, those I did all contained this sign.3 This relatively prosaic sign, and its promulgation, is the result of an important shift that has taken place in the Sangha of Sipsongpanna in the last 50 years as a result of Chinese “colonialism.” That is to say, that one of the effects of Chinese imperialism in what we now call Southwest China has been to centralize the organization of the sangha. This has resulted in the creation of a singular authority within the local Buddhist community with which the government can work. Ironically, this has taken place at the same time that the formal relations between Buddhist and governing institutions in Sipsongpanna have become severed, and Buddhism has been disestablished. In other words, the effect in Sipsongpanna of Chinese colonialism has been to create a (relatively) powerful singular actor, even as it has moved Buddhism away from the governance of the region.

102   Thomas Borchert

Locating Sipsongpanna as a Chinese colony Sipsongpanna (Xishuang Banna 西双版纳 in Chinese) is a Theravada Buddhist region of Southwest China. The region is on China’s Southwest border with both Myanmar and Laos, and it is a region that is filled with a variety of lowland and upland minority groups. Many of these live in communities that bridge the borders of the region. The dominant ethnic group in the region has for centuries been a Tai group, the Lue, a group that is spread throughout mainland Southeast Asia, though is concentrated in Northern Thailand and the Shan States of Myanmar. Since 1953 when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) entered the region, the Lue of Sipsongpanna have been citizens of the People’s Republic.4 Up until that point and for approximately 800 years,5 the region had been a semi­independent kingdom which served as a buffer state between China and Southeast Asian polities. Giersch has referred to the region between Sipsongpanna and Dehong as a “middle ground” between China and the more powerful states of Southeast Asia, a region where no one could maintain full control of the space over time.6 This inability, the product in part of geography and malaria, meant that while the government of the jao phaendin,7 the ruler of Sipsongpanna, was tributary to larger states to the north and the south, it also maintained a certain degree of autonomy.8 Its status as a buffer state effectively ended in the 1890s when the region was recognized as being a part of the Qing empire by French– British treaties which divided up the middle Mekong region.9 While politically Sipsongpanna was a buffer state that became the southern edge of the Chinese nation-­state/geo-­body, in many ways it should be seen as a Southeast Asian polity (at least historically). The language spoken by the Dai-­ lue is a Tai language, quite close to those spoken in Laos, Northern Thailand and the Shan States of Burma and its script is also quite close to that used in these regions.10 The social system of the region also largely mirrored those of the rest of the region. The Dai-­lue were lowland rice-­growers who dominated the groups dwelling in the mountains of the region, and Dai-­lue society as a whole reflected the “emboitement” described by Condominas.11 Social relations were hierarchical, with villages owing allegiance to the heads of centers (jao muang12), and jao muang owing allegiance to the jao phaendin (the lord of the earth). Most importantly for the discussion here, they also followed the combination of Theravada Buddhism and spirit worship that is common elsewhere in Southeast Asia. While it is not known when Buddhism entered the region, it has been present for at least 400 years (and probably longer).13 Moreover, while Sipsongpanna was no “galactic polity” on the scale of Ayutthaya,14 there was some relationship between Buddhism and the governance of the region, a point to be elaborated on below. The second issue that needs to be clarified is whether and how to think of Sipsongpanna as a colony. Most of the regions and Theravada communities discussed in this volume were under direct colonial rule by a European power. This is not the case with Sipsongpanna. Prior to the twentieth century, Sipsongpanna was a weak state that paid tribute to the Chinese and Burmese empires, but

Shifts in Buddhist authority   103 remained largely autonomous. With the exception of certain periods when the Chinese government moved armies directly into the region, the region was seen as mountainous and wild, and no one from the Chinese government wanted to go there, and a result, the jao phaendin “ruled on his own.”15 In the eyes of the Chinese state, the jao phaendin was a tusi, a local chieftain that they appointed and presumably controlled. However, at the same time, this rule was at best indirect, and there is evidence that the fealty of the jao phaendin was as much about a weak state maneuvering between several strong overlords.16 The Chinese empire exacted tribute, and could exact punishment, but it did not change the nature of the social structure or the direct governance of the region in long-­term appreciable ways. Under the rule of the People’s Republic, however, this indirect form of rule changed radically, and in particular Sipsongpanna’s “feudal manorial” social structure, as it was defined in the taxonomy of the mid-­ twentieth century People’s Republic of China (PRC), was abolished. It has been incorporated into a territorially defined political economy, and presumed to be part of the nation in a way that it was not during the Ming/Qing period. And yet, like a colony, it has largely been used by the Chinese government as a source of natural resources. We should see it as an example of “internal colonialism,” a concept that Dru Gladney utilizes to describe the relations between the PRC and Uighurs of Xinjiang Province in the northwest. Descriptions of “internal colonialism” are “predicated upon the unequal rates of exchange between the urban power-­centers and the peripheral, often ethnic, hinterlands.”17 Like other forms of colonialism, it is based on asymmetrical relations between core and periphery (i.e., metropole and colony), in both political and economic terms, but sharing a political space, such as that of the nation-­state. While Gladney recognizes that there are some definitional problems with this which emerged when the category was first used in the 1970s, nonetheless, it is a useful tool for describing the regions of China’s borders that are filled with ethnic minorities who are in some ways central to the definition of the nation, but also conceptually “Other” to it.18 These are also the kinds of exchange relationships that we see between the Chinese state and Sipsongpanna. The political economy of the region has been transformed in part through the cultivation of rubber plantations and tea, and while many Dai-­lue have participated in this transformation, the Dai-­lue as a whole lost their ability to develop their culture and economy as they would have liked in 1953.19 We should understand that calling Sipsongpanna a colony would be strongly rejected by the Chinese government and most citizens of the PRC, who see places like Sipsongpanna as “naturally” a part of China. These actors might argue that Chinese ideology is intrinsically anti-­colonial and anti-­imperialist (which was true in some ways), and that Sipsongpanna has been a part of the Chinese nation since the Yuan Dynasty (an argument which is possible, though highly problematic). They might also make a civilizational argument that the Dai-­lue had a “feudal” society, and so the Chinese have improved conditions in the region.20 If we solely consider infrastructure development and the reduction (if not elimination) of diseases like malaria and leprosy, then conditions have

104   Thomas Borchert improved in Sipsongpanna since the late nineteenth century. However, these improvements do not change the fact that the PLA came in, took over a region that had not been controlled by the Chinese in direct ways for much of the last several hundred years, that the Communist state radically transformed the political economy of the region, that Chinese official and corporate interests have consistently and systematically stripped the region of its resources.21 In 2002, when a Dai-­lue informant told me about the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the entrance of the PLA into Jing Hong, I asked him if people (meaning the Dai-­lue people) were excited about the upcoming anniversary. He looked at me as if this were a ridiculous thing to say and said, of course not, it has nothing to do with the Dai-­lue. Sipsongpanna has not endured the violent repression that some minority communities in China have experienced, but most Dai-­lue had little choice in the incorporation into the national geo-­body of China. In other words, Sipsongpanna is an internal colony of the nation-­state of the PRC.

Buddhist organization under the Jao Phaendin The common assumption, particularly among Chinese scholars, is that pre-­ twentieth century Sipsongpanna seems to have had a sangha organization closely aligned to the traditional political structure. The editors of Yunnan Zongjiao Zhishi Baiwen note, for example, that Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the organizing system of the Theravada Buddhism [of Sipsongpanna] and the feudal system of leadership by lords were closely related … [T]hey were mutually dependent, and took advantage of one another. Ma Yao has argued more bluntly that Buddhism was the “religion that supported the feudal system,” and Zhao and Wu suggested that there was an “inseparable unity” (jinmi xianglian) between Buddhism and the government of the jao phaendin.22 The Thai scholar, Natcha Laohasirinadh, on the other hand, has argued the reverse position: Rather than Buddhism supporting the feudal system, it was this system, and in particular the jao phaendin, that effected the propagation of Buddhism throughout Sipsongpanna (though the religion helped him consolidate his own powers23). Regardless of the direction of the benefit, local chronicles and Chinese gazetteers seem to support the idea that the sangha had an intimate relationship with political institutions in Sipsongpanna. Throughout the Sipsongpanna Chronicle, and in particular during the reigns of the latter few centuries, new jao phaendin either performed ceremonies in front of Buddha images or sponsored the construction of new chedi or wat. These ceremonies were similar to, and indeed may have been patterned after, ones that were used by the Burmese court to establish authority in an area.24 The degree to which the aristocracy and the sangha may have seen their interests aligned is also evident in a curious event of intra-­ Buddhist (or perhaps ethnic) strife early in the Qing. While the vast majority of

Shifts in Buddhist authority   105 Buddhism in the region was what we now call Theravada, apparently a group of Chinese monks came down and taught the locals Mahayana Buddhist texts. The local jao, who were also tusi, and the local Buddhist monks attacked these Chinese monks and made sure that they left the region. While contemporary ethnic identifications are problematic in understanding what might have happened in this moment, they are identified as Han monks who recite Han texts, whereas the local jao are reported as having supported “Burmese” monks who recited “Burmese” texts. The implication is that the local jao and the local monks who saw their interests threatened by the encroaching “Chinese” monks, were in alignment with one another here.25 We see this mutually beneficial relationship at work in the organization of the sangha, which was closely affected by the “feudal” social structure. Non-­ aristocratic monks in Sipsongpanna had three ranks: pha (novice), du/dubi (monk) and khuba.26 However, there were four other titles that were generally reserved for the aristocracy (in ascending order): shami, sangharaja (literally king of the sangha), song ling and aga menli.27 The last two were reserved solely for the close kin of the jao phaendin.28 While this made them the highest positions in the sangha, this does not mean that the holders of these titles in fact ran the sangha, since these four titles seem to have been honorific.29 The highest ranking monk in the kingdom was called the khuba muang,30 who resided at the Wat Gui, in Ban Kongjing,31 just outside modern-­day Jing Hong. While not directly on the grounds of the king’s palace,32 it was nearby, as were the temples that served on the “right and left hands” of Wat Gui, Wat Zhuandong, and Wat Zhapeng.33 Despite this close relationship with the reins of power, I would suggest that this was a fairly decentralized system. Wat Gui is said to have “exercised jurisdiction” over all the temples within the kingdom,34 and Hsieh Shih-­chung suggests that the abbots of muang temples (i.e., the chief temple of a district or polity) needed to be approved by the khuba muang in order to be appointed. Nonetheless, each muang had its own general temple (wat long, ch. Zong fosi) that was responsible for all the temples within the muang. Monks (or perhaps only abbots) of local temples were supposed to go to the wat long each new and full moon to recite the patimokkha (the 227 rules of the monastic discipline). They were also supposed to give regular reports to the abbot of the wat long, who was responsible for helping them resolve disputes that they themselves were unable to resolve.35 Beyond the level of muang, there was a district level of organization. The final organizational level was the temple of each individual village.36 At each level, the abbot was responsible for the religious activities of those below him, as well as for the promotion of monks. Nevertheless, it is worth exercising caution in thinking about the degree to which the formal organization of the sangha translated into the direct control of the sangha. Due to a combination of factors such as the size and location of Sipsongpanna and the destructive aspects of the Cultural Revolution, there is a paucity of available information about the Buddhist organization of Sipsongpanna in the pre-­modern period. Moreover, what does exist has certain problems.

106   Thomas Borchert For example, while Chinese scholarship on Sipsongpanna and the Dai-­lue is interested in the role of religion, much of it is also the product of a period during which the academic community is concerned with linking religious institutions to exploitative political ones. This means that in order to justify the legitimacy of the Chinese changes to the political and social system, there is a tendency to overstate the effectiveness of the power wielded by the traditional institutions. Thai scholars on the other hand, who already live in a society organized around and with Theravada Buddhism have tended to be more interested in portraying Sipsongpanna as a “traditional state” on the one hand, but also as a/the primordial home of the Tai peoples, and as such they have been more interested in portraying Sipsonpanna as a simple, authentic version of Thailand, and not interested in the sociology of the sangha.37 This means it is necessary to use circumstantial evidence, as well as comparison with other regions to speculate about conditions in Sipsongpanna, particularly before the twentieth century. To begin, we might think about the way that the Lanna sangha functioned in the period prior to the twentieth century. Ratanaporn Setakul in this volume argues that the Lanna sangha was a largely decentralized set of institutions. It was certainly tied to the authority of the local state, but unlike in Ayutthaya and Bangkok for example, the Lanna kings did not impose governmental regulations upon the Lanna sangha.38 While Lanna and Sipsongpanna are not the same place, there was significant overlap in the cultural forms of each place. In Sipsongpanna itself, based on ethnographic evidence from the 1980s, Tan Leshan has suggested that temples were largely independent entities. The wat long muang and the district level temples might have had jurisdiction over a village temple, but they did not have direct administrative authority over them.39 This makes sense if we consider the geography of the region. Condominas has commented that topography of the region reinforced a tendency toward autonomy in the villages,40 something we see in terms of the language of the Dai-­lue in Sipsongpanna. Both Dai-­lue and Chinese people regularly note that Dai-­lue never had a standard form, and that each muang had its own variants (though for the most part these were mutually comprehensible). While language and religion are not the same, the same geographical influences that discouraged standardization of the language would have made religious control difficult across the region. Moreover, as noted above, Buddhism seems not to have been as important in the ruling ideology of the jao phaendin as in other Theravada states.41 Assuming this is the case, even if the center could have controlled the margins, there was less incentive to actually control the sangha, even if monks and/or Buddhism were not wholly divorced from political activity. What we see here, then in the pre-­colonial sangha is an organizational structure that is tied to the reins of power in terms of its organization, but also rela­ tively de-­centralized in its authority structure. What happened at the level of the village temple largely remained under the control of the village and the abbot.

Shifts in Buddhist authority   107

Buddhist organization after Mao Organizationally, in the post-­Mao era, the Sipsongpanna Sangha changes in a few key ways.42 First of all, the political system with the jao phaendin at the head is abolished, and is replaced by the bureaucratic structure of the Communist state. Thus each town (or muang) continues to have a “lord,” but it’s not a jao.43 The “lord” is a member of the CCP, he is for the most part not in place simply by birth, but rather through having worked his way up through the Communist hierarchy, and he owes his allegiance not to a higher lord, but to the bureaucratic authorities not just in Jing Hong, but in Kunming and ultimately Beijing. Just as importantly, the ruling ideology is no longer one that relies on spirit cults and Buddhism for authority (to the degree that it ever did), but rather the support of the CCP in its efforts to govern the nation and control the people. This change in social/political structure immediately changes the shape of the sangha. Where before there had been seven different positions of monks, now there are only three: novice (pha), monk (du) and khuba. Moreover, in the post-­ Mao period, the status of khuba effectively loses the charismatic aspect that it has in other parts of the middle Mekong area, and it has become largely a bureaucratic title. When I conducted fieldwork in 2001–2002, I was told that the requirement was that someone had to be a fully ordained monk for 20 years in order to be promoted.44 Thus, at that point, there were no monks who were recognized as khuba by the government or the Buddhist Association (BA) (though a few were called khuba by local villagers). The head of the sangha (sangha nayok) was promoted from dubi long (chief monk) to khuba in 2004.45 While it is not quite right to call this a democratization within the sangha, the traditional close relationship between political power and religious authorities has been radically changed.46 Beyond this, there has also been a centralization of the sangha, largely in the guise of the BA. The rules and regulations of the sangha described above are an example of this. The BA is a quasi-­governmental institution, and it serves two different roles. On the one hand, it is the liaison between the state and Buddhists (primarily monks and novices). At the same time, it also has a regulatory function, whereby it is supposed to make sure that Buddhists follow the rules and laws to which they are beholden. It is an organization that follows the bureaucratic organization of the state. Each locale has a BA, and these are supposed to report to and listen to the provincial BAs, which in turn are tied to the national offices in Beijing. Thus, in Sipsongpanna, there is a BA of Sipsongpanna, a BA of each of the three counties and the city of Jing Hong (three of these offices are based at the same temple, Wat Pajie). Structurally, the BA reaches across the region, making it perhaps the first Buddhist institution in history to do so. At the same time, it is important to note that while there are offices (buildings with names on the doors), the heart of the BA in Sipsongpanna is a handful of 15 to 20 monks, and a handful of former monks, who are referred to as khanan. In addition to making up the staff of the largest offices of the BA, these monks have built the largest school at the region

108   Thomas Borchert which was housed at Wat Pajie, the General Temple of Sipsongpanna, from 1994–2009 and is now housed at Wat Long Muang Lue, a large temple built on the outskirts of town and dedicated in 2007.47 In addition, they have been among the primary actors in developing the Yunnan Buddhist Institute outside of Kunming. Both of these schools draw novices and young monks from around Sipsongpanna and provide these students with advanced Buddhist education, as well as the equivalent of a middle school education. In addition, the influence and reach of these monks can be seen in a variety of capacities outside of Jing Hong. They attend the dedications of temples, funerals, and other kinds of events throughout the region. Sometimes their presence is the result of local networks of which they are a part, and sometimes they will attend an event less because they are known to a particular town and more because they are the officers of the BA. This works in the other direction as well. In addition to moving out to attend events around the region, these monks and the twin wats of Wat Pajie and Wat Long Muang Lue provide a center of gravity which brings lay people to Jing Hong to make merit. Throughout the fall of 2001, lay folk from around Sipsongpanna came regularly to Wat Pajie to pay their respect to the abbot, and I was told by some of the monks that many people come back year after year. Finally, these monks also serve as a resource for temples around the region. Normally, if the abbot of a village temple disrobes or dies he will be replaced by the oldest novice/young monk who lives at the temple, or comes from a nearby village. However, it happens not infrequently that there is not an obvious choice to replace the abbot. In this case, the local temple association might very well ask the monks of the BA for advice and recommendations for a new abbot. In other words, the BA, which is comprised primarily of the small number of monks who are at Wat Pajie and Wat Long, spans Sipsongpanna in a variety ways. Their influence and authority is not spread evenly; there are places where their networks are stronger, but they do reach to all the temples in the region.48 This influence is shaped in no small measure by the structure that has been imposed by the Chinese state, and thus by Chinese colonialism. In a recent article, Ji Zhe has suggested that the BA of China is the first truly national Buddhist organization in Chinese history. The BA was created in part by Buddhists themselves, but in part through the policies of the Chinese government. Ironically, in creating such a national organization, the Chinese state has also created an organization that has the capability of fostering the interests of Buddhists. Because they serve bureaucratic roles within the state apparatus, the monks of the BA of China have had to go through training, and speak the language of state campaigns. At the same time, because they also work for Buddhists (and in particular monks and nuns), when the needs of Buddhists are counter to or in tension with those of the local government (for example in matters of who controls the space in a temple), the monastic officers of the BA are in a position to use the language and technologies of the government against it.49 There are of course limits to this, and the BA should not be seen as an anti-­Communist Party organization, but nor is it necessarily simply a tool of the Chinese state.50 I would suggest that one can see something similar in Sipsongpanna with the BA. The

Shifts in Buddhist authority   109 senior monks in Sipsongpanna have learned to work within this structure to create institutions that they see as fostering their agendas, such as the school at Wat Pajie, Wat Long Muang, and the Yunnan Foxueyuan.51 At the same time, the state structures, and access to certain resources has put the senior monks of Sipsongpanna, the monks of the BA, in the position to build networks throughout the region. There are two caveats to make here in terms of the impact that Chinese colonialism has had on the sangha of Sipsongpanna, and thus the ability for us to apply Ji’s model to Sipsongpanna. First the kind of centralization I noted above is not solely about the actions of the state, but in part about the ways that local Buddhist politics works. The state gives the senior monks of the BA a structural centrality that has been imposed on the region, and a certain ability to force local monks to follow their rules. However, the status of the monks also relies on their ability to fulfill the traditional roles of monks. The lay folk who came to pay their respect to the abbot of Wat Pajie mentioned above did so not because he was the head of the BA, but because he was the sangha nayok.52 It was far more important that this monk had been ordained continuously for more than 25 years (and longer if one counted his time as a novice), that he had a profound Buddhist education and that he was linked into and could draw on for support Theravada networks from around Southeast Asia for these Dai-­lue folks than that he had traveled to India, Japan, and Taiwan as an officer of the BA. Moreover, the ability of the monks of the region to draw on lay support relied (and relies) more on their active participation in an economy of merit and attending celebrations throughout the region than it does on the fact that they go to Kunming to work with the BA of Yunnan. In other words, while the authority of these monks is shaped in important ways by the Chinese state, it also emerges as a result of long-­standing patterns of authority and merit-­making networks in the Tai world. The second caveat is that there are limits to the effectiveness of the centralization, and limits indeed to the power of the senior monks of the BA. While the BA of Sipsongpanna can and does have authority over the entire region, there are many moments where it cannot control the situation. I have written elsewhere of the struggles that the monks of Wat Pajie have had in controlling local Buddhists. Two examples should suffice to explain this. First, in November 2001, Wat Pajie was dedicating a new house for the abbot, and the abbot wanted to have in place a fully planted garden for the celebration. This meant that he wanted several fully grown trees, and while he eventually acquired them, he had to buy them. Efforts to get the laity to donate them fell on deaf ears.53 Second, in the spring of 2002, there were a group of Han Chinese men who were posing at a temple famous among tourists as monks who could tell fortunes. The BA was concerned that these men were causing damage to the reputation of Buddhism in the region, and went to great lengths to have them kicked out. However, they could get neither the local villagers nor the regional government to do anything about these fake monks.54 The point is that while there has been a centralization of Buddhist authority in Sipsongpanna as a result of Chinese colonialism, centralization does not mean absolute power or authority.

110   Thomas Borchert In other words, in some ways what we see in Sipsongpanna is that the sangha has flipped. Whereas in the period of the jao phaendin, the sangha was closely tied to the power of the state, but highly decentralized, now under contemporary Chinese colonialism, the sangha has no formal affiliation with the state but is far more centralized.

Conclusion I have noted here an important shift in the Sipsongpanna Sangha in the last 50 years, one that is largely the result of a colonial relationship with China. I have described this in relatively stark terms, and of course the conditions on the ground are undoubtedly more complicated. Moreover, part of what needs to be disentangled here is the relationship between different modes of governing authority. For example, we might distinguish between direct control and indirect influence in the governing of a sangha. In doing so, we can see that the sangha of the twenty-­first century shares some similarities with that of the nineteenth. There is an important difference between the shift taking place here and in other Theravada polities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Essentially, the form of colonialism is different: the region has been incorporated into a nation-­state, rather than into a faraway colony. Comparisons with Thailand (Lanna and Isaan) are useful perhaps, as part of what Ratanaporn shows in her chapter is the way that the sangha in Lanna is colonized and incorporated into the bureaucratic structure of the Thai nation-­state, though there is a difference there too. In Sipsongpanna, the king was removed, and the region is shaped by the technologies of the nation-­state. There is no “wise prince-­patriarch,” as Ratanaporn argues to soothe the anger of the locals. Moreover, the Chinese state in the region is an avowedly secular one that has generally eschewed traditional Chinese authority structures (despite a loosening of its active oppression of some religions since the beginning of the Reform Era). While the Chinese state certainly interacts with religious actors through a variety of structures, the personal links between the aristocratic families of the pre-­twentieth century and the sangha were erased, and the sangha was disestablished. The disestablishment of the sangha of Sipsongpanna has ironically given the sangha some autonomy that it may not have had under the regime of the jao phaendin. This has meant, ironically perhaps, that the sangha of Sipsongpanna has had more independence under a Communist regime than have other sanghas that exist under putatively Buddhist regimes. The question becomes whether or not this type of disestablished centralization that I have pointed to can be seen in other regions. Is it a unique form, or a more widespread phenomena? As a final thought, it is worth commenting on the presence of Sipsongpanna in a book like this. As we have seen, Sipsongpanna is a region where Theravada Buddhism is common and important (and indeed a place where there are colonial conditions); and yet, comparative considerations of Theravada communities have tended not to include Sipsongpanna, for several reasons.55 Perhaps the most important reason is that the region is in China. There are a couple of reasons

Shifts in Buddhist authority   111 why this matters. First of all, Sipsongpanna was not an easy place to get to until the 1970s when infrastructure development connected it to Chinese cities. It was not easy for scholars from outside of China to get permission to go there until the 1990s, when many travel restrictions were eased (though even then, it was not until the late 1990s that people could stay beyond a week or two). Part of this meant that in the period when the study of Theravada Buddhist communities in English was thriving (1960s through the 1980s, partly as a result of post-­war missionary work, anthropology and the Peace Corps),56 Sipsongpanna was not a place that could be easily visited, let alone studied. Second, study in Sipsongpanna required an investment in the study of the Chinese language that was fairly rare among students of Theravada Buddhism. Students of Buddhism in China have tended to focus, reasonably, on Mahayana Buddhism while students of Theravada Buddhism focused primarily on Southeast Asian languages. Moreover, while there has been significant work done by Chinese and Thai scholars on Sipsongpanna, some of which is cited here, there is a relatively paucity of research conducted on Theravada Buddhism. The reasons for this are also complicated, but have to do with the reluctance of Chinese scholars to focus on religion until recent years, except in critical ways, and the tendency for Thai scholars to be more interested in Sipsongpanna as a potential original source of the Tai peoples, rather than as a source of information about Theravada Buddhism. All of this has meant that while there has been research into the Dai-­lue communities of Sipsongpanna over the years, and scholars have long known that Theravada was important there, the study of Theravada Buddhism there, and its implications for our understanding of Theravada communities, both inside and outside considerations of colonialism, has tended to be overlooked.

Abbreviations BA CCP EFEO PLA PRC

Buddhist Association Chinese Communist Party École Française d’Extrême-Orient People’s Liberation Army People’s Republic of China

Notes   1 This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted in Sipsongpanna, a minority region of Southwest China between 1998 and 2009, including 15 months in 2001–2002.   2 See Borchert, Educating Monks, pp. 72–74 for further discussion of these rules.   3 In visits since 2002, this sign has been less prominent at village wats. My impression is that as villages have rebuilt the main worship halls (wihan), they have tended to not replace the sign.   4 There is no single way to refer to the group of people that I am discussing here. They are a “Tai” group, of which there are many. In China, they are referred to as Daizu, i.e., the Dai people, but they are one of four Tai peoples that make up the Daizu. For example, the Dai-­Neua of Dehong, a region to the northwest of Sipsongpanna, are also part of the Daizu. Ironically, although the Dai-­neua of Dehong and the Dai-­lue of

112   Thomas Borchert Sipsongpanna are part of the same ethnic group in the eyes of the Chinese state, until the middle of the twentieth century, the two groups had relatively little contact. In everyday conversation, especially Chinese, it is not very common to hear people refer to themselves as Dai-­lue. However, because “Lue” is an important part of who they are as a people, and who they interact with in the Shan States and Northern Thailand, I refer to them here as Dai-­lue.   5 Liew-­Herres et al., Chronicle.   6 Giersch, Asian Borderlands.   7 In previous publications, I have written the title “cao.” I am using the letter j, rather than the letter c to be consistent with the spelling in Ratanaporn’s chapter.   8 Liew-­Herres et al., Chronicle, pp. 49–50, note that the region was managed by both Chinese and Burmese kingdoms, with Chinese and Burmese participation in and authorization of the investitures of the jao phaendin. This was communicated by the comment that in Sipsongpanna, the Chinese court was “father” while the Burmese court was “mother” (haw ben paw, mon ben mae). As they also note, degree of control fluctuated over time.   9 Keyes, “Who are the Lue.” 10 Emblematic of this is the fact that monastery schools in the 1990s used books that were brought up from Muang Yong and Takhilek in the Shan States. Moreover, the first computer script that Dai-­lue monks used to publish texts in the late 1990s came from the Shan States. Reportedly, the differences between this script and the traditional hand-­written forms caused some conflict between the senior monks (who were using it) and some lay supporters (who didn’t feel comfortable reading it). On the decrease of Southeast Asian influence in the region, see Evans, “Transformation.” 11 Condominas, From Lawa to Mon. Hsieh, “Ethno-­political Adaptation,” p.  116, describes this as a “hierarchical bureaucracy.” 12 In other publications (Borchert 2017), I have spelled this term meuang, as this is closer to the way it is pronounced. I am spelling it here as muang to be consistent with the Thai for the sake of consistency with Prof. Ratanaporn’s chapter. 13 The time of the presence of Buddhism in Sipsongpanna is difficult to determine. There are competing claims between Dai-­lue informants (who tend to say that Buddhism is “1,000 years old” in the region), and Chinese scholarship (which tends to suggest that it has been in Sipsongpanna no more than a few hundred years). Liew-­ Herres et al., Chronicle, p.  85, note that the most widely known chronicles in the region, a history of the jao phaendin has relatively little information about the spread of Buddhism in the region. However, one might also note that in the mid-­fifteenth century, there is reference to a jao phaendin going to a temple as a part of his assuming the position (Liew-­Herres et al., Chronicle, p. 143). 14 See Hill, Merchants and Migrants and Natcha, Sipsongpanna. 15 Bunchuay, Thai Sipsongpanna, vol. 1, p. 42. 16 Liew-­Herres et al., Chronicle, pp.  44–46; Hsieh notes that Sipsongpanna was not a protectorate, but that the ruler had full rights to engage in foreign affairs and economic activities, and that accepting its status as tusi was a kind of “strategy for state survival.” Hsieh, “Ethno-­Political Adaptation,” pp. 122, 131. 17 Gladney, “Internal Colonialism,” p. 2. 18 Schein, Minority Rules, Thongchai, “Others Within.” When interviewing a Tibetan lama visiting the United States in 2008, I asked him (in the context of a class) why it was that he thought the Chinese government was so desirous of controlling the Tibetan plateau, and he said without missing a beat, “Oil and minerals.” Personal communication, Burlington, VT, November 2008. 19 Hsieh, “Ethno-­political Adaptations,” pp. 177–182, shows that there were significant conflicts within the ranks of the local jao over whether to follow the CCP or to support the Nationalists during the civil war. See also McCarthy, Communist Multiculturalism, pp. 52–58.

Shifts in Buddhist authority   113 20 On the “feudal” conditions in pre-­twentieth century Sipsongpanna, see Zhao and Wu, Daizu, pp. 125–126. On the “civilizing” aspects of the Chinese state for its borderland minorities, see Harrell, “Introduction.” 21 McCarthy, Communist Multiculturalism, p. 58, notes that by the time of the Cultural Revolution, Sipsongpanna had been completely transformed economically and politically by Maoist Socialism. The degree to which the economy relies on a combination of domestic tourism and rubber production, has only reinforced this transformation. 22 Yang, Yunnan Zongjiao, pp.  80–81; Ma “Religion”; Zhao and Wu, Daizu Wenhua, p. 392; see also Li, Daizu Shehui: 48; Yang, Xishuangbanna, p. 148. 23 Natcha, Sipsongpanna, p. 79. Hsieh, “Ethno-­political Adaptation,” p. 116, argues that the jao phaendin was said to own the land, the water and the people, enabling him to “dominate” the state and economy. 24 Liew-­Herres et al., Chronicle; Giersch, Asian Borderlands, p. 61. 25 Giersch, Asian Borderlands, p.  113, note 63; personal communication, January 29, 2013. 26 Khuba is defined by the Dai-­Han dictionary as “a high monk in Southern Buddhism” (Dao et al., Dai-­Han, p.  294). In Laos, the Shan States and Thailand (where it is “khruba”), it seems to be more of an honorific than an actual rank. In other words, not all du become khuba. 27 Li, Daizu (vol. 3), 103. Some of these are transliterations of Dai-­lue terms that I am not familiar with. Pha, du and khuba are still in use, and the fifth term I recognized as sangharaja, which is the term used to describe the chief monk in some Theravada polities. However, the fourth rank and the top two are somewhat more difficult to understand. This is not helped by the fact that different sources use different characters to transliterate the terms. Zhao and Wu (1997: 201), for example use song li (松 利) rather than song ling (松领). Song is probably meant to be Sangha (though sengjia is the word normally used to indicate the Sangha), but it is unclear if li or ling is closer to the Dai-­lue. Similarly, for the top rank, Zhao and Wu write a ga mou ni (阿 嘎牟尼) instead of a ka men li (阿嘎门里). In neither case is it clear what the meaning is. There is another shift, however, which has a more interesting potential. In Li, Daizu Shehui, monk, du, is transliterated using the character 独, which means single or alone. It is part of the word independent, duli. More recent materials, such as Zhao and Wu (1997), as well as monks themselves on business cards, use the character 都, which means capital city. Without further research, it is impossible to know if this shift was intentional. However, it would certainly make sense that Chinese ethnologists would not want to associate Dai-­lue monks with something that meant independent. 28 Li, Daizu Shehui, vol. 3, p. 103. 29 There appears to be some disagreement over whether the lowest title, shami, could be held by a commoner. Yang, Yunan Zongjiao, pp. 80–81 suggests that it could be, while Tan Leshan, “Theravada Buddhism,” p. 39 suggests that these were only for the aristocrats. 30 A muang is a political term in the Tai world, ranging from a small center or market town up to a nation-­state. A political community or polity might be the best way to think of it. Many of the small cities in Sipsongpanna were muang, and each muang had its own lord (jao). 31 The district of the jao phaendin and his government was called Xianyigai, and Ban Kongjing was one of the villages within this. Hsieh suggests that because the highest jao lived there, this temple was the “highest ranked” in Sipsongpanna. Hsieh, “Ethno-­ political Adaptation,” pp. 241–242, 346 n. 3, 5; Li, Daizu Shehui, vol. 3, pp. 101–102. 32 Bunchuay, Thai Sipsongpanna, vol. 1, p. 114. 33 Bunchuay, Thai Sipsongpanna, vol. 2, p. 151, notes that there are six ranks, swami, mahatheri, sangharaja, khruba, dujao and phra. He says that swami is the highest monk in the region, but does not make the links between the status of the monk and

114   Thomas Borchert the jao phaendin’s family that Li et al. does. He also states that governance of the monks is according to the ranks listed. 34 Li, Daizu Shehui, vol. 3, p. 101. 35 Li, Daizu Shehui, vol. 3, p. 101. 36 Yang, Yunnan Zongjiao, 81. 37 Natcha, Sipsongpanna; Thongchai, “Others Within.” 38 It might be suggested that the control that the Thai state had over the sangha in Central Thailand has also been overstated. Jory, Thailand’s Theory, p.  88, has suggested that despite rules that forbade the comical recitation of the Vessantara Jataka during the reign of Rama I, it is not clear that people heeded the decrees. Moreover, McDaniel, Gathering Leaves has argued that English language scholarship on Thai monastic education has tended to overstate the effect of reform efforts on monastic education, driven by the central government. 39 Tan, “Theravada Buddhism,” p. 44. 40 Condominas, From Lawa, p. 84. 41 Natcha, Sipsongpanna, p. 79; Hill, Merchants, pp. 67, 147, n.1. 42 During the 1960s when Sipsongpanna was undergoing land reform and moving quickly to Communist political structures, Buddhism seems to have been largely abolished. When exactly Buddhist institutions were abolished and monks and novices were disrobed remains unclear. Older Dai-­lue that I have interviewed have tended to be reluctant to talk about the 1960s beyond generalities. One senior monk told me that all monks were disrobed by the mid-­1960s except for his own teacher, because that monk had been too fat to wear anything other than robes. While I cannot verify the truth of his claims (and this monk would have been born right around the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1965, so I’m not sure he can either), if it is true, the monk would have required the protection of the local people against Red Guards (either from inside or out) to survive as a monk, and if there was one, there may very well have been more. 43 Though it is worth noting that in the decades after the establishment of the PRC, the Dai-­lue officials that were high up in the government were former aristocrats, most notably Zhao Cunxin, who was the son-­in-law of the last jao phaendin, and was the governor (zhou zhang) of Sipsongpanna for much of the first four decades of Chinese rule. On the split between Dai-­lue aristocrats over whether to support the Nationalist Party or the CCP, see Hsieh, “Ethno-­political Adaptation,” pp. 177–183. 44 Rule 16 of the rules cited at the beginning of the chapter reads:  A ceremony can be held for a bhikkhu to become khuba changlao if the bhikkhu: has been ordained for 20 years; has profound Buddhist knowledge, integrity, good mentality, morality and unrighteousness; has certain prestige among believers; has made certain contributions to the society; has proposed written applications (put forward by believers) toward the village and town Buddhist Association Team, which will approve the application and put forward the application proposal to city and county Buddhist Association for examination, approval, and the issuance of a certificate. Those who break this rule will be fined 300–500 yuan. 45 In February 2016, there was a ceremony elevating six senior monks to the level of khuba, and the highest monk in the region, Khuba Muang Jom (he is the abbot of the “general temple,” and head of the BA) to a new level, pha somdet. This is a title that does not seem to have a clear precedent in Sipsongpanna, but may have been adapted from Thai royal titles. Because this seems to be a new title, and it may be that it ends up being a singular usage, I refrain from adding it to the discussion above. 46 See Borchert, Educating Monks, pp.  65–70, for ways in which the senior monks in Sipsongpanna develop and maintain close ties to the political leadership of Sipsongpanna. These ties, however, are a part of political networks, and not the result of kinship networks as Li et al. describe being the case for the top of the traditional sangha structure.

Shifts in Buddhist authority   115 47 The sangha nayok, tellingly, is abbot of both of these temples. 48 I discuss internal networks and influence in Sipsonpanna in Educating Monks, chapter 3. 49 Ji, “Secularization.” I speak of the state as singular, but it is important to remember that the state is comprised of competing factions, and so it is often the case that groups like the Sipsongpanna BA do not compete against “the state” (which is a fraught endeavor in the best of circumstances), but rather use the language of the state to appeal for the help of one fraction of the state over and against another. 50 On the micro-­politics of religious organizations across China, see the chapters in Ashiwa and Wank, Making Religion. 51 On Wat Pajie, see Borchert, “Worry for the Dai Nation;” on Wat Long, see Borchert, “Relocating the Center.” 52 Probably in part because of the remnants of Communist ideology, there is no sangha­ raja. The monks at Wat Pajie explained to me several times that the sanghanayok was the same as a sangharaja. Ashiwa and Wank, “Politics of a Reviving,” explain that it is a common strategy for Chinese monks to have several overlapping titles. 53 See Borchert, “The Abbot’s New House.” 54 See Borchert, Educating Monks, chapter 2. 55 For example, recent surveys of Theravada Buddhism such as Swearer, Buddhist World, and Crosby, Theravada Buddhism, refer to Sipsongpanna only in passing. It is not the only such place. Singapore, Malaysia and India (represented by Zhang, Samuels and Surendran here) also all have Theravada communities that have been largely ignored by English language scholarly communities until recently. 56 I would add to this that because Sipsongpanna was beyond French Indochina, the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) never had a robust presence there. So while the English language work on Laos has never been particularly robust, as we see from Kourilsky and Harris in this volume, there has been significant work in French on both Laos and Cambodia.

References Ashiwa, Yoshiko and David Wank. “The Politics of a Reviving Buddhist Temple: State, Association and Religion in Southeast China.” In Journal of Asian Studies 65, no.  2 (May, 2006): 337–360. Ashiwa, Yoshiko and David Wank, editors. Making Religion, Making the State: the Politics of Religion in Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Borchert, Thomas. “Worry for the Dai Nation: Sipsongpanna, Chinese Modernity and the Problems of Buddhist Modernism.” In Journal of Asian Studies 67, no.  1 (February, 2008): pp. 107–142. Borchert, Thomas. “Relocating the Center of a Sangha: Minority Buddhists, Local Politics and the Construction of a New Temple in Southwest China.” “Place/No Place: Spatial Aspects of Urban Asian Religiosity,” Syracuse University, October 2009. Borchert, Thomas. “The Abbot’s New House: Thinking about how Religion Works among Buddhists and Minorities in Contemporary China.” In Journal of Church and State 52, no. 1 (2010): 112–137. Borchert, Thomas. Educating Monks: Minority Buddhism on China’s Southwest Border. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017. Bunchuay Srisawat. Thai Sipsongpannā. Bangkok: Rongphim Rapphim, 1955 [2498] (third edition) 2004 [2547]. Condominas, Georges. From Lawa to Mon, from Saa’ to Thai: Historical and anthropological aspects of Southeast Asian social spaces, translated by Stephanie Anderson,

116   Thomas Borchert Maria Magannon, and Gehan Wijeyewardene. Canberra: Australian National University, 1990. Crosby, Kate. Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity and Identity. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. Dao Shixun, Jao Cunxin, and Dao Guolian, eds. Dai-­Han Cidian. Kunming, Yunnan Renmin Chubanshe, 2002. Evans, Grant. “Transformation of Jing Hong, Xishuangbanna, PRC.” In Where China Meets Southeast Asia, edited by Grant Evans, Christopher Hutton, and Kuah Khun Eng, pp. 162–182. Singapore: ISEAS, 2000. Giersch, C. Patterson. Asian Borderlands: the Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Gladney, Dru. “Internal Colonialism and the Uyghur Nationality: Chinese Nationalism and its Subaltern Subjects.” In Cahier d’Etude Méditerranée Orientale et le Monde Turco-­Iranien 25 (1998): 2–11. Harrell, Stevan. “Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reactions to Them.” In Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontier, edited by Stevan Harrell. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1995. Hill, Ann Maxwell. Merchants and Migrants: Ethnicity and Trade among Yunnanese Chinese in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Monograph 47/Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1998. Hsieh, Shih-­chung. “Ethnic-­political Adaptation and Ethnic Change of the Sipsong Panna Dai: An Ethnohistorical Analysis.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, 1989. Ji Zhe. “Secularization as Religious Restructuring: Statist Institutionalization of Buddhism and its Paradoxes.” In Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation, edited by Mayfair Yang, pp. 233–160. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. Jory, Patrick. Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jātaka and the Idea of the Perfect Man. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016. Keyes, Charles F. “Who are the Lue, Revisited? Ethnic Identity in Laos Thailand and China.” Working paper, Center for International Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992. Li Zhaolun, editor. 傣族社会历史调查, 西双版纳 Daizu Shehui Lishi Diaocha, Xishuangbanna [Historical Research of the Society of The Dai People, Xishuangbanna]. Volumes 2 and 3. Kunming: Yunnan Minzu Chubanshe, 1983. Liew-­Herres, Foon Ming, Volker Grabowsky, and Renoo Wichasin. Chronicle of Sipsong Panna: History and Society of a Tai Lu Kingdom. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012. Ma Yao. “The Religion Which Protected the System of Feudal Leadership.” In Yunnan Project Newsletter. No. 2 (1988): 16–21. McCarthy, Susan K. Communist Multiculturalism: Ethnic Revival in Southwest China. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2009. McDaniel, Justin Thomas. Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008. Natcha Laohasirinadh. Sipsongpanna: Rat Carit [Sipsongpanna: A Traditional State]. Bangkok: The Thailand Research Fund, 1998 [2541 B.E.]. Schein, Louisa. Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Swearer, Donald K. The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia, second edition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. 

Shifts in Buddhist authority   117 Tan, Leshan. “Theravada Buddhism and Village Economy: A Comparative Study in Sipsongpanna of Southwest China.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, 1995. Thongchai Winichakul. “The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-­spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects, 1885–1910.” In Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, edited by Andrew Turton, pp. 38–62. London: Curzon Press, 2000. Yang Xuezheng, editor. 云南宗教知识百问 Yunnan Zongjiao Zhishi Bai Wen [100 Questions for Knowledge of Religion in Yunnan]. Kunming: Yunnan Renmin Chubanshe, 1994. Yang Zhimin. “西双版纳佛教调查 Xishuangbanna Fojiao Diaocha” [Investigations into Sipsongpanna Buddhism], in西双版纳傣族社会综合调查 Xishuangbanna daizu shehui zonghe diaocha, volume 1. Kunming: Yunnan Minzu Chubanshe, 1984 [1958]. Zhao Shilin and Wu Jinghua. 傣族文化志 Daizu Wenhua Zhi [A Cultural History of the Dai Nationality]. Kunming: Yunnan Minzu Chubanshe, 1997.

Part III

Managing and governing Theravada Buddhists

7 “Colonial governmentality” Legal and administrative technologies of the governance of Sri Pada temple in Sri Lanka1 Premakumara de Silva Introduction This chapter focuses on the control and management of the affairs of the Sri Pada temple (the temple of sacred footprint) under new administrative and legal technologies of colonial powers, and the disputes that arose as a result of such control. Sri Pada, or the temple of the sacred footprint, is known to the English-­ speaking world by the name Adam’s Peak.2 The latter is still used, which points to the long colonial presence on the island. Sri Pada is situated at the top of Samanala (butterfly) mountain, roughly 7,360 feet (2,200 metres) above sea level, on the south-­western edge of the central hills in Sabaragamuva Province. The lucrative Sri Pada temple economy created all sorts of contestations and disputes among the groups and individuals who wanted control of it throughout its long history.3 In the early part of the twentieth century the authority for controlling Sri Pada temple was taken away from its chief priest and the “hereditary Trustees” and vested under a newly created “legal Trustee” who was responsible for another legal body known as “District Buddhist Temporalities Committee” which came into operation under a colonial modality of control that I refer to as “legal-­rational.” The legal-­rational is a technology of control that hid its coercive force in discourses and mechanisms of the law. Under this colonial legal technology, the participation of monks in the Sri Pada temple management was substantially reduced and their role in the temple affairs were limited to its ritual practices. Hence, the chief priest of the temple significantly lost the privileges that he had enjoyed before this new arrangement came into operation. Under the new rule he was paid a limited allowance as recognition of his status as the chief priest. Significantly, this prised the monk loose from his place in a close symbiotic relationship with the ruler. Similarly, the hereditary Trustees who had controlled the temple revenue on behalf of the chief priest now had to work under the authority of the “legal Trustee” and the person who always controlled this post was nominated against the will of the chief priest and the temple villagers. This shift marked the power that monks and hereditary Trustees had exercised under the absolute monarch vested into the local elite that had become regimented under the legal bureaucratic framework of the British colonial governmentality.

122   Premakumara de Silva However, after four decades in operation, it was determined that this legal-­ rational technology of governance was insufficient for the proper management of the temple affairs in Sri Pada and in 1931 another centralized legal technology was introduced under the name of “Public Trustee” for the management of temple affairs. Under this new legal technology, the monks could (again) substantially intervene in temple management. The governmentality that had resituated the monk’s authority over temple affairs is quite contrary to what it did for them in the early stages of colonial governance. Under those governmentalities, the temple authority had to find solutions to the temple matters within the given legal frameworks such as commissions, legislations, or court settlements. One of the main tasks here is to excavate such disputes, contestations, and discrepancies that arose over the governing of Sri Pada temple under British colonial governance. Such exercise of power, which we might refer to as “colonial governmentality,” affected the country in general, but its power over the Buddhist establishment becomes visible through a micro-­historical approach to a specific temple like Sri Pada.4 Let me first make clear my usage of the Foucauldian notion of “governmentality.” In the Foucauldian sense, governmentality is a novel kind of governance that emerged in Europe during the sixteenth century. It happened when feudalism was failing and when there was a loss of power of the absolute monarch. Although there is no monarch with absolute power now, we do have government. To a large extent this is internalised by people, but there is also a level of surveillance and reinforcement of conformity to the rules. This new kind of governmentality was made possible by the creation of specific (expert or professional) knowledge as well as the construction of experts, institutions and disciplines (e.g., medicine, psychology, psychiatry) so that individuals who we think of as experts could claim the knowledge necessary to assume the power of governance.5 But Foucault pays little attention to colonialism in outlining “European” governmentality. Hence, some scholars have endeavored to reformulate this notion in order to understand colonial forms of power that led to a construction of the modern colonial subject and the governing of bodily conduct: in other words, to explore how the political sovereignties of colonial rule were constructed and how they operated. And it is this reformulation that has been conceptualized as “colonial governmentality.” Colonial governmentality, Prakash argues, had to be radically discontinuous with the Western form.6 He argues that colonial governmentality was obliged to develop—in violation of the liberal concept that the government was part of a complex domain of dense, opaque, and autonomous interests—that it only harmonized and secured with law and liberty. It also had to function as an aspect of coercion, the institution of the sovereignty of alien rulers.7 David Scott, in his reformulation of colonial governmentality, argues that the Colebrook-­Cameron reforms in 1833 (“the point of application of colonial power”) were designed to support a “transformation of power” in Sri Lanka, from one of direct rule to one in which changed social conditions would produce natives who would automatically “do what they ought.”8 For him, the Colebrook-­Cameron reforms are significant in

“Colonial governmentality”   123 their displacement of the old mercantile politics of territorial expansion and introduction of a new politics into the colonial state, a politics in which power was now directed at the conditions of social life rather than the producers of social wealth.9 He shows that the crucial point here is not whether natives were included or excluded so much as that there was “the introduction of a new game of politics” that the colonized would be obliged to play if they were to be deemed political. In such conditions one of the things the new game of politics came to depend upon was the construction of a legally constituted space where legally defined subjects could exercise rights, however limited they were.10 By broader agreement with both Scott’s and Prakash’s concept of colonial governmentality, as they seek to reformulate it as new forms of knowledge, and new technologies, and as the production of new effects of order and subjectivity in the colonized societies, I question the very idea of their “colonial governmentality” with my Sri Pada materials in relation to the theoretical argument made by anthropologist Peter Pels. Governmentality, he states “should be understood as a power dispersed through the social body.” Moroever, it  cannot be regarded as a singular colonial strategy, and we ought to study the struggles going on among groups of colonizers and colonized and between them, not only over the control of governmental technologies, but also over their appropriateness, application and desirability.11 It is this line of argument I follow, because as we shall see in the case of the governance of the Sri Pada temple the disputes, disagreement, conflicts and debates not only occurred among/between groups of colonized subjects (in this case; monks, local elites and temple servants) but also colonizers (e.g., colonial officers, administrators and missionaries) on the appropriation and the application of governmental technologies in the control of temple’s affairs. The disagreement and agreement over governmental technologies and their appropriateness, application and desirability over Sri Pada temple affairs show us that—as Pels remind us—governmentality cannot be understood simply as a singular colonial strategy.12 Let me test Pels’ position in relation to governance of Sri Pada under British colonial supremacy in the island called “Ceylon.” Before that let me explain briefly how Sri Pada was governed under the pre-­ colonial polity.

Traditional management of the temple: kings, monks, and aristocrats Sri Pada became a nationally important pilgrimage site, in that it began to be recognized as a royal place of worship, with the advent of trade-­based Mayarata civilization around the twelfth century. Prior to that, as I explain elsewhere, it is hard to find any royal patronage or clear connection between the pre-­colonial states and the Sri Pada temple.13 Since the twelfth century, Sri Pada has been an important site for all the centers of power which emerged in the South-­west

124   Premakumara de Silva (Mayarata) and central Kandyan regions (Malaya Rata) in pre-­colonial Sri Lanka. Throughout this temple’s long history, different centers of power took Sri Pada temple affairs seriously in their court agendas and put it under the control of Buddhist monks. Though, geographically speaking, Sri Pada remained peripheral to those “centers of power,” it was never completely marginalized from them because it came substantially under their influence through patronage projects such as temple restorations, village grants, the appointment of priests and the making of royal pilgrimages to Sri Pada by kings themselves. As the chief patron of Buddhism, the king watched over not only Buddhist Temporalities,14 but also the monkhood itself. Whenever disputes occurred among monks, the king acted as the ultimate arbiter, as in lay disputes, and he maintained the internal discipline of the monkhood. Like Southeast Asian Buddhist kings, he acted as the guarantor of the social order and the source of prosperity.15 Royal connections with the sacred sites in general were not merely religious but also political and economic; through them the center exercised its power over not only sacred sites but also regions and the people who lived in them. In other words, royal ritual connection not only to Sri Pada temple but also to other temples tied the fragmented or segmented state together. With the expansion of royal hegemony, and increasing administrative complexity, gift-­giving patterns grew more elaborate and became the prime public expressions of sovereignty.16 That is why almost all the royal courts (kingdoms) that emerged after the eleventh century for the most part took Sri Pada temple affairs seriously in their court agendas. The right over controlling Sri Pada temple affairs was traditionally gained from the kings who were, according to Buddhism, generally responsible for the protection of temples (and the sasana in general). This system was largely consistent, until the British conquered the Kandyan kingdom in 1815. British governmental technologies, which changed the relationship between government and religious institutions, are generally seen by historians as having had a deleterious effect on Kandyan Buddhist institutions. The support of the king, and the economic base of the land tenure system, provided a crucial foundation for the well-­being of Kandyan monasticism. The king appointed monks to high office and to the incumbencies of particular temples, and the effective authority of senior monks was sustained with royal backing. The chiefs, on behalf of the king, enforced the tenurial obligations of tenants to temples. However, after the “disestablishment” of Buddhism under the British, as Malalgoda (1976) puts it, along with the changed basis of land tenure, the Buddhist hierarchy was weakened and its institutions began to fall into disarray. After 1832 there was no longer any actor or institution to enforce service obligations to temples, and after 1853 government ceased to make monastic appointments. The authority of senior monks in Kandyan Buddhist institutions was questioned, but they had no sanctions, and their decisions were ignored. Thus, disputes and accusations of corruption became rampant in the Kandyan temples, including at Sri Pada. Such traditionally established temple management and controlling systems began to evaporate under the new legal-­rationalities of the occupying British regime, for a considerable period of time at least.

“Colonial governmentality”   125

British colonial project(s) British Ceylon was filled with pilgrimage sites and temples, and their importance both culturally and economically meant that they had to be dealt with through the new administrative and legal-­rationalities of the colonizer. Sri Pada was one such place where colonial technologies of governance were both implicitly and explicitly engaged in the management and control of its temple affairs through the new technological modalities. The control and management of temple affairs under new administrative and legal-­rationalities and the disputes that have arisen as a result of such control, have been examined in connection with large temples in South Asia particularly South India and Sri Lanka by several anthropologists.17 In his (1981) Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case, Arjun Appadurai provides a close, detailed study of the changes brought about in the Sri Partasarati Svami Temple of Madras during 200 years of British rule. For Appadurai, the combination of an ability to legitimate the results of conflicts by the British with a complete inability to solve them often proved absurd and disastrous. The British, who found the role of royal protector distasteful, tended to view temples as “charitable trusts” and, hence, as institutions that should be capable of handling their own affairs by traditional means. For the British, when these traditional means proved inadequate, they had to be codified under trust law, and by courts or commissions of inquiry. But this attempt, Appadurai argues, to cut temples and their conflicts adrift from colonial authority often had bizarre results. In fact, the search for solutions to such a fixed set of “traditional” rules was largely conducted in British courts.18 Before discussing the governance of the Sri Pada temple and the conflicts that arose there as a result of the new form of colonial legislative power that exercised control of the management of temple endowments, it is important to briefly explain the contractual boundaries of the colonial regime involved in safeguarding the Buddhist institutions. The authority for “safeguarding Buddhist institutions” was obtained through the Kandyan Convention. This treaty, by which the kingdom was ceded to the British, contained the following clause: “The Religion of Boodhgoo professed by the Chiefs and inhabitants of these Provinces is declared inviolable, and its Rites, Ministers and Places of Worship are to be maintained and protected.” The British officials in Kandy publicly declared: “We are not come to this country to destroy the Religion of Buddha and the Gods, which have prevailed from ancient times in this country, but to protect and promote it.”19 As promised, at least for some time, they took measures to safeguard Buddhism and accepted the authority of the monks of the Siyam nikaya (fraternity) over Buddhist affairs in the island, particularly over the monks of both the Malvatta and Asgiriya Buddhist establishments. This authority was exercised through the two separate councils of monks (karaka sangha sabaha) at Malvatta and Asgiriya, each of which consisted of more than ten monks under the leadership of a chief monk (mahanayaka). These two karaka sangha sabaha were the only monastic councils recognized by the colonial regime and that recognition was further authorized by granting an allowance

126   Premakumara de Silva worth £106 to the Malvatta sangha council and £70 to the Asgiriya sangha council.20 However, under enormous pressure brought by the Christian missionaries to bear on the British colonial state to avoid interference with Buddhist affairs, these promises were not kept. The colonial policies and strategies on Buddhist affairs were adjusted and reconstituted to normalize the missionary pressure on government affairs. However, under this policy revision the colonial engagement in controlling temple affairs such as land and wealth and the appointment of chief incumbency of those wealthy temples were not excluded. These are the more striking and the controversial areas that rulers had to deal with both before/ after the British period. Appadurai and Breckenridge point out that, “Control over endowment is only one potential locus of conflict in the temple,”21 and Sri Pada is not exceptional in this regard. However, as the case of Sri Pada demonstrates, although the origin of controversies regarding temple control over endowment can be traced back to before the British era, I argue that the eruption of temple disputes in British Ceylon was the product of the new administrative and legal-­rationalities of colonial forms of governance. Some of these disputes were not only generated by colonial governmentality but remained unsolved even after the end of the colonial period.

Temple disputes and British governmental technologies No doubt because of the significant finances and property involved, the management of the Sri Pada temple was marked by regular conflict, however this conflict was exacerbated by the shifting choices on the part of the colonial regime. The Sri Pada temple was treated as a special case and the colonial government wanted the monks of the Malvatta sect who lived in the Sabaragamuva Province to elect the chief priest of Adam’s Peak (Sri Pada temple) but not the chief monks of the Malvatta establishment in Kandy as they had under the Kandyan kings. In 1860, the new policy of appointing the chief priest of Adam’s Peak was tested by the colonial government. However, the Kandyan monks were not happy with the decision and continually protested by sending petitions and letters to the colonial authorities claiming their authority over such appointment and their eligibility and right to hold the office of the chief priest at the Sri Pada temple as they had on the previous occasions. As a response to the argument of the Kandyan monks, Sabaragamuva monks of the Malvatta sect claimed that holding the office of chief priest of the Sri Pada temple had been a duty of the monks of the pupillary lineage of Vehalle Dhammadinna. Moreover, they began to legally challenge the eligibility of the Kandyan monks to hold office at Sri Pada. This was in 1825, when the matter came up before the Board of Commissioners appointed by the British government in Kandy. In the following year, the control of Sri Pada temple was taken away from the Kandyan monks and given back to the Sabaragamuva monks on the recommendation of George Turnour, the Agent of Government at Sabaragamuva, who was directed by the commissioners to make a special inquiry into the

“Colonial governmentality”   127 case. Under this commission, Galle Medhankara, a member of the Vehalle pupillary lineage was nominated as the new recipient of the chief priest at Sri Pada temple. His appointment was fully supported by the landed Sabaragamuva elites. However, the appointment of Galle Medhankara was unacceptable to the Malvatta monks in Kandy who sent several petitions to the Governor, Edward Barnes, in order to reclaim their “traditional” authority on appointing and controlling such temples in the country. In response to this claim, the government agreed to give a quarter of the revenue of Sri Pada temple to the Malvatta high priest, “as a mark of favor” and “not as a right.” After the death of the high priest this grant was abolished; nevertheless it is clear that the Kandyan monks had not dropped their claim on the revenue of Sri Pada temple.23 After the death of Galle Medhankara in 1836 his chief pupil, Induruve Sumangala was appointed as the chief priest of the Sri Pada temple and the provinces of Sabaragamuva and the South. This was the last appointment made by the colonial government before it ceased to be directly involved with such matters in 1853. The implementation of bureaucratic and legislative control over Sri Pada temple affairs in the early nineteenth century did not alter the existing disputes between Kandyan and Sabaragamuva monks of the Malvatta sect. Hence, the colonial government sought to introduce different technologies for the management of such situations. After the death of Induruve Sumangala in 1858, and under the new regulative technique of the colonial government on appointing the chief monk at Sri Pada, the Sabaragamuva monks of the Malvatta Chapter obtained an autonomous power to elect their own monks to the Sri Pada office. This was a new move but led the existing conflict into another field of contestation. In 1860, it was under this technique that Sabaragamuva monks elected their own monk for the first time, namely Galagama Attadassi, to the Sri Pada office. Attadassi was the monkhood brother (pavidi sahodara) of the former chief monk of Sri Pada, Induruve Sumangala, and the younger pupil of Galle Medhankara. Under this new legislative process, power which had been exercised over such appointment by the Kandyan monks was further undermined, and that power was transferred to a group of landed monks in Sabaragamuva.24 Though the Sabaragamuva monks had been involved in disagreements and controversies with Kandy, they continued to give formal recognition to the authority of the mahanayakas at Kandy by annually sending their pupils for higher ordination at Malvatta (a practice which continues today). But as the main center of the Malvatta Chapter of the Siam Nikaya, Kandy repeatedly tried to assert the rights of the control of the Sri Pada temple affairs over Sabaragamuva monks. Such attempts were quite evident throughout the appointment process. The controversy between Kandy and Sabaragamuva monks continually escalated around the main question of who held the authority of office at Sri Pada. The Kandyan monks seemed to be persistent in their struggle over the issue until they received a satisfactory answer from the colonial government. This brings us to the difficult problem of the interrelationship between British colonial government and traditional institutions like the Malvatta establishment. 22

128   Premakumara de Silva The colonial government addressed the issue, as Whitaker reminds us, through “the language of rational-­legal law,” and whereas the Kandyan monks like the authorities of Mandur temple approached it through a language of—following Appadurai—“temple ideology.”25 Though the Mandur temple elites secured “the paradigmatic sovereign”26 of the temple under the unfriendly language of rational-­legal law of the British, the Kandyan monks failed to do so. Hence they continued to bargain for authority over Sri Pada temple affairs in the framework of rational-­legal law of the British government.

New administrative technologies for the management of temple affairs The first part of the nineteenth century was marked by a conflict between different monastic groups over the control of Sri Pada, a result of policy changes by the colonial state. By the mid-­nineteenth century, the colonial state had introduced a new set of administrative technologies for the management of temple affairs on the island that would take the control of the site out of the hands of the monks and put it in the hands of local landowners. This was popularly known as the “Buddhist Temporalities.” In 1854 legislation was passed but was not finalized until 1889, and results were found to be unsatisfactory, and new legislation was introduced from time to time to amend them. Under these legislative technologies, the management of temple affairs came before committees of lay Buddhists, known as the “Buddhist Temporalities Committees” (BTC). The BTC were predominantly dominated by local landowners and headmen.27 As Spencer points out, they were pivotal intermediaries between the colonial state and the mass of the peasantry in the region.28 While the purpose of these new administrative modalities was to ameliorate the ongoing bitter conflicts in the management of Sri Pada temple affairs, in fact they further complicated and exacerbated them. It is under Ordinance No. 3 of 1889 that, like other main temples, Sri Pada management came under a newly created “Trusteeship.” Trusteeship (vidane) was normally hereditary, under this legislative technology it was replaced by the appointed rather than elected ones. However, surprisingly, this new technique was not introduced to the Sri Pada temple until 1911. One reason was later found in a report of Government Agent Sabaragamuva who notes, “As a respect to Hikkaduve Sumangala; the government was reluctant to appoint a Trustee over Sri Pada until his death in 1911.”29 Another obvious reason would be that the Ordinance did not fully operate as was expected and subsequently a new amendment was brought into force in 1905. It began to function fully only from February 1, 1907.30 Under the Ordinance No. 8 of 1905, Provincial Committees (PBTC) were abolished so that the system would be simpler, under elected District Buddhist Temporalities Committees (DBTC). Under this new formulation the selection, appointment and disciplinary control of Trustees of temples, and the deity shrines were vested under the District Buddhist Temporalities Committees. The representatives to DBTC were appointed under the voting system in which Buddhist males (that includes monks

“Colonial governmentality”   129 over 21) were eligible to vote in the election of their representatives for the period of five years.31 It is not clear who these eligible Buddhist males were but one thing is clear: under the new election system the colonial government tried to impose a facsimile of British democratic modalities in a local setting.32 Exploring such a situation is beyond the scope of my work here but as historian K.M. de Silva points out, the DBTC were given greater powers under the new legislative arrangement.33 These new modalities of the temple management undoubtedly challenged the authority of the landed monks and the hereditary Trustees (lekama) who had been previously in control and enjoyed the temple revenue under their names. Tensions developed between legal Trustees and incumbent monks, and, as Kemper argues, the introduction of (new legal) lay Trustees undermined the authority of monks.34 Under this new legal system monks who held the chief incumbencies at the wealthy Buddhist temples were only entitled to have an annual grant from the DBTC, rather than the entire revenue. Moreover, for a number of the monks, they had to go through significant effort just to receive the grants to which they were entitled.35 Obviously many monks were against this new arrangement, as is evident in the Sri Pada case, and continually struggled to regain the power lost to the DBTC, but they were not successful until 1931. It was under the 1931 Temple Ordinance that the powers of the monks’ control and management of temple affairs were reactivated.

Ambiguity of the technologies: disputes between DBTC, legal Trustees, and the chief monks The colonial “legal-­rational” technologies for managing temple affairs on the island were further problematized once they were applied to Sri Pada temple affairs after 1911. This time the issue was raised very interestingly. Colonial administrators asked whether Sri Pada is or is not a temple. This issue came up under the new Ordinance of Buddhist Temporalities in 1905. Under the Ordinance a Buddhist temple was defined with the features of vihara (image hall) or dagaba (pagoda). In other words an institution was defined as a Buddhist temple under the colonial state’s legal framework only when it had either a dagaba or a vihara. The inclusion of a dagaba was irrelevant in this case, because there has never been a dagaba located at Sri Pada (even today). Then, an argument came up from the colonial government as to whether Sri Pada had a vihara or not. There was a strong opinion among several landed elite and few leading Buddhist monks of the region that Sri Pada did not have a vihara hence it should not be regarded as a temple. They managed to bring out this argument to avoid the Sri Pada temple coming under the control of colonial law. Therefore, monks began to argue that the rules of the new Ordinance were not relevant to its management. Even the colonial Government Agent (GA) of Ratnapura supported a monk’s claim and subsequently reported “there are no images on it and that it is, therefore not a vihara an amendment to the definition of “Temple” is urgently required.”36 In response to the GA’s suggestion, an officer at the colonial secretary’s

130   Premakumara de Silva office strongly argued, “Why is it not a Vihara? There is a shrine, there is the Sri Pada [sacred footprint]—and several small images of Buddha kept inside the railing—which qualify it being regarded as a Vihara.”37 But this issue remained unsolved for several years. The colonial government was not ready to make further amendments or redefinitions of the features of the temple. Instead, it encouraged the members of DBTC of Ratnapura to adopt the government’s definition. It was essential that the DBTC came to a favorable conclusion, otherwise it would not have been able to control the lucrative Sri Pada temple. But the problem remained unsolved. By this time the new chief monk, Rambukpota Pannasara38 was appointed by the majority of vote of Sabaragamuva monks. Pannasara continued the protest against the management of Sri Pada temple under the DBTC of Ratnapura. He himself brought up the issue of whether Sri Pada should be understood to be a vihara as the central point in order to undermine the authority of the DBTC. In 1915, after obtaining legal advice, the chief priest sent a group of men to collect the offerings while the DBTC appointed Trustee was in charge at the temple. The DBTC filed a case against him at the District Court of Ratnapura. It was revealed that the Trustee was not appointed by the DBTC according to the rules of 1905 Ordinance. On that basis the court declared it as a provisional appointment and therefore the Trustee had no legal status to collect offerings at Sri Pada temple.39 The court decision further complicated the dispute between the chief priest and the DBTC. By the mid-­1920s the new DBTC of Ratnapura was appointed and in 1928 they had the task of appointing a new legal Trustee to the Sri Pada temple. In this appointment the DBTC was split on two crucial issues.40 The first one was the eligibility for voting for the selection of the temple Trustee by the people of the newly attached temple villages. The secretary of the DBTC was against such an arrangement but the president supported the voting right of newly attached temple villagers of Gilimalaya and Eratne in the election. The second issue was that the decision of DBTC’s president to support the re-­election of the outgoing Trustee who had been allegedly charged for the misuse of Sri Pada funds.41 But the secretary wanted to support the new contender who came from the area of his jurisdiction. The secretary and the president of the Ratnapura DBTC were bitterly divided on these issues. On October 18, 1928, an election was held to appoint a new Trustee for Sri Pada temple as scheduled, but the election was interrupted by the supporters of the president of the DBTC who later made an announcement on the postponement of the election, However, the secretary and the two other committee members resumed the meeting and elected the new Trustee they wanted. Soon after this appointment, the former Trustee challenged the decision at the Ratnapura District court but it was rejected.42 This case further indicates how the disagreement and agreement over governmental technologies and their appropriateness, application, and desirability over Sri Pada temple affairs were at work. In 1930, the new Trustee, like the previous one, was accused of corruption and after the hearing he was sacked from the post. One of the charges was that

“Colonial governmentality”   131 he kept none of the accounts required by the DBTC. The president of the DBTC was behind the dismissal of the Trustee. In the next appointment, the candidate who had openly been backed by the president of DBTC was elected.43 But on the eve of new legislation that appointment was limited to only a year. By 1930, the colonial state had realized that the Ordinance of 1905 failed to properly manage the Buddhist temple economies. One of the reasons was that the British government was not getting the kind of revenues that they wanted extracted from the temple economy due to charges of corruption and the bitter disputes that were taking place around the temple management. To avoid such failures a new legislation popularly known as the Temple Land Ordinance (vihara ha devala gam panata) was passed in 1931. Under the new governing technologies, the DBTC was abolished and administrative powers were returned to the Chief Priest of Temples. The new legislation also gave authority to the chief priest to appoint the temple Trustee44 and under this option most of the chief priests appointed themselves as Trustees of the respective temples. At the same time that it gave the mahanayaka a greater say in the management of the temple, the new Ordinance also gave the colonial state a direct supervisory role over temples for the first time by making Trustees of temples answerable to the Public Trustee. For that task, the Public Trustee Department was created and a new Public Trustee was appointed. This new legal arrangement considerably reduced the authority of the local elites that they had previously enjoyed over the control of Buddhist temple economies. In other words, this new legislation reactivated the monk’s power over the control of temple economies (that had been enjoyed traditionally) that they had basically lost under the previous legal-­ rationalities of the Temporalities Act. It also entangled the colonial state in the management of temples, a task they had tried to give up in the middle of the nineteenth century. This new act, however, again did not really solve the conflict over the control of Sri Pada. Though the Buddhist monks in the country regained the authority over the control of the temple economies under the new legislation, the Sabara­ gamuva lay elite could still have influence over the management of Sri Pada temple affairs. The main reason for this was that at this time there was no formally appointed chief priest at the Sri Pada temple who could appoint a Trustee under the new regulation. The post of chief priest, from 1925 to 1954, remained vacant due to unsolvable disputes in the several attempts to fill the vacancy.45 Until 1954 the members of Sabaragamuva elite families were able to hold the post of provisional Trusteeship at Sri Pada temple. In that year, the court decision was made in favor of appointed Trustee by the chief priest of the temple.46 But under the regulation of 1931 Ordinance, the chief priest kept the Trusteeship himself until he died in 1970.47 However, the issue of appointing the chief priest of the Sri Pada temple was not resolved, rather it moved into the postcolonial state which inherited the forms of the colonial state.48 Indeed, the 1954 court decision was a historic one: for nearly half a century monks were kept aside from the management of affairs on Sri Pada. This was the legacy of the legal-­rationalities of the colonial state in

132   Premakumara de Silva the early part of the twentieth century. As I have argued, it needs to be understood as a product of the new legal-­rationalities or as Appadurai puts it, the “legislative” aspect of the colonial governmentality. The British found a temple’s own traditional administrative system incapable of managing the temple’s affairs effectively (or in the ways that they preferred) and they were to be codified under new legal-­rationalities and by courts or commissions of inquiry. However, as we have seen, such attempts of the colonial governmentality often had unintended consequences (e.g., conflicts). Dirks has described a similar inability of colonial law in India to deal with conflicts over the estates of South India’s newly minted Tamil Zamindars. He argues that its failure, however, was really a kind of success. Like the Zamindars described by Dirks, the Buddhist monks here found more and more of their world swallowed by colonial law.49 Ironically, as we have seen in the case of Sri Pada temple under the similar colonial legal conditions they could regain their authority over temple management but under the different form of colonial governmentality. The governmentality that had resituated the monk’s authority over temple affairs is quite contrary to what it did for them in the early phases of the colonial regime. Under those governing technologies, the temple authority had to find solutions on the temple matters within the given legal frameworks (e.g., commissions, legislations, or court settlements). This is quite contrary to what Mark Whitaker found in the east coast Hindu temple in Sri Lanka. He argues at the end of colonial law, even under the postcolonial nationalist counterforce, the temple authority could be re-­ colonized or could preserve the traditional temple ideology and management practices of which colonial authority was largely ignorant.50 But as far as Sri Pada temple is concerned the appointment and the shape of the temple organization was constructed not on traditional temple ideology but rather on colonial legal-­rationalities. This situation is quite similar to what Nissan has shown us in relation to the temples at Anuradhapura. She argues that many features (including the appointment of chief priest of the temple) of traditional temple organizations were constructed by the British colonial regime.51 We both agree largely on such a construction based not on the so-­called “temple’s tradition” but the new legal rationalities introduced by colonial governmentality. That is why even today the monastic election to the appointment of Sri Pada’s chief priest is largely worked out through fixed legal-­rationalities that were introduced under British colonial law but not under an invented traditional temple ideology as in Whitaker’s sense. The monks’ authority that was reinstated (mainly on temple economies) under the late colonial legal-­rational measures was further secured under the postcolonial, Buddhist-­oriented governments as well.

Conclusion This chapter shows that the Sri Pada temple has not been governed under the influence of particular (colonial) governmentality or a set of legal technologies but under several governmentalities or sets of legal technologies. It justifies what Peter Pels argues, that governmentality cannot be regarded as a singular (colonial)

“Colonial governmentality”   133 strategy, and we ought to study the struggles going on among and between groups of colonizers and the colonized (even in postcolonial situations), not only over the control of governmental technologies, but also over their appropriateness, application, and desirability.52 Such contestations clearly indicate that sacred centers cannot actually be understood as a universal or homogeneous phenomenon, as both states and religious actors might want us to believe, but should instead be treated as places where constant contestations are evident. The colonial history of Sri Pada Temple tells us that the disagreement and agreement over governmental technologies and their appropriateness, application, and desirability over control of colonized subjects simply cannot be understood as a singular colonial strategy. As I explain in the chapter, under such colonial governmentalties the continuous disputes and disagreements erupted between rival monastic groups over the appointment of the chief incumbency of the temple and constant struggles occurred between the chief monks, the “hereditary Trustee,” the legal Trustee and the landed local elite in controlling the temple revenue and even colonial officers among themselves in attempting to formulate and control the “Buddhist Temporalities” of colonial modernity in Sri Lanka. The management, and conflicts around it, were thus constructed according to the different forms of the governing legal technologies of the British colonial regime, rather than “traditional temple ideology.”

Abbreviations BTC DBTC GA PBTC SLNA

Buddhist Temporalities Committees District Buddhist Temporalities Committees Governor Agent Provincial Buddhist Temporalities Committees Sri Lanka National Archives

Notes   1 I have greatly benefited from research funding provided by Wenner-­Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Overseas Research Student Fellowship (ORS), and The British Academy Fellowship for my “Sri Pada Project.” I would also like to thank Jonathan Spencer, Charles Hallisey, Tony Good, Bob Simpson, and Kumari Jayawardena for providing valuable comments on the early draft of the chapter, and the commentators at the Singapore Conference, particularly Thomas Borchert.   2 See de Silva “Colonialism and Religion,” pp. 19–32.   3 The Sri Pada temple’s annual income was always far ahead in comparison to other main pilgrimage sites in the island such as the Temple of the Tooth Relic in Kandy, the shrine of the god Kataragama and the Bo Tree temple in Anuradhapura. For example, an available budget description of Sri Pada temple in 1837 shows that the approximate net income in cash was £30 and the value of things such as robes, cloths, and rice was £60, but this does not include the large income that came from the temple land of Kuttapitiya. In 1876 the annual offerings in cash amounted to about £200, and in kind to about £50, while paddy from Kuttapitiya was worth £12 or £15. The offering brought by the tenants was worth about £50 per annum and the services

134   Premakumara de Silva of the tenants were worth about £70 a year. Two recent examples, the first being the Public Trustee’s Administrative report in 1936/1937 shows that the cash offering in 1936 was Rs.9261.62 and in 1937 Rs.11212.80 and the total balance to the credit of Sri Pada temple was Rs.37586.30.   4 For a similar use of micro-­history, see Samuels this volume, and also Blackburn, Locations.   5 Foucault, “Governmentality,” notes that “Governmentality also includes a growing body of knowledge that presents itself as ‘scientific,’ and which contributes to the power of governmentality.”   6 Prakash, Another Reason, p. 125.   7 Prakash, Another Reason, p. 126.   8 Scott, Refashioning Future, p. 42. According to Scott these reforms basically led to the unification of the administration of the island, the establishment of executive and legislative councils, judicial reform, the development of capitalist agriculture, and of modern means of communication, education, and the press.   9 Scott, Refashioning Future, p. 42. 10 Scott, Refashioning Future, p. 42. 11 Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism,” pp. 175; 174. 12 Blackburn, Locations, also proposes South Asia colonial history cannot be understood by merely displacing its traditional (Buddhist) conceptual framework and forms of identity by colonial ones. She argues for a radical new way of studying the impact of colonialism on colonial societies by providing the concept of locative pluralism (p. 210). 13 De Silva, “Kings, Monks and Pre-­colonial States.” 14 “Temporalities” are the secular possessions of a religious cleric or institution, such as property or revenue. The laws governing Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka, described below, is referred to as the Temporalities Act. 15 Tambiah, World Conqueror. 16 Dirks, 1992: 145. 17 For example, see Appadurai, Worship and Conflict, Fuller, Servants, and Whitaker, Amiable Incoherence. 18 Appadurai, Worship and Conflict, p. 211. 19 Malalgoda, “Millennialism,” p. 8. 20 This allowance was stopped in 1847 and was reintroduced it in 1856 not in cash but by donating some land (63 acres) to them. However, the recipient monks made a complaint that the income from these lands was not equal to the cash payment. As a positive response to that complaint the colonial state allowed them to collect grain tax as additional revenue from six different villages in the region until the abolition of the grain tax in 1893. (A letter to Governor Hugh Clifford in 1911 by Tibbotuwawe Sri Siddarta Sumangala, Chief Priest of Malvatta; VD Collection.) 21 Appadurai and Breckenridge, “The South Indian Temple,” p. 204. 22 In the same year under the recommendation of Governor Edward Barnes (1824–1831), Karatota Dhammarama (1734–1827) was awarded the chief incumbency of Sabaragamuva and the Low country and just after his death, this post also came under the name of Galle Medhankara, a pupil of Karatota. 23 They continually sent petitions against the succession of Galle Medhankara; some of them were a bitter personal attack (see in KGC: a letter on November 24, 1849 to Governor Torrington). Similarly, on January 31, 1848 Mahanayaka of Malvatta, Galgiriyave Dharmarakshita was sent a letter of warning with the signatures of few other monks and the Kandyan elites to local offices (lekam) in charge of Sri Pada and its temple land, not to overrule the authority that they assigned to two Buddhist monks and a well known elite of Sabaragamuva (Iddamalgoda) to collect the revenue at Sri Pada and its temple land. (This was in a letter from Vehalle Dhammapala in the collection on Sri Pada at Meeghagoda temple in Palmadulla (VDC)). However, this attempt was repulsed by the colonial government under request made by Induruwe

“Colonial governmentality”   135 Sumangala (see in KGC; A letter from Sumangala to colonial secretary on February 22, 1849 and Diaries of GA Sabaragamuva for 1848 in SLNA 45/350). 24 Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, reads this event—support of taking the incumbency of Sri Pada away from the Kandy monk and giving it to the Low country monks—as a further loss of the authority of the Monks in Kandy to the low country monks (in this case monks of the province of Sabaragamuva). It is important to note here that most of the Sabaragamuva monks of Malvatta Chapter had originally come from those coastal towns and had occupied positions in the province. 25 Whitaker, Amiable Incoherence, pp. 31–48. The temple became, in his terms, a kind of “non-­modern” enclave in a world of growing colonial governmentality, and it is this lingering property that allowed temples, and to some extent temple politics, to flourish. 26 Sovereignty is central to Appadurai and Breckenridge’s (1976) analysis of the ideal typical South Indian temple. 27 The Provincial Committee was held at Ratnapura on June 11, 1893 and comprised as follows: W. Ellawala (President), J.W. Maduwanwela, S.D. Mahavalatenna, A.F. Molamure and F. Ellawala. And Ratnapura District Committee representatives were reported as; Ekneligoda Tikiri Bandara [President] (Kuruvita Korale), D.L. Banda (Kukul Korale) and J.L. Rambukpota (Navadun Korale); for Balangoda Committee— S.D. Mahavalatenna [President] (Meda Korale), F. Pohorabawe (Kadawat Korale) and R.W. Banda (Kolonna Korale)—SLNA 45/2958. 28 Spencer, A Sinhala Village, p. 215. 29 SLNA 45/2966. The connection between Hikkaduve and the colonial government is further exemplified when his biographer, Yagirala Pannananda mentions an incident where the prelate was greeted by the Governor Arthur Hamilton at a railway station. Apparently Sumangala’s train had stopped at the station to make way for the Governor’s train and the Governor, seeing the former, alighted and walked over, which must be considered an act of the highest courtesy by a British Governor (cf. Seneviratne, Work of Kings, p. 133; also see Blackburn, Locations). 30 SLNA 45/2960. 31 SLNA 45/2960 and Ceylon Sessional Papers 1956, p. 35. 32 Under the new system, Francis Theodor Ellawala (President), William Alexander Ekneligoda and P.B. Muttettuwegama were elected for the DBTC of Ratnapura. SLNA 45/2960. 33 De Silva, History of Ceylon, p. 210. 34 Kemper, “The Buddhist Monkhood,” pp. 401–421. 35 In 1921, Rambukpota Pannasara received Rs.1,800 as the Chief Priest of Sri Pada (SLNA 37/961; on the need to apply for the grant, see SLNA 37/959). 36 SLNA 45/2964. 37 SLNA 45/2964. 38 He functioned in Sri Pada office until he died on February 12, 1925. 39 SLNA 45/2964. 40 SLNA 45/2964. 41 SLNA 37/959. 42 SLNA 37/959. 43 SLNA 37/959. 44 The Trustee was appointed to manage temple income and property, as well as to look after the overall administration of temple affairs. 45 See: De Silva, “Sri Pada.” 46 The New Law Reports (NLR) Vol. LVIII (1956), pp. 78–92. 47 Due to the chief priest’s health matters he appointed the lay Trustee in 1969 (Personal Communication with Pinnagoda Sumanatissa on November 13, 2001). 48 See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. But Blackburn, Locations, p.  216, argues that specifically in the threatening context of colonial rule, translocal Buddhist

136   Premakumara de Silva networks were also used to facilitate ritual resistance to colonial domination and attempt to articulate obligation based on sasana rather than state or nation. 49 Dirks, “From Little King,” p. 201. 50 Whitaker, Amiable Incoherence. 51 Nissan, “The Sacred City of Anuradhapura,” pp. 133–243. 52 Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism,” p. 175.

References Appadurai, Arjun. Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Appadurai, Arjun and Carol Breckenridge. “The South Indian Temple: Authority, Honour and Redistribution.” In Contributions to Indian Sociology 10, no. 2 (1976). Blackburn, Anne M. Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. de Silva, K.M. “The Government and Religion: Problems and Policies, c.1832 to c.1910,” In History of Ceylon, vol. 3, edited by K.M. de Silva, pp. 187–212. Peradeniya: University of California Press, 1973. de Silva, Premakumara. “Sri Pada: Diversity and Exclusion in a Sacred Site in Sri Lanka.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, 2005. de Silva, Premakumara. “Kings, Monks and Pre-­colonial States: Patrons of the Temple of the Sacred Footprint” In Ananda Comarswamy Commemoration Research Volume. (ed.) Anura Manatunga. University of Kelaniya: Center for Asian Studies, 2012. de Silva, Premakumara. “Colonialism and Religion: Colonial Knowledge’ Productions on Sri Pada as ‘Adam’s Peak’.” In Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences 37, no.  1&2. http://sljss.sljol.info/articles/abstract/10.4038/sljss.v37i1-2.7376/ (2014). Dirks, Nicholas B. “From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule,” In Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” Ideology and Consciousness, no.  6, Summer (1986): 5–21. Fuller, Christ J. Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Kemper, Steven. “The Buddhist Monkhood, the Law, and the State in Colonial Sri Lanka.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3 (1984). Malalgoda, Kitsiri. “Millennialism in Relation to Buddhism.” Colombo: Studies in Society and Culture Series, (1993) (Originally in Comparative Studies in Society and History 12, no. 4 (1970): 424–441. Malalgoda, Kitsiri. Buddhism in Sinhalese Society 1750–1900: A Study of Religious Revival and Change. London: University of California Press, 1976. Nissan, Elizabeth. “The Sacred City of Anuradhapura: Aspects of Sinhalese Buddhism and Nationhood.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, University of London, 1985. Pels, Peter. “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History and the Emergence of Western Governmentality.” In Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 163–183. Prakash, Gayan. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

“Colonial governmentality”   137 Scott, David. Refashioning Future: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Seneviratne, H.L. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Spencer, Jonathan. A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble: Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. Tambiah, Stanley J. World Conquerer and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Whitaker, Mark. Amiable Incoherence: Manipulating Histories and Modernities in a Batticalao Hindu Temple. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999.

8 The thathanabaing project Monastic hierarchies and colonialism in Burma Alexey Kirichenko

For quite some time, scholarship tended to highlight disruptions in the history of Burmese monastic Buddhism under colonialism, citing that monastic structures were deprived of state patronage, centralized authority in the sangha collapsed, and it became fragmented. One of the key actors in that narrative was the presumed head of the sangha known as the thathanabaing and the disappearance of his office was interpreted as a symptom of the decline of a centralized monastic system. In the existing understanding of pre-­colonial Burmese monasticism, royally appointed thathanabaing functioned as the highest authority in settling disputes involving monks, and helped legitimize the power of the crown by cooperating with it to support Buddhism. It is believed that routine control over the sangha was exercised through a well-­structured hierarchy consisting of local abbots, regional leaders (called gaing-­dauk, gaing-­ok and gaing-­gyok), and finally the thathanabaing assisted by the Thudama council. Dedicated secular officers, such as the ecclesiastical censor (mahadan-­wun), were at the thathanabaing’s service and worked as a liaison between the monastic hierarchy and secular authorities. Important tools for maintaining centralized authority were also periodic monastic reforms and the purification of the sasana sponsored by the court and effected by the thathanabaings.1 Under the secularized government of colonial Burma, the state engaged the sangha on a much narrower agenda of maintaining monastic discipline (to preserve law and order and keep the monks from joining rebellions against the colonial state) and reforming monastic schools (to foster modern education). Secular law and the courts encroached on former prerogatives of monastic leaders, allegedly undermining their influence. As a result, it became impossible to ensure the  sangha’s acceptance of the colonial project and legitimize secular state-­ building.2 This capsule description that at its surface looks like a history of state-­ sangha relations is, however, more of a history of knowledge production in colonial discourses and academic research on Burma. In fact, little empirical research into the functioning and trajectories of Burmese monastic hierarchies has been carried out. To address this issue to some extent, the chapter re-­ examines the conditions of these hierarchies under colonialism with a focus on

The thathanabaing project   139 the thathanabaing’s office. The chapter is organized as follows: I start with an analysis of existing knowledge on monastic hierarchies and its underlying assumptions. These assumptions are reconsidered in the light of empirical evidence thus providing a new baseline to discuss the influence of colonial transformations on monastic hierarchies. Then I analyze the activities of the last thathanabaing and his allies and their relevance for centralization of monastic structures in Burma. In conclusion, I compare the case of Upper Burma with some recent studies about the trajectories of Sinhalese and Southeast Asian Buddhism under colonialism.

Colonial knowledge on monastic hierarchies in Upper Burma If a decline of Burmese monastic hierarchy was caused by colonialism, it should have started after 1852, when the Second Anglo-­Burmese war resulted in the annexation of Lower Burma and left the Burmese court in control of only interior areas of its former kingdom (the First Anglo-­Burmese war ended in 1826 with the annexation of Manipur, Tenasserim, and Rakhine, remote provinces that had been only loosely integrated with Burma proper, so their loss could not have destabilized Burmese monastic structures). Indeed, this point has been referred to as the beginning of a process.3 However, some colonial sources push this date back making the link with colonialism problematic. Already as early as 1850, Father Paul Bigandet (1813–1894) claimed that  in our days, the power of the Tha-thana-paing is merely nominal; the effects of his jurisdiction are scarcely felt beyond his own neighbourhood.… Left without a superior control, the order has fallen into a low degree of abjectness and degradation.4 Bigandet would later spend 38 years in Burma as Vicar Apostolic of Ava and Pegu, but at the moment of writing he had been only to British-controlled Tenas. Given that by 1850 Bigandet hardly had first-­hand experience enough for such a sweeping conclusion, one might think that he should have been relying on some better-­informed authority. Yet, as Bigandet introduced his observations as “a short account of the low and degraded state into which this order has fallen in those parts I have visited,” it seems that the only basis for his far-­reaching claim was whatever reverend father had seen in around Tavoy and Mergui in 1836–1841.5 The passages on Burmese monastic hierarchy and its then-­current condition were later reproduced with some additions in Bigandet’s book on the life of the Buddha, first published in 1858 and then seeing new editions in 1866, 1880, and 1911.6 A reader of the book would, however, have a different appreciation of Bigandet’s findings, as the bishop’s residence and travels in Burma between 1856 and 1894 established his credentials as an authority. That Bigandet’s views on Buddhism, his description of Burmese monastic hierarchy in particular, wielded influence among colonial officials and observers is confirmed by the fact

140   Alexey Kirichenko that the latter often reproduced these views (with or without attribution to Bigandet) in their own works.7 In 1878, in a passage heavily reliant on Bigandet, Albert Fytche (1820–1892), chief commissioner of British Burma in 1867–1871, noted that, since the establishment of colonial rule, schisms have appeared in Lower Burma threatening “to disorganize the ecclesiastical structure,” and linked this process to the dislodging of the traditional monastic hierarchy presided over by the thathanabaing.8 The very same year a similar argument was voiced by C.J.F.S. Forbes (d. 1879), officiating deputy commissioner of British Burma, who also remarked that after the annexation the government, perhaps, should have appointed some local monastic dignitary as the head of the sangha.9 Thus, by the late 1870s an appreciation of the Burmese sangha arrived at by observing monks in Tavoy and Mergui before 1852 became a conventional wisdom true for the entire Lower Burma after 1852. Moreover, the works of Fytche and Forbes linked the degradation of the sangha and its loss of influence with the government’s unwillingness to recognize or establish monastic hierarchies. Neither Fytche nor Forbes detailed what exactly they saw as manifestations of growing sectarianism in Lower Burma, however, publications that appeared during the next 30 years make it clear that the reference was to the split of monks and laity into two groupings known at that time as Sulagandi and Mahagandi.10 Seeing this and perhaps other potential conflicts as a threat to law and order, colonial officials looked for a solution that would have allowed keeping the sangha in check. Thus, on the eve of the Third Anglo-­Burmese war of 1885 that led to the annexation of Upper Burma, Sir Edward Sladen (1827–1890), former British resident in Mandalay, suggested that after the annexation the British should not only grant recognition to the thathanabaing, but also extend his authority to Lower Burma.11 In reality, the hierarchy presided over by the thathanabaing was a poor remedy against the Sulagandi-­Mahagandi split, as the split had been aggravated in the 1870s and 1880s by the immediate predecessors of those monks from Mandalay who were now sought after to provide a solution. In 1887 colonial authorities sponsored Taungdaw Hsayadaw (1816–1895), the thathanabaing under King Thibaw-­min (r.  1878–1885), to visit Rangoon and remained completely unconvinced of his ability to police the monkhood.12 As a result, invoking the principle of religious neutrality, the government opted to confirm Taungdaw Hsayadaw in his office in Upper Burma only informally and refused to appoint secular officers who could enforce the thathanabaing’s decisions. Neither had they extended his jurisdiction, as had been suggested by Sladen. After Taungdaw’s demise in 1895, when the task of “pacifying” Burma after the annexation was essentially complete, colonial authorities also shied away from appointing a successor to the thathanabaing. Instead, as suggested by the government, the new thathanabaing (actually, several of them concurrently) was elected by leading monks and lay patrons of Mandalay. Vigorous lobbying for the official recognition of the primate-­elect followed, resulting in the granting of Lieutenant-­Governor’s sanad to Taunggwin Hsayadaw (1844–1938) in 1903.13

The thathanabaing project   141 The next major problem identified in the state-­sangha relations was the enforcement of the thathanabaing’s decisions, as colonial courts did not honor monastic rulings on cases involving the laity and even giving effect to decisions on cases where both parties were monks was not guaranteed. For a number of years, monastic hierarchs had been complaining that the civil courts undermined their authority, for secular judges should not try ecclesiastical cases. Such complaints had little practical effect. By 1920 the growth of political activism of the sangha had again increased the relevance of controlling the monks. The reform scheme suggested in 1920 by Sir Reginald Craddock (1864–1937), the then Lieutenant-­Governor of Burma, contemplated (again!) the extension of the thathanabaing’s authority to Lower Burma and brought about a new round of campaigning for this measure, as well as for the possible election of a new primate for the entire province and for reviving the position of ecclesiastical censor, a lay officer subordinate to the thathanabaing and responsible for enforcing his decisions.14 In the end, few of these proposals were implemented, with only the mahadan-­wun reappointed in 1921 and a promise made to extend the authority of the thathanabaing to Lower Burma when a successor to the present incumbent of that office would be elected.15 As political involvement of the sangha grew in the late 1920s and 1930s, colonial administrators laid increasingly less hope on Taunggwin Hsayadaw, though the problems of competing jurisdictions of secular and monastic arbitrators and of law enforcement in relation to the sangha only loomed large. In 1935, amid the public debate on legislation necessary to establish ecclesiastical courts, a ruling passed by the High Court in Rangoon completely deprived the thathanabaing of the power to settle disputes between monks. Though the office itself was confirmed by the government, when in 1938 Taunggwin Hsayadaw died, no elections of a successor to him were held and the Thudama council continued supervising the sangha as a collective body. Monastic involvement in Burman-­Indian clashes of 1938 and the failure of police to deal with the monks during the riots once again demonstrated that the colonial state possessed no mechanisms to restrain those elements of the sangha that it defined as “unruly,” “disreputable,” and “evil.” In its report, the commission appointed to investigate the riots claimed that the root of the problem of the “corruption of the Sangha” lay in the fact that monastic hierarchy was made obsolete by the lack of state enforcement. It proposed that the government should properly support monastic authority and that the Buddhists themselves should lead the sangha to enforce the observance of vinaya.16 The war, Japanese occupation in 1942, and the brief restoration of colonial power in 1945–1947 did not lend much hope of implementing these recommendations. However, publications appearing during this period still repeated the mantras that the degradation of the sangha resulted from stripping traditional hierarchies of secular support and argued that a reversal of that trend was necessary.17 Thus, for 60 years of administering Burma, colonial authorities found no practical way of concentrating monastic authority decisively in the hands of the

142   Alexey Kirichenko thathanabaing. Moreover, on a number of occasions they rejected this measure (each time with its own rationale). However, in terms of knowledge production, the conventional wisdom remained convinced that ecclesiastical structures presided over by the thathanabaing were a solution for maintaining control in the sangha. With Burma becoming independent in 1948, the context of state-­sangha relations changed, yet the arguments that the policies of the colonial government (such as the subjection of monks to secular judicature) had created a vacuum of authority in the ecclesiastical sphere, and that the disorganization of monkhood was due to the undermining of traditional monastic hierarchies (with Lower Burma particularly suffering from such disorganization and fragmentation of the sangha), lived on—by being adopted and still remaining current in academic research.18 As the present chapter traces the genealogy of this knowledge production mainly to make explicit its underlying assumptions, it will suffice to say that Western perception of the Burmese sangha was initially shaped by the missionaries who projected on Burma the notions of the large-­scale ecclesiastical organization characteristic of the Catholic Church. With each new publication reinforcing the earlier claims, the argument of a chain of command presided over by the thathanabaing and running down to individual monasteries was then adopted by the diplomats, travelers, colonial administrators, and, finally, researchers. The proclivity of missionaries to see the sangha as degenerate and unable to live up to its own standards was noted long ago,19 and it is understandable that some of them actually wanted to see the sangha in such a condition. On the contrary, colonial administrators as well as observers sympathetic to Buddhism tended to see such a condition as a threat and hence their reception of knowledge produced by the missionaries infused it with a different teleology, namely, that the sangha as a whole should develop a capacity for mechanisms of self-­ regulation that would allow it to prevent such degeneration. In such a teleological reading, the failure of the monastic hierarchy to serve its presumed purpose was interpreted as the evidence of its dysfunctionality under colonialism. With the discussion revolving around the claim of the thathanabaing’s position being undermined by colonialism, colonial thathanabaings were effectively denied agency and seen either as the victims of colonial policy (expected to discipline the monks but deprived of the means to do that) or as traditionalists attempting to preserve a pre-­colonial status-­quo.20 To get to the underlying assumptions, the poorly substantiated narrative of colonialism disrupting centralized monastic structures rested on three premises, namely (1) that in the pre-­colonial period the Burmese sangha was centralized and centrally administered and that it had an established structure of authority with the thathanabaing as its apex; (2) that the primary functions of the thathanabaing and monastic hierarchy were disciplinary; and (3) that the fragmentation of the sangha resulted from the disintegration and failure of an earlier centralized structure.

The thathanabaing project   143 In the light of empirical evidence all of these assumptions appear to be wrong (as will be shown below), and so the existing understanding of the trajectory of monastic hierarchies in colonial Burma provides an example of knowledge poorly grounded in empirical research and assigning privileged position to colonial sources over and above indigenous evidence. It is also understandable why these assumptions were accepted less critically than they should have been in academic research. The notion of a centralized royally appointed hierarchy controlling monastic behavior fitted well into the argument that the legend of Emperor Asoka served as an influential model of kingship for Buddhist sovereigns in Southeast Asia and Lanka. Though different definitions of the Asokan paradigm were suggested, some of which deemphasized religious reform and the purification of the sangha, the notions of the state trying to control the monks and promoting a particular model of monasticism implicit in colonial understanding of the thathanabaing should have appeared logical and comprehensible to the majority of researchers. Another problem with the existing narrative on the trajectory of monastic hierarchies under colonialism lies in the fact that it posits government policy as almost the only factor that affected the sangha during this period. This hardly could have been the case. Given these multiple issues with the understanding of state-­sangha relations, it is necessary to re-­evaluate the pre-­colonial condition of monastic hierarchies and reconsider their workings after the British annexation in a broader context. This would be done in subsequent sections and serve as a basis for a discussion of the activities of colonial thathanabaings.

Monastic structures and centralized authority in the sangha of Upper Burma before colonialism Based on the available evidence, the structure of pre-­colonial Burmese monasticism could be described in the following way.21 During the Konbaung dynasty (1752–1885) the Burmese sangha was not unified. Instead of a single centralized top-­down hierarchy imagined by Western observers, there existed, at least, five different types of hierarchies: 1. Authority structures of large monasteries. By the late nineteenth century, large complexes (kyaung-­taiks) with dozens of constituent monasteries usually had several grades of leadership. Such complexes were the primary form of monasticism in the capital area. 2. Local ritual communities. Known as gaings, such communities were defined by common performance of ecclesiastical ceremonies (sanghakamma) and were usually linked to a certain area. Local gaings consisted of multiple monasteries and a single administrative jurisdiction such as myo usually had several gaings, for example, in the late nineteenth century the sangha in Bagan area with its adjacent myos of Ngathayauk, Taywindaing, Singu, Poppa, and Taunghsin was segmented into four gaings, the sangha in Pakhan area was divided into seven gaings, etc. Monastery complexes in the

144   Alexey Kirichenko capital area also formed gaings with community comprised of one or multiple complexes, however, there existed certain differences in the way ritual communities were organized in the capital and in provinces. Gaings had leaders (gaing hsaya or gaing-­ok hsaya) who settled the disputes that the members of community were a party to. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were also cases when several local gaings would recognize a certain monk as the authority for all of them. Such abbots were known as gaing-­gyok hsaya, “teachers supervising the gaing.” The membership of gaings was quite fluid due to active movement of monks and novices from one community to another, especially at the early stages of their careers when they were pursuing their education. 3. Royally appointed hierarchies established to preserve the sasana. While local gaings were a form of intra-­monastic relationship, monastic structures were also created by the king as the patron of the sasana (sasana-­dayaka). The routine tasks of supervising the royal exams for schoolboys and novices, editing and checking of royal manuscript copies of Buddhist texts, and trying ecclesiastical cases were assigned to specially designated abbots and monks of elite monasteries from the capital area. Besides these task-­ oriented structures, there also existed a hierarchy of recognition of abbots of court-­sponsored monasteries. The most venerated abbots were given monastic titles and specific insignia. The greatest honor was given to the primary royal advisor known as “the royal teacher taking care of the sasana” (thathanapyu hsayadaw) or as “the royal teacher owning the sasana” (thathanabaing hsayadaw). On his appointment, the thathanabaing was entrusted with “the affairs of the sāsana” which effectively meant coordinating the court’s merit-­making, supervising the royally supported sangha, and advising the crown on a broad range of issues in consultation with other monastic leaders. By the mid-­nineteenth century a formal consulting body known as the Thudama council was established to assist the thathanabaing. 4. Translocal reformist structures created by charismatic monastic leaders. Besides local ritual communities, gaings were also formed around charismatic leaders who advocated specific interpretations of the discipline or the teaching or a particular reform agenda. The organization of such gaings was not much different from local communities, but as their ideologies were perceived as controversial by non-­members, they tended to ritually separate themselves from other communities and did not perform sanghakammas with them. An ideology or reform agenda was also an important factor facilitating the growth of discipleship network that helped these communities to achieve translocal status, as distinct from local gaings. The best-­ known examples of such structures were the Tisiwareit Gaing, the Yon Gaing, and Zawti Gaing in the eighteenth century and the Sulagandi/Dwaya and Hngettwin in the nineteenth century. 5. Local and translocal structures that were granted autonomy from other hierarchies and ritual communities. Gaings formed by charismatic monastic leaders and seeking to ritually differentiate themselves from earlier hierarchies

The thathanabaing project   145 and ritual communities in their area (as they were not satisfied with the latter’s standards of orthopraxy) could also be exempted from the jurisdiction of local hierarchies. This type of immunity called “the group exemption” (ganavimutti) is first attested in c.1840s and was first granted by the kings and then by colonial thathanabaings. In this way the establishment of a new ritual community was recognized by a formal investiture document, which made newly established structure less vulnerable to accusations of splitting the sangha. Examples of such ganawimot communities were the followers of Thilon Hsayadaw (1786–1860) and Shwegyin Hsayadaw (1822–1894) as well as Gudo Nikaya from Tavoy formed c.1890s. It is also possible that Okhpo Hsayadaw (1818–1906), the founder of Dwaya, received exemption during the visit of Taungdaw Hsayadaw to Lower Burma in 1887. To complicate the situation, different types of hierarchies could occasionally coalesce or become separated, cooperate, or be in conflict. For instance, leaders of translocal reformist gaings could take control of royally sponsored structures (as in the 1750s and in c.1780–1784), local gaings could resume or stop performing ecclesiastical acts together (as seems to be quite common for gaings in the Bagan area), local gaings could merge with translocal gaings or split from them (as was the case of the Tawya Gaing merging into the Shwegyin Gaing in 1893), royally sponsored hierarchy might be completely separated from dozens of monastery complexes and have no official communications with them (as was the case when the sangha was divided into sabhaga and visabhaga between 1786 and 1801), royally sponsored hierarchies could be comprised of autonomous communities (as was the case with both Thudama and Shwegyin monks receiving jurisdiction between the late 1860s and early 1880s) or become more integrated, leaders of local hierarchies could be confirmed in their offices by royally appointed monastic leaders (as seem to be the case in the 1780s and 1790s and then after the 1850s). The structure of the royally appointed hierarchy was also not fixed. A single thathanabaing was recognized only in 1753–1782, 1786–1807, 1819–1866, and 1883–1885. In the meantime, there was either no recognized authority at all, or it was more fragmented. In 1862 the Thudama council, a body of senior royally supported monks, was appointed delineating more clearly those abbots the thathanabaing was supposed to consult and cooperate with.22 Between 1866 and 1881, the Thudama council functioned without the thathanabaing and each member was assigned responsibility for a particular area in Upper Burma overseeing local gaing-­gyoks and gaing-­oks. At the same time, in parallel with the Thudama, the crown supported Shwegyin Hsayadaw and his disciples. Having ganawimot status, Shwegyin Gaing was an alternative hierarchy outside of the Thudama control, yet, it had been participating in overseeing local gaings. Finally, the connection between local gaings and the royally appointed hierarchy was also fluid. As early as the mid-­eighteenth century, the thathanabaing appointed at least some of the heads of the gaings. Since the 1780s the royal

146   Alexey Kirichenko hierarchy required the heads of local gaings to have knowledge of certain Pali vinaya texts and conducted exams to check this knowledge. During the reigns of Mindon-­min (r.  1853–1878) and Thibaw-­min (as well as under Taungdaw and Taunggwin thathanabaings) gaing-­gyok monks had to know Ubhatovibhanga, gaing-­oks had to memorize Bhikkhu-­patimokkha, Bhikkhuni-­patimokkha, ­Khuddasikkha, and Mulasikkha, gaing-­dauks had to memorize Bhikkhu-­ patimokkha, Bhikkhuni-­patimokkha, and Khuddasikkha, and every monk had to know Bhikkhu-­patimokkha and Bhikkhuni-­patimokkha by heart. However, even these standards could not be uniformly imposed, primarily because the royal hierarchy itself did not always have the ability or willingness to ensure conformity. The primary disciplinary responsibility of the royally appointed hierarchy was the settlement of disputes if such were referred to a court monks’ decision. Sustained efforts to regularize the discipline of the sangha were made only occasionally and were not a result of attempts to centralize the authority and impose a centrally controlled model of monasticism. Instead, the main perpetuators of disciplinary campaigns were reformist monastic movements advancing the concern about the progressive disappearance of the sasana and the stimulating role the immoral or “shameless” (alajji) monks could play in this process. The royally appointed hierarchy promoted the reforms aimed at suppressing the alajji at points when it was influenced by reformist movements (between 1784–1785 and 1810, in the 1850s, and from 1871–1872 to c.1883). These efforts have not been adequately researched, so it is impossible to say to what extent the declared goals were achieved, and the only evidence that we have so far is a series of documents aimed at the establishment of common standards of observance of the vinaya, not the data on actual observance. At the same time, it is clear that the alignment between the royal monastic establishment and local hierarchies depended not so much on the former’s ability to coerce, but rather on the crown’s ability to co-­opt local lay and monastic elites. The royal sangha in the capital area with its privileged educational, ritual, and career opportunities functioned as the center of gravity for Upper Burmese monks, and roughly from the 1820s, for Lower Burmese monks as well. At the same time, prior to the 1850s the crown’s merit-­making and, more importantly, its sponsorship of monasticism was heavily concentrated in the current and former capitals. Provincial towns and some large villages benefited from the patronage of individual ministers, military officials, and court bankers, but usually not the royalty. Since the 1850s direct royal patronage has been extended to some provincial locations as well, however, the outreach of that patronage was not uniform. Data available on the gaing-­oks and gaing-­dauks of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show that usually they were the abbots of monasteries constructed by the local power holders. If the local elites were well aligned with the royal administration, and if the system of court monasticism offered certain benefits to the local monastic leaders interacting with it (in the form of access to positions at the court for such leaders themselves, good career prospects for their

The thathanabaing project   147 pupils coming to study at the capital, and the possibility of extending court patronage to local monasteries, etc.), the cooperation proceeded quite well, and the influence of the center over the local communities was significant (provided local leaders had effective control over the monasteries in their area). If the local elites were more loosely integrated with the elite at the center (as was the case in the outlying parts of Burma in the pre-­colonial period and which became the norm throughout the country during the colonial period), if there existed a marked plurality of elites, and if the official monastic hierarchy had few things on offer for local monastic leaders, then it is not logical to expect a high degree of integration of various segments of the sangha or a willingness on the part of the monks with no direct links to the official hierarchy to subscribe to the latter’s agenda. To sum up, the process of centralization in pre-­colonial Burmese sangha was a work in the making. In terms of organizational patterns and forms of interaction between monastic structures, the system remained quite diverse and fluid. Structural richness of monasticism was not a result of disorganization or the crumbling of some earlier centralized system, but rather reflected the growing complexity of Burmese monasticism as a consequence of various initiatives promoted by the monks themselves and the crown. Instead of running the sangha top-­down, royally appointed hierarchies had to recognize this complexity and partner with other monastic structures such as autonomous (ganawimot) and local ritual communities. The overview offered in this section shows that the recognition of Taunggwin Hsayadaw as the thathanabaing in 1903 was not a return to some pre-­colonial arrangement, as between the 1860s and 1880s Upper Burmese sangha had a more plural structure of authority than a single royally appointed hierarch in charge of the sasana affairs. Next we will look into what else affected monastic structures besides government policy and then what exactly the colonial appointment of the thathanabaing was and what implications it had.

Monastic structures under colonialism As was shown in the previous section, the pre-­colonial influence of royally appointed hierarchies was based on the unquestioned centrality of the royal city. It was shaped to recruit the best talent into the court sangha and provide the latter with the best available resources. Key patrons and the largest monastic institutions were concentrated in the capital area. With the support given by the court, the royal teachers could stimulate the greater alignment of local communities with the royal sangha because they could redistribute some of these resources. As a result, in the second half of the nineteenth century the court monks were linked with the incumbents of village and town monasteries in Upper Burma by means of well-­ developed networks which provided for the active circulation of personnel, expertise, manuscripts, property, and signs of recognition, etc. Colonialism changed all that to a greater or lesser extent. By the late nineteenth century multiple urban monastic centers sprang up both in Lower and

148   Alexey Kirichenko Upper Burma. In Lower Burma, Rangoon, Moulmein, Akyab, Bassein, Prome, Henzada, Tavoy, Pegu, Toungoo, and Thaton all had significant monastic populations. In Upper Burma, Mandalay had to compete with Pakkoku, Myingyan, Meiktila, Monywa, Taungdwingyi, etc. Prior to the colonial period these places had limited importance as monastic sites. At the same time, the earlier regional centers of monasticism, such as Shwebo, Dipeyin, Pakhangyi, Salin, Pagan, and Talot were lapsing into obscurity. This was paralleled by a decline in villages’ role as the key monastic sites in Upper Burma.23 The development of trade, the commercialization of agriculture, and the rise of new professionals in the nineteenth century pluralized the Burmese elites, at the same time the court was losing its ability to generate new patrons. While the earlier regional monastic leaders were patronized by local power holders (a situation that promoted a double integration of the administrative and monastic elites), by the late nineteenth century every important trading or administrative hub could boast new wealthy or socially prominent patrons ready to support a monastery and less inclined to look to the monastic hierarchy in Mandalay to choose an incumbent. Instead, the 1880s and 1890s saw an exodus of teacher-­ monks from Mandalay who moved from the subordinate monasteries of monastic complexes in the old capital to establish their own monasteries elsewhere. The loyalty of such abbots to the thathanabaing and his deputies was mixed, so local and central monastic hierarchies were becoming less and less integrated. Due to this pluralization of monasticism, the thathanabaing had to face the communities that relied on patterns of support that were entirely independent. Another factor that affected the influence of royally appointed hierarchies in the colonial setting was their connection with the state and the lack of scriptural basis for state-­appointed structures. Measures taken by the Thudama leadership were rooted in the discourse of the royal promotion of the sasana and were largely a function of it. This relation to the king’s role as a patron of the sasana was explicitly stated in the documents issued both by the crown and the monastic hierarchy. For example, the orders on the observance of the vinaya issued in 1871–1872 and 1881–1882 were justified by a royal desire for the purity and efflorescence of the sasana.24 The same justification adapted to new circumstances was used by colonial thathanabaings who, like Taungdaw Hsayadaw in 1890, explained their instructions to the sangha as based on “the appeal of the English lords (ingaleit-­min-do) to give such instructions for the benefit of Buddhism (botdabada thathana-­daw-myat).”25 Accordingly, the prescriptions of monastic behavior by the official hierarchy were legally based on the wishes of the government. Such prescriptions might have seemed valid to those who were ready to recognize the government’s leadership in the matters of religion but were hardly of any consequence for those who denied such agency to the government and its official monastic hierarchy. For example, when Taungdaw Hsayadaw visited Lower Burma in 1891 and invited Okhpo Hsayadaw, the founder of the Dwaya community, for a meeting, Okhpo Hsayadaw reportedly refused to accept this invitation saying that the thathanabaing’s visit is due only to the latter’s desire to function as a

The thathanabaing project   149 government servant (min-­hmudan) and has no relation to the affairs of the sasana.26 The pluralization of monastic structures as a result of pluralization of patronage arrangements, intra-­monastic competition, and the use of the vinaya as an avenue for recognition is illustrated by the following examples. Taungdaw Hsayadaw’s demise in 1895 led to the split of the Mandalay sangha into two competing factions each with its own thathanabaing. The members of Taungdaw’s Thudama council argued that the powers of the late thathanabaing should be inherited by them, for in the absence of dhammaraja a new thathanabaing could not be appointed. They formed the “Twelve Abbots’ Gaing” (Ta-­kyeit-hnit-­pa Gaing) with Mogaung Hsayadaw as the thathanabaing. This, however, was challenged by the abbots of complexes located in the eastern and southern parts of Mandalay who elected Pakhan Hsayadaw as the thathanabaing and established their own Thudama council.27 In 1921 the presiding abbot of Hpayagyi-­taik, one of the largest monastery complexes in Mandalay, supported by other prominent abbots, broke away from Taunggwin-­controlled Thudama in protest to the thathanabaing’s appointment of mahadan-­wun, because the appointment of a lay officer meant that Taunggwin was acting in the capacity of secular authority. As a result, 12 large complexes of Mandalay formed Hpayagyi Gaing separate from Taunggwin’s Thudama.28 Be it the establishment of the Pali-­daw Gaing in Sagaing aimed at reforming monasticism strictly on the basis of canonical, not commentarial vinaya, or the formation of the Mahawithutayamika Gaing in Pakkoku in 1936 that converted an educational network of several hundred monasteries (built during the previous 40 years and including many local Thudama gaing-­gyoks and gaing-­oks) into a more coherent monastic organization, none of these examples provides evidence of disorganization or decline in discipline of the sangha. What is also important, in contrast to “exempted” or reformist gaings, Ta-­ kyeit-hnit-­pa, Hpayagyi, and Mahawithutayamika continued the joint performance of ecclesiastical ceremonies with the Thudama monks. In other words, organizational separation was not always paralleled by ritual separation. It is clear that, contrary to the claims of colonial observers, such fragmentation of the sangha could not have been stopped by giving firmer government support to the thathanabaing. The fallacy of the colonial argument that the sects were forming as a result of non-­recognition of the thathanabaing in Lower Burma is further highlighted by the fact that all the examples mentioned above are from Upper Burma and so the areas under the thathanabaing’s control were affected by segmentation as much as Lower Burma was. Finally, the development of political parties in the 1920s and 1930s together with monastic participation in the nationalist movement created new types of alliances between politicians and monastic leaders that cut across established monastic structures. For example, when in 1934–1936 Sir Joseph A. Maung Gyi (1872–1955), a conservative separationist politician and the acting governor of Burma in 1930–1931, drafted the Ecclesiastical Courts Act that was amended

150   Alexey Kirichenko and endorsed by the Fourth Hpayabyu Hsayadaw from Rangoon and 17 other monastic leaders, monastic opposition to the draft on the grounds of its contradictions to the vinaya was galvanized by C.P. Khin Maung and Dr. Ba Maw (1893–1977), anti-­separationist leaders and Maung Gyi’s political rivals. To oppose the draft and promote an alternative one, Ba Maw-­sponsored General Council of the Monks’ Associations presided by Mingalun Hsayadaw together with U Thuseitta (1878–1936), a lecturer monk from Hpayagyi-­taik who was personally patronized by Dr. Ba Maw and toured Burma with sermons in Ba Maw’s favor, convened conferences in Mandalay and Myingyan allegedly enlisting the support of the Hpayagyi Gaing, several key regional Thudama leaders, and some 30,000 monks from various places in Upper and Lower Burma.29 These examples testify that colonial thathanabaings had to adapt to rapidly changing conditions that were beyond the control of any single actor. Accordingly, the activities and the agency of Taunggwin Hsayadaw should be evaluated against this background, not only on the basis of his interactions with the colonial authorities.

The thathanabaing project and the development of the Thudama Gaing Instead of being a reinforcement of traditional centralized authority in the sangha by means of official endorsement, the recognition of Taunggwin Hsa­ yadaw as the thathanabaing was a collaborative project of the colonial authorities and the lay and monastic elites of Mandalay supported by the new Buddhist elites in Lower Burma. Though the interests of the stakeholders in this project were quite different, they were not mutually exclusive. Colonial authorities wanted to find counterparts to deal with the sangha, avoid the stigma of being anti-­Buddhist, and prevent the monks from rebelling. At the same time, they wanted to ignore or downplay those functions of the royally appointed monastic hierarchy that were irrelevant for them. Colonial authorities neither sought preeminence as the patron of the sasana, nor needed help in coordinating their merit-­making activities. They did not care about producing an authentic copy of Buddhist texts. Neither had they intended to use the monastic hierarchy as an alternative communication channel to keep the local power holders in check or to ease the collection of taxes. The established lay and monastic elites of Mandalay wanted to maintain their earlier place in the monastic structure and in the preservation of the sasana. For that reason the ex-­ministers, such as Kinwun Mingyi (1822–1908), or the abbots of the Thudama complexes, such as Taunggwin Hsayadaw, would argue that the thathanabaing was essential, would organize the elections, and lobby for the recognition of the thathanabaing-­elect for many months. They knew the nature and limitations of the pre-­colonial monastic hierarchy, yet they would subscribe to the new role of the thathanabaing as the head of the sangha with broad disciplinary responsibilities and try to pressure the government to support their initiatives in patronizing the sasana.

The thathanabaing project   151 The new Buddhist elites of Lower Burma, which included wealthy merchants and civil servants who participated in lay Buddhist associations, and even Western monks, such as Ananda Metteya (1872–1923), also lobbied for the thathanabaing, publicized the issue, and helped to organize Taunggwin’s visits to Rangoon. For them, involvement in such a project served to raise their profile as the sponsors of Buddhism who were capable of compensating for the lack of the sasana-­dayaka. The rulers of Shan states (sawbwas) under indirect British rule were also happy to step in as the sponsors of the teaching and monastic hierarchies of Mandalay. All those donors were looking for great monastic names to patronize and great names came predominantly from Upper Burma with its better-­developed monasticism. Though Taunggwin Hsayadaw and his closest allies might have had less personal charisma when compared to such figures as Ledi Hsayadaw (1846–1923) or Mahawithotdayon Hsayadaw (1838–1916), they could rely on the charisma of the Thudama establishment and its former leaders. The officialization of the former royally appointed hierarchy in a new colonial setting that I call here “the thathanabaing project” brought about the redefinition of a centralized monastic authority. This process included the renegotiation of principles of the government’s engagement with the sangha and occasional departures from the policy of non-­interference. In recognizing Taunggwin Hsayadaw, the British acknowledged the thathanabaing as a central authority in all Buddhist matters. The preamble to the sanad of 1903 claimed “by ancient custom, ecclesiastical affairs in Upper Burma are superintended by a Thathanabaing.”30 The Burmese-­language version implied even more and read “by ancient custom, the affairs related to the monks in Upper Burma are always decided and taken care of by the Thathanabaing Hsayadaw, who is the lord of the sangha.”31 However, these acknowledgments merely reflected the government understanding of how Buddhism operated in Burma, not the capacity in which monastic hierarchy was to receive the backing of the state. The expression “the affairs of the sasana,” which described the thathanabaing’s responsibility in pre-­colonial royal orders, was used only in the Burmese version of the sanad to refer to a wish of the monks and laity of Upper Burma to entrust these affairs to Taunggwin Hsayadaw.32 The capacity in which the government had recognized him was as administrator of the sangha and as the one to ensure the observance of the vinaya as well as to promote education and the prevalence of law and order.33 The point that the recognition was made of administrative, not religious functions of the thathanabaing was stressed in the address given by the Lieutenant-­ Governor on the occasion of granting of the sanad.34 As was noted by another important colonial observer, the thathanabaing was supposed to act as a check against “unruly monks who do not know how to apply their energies usefully.”35 The focus on the discipline and administration lay not only the recognition of Taunggwin, but also the schemes to extend his authority to Lower Burma, and the permission to restore the position of the mahadan-­wun in 1921. Giving the monastic hierarchy headed by the thathanabaing a fuller agency in disciplining the sangha and controlling its affairs (subject to compliance with

152   Alexey Kirichenko the existing legislation) was a significant departure from this hierarchy’s earlier role as an establishment assisting the crown in promoting the sasana (where the disciplinary function was only one element). The British recognition of the thathanabaing established the latter as a primary monastic leader at least in principle, positioned the sangha as a centrally administered organization (again, at least in principle), and granted the thathanabaing with broader rights in monastic matters, which (at least in the early decades of the twentieth century) were upheld by civil courts. Emphasizing the disciplinary function of the thathanabaing and agreeing that the relations between the monks would be governed by the vinaya (if existing legislation did not require otherwise), the British had effectively inscribed monastic discipline into the legal practice of the modern state.36 Yet, as was argued above, to maintain their relevance, the former royally appointed hierarchy of Mandalay could not simply rely on formal recognition and disciplinary authority. They had to find a way to preserve the position of Mandalay as a monastic center, to retain old alliances as well as build new ones, create new modes of recognition of monastic leaders while promoting their orientation toward the thathanabaing, establish new links with the countryside, and reach out to distant locales with monastery branches. They also had to adapt to the increasing lay religious activism and to redefine their relations with the laity, to react to new trends and roles of Buddhism, and to develop new means of legitimizing their contribution to the benefit of the sasana. The Thudama structures under Taunggwin invested a lot in organization-­ building and broadening their support base. Historically, the acceptance of new monasteries has been one of the key means of extending one’s lineage and positioning one’s disciples. Taunggwin Hsayadaw was very active in this regard, receiving at least 12 new monasteries built specifically for him in Rangoon, Maymyo, Paleit, Mandalay, and Amarapura and its environs. Not only the geographical distribution of these monasteries, but also the sociology of their donors is illustrative of the thathanabaing’s ability to reach out to areas outside of the former royal city and to foster new classes of patrons. The donors were not limited to the thathanabaing’s relatives from the old capital elites: they also included village heads, rice merchants and millers, brokers, lawyers, government servants, villagers, pagoda trustees, and the members of Buddhist associations.37 Taunggwin Hsayadaw was also instrumental in setting up a few lay associations, which shows his attention to this new emerging form of Buddhist organizations. Taunggwin Hsayadaw maintained an alliance with the abbots of several important monastic complexes at Mandalay and Amarapura and also inherited a number of other complexes where he installed his disciples. While having to deal with at least three influential independent monastic groups in Mandalay alone (Ta-­kyeit-hnit-­pa Gaing, Shwegyin monks, and the Hpayagyi Gaing), Taunggwin managed to navigate his course, achieve a degree of interaction with members of the Ta-­kyeit-hnit-­pa and Hpayagyi, and secure their participation in the Thudama council.

The thathanabaing project   153 The Thudama council became a more or less coherent structure only under Taunggwin, when specific documents were adopted fixing the responsibilities of the members.38 The search for an optimum structure continued throughout the Taunggwin’s tenure with at least three different configurations tried.39 Both Taungdaw and Taunggwin thathanabaings strived to continue the policy of Mindon-­min’s reign aimed at placing the majority of monastery complexes in Mandalay under the control of the Thudama council and establishing a chain of authority running from the thathanabaing through the Thudama council to individual monasteries. Moreover, to better align the Thudama structures in Mandalay with local gaings outside of the former capital, the heads of gaings who recognized Taunggwin’s incumbency were organized into “the remote Thudama” (awe thudama), thus creating an umbrella name for all ritual communities subordinate to the thathanabaing for the first time in history. Attempts were also made to broaden the spread of the Thudama structures in the 1920s with the members of the council and Thudama abbots sent to do missionary work in remote places in the Shan States and Upper Chindwin District.40 Besides that, the Thudama hierarchy and lay Buddhist elites had cajoled the authorities to depart from the policy of religious neutrality and embrace, at least, two important initiatives that strengthened the Thudama’s capacity to act as a patron and expanded its patronage network. The thathanabaings’ involvement in Pali exams that were revived with the government sponsorship in 1895 helped transform these examinations from being a recruitment mechanism for the court sangha into a tool to select a new national monkhood.41 As the government scheme covered several large urban monastic centers, the involvement of the Thudama hierarchy established a link between the latter and the new educational monasteries. Although the rise of numerous local associations, which conducted religious examinations based on different curricula and different forms of recognition of the laureates, led to the decentralization of monastic exams, the thathanabaing’s endorsement of the “official” exams brought the growth of a new system under government patronage. Participation in government exams, together with conducting separate exams by the Thudama and promoting yearly examinations at the monasteries of subordinate regional leaders, carved a role for the official monastic hierarchy in the public project of the preservation of the sasana in colonial Burma which was heavily focused on scriptural studies (pariyatti).42 The launch in 1911 of a new monastic title, aggamahapandita, which was conferred by the government and handed over by the thathanabaing, created a new mode of official recognition highlighting the achievements of the recipients in the fields of scriptural studies and textual production and promoting a more cooperative attitude toward the official hierarchy. In this way it complemented the government exams in helping the alliance behind the thathanabaing to link up with new monastic communities, centers, and hierarchies. Bestowal of aggamahapandita titles also became an important tool of rewarding the thathanabaing’s closest allies in the Thudama council.

154   Alexey Kirichenko All of these activities—establishing a broader base in the Mandalay area, building strategic alliances with competing elite monastic factions in the former royal city, participating in the new national exams and promoting its own, sponsoring a new system of official recognition of Buddhist learning, developing links with the new lay and monastic elites, mastering the new modes of organization, and augmenting all these efforts by cooperating with the colonial authorities—were critically important for the survival of the old monastic and court elites as the key patrons and custodians of the sasana. In organizational terms, the results of the thathanabaing’s activities was the establishment of the Thudama Gaing as a key player in Burmese monasticism set to absorb a number of communities, which were independent during the colonial period. In the end, the Thudama became the largest monastic fraternity officially recognized in modern Burma. In this context it is worth noting that the thathanabaing project spanned over a broader space than the official jurisdiction of Taunggwin Hsayadaw. Though nominally the thathanabaing’s authority was limited to Upper Burma, his advice and decisions were actively sought by the officials from Rangoon and the monks and laity from Lower Burma. For example, the published decisions of Taunggwin Hsayadaw are heavily biased toward Lower Burma cases, which reflects the demand for the thathanabaing project in the most advanced locations of colonial modernity.43 Accordingly, in his survey of the history of Buddhism written in 1926, the Fourth Hpayabyu Hsayadaw noted that effectively Taunggwin controlled segments of the sangha both in Lower and Upper Burma.44 Contrary to the claims made in colonial sources, the government policy toward the thathanabaing was not just disruptive and causing the fragmentation of the sangha. At least equally important were measures that favored centralization. The thathanabaing project allowed the preservation of the ideas (or ideals) of centralized control over the monkhood, of single hierarchy as well as the desirability of the unification of the sangha, and of a link between the government and the monkhood. Whatever limited support the government granted to Taungdaw and Taunggwin Hsayadaws, that strengthened their profile in the eyes of those Burmese donors who saw themselves as loyal colonial subjects. The boosting of the Burmese support base increased the leverage of Mandalay sangha in dealing with regional monks. The recognition and prestige, government exams and aggamahapandita titles, all these helped to cement the links between many local gaings and monastic authorities in Mandalay and contributed to the development of the Thudama Gaing as a translocal community with the broadest mass base in the Burmese sangha. This project helped to work out the principles of cooperation between the modern state and the sangha and to develop new modes of official recognition and selection of monastic leaders. In my analysis, this project was vital for the later unification of the sangha in postcolonial Burma under Gen. Ne Win. The death of Taunggwin Hsayadaw and the effective cancellation of the office of the thathanabaing did not alter that trajectory of centralization. The activities of the Thudama council, the Pali exams, and the conferral of titles

The thathanabaing project   155 sponsored by the government continued. The tasks of unifying the sangha, creating an overarching monastic organization and basing it on the principles of scriptural vinaya, remained on the agenda. Finally, the thathanabaing project made it possible to shift the basis of authority of the official monastic hierarchy away from its royal functions and wishes to legal arrangements and the vinaya rules. The vinaya was recognized as the only model for monastic behavior and control of the sangha. This change was reflected not only in the documents drafted by colonial authorities, but also in the removal of the dhammathats, traditional Burmese legal literature, from the practice of monastic courts which from that time on was to be based exclusively on the vinaya.

Conclusion Recent scholarship on Burmese Buddhism under colonialism has made important steps in recognizing the multiplicity of trajectories of Buddhist practice in the early twentieth century, going beyond the focus on disruptive effects of colonial domination, and acknowledging the relevance of pre-­colonial forms of patronage, scriptural scholarship, reform agendas, and meditation traditions for the emergence of modern Buddhist movements in colonial Burma.45 This chapter adds monastic organizational structures to this list of Buddhist projects that transcended the indigenous-­colonial divide and argues for creative agency of colonial subjects in the developments of the colonial period. Rather than being caused by the weakening of control mechanisms due to the British intervention, the fragmentation of the sangha was a result of growing complexity of monastic structures reflecting greater variety of Buddhist agendas and the pluralization of patronage opportunities. It is also important to recognize that the colonialism in this case was rather a backdrop, not the root cause of this process, because growing complexity and segmentation of monastic structures was not limited to colonized contexts. Such processes were also sponsored by surviving royal elites of Southeast Asia, of which the establishment of Dhammayutika Nikaya as a parallel hierarchy to Mahanikaya in Siam in the 1840s and 1850s, the introduction of Dhammayut Nikaya and the rise of the “new dhamma” movement in Cambodia provide illustrative examples.46 Increasing social complexity, the pluralization of occupational structures, educational backgrounds, worldviews, ethics, and the forms of behavior in the period under study provoked a concomitant pluralization of the sangha. The social and economic changes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century Burma caused the monastic hierarchies to search for new patrons and try new alliances and modes of organization. The analysis presented here leaves no space for the argument that monastic organization or the office of the thathanabaing was affected primarily by government policy. Instead, their trajectory was dependent on a broader mix of factors where colonial policy was just one among many. Even though it created a window of opportunity for diverse forms of monasticism and monastic reactions, colonial modernity did not favor them equally. The

156   Alexey Kirichenko offers of establishing centralized control over the sangha, the cooperation with the secular authorities, and identification of a coherent set of rules to govern the monastic behavior were appealing to both the colonial and postcolonial elites. That made Taunggwin Hsayadaw and his successors in independent Burma more widely-­acceptable and socially-­successful figures than the monks who radically opposed the “unrighteous” rule and sought to overturn it, or the narrowly “traditionalist” segments of the sangha who objected to the introduction of the printing press, sharing the Buddhist manuscripts with the Western Orientalists, or other innovative practices and interactions. While I do not deny the disruptive effects of the sangha’s subjection to the civil courts and the deep changes in education, I argue that many trajectories of Burmese Buddhism under colonialism do not fit the predominant narrative of conflict and opposition but provide important examples of collaboration and innovative adaptation. Taunggwin Hsayadaw or the alliance behind him should be seen not as a relic, but as transitional or even new actors on the religious scene alongside the new reformist sects, lay organizations, and initiators of innovative practical movements (meditation, etc.). Taunggwin Hsayadaw stood at the junction of diverse trends—colonial search for pacified sangha, a modernist tendency to favor centralization over local autonomy, partisan politics of older elites trying to secure a distinguished place for themselves in a new order, and a necessity to adapt, embrace new modes of operation, and speak to multiple audiences in order to build a successful monastic enterprise in the colonial setting. Borrowing a term from Anne Blackburn, who described Hikkaduve Sumangala’s simultaneous engagement with Sinhalese monastic lineages, aristocratic patrons, colonial authorities, modern lay associations, Southeast Asian royalty and monks, and Western Orientalist scholars, as “locative pluralism,” it is possible to define the thathanabaing project as an example of collective action addressing multiple (and changing) audiences and interlocutors.47 This chapter also shows there was a high degree of innovation in the activities of the thathanabaing, and that he was instrumental in the emergence of the modern structure of Burmese sangha. Despite the disappearance of the office of the thathanabaing, the ideals that underlay its recognition, namely, the unification and central administration of the sangha, as well as the effort to bring it in conformity with the vinaya, survived and became more entrenched. Being inscribed in a legal framework of the modern state, these ideals became a point of reference for subsequent Burmese governments that now have more or less achieved them. This probably indicates that the most lasting impact of colonialism on Theravada Buddhism was made in those areas where the colonial agenda overlapped with local interests. Colonial production of knowledge on monastic structures also might be analyzed as an overlap of interests, for every party that has contributed to the thathanabaing project had a stake in finding centralized authority in Burmese sangha. Catholic missionaries’ own cultural experience coupled with their willingness to see the sangha as degenerate equipped them to discern a crumbling

The thathanabaing project   157 country-­wide hierarchy, a broken mirror image of the Catholic Church. Colonial officials were willing to find an established hierarchy as such could have been useful to maintain law and order. Finally, the Thudama leaders and lay patrons of Buddhism were happy to affirm the existence of centralized monasticism because building or reviving it ushered a bright future for the sasana and themselves. And though the implementation of the project turned out to be a complex task, the birth of the Thudama Gaing is the lasting evidence that its colonial-­ period midwives did not fail in their job.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Thomas Borchert for his valuable comments on the draft of this chapter, William Pruitt for making the English of this chapter acceptable, Alicia Turner, and Charles Carstens for sharing with me some of the materials used in this research, and Ko Than Zaw for his assistance during the field work.

Notes   1 Smith, Religion and Politics, pp. 15–19, 26–31, 43–44; Mendelson, Sangha and State, pp. 50–53, 70–73; Ling, Buddhism, Imperialism, pp. 61–63; Aye Kyaw “The Sangha Organization;” Koenig, The Burmese Polity, pp. 126–130; Schober, “The Theravada Buddhist,” p.  311; Aung-­Thwin, “Those Men,” pp.  251–253, 261–277; Braun, The Birth of Insight, pp. 20–21.   2 See, for example, Schober, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures, pp.  34–75, 99–107, 119–120, 138–143; Aung-­Thwin, “Those Men,” pp. 277–284; Keyes “Buddhists Confront,” pp. 22–24.   3 Smith, Religion and Politics, p. 44; Htin Aung, Burmese Monk’s Tales, pp.  15–16; Aung-­Thwin “Those Men,” p. 279.   4 Bigandet, “Some Account,” pp. 230–231.   5 Bigandet, “Some Account,” p. 221.   6 Bigandet, The Life or Legend, p. 252.   7 Cf. Bigandet, “Some Account,” pp.  227–231; Bigandet, The Life or Legend, pp.  247–253; Fytche, Burma Past and Present, pp.  190–195; Macneill, Report and Gazetteer, pp. 107–108; Nisbet, Burma under British Rule, pp. 123–127; Crosthwaite, The Pacification of Burma, pp. 37–38.   8 Fytche, Burma Past and Present, p. 195.   9 Forbes, British Burma, pp. 325–326. 10 The earliest publication (1882) recognizing this split I am aware of is Shway Yoe, The Burman, pp.  149–152. Further mentions could be found in Eales, Report, pp. 64–65; Nisbet, Burma under British Rule, pp. 117–118; The Imperial Gazetteer, p. 142; Purser, Christian Missions, pp. 72–73; and Taw Sein Ko, Burmese Sketches, vol. 1, p. 205. Besides the division into Sulagandi and Mahagandi, Christian missionaries and colonial scholarship also referred to the existence in Burma of a “semi-­ deistic sect” that has been rejecting the veneration of Buddha images and the sangha. Sangermano, A Description, p. 89; Malcolm, Travels in South-­Eastern Asia, p. 270; Yule, A Narrative of the Mission, pp.  241–242. This movement, however, was believed to have been in existence in Upper Burma since the eighteenth century and thus could not be mentioned in the context of presumed weakening of monastic hierarchy in Lower Burma after 1852. 11 See Mendelson, Sangha and State, pp. 180–181.

158   Alexey Kirichenko 12 See, for example, the discussion of this visit in the reminiscences of Sir Herbert Thurkell White (1855–1931), the Lieutenant-­Governor of British Burma in 1905–1910. White, A Civil Servant, pp. 189–190. 13 Taw Sein Ko, Burmese Sketches, vol. 1, pp. 216–223; “The Thathanabaing.” 14 Illustrative information on that campaigning is provided in Taw Sein Ko, Burmese Sketches, vol. 2, pp. 200–205. 15 Smith, Religion and Politics, pp. 53–54. 16 Final Report, pp. 276–277, 296–297. 17 Appleton, Buddhism in Burma, pp. 27–28; Harvey, British Rule, pp. 26–29. 18 Smith, Religion and Politics, pp. 38–39, 43–57; Htin Aung, Burmese Monk’s Tales, pp.  15–16, 26–30; Mendelson, Sangha and State, pp.  188–193; Ling, Buddhism, Imperialism, pp. 70–75; Matthews, “The Legacy of Tradition,” pp. 28–29; Schober, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures, pp. 37–40. 19 Mendelson, p. 81 n. 34. 20 Smith, Religion and Politics, pp. 43–57; Schober, “Colonial Knowledge,” p.  62; Schober, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures, pp. 53–55. 21 This section is based on ongoing original research. Due to space constraints, I offer a generalized description without discussing details or the evidence. For more information, see Kirichenko, “Dynamics of Monastic Mobility” and Kirichenko, “Change, Fluidity.” 22 There is a tendency in research literature to project the existence of the Thudama Gaing as a community integrating the majority of Burmese monks back to the reign of Badon-­min or even earlier. This claim seems to originate in Htin Aung, Burmese Monk’s Tales, but it is not supported by the evidence. The Thudama council as an entity appeared only in the 1860s. In the 1870s, a kind of disciplinary bylaw was promulgated for the residents of monastery complexes presided over by the members of the council. That probably was the genesis of the Thudama as a monastic community, yet at that time this community was confined to the capital area. The integration of local gaings into the Thudama structure started only under colonialism. 23 Between the late seventeenth and mid-­nineteenth centuries the villages functioned as the nodal points in Upper Burmese monastic networks and even competed with the capital area as the sites of training of young monks and textual production. See Kirichenko, “Dynamics of Monastic Mobility,” pp. 347–358. In the colonial period they retained a degree of importance but could not compete with the key urban centers. 24 Htun Yee, ed. Collection of Upade, pp. 192–200, 227, 272–290. 25 Parabaik from the Taunglelon monastery in Amarapura reproduced in http://taweb. aichi-­u.ac.jp/DMSEH/Vol_3/ITOH117-14.JPG. 26 Tin Shwe, Thathana-­pyu, pp. 204–205. 27 Yazeinda, Thathana bahotthuta, pp. 228–231. 28 Kelatha, Mandale thathanawin, pp. 137–138. 29 Thumana, Hsa Gye Aye. 30 Quoted from the full text reproduced in Mendelson, Sangha and State, p. 185. 31 Mahathangayaza thathanabaing, p. 1. 32 Mahathangayaza thathanabaing, p. 2. Cf. Mendelson, Sangha and State, p. 185. 33 The sanad stated the government’s decision to “recognize the Thathanabaing as supreme in all matters relating to internal administration and control of Buddhist hierarchy in Upper Burma, the discipline of the monastic order, and the repression of abuses therein.” The Burmese version meant basically the same Recognize as the supreme authority in the matters relating to control and administration of the monks in Upper Burma, the instruction [of the latter] in accordance with the vinaya, and the correction of cases when [the monks] contravene the vinaya. (Mahathangayaza thathanabaing, pp. 2–3; Mendelson, Sangha and State, p. 186)

The thathanabaing project   159 34 Twomey, “The Thathanabaing,” pp. 329–330. 35 The expression is from Taw Sein Ko, Burmese Sketches, p. 220. “Unruly behavior” here implies the revolts headed or instigated by the monks. Occasional monastic involvement in local rebellions and banditism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made colonial administrators perceive the monks (e.g., those who were tattooing their lay disciples or traveling on foot) as a possible source of discontent (White, A Civil Servant, p. 264). 36 Ironically, that provided the thathanabaing with additional leverage to sabotage unwelcome initiatives of the colonial powers on the basis of their contradictions with the vinaya. 37 Naradabiwuntha, Mahathangayaza, pp. 58–73. 38 Mahathangayaza Taunggwin, pp. 75–76. 39 Naradabiwuntha, Mahathangayaza, pp. 49–51. 40 Nandiya, Dwatteintha kawhtatha, pp. 7–8. 41 Under the royal administration, the exams were conducted only in the royal city and involved a limited number of schoolboys and novices. All participating candidates were the disciples of court monks who acted as the examiners. Given that, I see the examinations as a recruitment mechanism or a tool of selection of prospective candidates to the ranks of the court monastic hierarchy. 42 Turner, Saving Buddhism, pp.  36–44; Braun, The Birth of Insight, pp.  62–76, 102–121. 43 See Mahathangayaza Taunggwin. 44 Yazeinda, Thathana bahotthuta, p. 229. 45 Braun, The Birth of Insight; Turner, Saving Buddhism; Schober, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures, pp. 63–72; Kirichenko, “Driven by Reform.” 46 See Reynolds, “The Buddhist Monkhood;” Harris, Cambodian Buddhism, pp. 105–122; Hansen, How to Behave. 47 Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism, pp. 209–211.

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160   Alexey Kirichenko Fytche, Albert. Burma Past and Present with Personal Reminiscences of the Country. Vol. 2. London: C. Keagan Paul & Co, 1878. Hansen, Anne Ruth. How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Harris, Ian. Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Harvey, Geoffrey Eric. British Rule in Burma, 1824–1942. London: Faber & Faber, 1946. Htin Aung, Maung. Burmese Monk’s Tales. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. Htun Yee, ed. Collection of Upade: Laws and Regulations of Myanmar Last Two Kings, 1853–1885. Vol. 2. Toyohashi: Aichi University, 1999. Kelatha, Ashin. Mandale thathanawin [The History of Mandalay Sasana], vol. 2. Yangon: Thathana-­ye-uzihtana, 1982. Keyes, Charles F. “Buddhists Confront the State.” In Buddhism, Moderntiy and the State in Asia: Forms of Engagement, edited by John Whalen-­Bridge and Pattana Kitiarsa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kirichenko, Alexey. “Change, Fluidity, and Unidentified Actors: Understanding the Organization and History of Upper Burmese Saṃgha from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries.” Paper presented at the AAS/ICAS joint meeting in Honolulu, April 3, 2011. Kirichenko, Alexey. “Dynamics of Monastic Mobility and Networking in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-­Century Upper Burma.” In Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia, edited by D. Christian Lammerts, pp. 333–372. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Press, 2015. Kirichenko, Alexey. “Driven by Reform: Interactions between Burmese and Sinhalese Monks in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Unpublished paper. Koenig, William J. The Burmese Polity, 1752–1819: Politics, Administration, and Social Organization in the Early Kon-­baung Period. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Center for South & Southeast Asian Studies, 1990. Ling, Trevor. Buddhism, Imperialism and War: Burma and Thailand in Modern History. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979. Mahathangayaza thathanabaing hsayadaw htot-­hsin-daw-­mu-de upadei [Order Promulgated by Mahasangharaja Thathanabaing Hsayadaw]. Mandalay: Mandala-­bonmi, 1905. Macneill, Douglas. Report and Gazetteer of Burma, Native and British in Three Parts. Pt. 1. Simla, India: Government Central Branch Press, 1883.  Malcolm, Howard. Travels in South-­Eastern Asia: Embracing Hindustan, Malaya, Siam and China, 7th edn., vol. 1. Boston: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1844. Matthews, Bruce. “The Legacy of Tradition and Authority: Buddhism and the Nation in Asia.” In Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-­Century Asia, edited by Ian Harris. London: Continuum, 1999. Mendelson, Michael E. Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Nandiya, Atumashi Hsayadaw. Dwatteintha kawhtatha kanmahtanadi dipani-­kyan [The Exposition on the Meditation on the Thirty-­two Gateways]. Mandalay: Shwe-­man aung-­si, 1950. Naradabiwuntha. Mahathangayaza Taunggwin-­thathanabaing-hsayadaw-­hpaya-gyi-­i Mahahteiyotpatti-­dipani [Great Biography of Mahasangharaja Taunggwin Thathanabaing Hsayadaw]. Mandalay: Myanma-­taya, 1939. Nisbet, John. Burma under British Rule‑and Before. Vol. 2. Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1901.

The thathanabaing project   161 Purser, Rev. William Charles Bertrand. Christian Missions in Burma. Westminster: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1911. Reynolds, Craig James. “The Buddhist Monkhood in Nineteenth Century Thailand.” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1972. Sangermano, Vincenzo. A Description of the Burmese Empire, translated by William Tandy. Rome: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1833 [reprint]. Schober, Juliane. “The Theravada Buddhist Engagement with Modernity in Southeast Asia: Whither the Social Paradigm of the Galactic Polity?” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 307–25. Schober, Juliane. Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies, and Civil Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011. Smith, Donald E. Religion and Politics in Burma. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. Shway Yoe [Scott, James George]. The Burman: His Life and Notions, 4th edn. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. Taw Sein Ko. Burmese Sketches. 2 vols. Rangoon: British Burma Press, 1913–1920. The Imperial Gazetteer of India. New Edition. Vol. IX: Bomjur to Central India. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. “The Thathanabaing.” Buddhism: An Illustrated Quarterly Review I, no.  2 (1903): 177–208. Thumana, Gugyi Hsayadaw Ashin. Hsa Gye Aye Hpayabyu-­do winayadara-­upade-gyan­go kan-­kwet-kye-­hnin botdabatha-­yahan-daw-­do winyadaradi upade-­gyan [Objections to Draft Ecclesiastical Court Act Proposed by Sir J. A. Maung Gyi and Hpayabyu Hsayadaw and Draft Buddhist Monastic Courts Act]. Myingyan: Dipa-­nyun, 1936. Tin Shwe, U. Thathana-­pyu Okhpo Hsayadaw-­hpaya-gyi-­i thathana-­thanshin-tidan-­ye [Purification and Perpetuation of Sasana Effected by the Great Okhpo Hsayadaw]. Yangon: Nila, 1982. Turner, Alicia. Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Twomey, D.H.R. “The Thathanabaing, Head of the Buddhist Monks of Burma.” The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review Third Series vol. XVII, no. 33 & 34 (January– April 1904): 326–335. White, Sir Herbert Thirkell. A Civil Servant in Burma. London: Edward Arnold, 1913. Yazeinda, Hpayabyu Hsayadaw Ashin. Thathana bahotthutatpakathani [The Exposition of Knowledge about the Sasana]. Yangon: Hpaya-­byu-sape-­htein-thein-­ye-ahpwe, 1993. Yule, Henry. A Narrative of the Mission Sent by the Governor-­General of India to the Court of Ava in 1855. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1858.

9 The Institut bouddhique in Laos Ambivalent dynamics of a colonial project Gregory Kourilsky

When, in 1930, the colonial administration raised in Phnom Penh the Institut indigène des études du bouddhisme du petit véhicule, which later became the Institut bouddhique, Cambodia and Laos had been a part of French Indochina for several decades.1 The following years, Lao sections of the Institut bouddhique opened in Vientiane, then in Luang Prabang. The implicit goal of this original institution was to free Khmer and Lao Buddhism from the strong influence that neighboring Siam was exerting on the region. Indeed, Siam (which would become Thailand in 1939) remained the only country in Peninsular Southeast Asia which was able to keep its political independence in regard to European expansionism. From both sides of the Mekong River, religion was hence seen principally from a political perspective.2 It is not difficult to think about the role played by Institut bouddhique in Cambodia during the last century. First of all, this institution still exists in Phnom Penh, even if its organization and prerogatives have changed since the 1930s and it had to endure the terrible injuries caused by the Khmer Rouge regime. Furthermore, several studies have attempted to retrace its history, its action and its influence.3 On the other hand, almost no visible testimony remains today of the presence of the Institut in Laos: it is as if it never existed. Yet this establishment has had locally a significant impact, and marked a turning point in the modern history of Lao Buddhism, to the extent of having left some traces in present-­day policies toward religion in Laos. This chapter attempts to draw a brief overview of the role played by the Institut bouddhique in French Laos and to understand the stakes underlying its success and its failure. It will explore, in particular, the colonial agenda consisting, through the tools and structures that were set up before or contemporaneous with the Institut, in strengthening Lao Buddhism after centuries of war and foreign domination, and in bringing the Lao Sangha closer to that of Cambodia in order to build an “Indochinese Buddhism” that would stand apart from Siam. In parallel, it aims to highlight some Lao responses to and perspectives on colonial policies toward local forms of Buddhism. It is worth highlighting that extant sources from the colonial archive are more prolific than are independent Lao voices. Despite this, Lao desires can be seen sometimes in the complaints ­registered in French and local documents. From reading against the colonial

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   163 archive, in combination with what Lao sources do exist, a picture of the interactions between the French and the Lao becomes clear. It will become apparent here that French and Lao agendas were distinct, but converged in particular moments. These would have an impact on the move toward independence.

(Re)constructing Laos Little is known about the territory known today as Laos before the French colonial period.4 Most of our knowledge comes from a few local chronicles of limited value in writing academic history.5 From these chronicles we learn that the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang (“Millions of Elephants”) was established in the middle of fourteenth century by the king Fa Ngum (r. 1353–1374). After about three centuries of relative prosperity, Lan Xang split in the very beginning of eighteenth century in two, and later three, kingdoms as a result of internal quarrels: Luang Prabang in the North, Vientiane (Vieng Chan) in the center, and the small principality of Champassak in the South, adjacent to Cambodia. Weakened, these three Lao kingdoms quickly came under the control of neighboring Siam. In 1828, Vientiane was devastated by the Siamese following a Lao revolt lead by King Chao Anuvong (r. 1805–1828), while the invasions by the Ho pirates coming from the North completed its destruction over the following decades. As for Champassak, it was soon annexed by Siam and administrated by a governor sent by Bangkok. Only Luang Prabang remained as a semi-­independent kingdom, though as tributary to Siam.6 It is therefore not surprising that the first French travelers in Lao territories from the mid-­nineteenth century offer an apocalyptic picture of what remained of the ancient kingdom. Even a decade after the integration of some of the Lao territories to French Indochina (1893), travelers still describe Vientiane, which had become the capital of the newly constructed Laos, in pathetic terms: Vientiane in the present day is no more than a big village: hundreds of Laotian huts, a few Chinese shops, a dozen ruined pagodas, invaded by grass and inhabited by some lazy monks; nothing recalling, in the eye of the traveler, the glorious city that it should have been in ancient times that is, the warrior capital where conqueror kings gathered riches and treasures across the centuries.7 Religion was seen as a victim of this decay and the practice of Buddhism seemed to French administrators to be broken. Some stigmatized temples as “devastated, mutilated, plundered,”8 and the clergy as “ignorant and lazy.”9 This statement was partly due to the peculiar form of Lao Buddhism that could have appeared as different from academic knowledge based on Indic scholarship, but it is undeniable that Lao Buddhism at that time had been weakened institutionally, especially by comparison with testimonies of European travelers who had described a flourishing Buddhism in seventeenth century Lan Xang.10 A treaty signed between France and Siam had given authority to the former on territories located (approximately) on the East bank of the Mekong River,

164   Gregory Kourilsky while the latter kept the Western part.11 As a consequence the Mekong, which had once been an axis of communication, became a frontier, and French Laos rose from this new configuration. Furthermore, colonial administration added to this new entity some areas that either had never been or only weakly encompassed in Lan Xang. These provinces, situated in a wide perimeter around Vientiane, Luang Prabang and Champassak (North, South and East), were largely inhabited by other Tai or non-­Tai populations—sometimes rather autonomous, sometimes under the influence of neighboring kingdoms (Vietnam, China, Siam). Ultimately, however, what has since been called Laos has little to do with the ancient kingdom of Lan Xang. One of the aims of the French administration was hence to federate within a “country” all these territories for which unity was not historically an important issue. Some administrators thought that Buddhism, the religion of the Lao, could serve as strong cement for creating this unity: Buddhism is an excellent doctrine for a population under control and a guarantee for peace and political stability, for the benefice of the protective government.12 This conviction may have arisen from previous observations made by French officials in Asia who perceived Eastern religions, in particular Buddhism and Confucianism, as a vector of resistance against colonialism, even describing Buddhism in Burma as a “xenophobic weapon” in the hand of clergy.13 For Laos, this danger was even more significant due to the fact that the partition between Laos and Siam was particularly artificial and the Lao people maintained the practice of traveling across the Mekong River for monastic education. Indeed from the nineteenth century up to the present Bangkok has been the real center of Theravada Buddhist scholarship where Lao monks would get ordained or instructed, a phenomenon facilitated by the similarity between Thai and Lao languages14 and the lack of a strong monastic hierarchy in Lao principalities since the beginning of the eighteenth century if not before. Relying on monks for the construction of a national cohesion was especially relevant because in Theravada Southeast Asia, the Buddhist monastery (vat) was traditionally the only way to get an education in matters of reading, writing, accounting, arts, astrology, etc. which were taught alongside the religious curriculum.15 Yet, at the same time, while French authorities saw potential in the sangha for aid in governing the new country, they were nonetheless wary of substituting French culture for the local ones and hoped to avoid the criticisms faced by the British for having disturbed India’s intellectual life and social fabric.16 The French polity in Indochina preferred to rely on pre-­existent local structures rather than imposing new standards unfamiliar to the population, making the sangha the perfect medium for their undertaking: In place of the pagoda, in Khmer country, a school is established. In place of training entirely teachers with new and modern principles, we used monks to whom we gave some embryonic professional training and some

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   165 basic principles for their class. They go to school and, at the same time, they keep teaching and practicing their monastic life.17 From the French perspective, the goal moving forward was to build some tools to promote Buddhism inside French Indochina strong enough to counter Siamese influence and federate Lao (and Khmer) populations while staying under the control of colonial authorities.18 The Federation of French Laos would largely rest upon the building of a national religion, i.e., a “Lao Buddhism.”

Toward the building of a “national Buddhism” in French Laos From their first contact with the Lao, French administrators focused on Buddhism, and their efforts to develop a national form of Buddhism were organized around three different kinds of projects: reconstructing institutional structures, reforming the sangha administration, and setting up a new monastic educational system. While this work was driven by French colonial desires, some of the projects aligned with the needs and desires of the Lao Sangha as well. This point is most easily seen with French efforts to collect Lao texts and rebuild important structures. From the end of the nineteenth century into the 1920s, French scholars such as Auguste Pavie (1847–1925) and Louis Finot (1864–1935) worked with high-­ranking Lao monks and nobility to collect palm-­ leaf manuscripts, and other texts. In 1910, the Commissar of Government Meillier established with a Lao dignitary named Chao (“Lord”) Citammarat the first inventory of Lao manuscripts, which was used as the basis for the major article written by Louis Finot on Lao literature (1917).19 In 1918, with the patronage of King Sisavang Vong (r. 1904–1959),20 Meillier created the Royal Library of Luang Prabang to shelter a copy of every manuscript found in the vicinity, an act that many Lao supported as a way to find and preserve manuscripts that had been stolen or destroyed because of Siamese and Ho invasions during the first half of nineteenth century.21 While officially placed under the control of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the library was located in the Lao Département des Cultes and Chao Citammarat was appointed curator. During the first years, the performance of the Royal Library seemed to satisfy an existing need: The Royal Library is continuously frequented by monks, inhabitants and civil servants, who regularly come and request the loan of manuscripts, in order to be used for sermons or to be copied, especially because they were not able to find them in monasteries despite alleged investigations.22 In Vientiane, the primary focus of the colonial administration was to reconstruct the city ruined by decades of wars and assaults. Architectural works were undertaken from 1920 that consisted mainly of the restoration of important religious monuments, such as the Si Saket and the Chan monasteries and, later

166   Gregory Kourilsky on, the monumental reliquary (cetiya) of That Luang (1935–1935) and the Phra Keo temple (1936–1942) which would become a museum.23 As with the library, this work was run by the EFEO, but also included Lao involvement and reflected in some ways shared agendas. The reform of the sangha also included the involvement of the Lao monks, though their participation may be seen as largely superficial. In 1924, the colonial government appointed a commission of monks to elaborate a new regulation for the Buddhist clergy in Luang Prabang.24 According to French sources, this commission was made upon a request from the Ministry of Cults25 and was to have helped “restore the status of the clergy, in the aim of ensuring the dynamic of regular cults, the preservation and restoration of pagodas” and “to develop religious schools in the aim of the intellectual development of the people.”26 The truth is Suzanne Karpelès (1890–1968), a member of the EFEO who played a major role in Cambodia with regard to Buddhism,27 took responsibility for revising the articles for this new regulation. In her eyes the original took, “too much liberty regarding the prescriptions contained in the Vinaya,”28 clearly reflecting the view of orientalists in this period, who considered Buddhism through the prism of canonical scriptures and perceived local customs as a sign of degeneration. Moreover, new rules subordinated monks in all villages to a national (and secular) hierarchy. At the top of this hierarchy there was no longer a sangharaja (supreme monk) but the French Commissar of Government (art. 1, 2 and 3) who was empowered to approve or disapprove all important events within the monasteries, such as ordination, nomination, or removal of an abbot. Temples had to inform the government about the number of monks living there and about the possible offenses committed by novices or bhikkhus, and monks were required to carry an official document (sanya) which indicated the dates and place of ordination and residence.29 It was also required that candidates for ordination were to have specific knowledge (such as the ten precepts for the pabbajja). It is difficult to determine whether or not these new rules were applied efficaciously, but they represent the early beginnings of reforms in Lao Buddhism which were undertaken in the twentieth century, first by French and then by successive Lao governments. The third project was the creation in Laos of religious schools on the model of the Écoles de Pali which were previously set up in Cambodia in 1909 (Angkor) and 1914 (Phnom Penh).30 Pali schools were officially intended to provide Khmer monks with modern, European methods of Pali language instruction in place of the traditional way (primarily based on Kaccayana’s Grammar) considered as “absurd” by certain orientalists.31 More importantly, these schools would prevent Khmer and then Lao monks from going to Siam as had been their practice: The immediate motivation for the creation [of the Pali schools] was the following fact. Cambodian monks who wished to get instructed in religious matters, especially in the Pali language, for a long time had been going to Bangkok in search of knowledge which they were lacking in. They came

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   167 back with a foreign imprint that, for evident reasons, was not desirable. We wanted to stop this movement, and we found that the best way for this was to offer in their own place what they looked for from the outside. This is how the project [to establish] the École de Pali was born.32 This was part of a long-­term project to use the sangha to serve as the foundation for the education of the wider populace. The French administration therefore hoped the Écoles Normales de Bonzes in Vientiane in 1909 (with schools opened later in Luang Prabang, Savannakhet and Pakse) to train monks in “modern” pedagogies. However, according to the French in charge of the project, monks were, at first, motivated to receive an education but then showed little enthusiasm to teach what they learned to lay people as was expected of them.33 The government therefore decided to abandon this effort, and opened lay Écoles de village instead. Nevertheless, this experience began a working relationship between the Lao Sangha and the colonial administration. On this basis and modeled on their Khmer counterpart, two Écoles préparatoires de Pali were finally opened in 1928, settled in Sisaket monastery in Vientiane34 and in Pa Fang monastery in Luang Prabang.35 These specific establishments were developed all over the country and would be a part of a new momentum given to Lao—and more broadly to “Indochinese”—Buddhism instigated by French, which seriously begins with the creation, in 1930, of the Institut bouddhique in Phnom Penh.

The Institut bouddhique: a colonial project for an “Indochinese Buddhism” The dynamics of the development of Lao Buddhism must be considered in the light of what the French primarily planned within Cambodia, which had been a French Protectorate since 1863 (before being integrated into French Indochina in 1887). As in Laos, French colonial projects in Cambodia were organized partially through scientific knowledge about and control over religion and culture (it was out of these efforts that the École française d’Extrême-Orient36 emerged). As discussed above, French efforts to develop a Cambodian Buddhism focused on reconstruction and archaeology (especially at Angkor), the establishment of a library dedicated to the collection, preservation and analysis of manuscripts, and the reform of education.37 In considering the projects in both Cambodia and Laos, French administrators decided to establish a regional administrative tool that could be used to govern religious domain in “Hinayana”38 areas of French Indochina that were believed to “share the same civilization.”39 In 1930, the French administration established the Institut indigène des Études du bouddhisme du petit véhicule (later on simply called Institut bouddhique) in Phnom Penh. This was officially established to use Pali education and publications to promote “Indochinese Buddhism” and “revive” a local Buddhism supposed to be deteriorated. In this regard, the institute had a goal of centralizing educational action previously undertaken by the French in Cambodia and Laos

168   Gregory Kourilsky and to make it more effective by administering smaller departments as religious libraries, Buddhist museum, and the Pali schools eventually established in Laos and Cambodia. Suzanne Karpelès was nominated to run the institution that was for both countries, and remained in that role during more than a decade.40 Clearly, though not always overtly, this was also an attempt to counteract Siamese influence, to prevent Lao and Khmer monks from traveling to Thailand, and to reinforce French control on local Buddhist institutions. The Institut bouddhique was officially inaugurated in the Khmer capital on May 12, 1930 by General Governor Pasquier and the newly crowned Khmer monarch Sisowath Monivong (r. 1927–1941). No Lao official seemed to have attended the ceremony, but the newspaper Le courrier saïgonais talked about some Lao monks who came especially for the event.41 In their speeches, French officials emphasized the historical, cultural, and religious ties between both countries that yet felt now unrelated. The Institut bouddhique would help establish “a new spiritual and intellectual relationship between Cambodia and Laos”42 in order to get closer to each other and to work toward a common vision. The decree, redacted in 1929, gives the principal official goals of the institute and the structure of its administration while staying discreet with regard to its political facet: Art. 1: The Institut is set under the patronage of the protected Sovereigns of Cambodia and Luang Prabang, and under the presidency of the General Governor of Indochina. The presidency is assumed by two high dignitaries, one Cambodian and one Laotian, appointed by the General-­Governor on the proposal from local Kings and with the notice of “Résidents supérieurs” (…). Art. 2: The General Secretary of the Institute is appointed by decree from the General-­Governor. He should also assume the function of Curator of the Royal Library of Phnom Penh (…). Art. 3: The aim of the Institute is to preserve the traditional character of “Little Vehicle” Buddhism practiced by the populations of Laos and Cambodia, and by the Khmer population living in Cochinchina. Art. 4: The action of the Buddhist Institute is to publish Buddhist booklets and studies related to Art, Archaeology, the History of Buddhism, and publishing journals in Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese.43 The year following the creation of the Institut bouddhique in Phnom Penh, the first Lao section was inaugurated in Vientiane by the Resident Minister Jules Bosc.44 Suzanne Karpelès, the Commissar of Government Meillier, and many French and Lao officials participated in the ceremony which was organized on Febuary 18, 1931 in Vat Chan, the monastery that would later house this first Lao section. However, contrary to the Khmer section, no French scholar was appointed to supervise the Institut bouddhique in Vientiane, with Prince Phetsa­ rath (1890–1959), the charismatic viceroy (uparaja) of Luang Prabang being

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   169 designated as President. It is also significant that, from this opening day, this center took a local name which ignored the tie to the Institut bouddhique in Phnom Penh: the “Buddhist Scholars Assembly of Canthaburi” (Puttha bandit sapha canthaburi), referring to the ancient name of Vientiane (p. Candanapuri, “City of sandalwood”), a designation that was never taken into consideration by French for whom only “Institut bouddhique” existed. These preliminary—and for now rather discreet—signs of a certain distance from the more regional view of the French became more manifest in subsequent years. A Lao publication that reports the event states that lay and religious dignitaries came from 11 different provinces from the country in order to attend the opening,45 while other monks also came from Cambodia, particularly Chuon Nath (1883–1969) and Huot Tath (1891–1975), two key-­figures of the Institut bouddhique in Phnom Penh. At the same occasion, a new Buddhist library was inaugurated in Vat Sisaket, the temple that had just been restored by the EFEO. Last, a school for religious arts was also established in Vat Chan.46 A schedule was organized concerning the activities of this new institution. Principal decisions concerned the opening of more Pali schools and monastic libraries in the country, and the printing of religious books. The option to open a section within the École supérieure de Pali in Phnom Penh that would be specifically dedicated to Lao students was also mentioned. This resonated with the wish to establish strong connections between the monks of both countries, and also to make Phnom Penh the new regional center for Buddhist studies, in place of Bangkok. The inauguration was an important event in Vientiane, as it was the first time in a long time that hundreds of monks from many provinces had gathered together in the same place. This was an attempt to foster the idea that all these monks belonged to the same country that is, French Laos. Assuming that the Lao Buddhist clergy had been fragmented since the split of Lan Xang in the beginning of the eighteenth century into several realms, the French thought that gathering together local Buddhist organizations into a single sangha would bring back a unity that had been lost for centuries. The truth is this “unity” of the ancien Lao Sangha was perhaps more conventional wisdom than historical fact, as Lan Xang was never a centralized state but rather an agglomeration of “principalities” (meuang), which implied a relative autonomy of religious communities. Nonetheless, this reorganization of the Buddhist clergy was without a doubt a driving force toward the building of a national Buddhism and, more widely, the emergence of a feeling of a national cohesion among Lao individuals—understanding that the very idea of nation was hitherto unknown.47 The existence of a “Lao Buddhism” implied the existence of a united Lao people, (re)established through the efforts of the Protectorate. In his speech pronounced at the opening of Buddhist Institute of Vientiane, Bosc illustrated this dialectic in linking the rebirth of Lao Buddhism to the recovery of the whole country: This institution comes in time to protect the impressive vestiges and venerated relics of a civilization which reflects the ideal of humanism together

170   Gregory Kourilsky with the literary and artistic genius of the [Buddhist Religion]. It is good for a people to not be forgetful of its past, especially a past whose radiance had enlightened the history of all great countries following the Law of the Buddha. (…) [It is so] that the Lao will be able to stay faithful to their traditions, to their faith, to their beliefs, which have been forsaken under the ordeals and calamities which devastated their country during the previous centuries.48 Over the next 15 years, there were a number of shifts that occurred in the development of the Institut in Laos. A second section was opened in Luang Prabang in 1933, with the support of King Sisavang Vong, who had been an important patron of the library and Pali school in the royal city, and was for a time the President of the section. Interestingly, the opening of this section did not merit the attendance of either Khmer monks, or any French officials beyond Karpelès.49 In 1943, another section was opened in the city of Pakse, which came to replace the section in Vientiane. The reasons for these shifts were administrative, and not the educational or scholarly needs of the Institut. From at least 1895, the French had seen Laos as being divided into at least two ethnic and political parts, Haut-­Laos and Bas-­Laos, which here to be administered by different Commandant supérieur.50 Luang Prabang and Vientiane were a part of Haut-­Laos, while Pakse was in Bas-­Laos. In general, it would probably be best to see these shifts as driven by colonial administrative needs and desires, such as the goal to keep Lao monks from going to Bangkok. Considering the work of the different Lao sections of the Institut bouddhique, it is only the Vientiane section that left substantial accounts of its activities. Those concerned primarily publications, manuscript collections and above all Pali schools. While the first two Lao Pali schools were created prior to the creation of the Institut, from 1931 to 1943, Écoles de Pali opened in all the principle cities of French Laos and were placed under its supervision. In 1939, schools existed in Vientiane, Savannakhet, Pakse, Ban Keun, Thakhek and Luang Prabang.51 In 1943, others opened in Vang Vieng, Champone, Saphay52 and Xieng Khouang.53 Except for Luang Prabang, all these schools were officially administered by the Vientiane center of the institute. According to figures given by Prince Phetsarath in the reports he sent annually to Phnom Penh, the number of students in Vientiane increased year after year, starting from 55 in 1934–1935 and reaching 788 in 1942–1943.54 Eventually, the Pali schools in Laos admitted one Khmer student from Siem Reap and, above all, 22 Siamese monks55 (although we can presume these were probably Lao from Northeast Thailand). While it is difficult to know the numbers of Lao monks who went to Siam/Thailand during this period, there seems to have at least been a reduction in the numbers traveling out of Laos. The École de Pali in Luang Prabang, for its part, seems to have been far less dynamic. Because of the specific status of the royal city, the Pali school was run independently of Vientiane and its curriculum (established by Royal Ordinance) was distinct from that what applied in other parts of Laos. Opened in 1928 (thus

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   171 before the creation of the Institut), it closed a few years later because of logistical problems that remain unclear. The school reopened in September 1939 and the annual report for this year indicates that 115 students regularly attended courses, which were given by four teachers, all of whom had studied at the École supérieure de Pali in Phnom Penh.56 But according to the annual report of the General Assembly of the Institut bouddhique in 1943, the Luang Prabang center seems to have almost ceased its activities this same year.57 In terms of the goals of the French colonialists, the effect was at best limited.

Lao work in and agendas for the Institut Although arising from a French initiative, the prospect of establishing in Laos a series of institutional tools in order to stimulate Buddhism did not only result from a colonial impetus. As seen previously, French efforts relied on Lao monks, princes, intellectuals, or religious figures from the beginning. Overall, the Laotians welcomed the French attempt to provide to the country an opportunity to free itself from the Siamese influence, and thus to recover—paradoxically—a form of independence and prestige, at least in religious matters. Indeed, some expressed a nostalgia for a time when all the Lao principalities (meuang) were gathered in the powerful Lan Xang under the authority of a great king.58 In this context, the building up of new Lao Buddhist institutions that could help Laos to recover its lost unity was considered rather positively, even if the indigenous motivations were different from that of the colonial authorities. Sometimes, the Lao resisted French policies using the logic of the French themselves. The best example of this was after the EFEO restored the Sisaket monastery with the goal of turning it into a museum. A petition was signed by 57 monks and lay persons requesting that it remain a place of religious worship instead. According to French sources, the petitioners’ idea was here to make this temple an attractive place for Lao monks and thus to prevent them from going to Siam, which was naturally welcomed by French.59 There are other elements that indicate that what appears primarily as a French project was actually partly driven by local actors. First of all, the very idea to create the Institut bouddhique was inspired by the Mahamakut Royal College, a Siamese religious institution that the Khmer Venerable Chuon Nath had extolled the merits to the French as early as 1923.60 On his side, Lao King Sisavang Vong expressed to Suzanne Karpelès his desire to see the Library of Laos developing on the model of the Royal Library of Phnom Penh, and suggested that she should come to Laos “to work in the same frame of mind that she did in Cambodia.”61 This sentiment should not be a surprise: it was the king who presided over the inauguration of the Institut bouddhique section in Vientiane in 1931, and the first Lao book that was published and distributed under the auspices of the Institut, a manual of Buddhist ethics titled Adhibrahmacariyaka-­sikkha, was signed by Sisavang Vong himself. In the foreword, the king hopes that this religious manual would be spread “and used throughout the whole Kingdom of Lan Xang,”62 illustrating the desire that Laos should recover its unity, but also that he

172   Gregory Kourilsky imagined this unity in the frame of the past greatness rather than within the French Protectorate. This highlights a curious dynamic: while the king was undoubtedly an ardent supporter of the Institut bouddhique, he may also have seen the French unification of Laos as an opportunity for him to extend his authority across the entire country like the ancient kings of Lan Xang. King Sisavang Vong was not the only Lao supporter of the Institut, nor the only one with complicated motivations. The Institut bouddhique in Vientiane was essentially maintained by two charismatic Lao figures, Prince Phetsarath and Maha Sila Viravong, two remarkable men who literally bore the institution on their shoulders during more than a decade, but at the same time were particularly critical toward French policies. Indeed, in the following decade, each of them would undertake anti-­French activities. Prince Phetsarath (1890–1959), uparaja of Luang Prabang, was the recipient of both substantial traditional and modern education. He subsequently studied in Saigon, France, and Oxford. His intelligence and his erudition, as well as his European education and knowledge of French and English, allowed him to become a preferred interlocutor with the colonial authorities, and to hold several positions within the French colonial administration: In Vientiane, the leading native person is without a doubt the Tiao [Chao] Phetsarath, a prince and a great dignitary, which is also Inspector of Indigenous Political and Administrative Affairs. What an energy and a very endearing mind that is the Prince Phetsarath, and a living encyclopedia about everything that concerns Laos! … [Chao] Phetsarath is the right-­hand man of all successive Résidents supérieurs in Vientiane.63 It is thus not surprising that Phetsarath was designated as the President of the Institut bouddhique of Vientiane on the very day of its inauguration (1931). From this time, he would stand as a key figure in the institution, sometimes against the French whom he occasionally accused of failing to invest adequate resources into the project in Laos. Phetsarath initiated many actions within the institute, such as publication activities, appointment of professors of Pali, or the elaboration of a new Lao calendar and reckoning method in order to replace Siamese or Khmer calendars that were used in Laos at this time.64 Prince Phetsarath used to send annual activity reports of the Institut to Phnom Penh, par­ ticularly with respect to the École de Pali and to financial issues. Notwithstanding his privileged position with the colonial administration, Phetsarath’s attitude toward the French was by no means servile. Phetsarath for example strongly opposed a 1918 suggestion by Meillier that the Institut use Siamese characters for printing books in Laos.65 The debate led to the first attempt at standardization of the Lao writing system, which was to adopt semi-­ etymological spelling rules.66 Phetsarath took the opportunity given by the Institut bouddhique to relaunch the discussion on this matter, and appointed a committee tasked with the reform of the Lao alphabet, especially in order to accurately transliterate Pali.67 (His independence is evident in other ways. In

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   173 1928, he expressed opposition to the inclusion of Luang Prabang into the French colony, seeking to preserve the benefits afforded its peculiar status in Laos.68 Personally he made it a habit to not stand in the presence of colonial officials, even the high-­ranking ones). Despite his erudition, Phestarath was more a man of politics than of letters. If he was the main pillar of the Institut bouddhique in Vientiane, and the initiator of the majority of the actions undertaken there and in other provinces, he had to rely on local scholars who were able to teach Pali and to compose religious books. Among them, the most important and charismatic was the erudite Maha Sila Viravong (1905–1987) who eventually became the most prestigious scholar of modern Laos. Sila Chanthanam—his original given name—was born in Roi Et province,69 a part of present-day Northeast Thailand that had been a part of Lao kingdoms but was seized by Siamese armies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to Prince Phetsarath, Sila was born into a humble family of peasants in a small village of Isan, and was educated through the traditional monastic transmission of knowledge, especially classical literature and religious scriptures. Moreover, he never learned French and available data suggests he had at most a tenuous relationship with the colonial administration. The young Sila started his apprenticeship inside the great Siamese religious reforms initiated by King Mongkut (Rama IV, 1851–1868) and conducted by the Thammayut order, which aimed to purge regional Buddhism of all that was not in conformity with the orthodoxy of (what supposed to be) the original Theravada and the Pali Canon (Tipitaka). The son and successor of Mongkut, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, 1868–1910), pursued these reforms by implementing within Siamese territories a system of religious education that followed certain norms that was previously applied with the Thammayut order. The purpose of these reforms was not only religious but also political, notably ensuring Bangkok control over rural areas, especially those populated by non-­ ethnic Siamese and located in Northern and Northeast regions, where the monastery traditionally had significant prestige and autonomy.70 The Thammayut order, along with the reforms, were widely spread in Isan under the conduct of some senior monks originated from these provinces and who were favorable to these reforms. Among them were Uan Tisso (Somdet Maha Wirawongs, 1867–1956),71 who was a sangha leader in Nakhon Ratchasima. This leading monk met the young Sila while he was a novice, and became fond of him to such an extent that he authorized him to use his own name as a religious title. From then on, Sila took the name of Sila Wiravongs (spelled Viravong according to Lao orthography). Following the recommendation of Uan Tisso, Sila decided to continue his religious studies in Bangkok, within a Thammayut monastery, where he took the higher ordination, and received the highest grades in the religion curriculum as well as a high degree in Pali, thus obtaining the title maha (great or venerable). According to his own autobiography, Sila’s nationalist fervor for Laos emerged during his studies, thanks to the reading of Lao newspapers, as well as a Thai

174   Gregory Kourilsky history book that scornfully narrated the defeat of the Lao king Anuvong by the Siamese in 1828. In 1929, when he learned of the creation of the religious library and a Pali school in Vientiane, he resolved to go to Laos (which he did accompanied by some other Lao monks from the right side of Mekong River). According to his autobiography, soon after his arrival in Vientiane, Sila Viravong had to disrobe because of the disdain that the abbot of Vat Sisaket had toward Thammayut monks.72 It turns out that at that time, the teachers who had been in charge of Pali teaching at the Institut bouddhique in Vientiane had resigned or retired. It was therefore a very timely opportunity for Maha Sila who was immediately appointed by Phetsarath as the sole Pali teacher at the Pali school in Vientiane. Two years later, in 1933 he was joined by another scholar from Isan, Maha Noy, who came from Ubon Ratchathani to assist him.73 Although the French had envisioned that the curriculum in the Écoles de pali should be the same in Laos and Cambodia, Phetsarath asked Maha Sila to set up a specific program for the center in Vientiane and the other Pali schools that depended on it,74 another sign of both men’s desire for autonomy. Based on his Thammayut background, Maha Sila thus created the first curriculum, organized exams and established official diplomas that were inspired by the reformed Siamese system. He also wrote a Pali grammar for the school, thereby implementing the “modern” system of Pali education. Interestingly, this text also seems to have been based on the Pali veyyakarana (1927) by Prince Wachirayan, the architect of religious reforms in Siam.75 It is not without irony that such a religious education system based on the Siamese reforms was implemented in an institution which was aimed precisely to counteract Siamese influence. In the eyes of the monks and religious students of Laos, however, it gave them an equal footing with Bangkok. Moreover, Maha Sila’s curriculum, in contrast to the Siamese, included secular disciplines such as mathematics to allow students to “acquire a broader knowledge which could be useful in their professional life, once they leave the robe.”76 He also taught astrology, relying on the new Lao calendar that was previously established by Prince Phetsarath. His innovations, which really followed the aims of Lao traditional education, received strong criticism from the French administrators of the Institut bouddhique in Phnom Penh who demanded that “Laos take on the organization which has proved its worth in Cambodia (…) and to remove from the curriculum all matters unconcerned with Buddhism.”77 One can again see the irony that the French here were closer to the Siamese modernist ideas despite their efforts to distance the Lao Sangha from the influence of Bangkok. (There were other Lao intellectuals and monks who participated in the Institut bouddhique in all three sections, though none of them were comparable to either Prince Phetsarath or Maha Sila Viravong. It is noteworthy, however, that the several Pali teachers attached to Institut bouddhique in Luang Prabang were former students and graduates of the École supérieure de Pali in Phnom Penh who contributed to the Lao publications by translating Khmer books previously published in Cambodia into Lao.78 Their background and contribution thereby conform to French plans for stronger ties between monks and scholars of both countries.)

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   175 Occasionally, however, Lao perspectives conflicted with French projects or instructions. We have already mentioned the strong opposition from Phetsarath against the idea to use Siamese characters for printing books in Laos. Later on, in 1943, some French officials suggested this time that the Khmer alphabet should be used instead of Lao for transcribing Pali texts in Pali teaching, which also provoked objections.79 Other disagreements were perhaps more surprising, such as resistance to the Lao translation of the Tipitaka. Although King Sisavang Vong showed his enthusiasm, the monks of Luang Prabang proved to be reluctant, first because they wanted the Pali texts to be printed in tham script, for which there were no printing plates at the time. But when, in view of this claim, the French proposed to reproduce the scriptures with zinc plates engraved with tham characters, the same monks refused, saying that the edition of the Tipitaka was not a priority, and postponed the project to “later times.”80 Ultimately, only three volumes of the translated Tipitaka were produced. After the death of his principal translator, the project was abandoned.81 Actually this position must be understood in the light of the regional Buddhist traditions, which for centuries privileged vernacular religious literature over Pali scriptures—and this is precisely what the Thammayut reformists in Siam were fighting against, as well as French orientalism in Cambodia. However, the most striking object of controversy from the Lao was the obvious imbalance in matters of attention and means that the French gave to the Institut bouddhique in favor of Cambodia, which eventually fueled the anti-­ colonial resentments.

Structural imbalances and anti-­colonial activities The project to build a “Lao-­Khmer” Buddhism that would be free of Siam’s influence was fundamentally a French idea, although it was for a time shared by some Cambodian and Lao personalities. However, even these initial supporters of a more unified sangha quickly became disillusioned. Soon some started to provide criticisms against the Institut bouddhique which they considered as overtly favoring Cambodia, and as acting principally for the Khmer.82 From the Lao perspective, the French strategy consisted ultimately of substituting one religious hegemony for another one; Lao monks were to consider Phnom Penh as the regional center, not Bangkok. This new configuration surely flattered the Khmer Sangha, but was of little interest to the Lao. While it may have been true that the French had “helped Cambodia to free itself from foreign tutelage,”83 Laos had simply gone from a subordinate relationship with the Siamese, to one with the Khmer and French. Despite an official desire to unify Buddhism in the two countries, later evidence shows indeed that the Institut bouddhique, whose headquarters stayed in Phnom Penh, prioritized Cambodia and focused its efforts on Khmer Buddhist communities. It is not an exaggeration to assert that Laos was neglected by French officials in charge of the institution.84 Despite some statements purporting to strengthen relationships between the Khmer and Lao Sanghas, Karpelès

176   Gregory Kourilsky was almost exclusively concerned with Cambodia. Although she participated in the creation of the two sections of the Institut in Laos, her involvement was at best sporadic, limited to short trips and brief inspections that had little to do with the activities of the Vientiane or Luang Prabang centers. This imbalance is particularly obvious when we consider the publishing activities in Laos, which were minor in comparison to what was taking place in Cambodia, driven by Karpelès and other French administrators and scholars. The approximately 25 titles (12 by Maha Sila himself ) edited in Laos from 1931 to 1939 bear no comparison with the volume of publications released in Phnom Penh in the same decade. After 1939, publications in the Lao section became even more limited: in 1941, only two brochures, one on Lao decorative art and one a manual of hygiene, each with a print run of 1,000, were printed. This slowing down could be partly explained by the turn of World War Two and the German Occupation in France,85 but the figures for Cambodia in the same year show that war was not the only reason: 22 new titles were published in Phnom Penh, in addition to new issues and ten reprints of the journal, Kambuja Surya, coming to a total of almost 65,000 copies.86 The truth is Karpelès’ energies were largely monopolized by the bilingual (Pali-­Khmer) edition of the Tipitaka, begun in 1929 and completed— long after her departure—in 1968 with 110 volumes printed.87 Another indicator of this imbalance is the financial and human resources made available for the Lao sections of the Institut bouddhique, which were much more modest than for Cambodia. From 1938, Prince Phetsarath complained several times to the administration about the scarcity of funds to run the Institut, and pointed to the asymmetry on this matter in favor of Phnom Penh (around 2,500 French Indochinese piastres for both Lao sections, against 35,000 for Phnom Penh only).88 The uparaja understood very well the French interest, and then used it to defend his case: If the Institut bouddhique in Phnom Penh continues to refuse the necessary financial support, the institute in Vientiane will have no choice but to suspend its operation, and to shut down the École de Pali as soon as the end of the present academic year March 1940. We do not ignore that we would thus lose the benefit gained thanks to considerable efforts, and that the monks who are willing to receive an education would probably return to the path of Siam, as they used to do in the past. In any event, it is no more possible to ensure the effective functioning of the Institut bouddhique in the actual precarious conditions, which have lasted too long. So it falls to the local administration in Cambodia, which possesses the financial resources, (…) to decide the future of our institute and of the École de Pali in Laos, and to take responsibility of the political implications that might arise for the influence of France in this country if these schools were to end up closing.89 However, his complaints seem to have had little effect, as French officials increased only slightly the budget for the Lao sections, as well as expressing

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   177 their disappointment for the “lack of understanding from Laos.”90 The fact is that World War Two had started and it was certainly not good timing for France to raise educational budgets. They also chose to ignore protests from the Lao about the École supérieure de Pali and its curriculum, which were entirely under the control of the Cambodian Ministry of Cults and thus guided only by Khmer priorities.91 Added to this rivalry was another one of internal dimension, namely the war credits that existed between the centers of Luang Prabang and Vientiane— often to the detriment of the first.92 This was primarily due to the absence of unity of French Laos and the splitting of the organization within Lao territories, which means that the two Lao sections actually had few administrative relations. On a more general level, the links between Laos and Cambodia in the matter of Buddhism, meant to be strengthened through the Institut bouddhique, remained rather limited. Certainly, after 1918 quite a few Lao monks went to Cambodia to pursue their religious studies, and this phenomenon subsequently intensified after the creation of the Institut bouddhique. It was, however, not a wide-­ranging movement, and sources available suggest that the number of such cases did not exceed a few dozen students. Moreover, this movement was rather unidirectional, as there are only two cases recorded of Khmer students who went to study in Laos.93 Prince Phetsarath himself only showed interest in Cambodia through the institutions that the French created in order to reinvigorate Buddhism. His relationship with Khmers was mainly limited to courtesy visits. As for Maha Sila Viravong, he did not speak Khmer and barely refers to Cambodia in his writings. In his view—and it was probably the case of many Lao—the Institut bouddhique in Vientiane owed its existence to Prince Phetsarath, and was independent from the organization of the same name located in Phnom Penh.94 This sense of independence comes also through the local name of both Lao sections—Puttha Bandit Sapha Canthaburi (the Assembly of scholars of Vientiane), and Puttha Bandit Sapha Anachak Luang Prabang (the Assembly of scholars of the kingdom of Luang Prabang)—which explicitly ignores the connection to a central institution that the French term of centre d’activité meant to highlight. In any event, it is indisputable that it is only thanks to the effort of Lao characters like Prince Phetsarath, Maha Sila Viravong, and others, that the Institut was able to remain active in Laos. That is in sharp contrast to the situation in Cambodia where projects and activities were primarily led by Suzanne Karpelès and other French scholars. This situation, in combination with structural problems and local resentments toward the French, led the Institut bouddhique to become, from the 1940s, a locus of the anti-­colonial struggle in Vientiane. Some anti-­French sentiments started indeed to arise among certain elite figures like Phetsarath that inevitably worried the colonial administration. As a consequence, France attempted to adopt a new approach that took greater account of Laos. In 1942–1943, it was finally admitted that the Lao Sangha had been neglected, and solutions were sought to solve the problem. Those in charge realized that the resources allocated to the Lao sections of the Institut bouddhique were partly the cause for what they saw as their low level of development.95

178   Gregory Kourilsky But the damage was already done, and Prince Phetsarath and Maha Sila Viravong were undoubtedly—and perhaps paradoxically—among the first Lao to undertake anti-­French actions. The trigger of these actions might be the claim from the newly renamed Thailand to France for the Lao and Khmer territories that were under Siamese domination prior to the establishment of the French Protectorate. Phetsarath wished to respond to that claim, and tried to negotiate with Bangkok without the mediation of French authorities. To do this, the Prince appointed, in January 1941, Sila Viravong to conduct negotiations on the spot. However, the plan reached the ears of the French, who hence issued an arrest warrant against him.96 Therefore, Maha Sila had to flee to Thailand, accompanied by 43 other Lao devoted to his cause, including some Pali teachers of the Institut bouddhique in Vientiane. He would stay for several years in Bangkok, eventually obtaining a position in what would become the National Library. There, he worked closely with the famous scholar Phya Anuman Rajadhon, and under the direction of Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (1862–1943), who made the library a central place for Thai culture and knowledge.97 In other words, Maha Sila fulfilled the fears of the French by returning to Thailand. As for Phetsarath, his “betrayal” of the colonial authorities did not have immediate repercussions, as he presided over the Institut bouddhique in Vientiane throughout the war.98 It was only few years later, in October 1945, that he would be dismissed—and simultaneously deprived of his title of uparaja by the King of Luang Prabang— because he had refused agreements with French authorities.99 This was just after the short time of Japanese occupation in Laos (between June and August 1945), and Phetsarath had initiated the first attempt for the independence of Laos.100 The passivity of France under the authority of Vichy regime, then in the face of Japanese occupation, was certainly a determining factor for the Lao elite in choosing to turn away from a country that had shown itself to be incapable of protecting Laos against foreign incursions. This was in their view sufficient ground to renege on the “oath of Allegiance” toward France. The war did not bring an end to French actions with the Institut bouddhique in Indochina, but it changed the situation drastically. The governments of Laos and Cambodia denounced the administrative and political control that EFEO maintained on the institution, which was now classified as a “means of propaganda” toward indigenous populations.101 Local sections were given back to their respective countries, and the scientific monitoring that EFEO hitherto exercised ended. Only the appointment of the general secretary remained in the hands of the director of this French institution, in an effort to maintain some semblance of control and monitoring.102 Only in 1956, after the collapse of French colonialism were the different sections of the Institut bouddhique rebuilt, but separately, showing by this the fragility of the Lao-­Khmer relation emphasized by the French after 1930. Ironically, independence from France was the very moment when the Lao Sangha was finally able to realize the expression of a real national Buddhism, as it was encouraged by French. But later on, the new Kingdom of Laos faced the same trouble as French Laos had previously before, never being able to solve its

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   179 s­ tructural problem concerning its unity and identity. Moreover, in the next decades, the country had to deal with another conflict, the Second Indochina War, which led in December 1975 to the establishment of the Lao Popular Democratic Republic, a communist state with a single Party. Those events broke down all initiative to maintain the religious institution, seen as a stigma of French imperialism and Royal patronage, as well as an obstacle to Revolutionary ideals.

Conclusion Although the Lao sections of the Institut bouddhique never had the same influence or authority as the Khmer one, their activities were far from negligible. It was nevertheless thanks to local monks, men of letters and charismatic figures such as Prince Phetsarath and Maha Sila Viravong, that the Institut could operate with some success in Laos, at least in the decade following its creation. Evidently, Lao fully perceived the ambivalent dynamics of this project, the aim of which was both to make Lao Buddhism independent from Siam and to subjugate it to French interests. In any event, the work of the Institut bouddhique was fatally damaged in Laos and Cambodia during World War Two, while the movements of independence gave a fatal strike to the establishment which was, and this is not the smallest of paradoxes, a major cradle of those movements in both countries. Nevertheless, and despite its short existence and its failure in federating Lao Buddhism into a centralized organization, the Institut bouddhique is more than a testimony to the French and Lao visions at this particular time on the matter of what Lao Buddhism should be. The academic teaching of Pali and canonical texts, as well as its publications which contributed to the spread of the Dhamma, remain effective in the Lao Popular Democratic Republic.103 Above all, the idea that Buddhism was a means for wielding power on the population and hence must be centralized and institutionalized has been well accepted by successive Lao governments. After having adopted the Marxist perception of religion as “the opium of the people,” Revolutionaries rapidly rehabilitated Buddhism for propaganda purposes.104 Since then, the Buddhist hierarchy has been administered by the state and printed works are under censorship. In that matter, the Lao rulers learned very well their lessons from their former colonizers.

Abbreviations AEFEO BEFEO CEFEO EFEO NAC

Archives de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient Cahiers de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient École française d’Extrême-Orient National Archives of Cambodia

180   Gregory Kourilsky

Notes    1    2    3    4

   5    6    7    8    9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35

1887 for Cambodia and 1893 for Laos. See Ratanaporn’s chapter in this volume. See Edwards, Cambodge; Buddhist Institute, Prawat sanghep. The word “Laos” is problematic as it referred also to some territories today encompassed in Northern Thailand. From older sources (vernacular and European), we see that people from Chiang Mai, Nan, Lamphun, etc. were called “Lao” as well as “Lanna.” As late as the first decades of twentieth century, Northern Siam was often called “Western Laos” in non-­Thai sources. Michel Lorrillard (EFEO) is undertaking a study of all epigraphic data previously and newly collected in Laos. Most of his conclusions question information given in chronicles (see for example Lorrillard, “Quelques données”). The king’s sons were retained as hostages in Bangkok. Maspero, “Say-­Fong,” p. 1. Renaud, Le Laos, p. 107. Meyer, Le Laos, p. 33. Lejosne, Journal de voyage, p. 234; Marini, Relation nouvelle. The French-­Siamese treaty was first signed in October 1893, which was then amended by successive treatises and conventions in October 1902, February 1904, March 1907, February 1925, and August 1926. Meyer, Le Laos, p. 33. Léon, Colonisation, p. 293. Siamese and Lao, both belong to Tai-­kadai linguistic group and are quite close. Most of the lexicon and syntax is the same; differences lie mainly in the writing and tone systems. This was often an informal curriculum, and did not rely on any kind of state sponsorship. On Buddhist curriculum in Laos and Thailand, see McDaniel, Gathering Leaves. See also the chapters by Ratanaporn and Borchert in this volume. AEFEO, “Le Résident supérieur du Cambodge.” Charton, “L’enseignement en Indochine,” p. 104. Soren Ivarsson sees this as the first step toward a “nationalization of religion” in Laos. See Ivarsson, Creating Laos. Finot, “Recherches.” AEFEO, “Ordonnance royales.” Kourilsky, Institut bouddhique, pp. 38–40. AEFEO, “Rapport de Chao Sithammarat [Tiao Citammarat],” Luang Prabang, January 10, 1920. For the reconstruction of Vientiane by French, see Clément-Charpentier, “Les premières décennies.” Decree of June 11, 1924. AEFEO, “Rapport du Secrétaire de l’Institut.” BEFEO, “Annexe I.” See for example Edwards, Cambodge, and Khing Ho Dy, “Suzanne Karpelès.” BEFEO, “Chronique, Laos,” p. 331. Article 34. This was not invented by the French. Indeed, the Siamese King Rama I established a compilation of Royal decrees (kotmai phra song) which forced monks to carry an ID with them in the early nineteenth century. CEFEO, “Chroniques, Indochine française,” p. 823. AEFEO, “Finot dirécorient.” AEFEO, “Le Directeur de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient.” Clergerie, “L’œuvre française,” p. 369. Institut de Recherches, Maha Sila Viravong, p. 248. AEFEO, “Rapport d’assemblée.”

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   181   36 On the topic of establishment of EFEO, see Singaravélou, L’École française, p. 382.   37 On education, see Edwards, Cambodge, p.  343; Kourilsky, “Institut bouddhique,” p. 79.   38 The term “Theravada” was not widely used at that time. It should be remembered that the use of this very term to designate the Sinhalese/Pali Buddhism was originally created by some European orientalists. See Skilling et al., How Theravada.   39 CEFEO, “L’œuvre de l’institut,” 1943, p. 6.   40 In 1941, she was dismissed by the Vichy regime who invoked her Jewish origin, a measure annulled after Liberation (1944). Khing Hoc Dy, “Suzanne Karpelès,” p. 55.   41 Courrier saïgonnais, May 13, 1930.   42 Karpelès, “L’institut d’Études Bouddhiques,” pp. 424–425.   43 AEFEO, “Le Directeur du Cabinet.”   44 Institut bouddhique, Salong Sammakhom, 48 p.   45 Institut bouddhique, Kālāmasutta, pp. 3–5.   46 CEFEO, “L’œuvre de l’institut,” p. 6.   47 Lévy, “Histoire du Laos,” pp.  58–59. For a more general view on the building of Lao nationalism, see Ivarsson, Creating Laos.   48 BEFEO, “Chronique, Laos,” p. 336.   49 AEFEO, “Institut bouddhique n°3;” AEFEO, “Rapport morale.”   50 As late as 1939, some observers would carry on stressing the vagueness of the designation of “Laos” (e.g., CEFEO, 1939, N°20 & 21, p. 30). See also Lux, L’Indochine.   51 AEFEO, “Centre d’activité.”   52 AEFEO, “Institut bouddhique de l’Indochine,” (signed by Prince Phetsarath).   53 Personal communication, Acan Douangdi, abbot of Vat Pya Vat, Muang Khun (Xieng Khouang province), 2006. However, the existence of this school is not apparent in the colonial archives.   54 Until the Communist Revolution in 1975, the number of students increased consistently: “In 1930, there were no regular students in religion in the country; in 1940, they were about 200, about 2,500 in 1950, 5,400 in 1960, 4,100 in 1970, and 5,239 in 1971–1972” (from statistics given by Ministère des Cultes, 1972, in Zago, Rites et cérémonies, p. 137, note 23).   55 AEFEO, “Centre d’activité.”   56 AEFEO, “Rapport moral.”   57 AEFEO, “Note de présentation à Monsieur le Résident supérieur du Cambodge.”   58 Sila Viravong, Chao Maha Uparaj Phetsarath, p. 73.   59 Ivarsson, “Cultural Nationalism,” p. 248.   60 AEFEO, “personal signed letter from “Thong,” sent to EFEO’s Director (dated October 14, 1923).   61 AEFEO, “Séance du 15 octobre 1929” [Annual report].   62 HM Sisavang Vong, Adhibrahma-­cariyaka-sikkhā, Vientiane, Institut bouddhique, 1931, p. 1.   63 H. Th “Du Laos d’hier,” pp. 12–13.   64 Phetsarath’s work on a Lao calendar has been published in French and in Lao.   65 AEFEO, “M. Meillier.” According to Meillier, the king of Luang Prabang was very pleased with this idea—an assertion that sounds doubtful.   66 See Somlith Phathammavong, Laos, pays du million d’éléphants.   67 In contrast to other Southeast Asian languages, the Lao writing system does not include all the consonants needed to write Pali or Sanskrit. For example, there is no grapheme in the Lao script to write the sounded aspirated consonants (gh, bh, dh, etc.), the retroflexes (ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, etc.), or some fricatives (ś, ṣ). This is the reason why the Lao traditionally use another script, called Tham (Pali dhamma) to write down Pali and religious texts. For more details on this reform, see Kourilsky, “De part et d’autre du Mékong,” pp. 118–120.

182   Gregory Kourilsky   68 Sila Viravong, Chao Maha Uparaj Phetsarath, p. 40.   69 The following paragraphs are mainly based on Sila Viravong, Jivit Phukha, and Institut de recherches, Mahā Sila Viravong.   70 See Ratanaporn this volume.   71 Kamala Tiyavanich, Forest Recollections, p. 172.   72 According to his daughter, however, Sila had other reason than religious. He would have disrobed anyway, especially because he planned to get married (personal communication, Duangdeuane Bounyavong, 2008).   73 Sila Viravong, Jivit Phukha, p. 50.   74 In this regard, the Cambodian erudite Huoth Tath had worked together with Lao monks for its elaboration. AEFEO, “Institut bouddhique—Procès verbal.”   75 For a comparison between these two Pali Grammars, see Kourilsky, “De part et d’autre du Mékong,” pp. 116–117.   76 Sila Viravong, Jivit Phukha, p. 44.   77 AEFEO, “Note de presentation.” (1943).   78 Kourilsky “L’institut bouddhique,” pp. 89–91.   79 AEFEO, “Note de presentation.” (1943). It must be noticed that Cambodia was not spared by ideas of this kind. Indeed, the Romanization of Khmer script was suggested in 1936 by French civil servants aiming to “modernize” the country. This project met locally with a strong opposition, which eventually turned later on into an upheaval known as the “Umbrella revolt.”   80 AEFEO, “Assemblée générale de l’Institut bouddhique.”   81 All further projects for a Lao Tipiṭaka edition were aborted, leaving Laos as the only Theravada country without its own edition of the Pali Canon.   82 AEFEO, “Lettre de George Cœdès.”   83 AEFEO, “Institut Bouddhique, Cambodge, 1940–1953” (“Allocution prononcée par Son Excellence le Ministre des Cultes,” “Transfert de l’Institut Bouddhique).”   84 See Kourilsky, “L’Institut bouddhique.”   85 BEFEO, “Chronique, Laos.”    86 AEFEO, “Note de presentation.”   87 Huot Tath, Historique, p. 2.   88 AEFEO, “Conseil d’administration.”   89 AEFEO, “Centre d’activité de Vientiane” (emphasis added).   90 AEFEO, “M. le Gouverneur général de l’Indochine.”   91 Ibid.   92 An official report states an appropriation by Vientiane of the entire amount of the budget, which was normally dedicated for both centers (NAC, “Le Secrétaire général du Royaume.”).   93 Kourilsky, “Institut bouddhique,” pp. 96–99.   94 This view is particularly reflected in his autobiography (see Sila Viravong, Jivit Phukha, p. 42).   95 AEFEO, “Note de présentation à Monsieur le Résident supérieur du Cambodge, n° 397-ib/c.”   96 Sila Viravong, Jivit Phukha, p. 54.   97 Sulak Sivaraksa, “Venerating Maha Sila Viravong,” Seeds of Peace, vol.  21–22, May–August 2548 [2005].   98 AEFEO, “Assemblée générale de l’Institut bouddhique pour 1942 (Vientiane, 29–30 avril 1942).”   99 Sila Viravong, Chao Maha Uparaj Phetsarath, p. 92. 100 Sila Viravong, Jivit Phukha, p. 60. 101 AEFEO, “Point de vue cambodgien.” 102 AEFEO, “Le Directeur de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient.” François Martini, a Franco-­Khmer, was chosen to replace Pierre DuPont in 1947.

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   183 103 The present-­day Sangha College, established into the Vat Ong Teu in Vientiane, follows on from the École de Pali. 104 On this subject, see Ladwig, “Prediger der Revolution,” p. 18.

References AEFEO, “Assemblée Générale de l’Institut Bouddhique pour 1942,” Vientiane, 29–30 April 1942. AEFEO, “Centre d’activité de Vientiane, rapport annuel 1939, par SE Tiao Phetsarath,” Vientiane, December 22, 1939. AEFEO, “Conseil d’administration de l’Institut bouddhique, 30 janvier 1939 et 1er février 1940.”  AEFEO, “Finot dirécorient registre de départ courrier et télégrammes pour 1914, n° 14,” Hanoi, May 28, 1914 (cote Filliozat). AEFEO, “Institut bouddhique de l’Indochine, Centre d’activité de Vientiane, Rapport annuel de 1942, 22 janvier 1943.” (signed by Prince Phetsarath).  AEFEO, “Institut bouddhique—Procès verbal de la séance du 19 février 1931 (Vat Chan, Vientiane).” AEFEO, “Le Directeur du Cabinet du Gouverneur Général de l’Indochine à Monsieur le Directeur de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient,” Saigon, July 24, 1929. AEFEO, “Le Directeur de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient à M. le Commissaire de la République Française au Cambodge,” Hanoi, September 3, 1947. AEFEO, “Le Directeur de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient à Monsieur le Résident supérieur du Cambodge,” Hanoi, December 21, 1922. AEFEO, “Le Résident supérieur du Cambodge au Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, Hanoi,” Phnom Penh, January 12, 1925, signé Baudoin. AEFEO, “Lettre de George Cœdès au Directeur du personnel, Gouvernement général, Hanoi” (February 14, 1941). AEFEO, “M. le Gouverneur général de l’Indochine (direction des affaires politiques),” August 14, 1942 [“Note du Résident Supérieur prise comme base à la réorganisation de l’IB”]. AEFEO, “M. Meillier à M. le Résident Supérieur au Laos, Louang Prabang,” January 10, 1918.  AEFEO, “Note de présentation à Monsieur le Résident Supérieur du Cambodge, n° 397– ib/c du 13-4-43, Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée Générale de l’Institut Bouddhique, année 1943.” AEFEO, “Ordonnance royale, Luang Prabang, Sisavang Vong, Somdet Phra Chao Lan Xang Hom Khao, Chao Phra Nakhon Luang Prabang.” AEFEO, “Ordonnances Royales N°22 & 23 du 26 janvier 1940 portant réorganisation de l’École Supérieure de Pali et la Bibliothèque Royale et projet d’arrêté local fixant le règlement intérieur de l’Institut Bouddhique, de l’Ecole Supérieure de Pali et de la Bibliothèque Royale,” Arrêté du 22 avril 1940, Phnom Penh, signé Thibaudeau. AEFEO, personal signed letter from “Thong” [i.e., Chuon Nat], sent to EFEO’s Director (dated October 14, 1923). AEFEO, “Point de vue cambodgien relativement à l’École supérieure de pāli et à l’Institut bouddhique,” July 16, 1946. AEFEO, “Rapport d’assemblée du 20 mars 1931, Institut bouddhique—Procès verbal de la séance du 19 février 1931 (Vat Chan, Vientiane).”

184   Gregory Kourilsky AEFEO, “Rapport de Chao Sithammarat [Tiao Citammarat], chargé de la bibliothèque royale de Luang Prabang, à M. le Directeur de l’EFEO,” Luang Prabang, January 10, 1920. AEFEO, “Rapport du Secrétaire de l’Institut à la séance d’inauguration de la section laotienne à Vientiane—18 février 1931.” AEFEO, “Rapport moral sur l’exercice 1939 (Suzanne Karpelès, Assemblée générale de l’Institut bouddhique à Louang-­Prabang).” AEFEO, “Séance du 15 octobre 1929” [Annual report]. AEFEO, Section K3, Subdivision “Institut bouddhique n°3 (Organisation du bouddhisme, rapports et procès-verbaux), 1928–1943.” AEFEO, Section K3, Subdivision “Institut Bouddhique, Cambodge, 1940–1953.” BEFEO, “Annexe I: Arrêté portant réglementation du clergé bouddhique du Laos (10 mars 1928).” In BEFEO XXIX (1930): 522–530. BEFEO, “Chroniques, Indochine française.” In BEFEO IX: 817–827. BEFEO, “Chronique, Laos.” In BEFEO XXXI (1931): 329–342. Buddhist Institute. Prawat Sangkhep Buddhasasanapandit—[The Buddhist Institute. A Short History]. Phnom Penh: The Buddhist Institute, 2005. CEFEO, “L’œuvre de l’institut d’études bouddhiques au Cambodge, en Cochinchine et au Laos.” In CEFEO 1943, Supplément C, pp. 3–6. Charton, M. “L’enseignement en Indochine.” In Comptes rendus mensuel des séances de l’Académie coloniale, tome 7, séances des 7 et 21 février 1947, pp.  97–124. Paris: Académie des sciences coloniales, 1947. Clément-Charpentier, Sophie. “Les premières décennies de Vientiane à l’époque coloniale d’après les plans et les textes.” In Vientiane, architecture d’une capitale. Traces, formes, structures, projets, edited by P. Clément, S. Clément-Charpentier, C. Goldblum, Bounleuam Sisoulath, C. Taillard. Paris: Cahiers de l’Ipraus, 2010. Clergerie, Bernard. “L’œuvre française d’enseignement au Laos.” France-­Asie 125–126–127 (1956): 367–373. Edwards, Penny. Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Finot, Louis. “Recherches sur la littérature laotienne.” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 15 (1917): 1–218. H.M. Sisavang Vong, Adhibrahma-­cariyaka-sikkhā—[Handbook of Buddhist discipline]. Vientiane: Institut bouddhique, 1931.  H. Th. “Du Laos d’hier au Laos de demain.” L’Asie nouvelle illustrée, numéro spécial: Laos 1936, 1936, pp. 11–15. Huot Tath. Historique de la traduction et de l’édition du Tripitaka du pāli en cambodgien, revu par Samdech Preah Pothiveang Huot Tath, publié à l’occasion de la Cérémonie commémorant l’achèvement de la première édition du tripitaka bilingue, pāli-cambodgien, le 1er avril 1969. Phnom Penh: Institut Bouddhique, 1969. Institut bouddhique. Kālāmasutta, Extrait de l’Aṅguttara-nikāya, Tikkanipāta, Vientiane: Institut bouddhique, 1931. Institut bouddhique. Salong Sammakhom Prajña Pra Puttha sasana na prathet lao— [Inauguration of the Lao Buddhist Scholars Association]. Vientiane: Institut bouddhique, 1931. Institut de recherches sur la culture. Mahā Sila Viravong Jivit lae Phon-­ngan—[Mahā Sila Viravong, Life and Work]. Vientiane: Institut de Recherches en Sciences sociales, 1990.

The Institut bouddhique in Laos   185 Ivarsson, Søren. “Cultural Nationalism in a Colonial Context: Laos in French Indochina, 1893–1940.” In Recherches nouvelles sur le Laos, edited by Y. Goudineau and M. Lorrillard, pp. 237–58. Vientiane/Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2006. Ivarsson, Søren. Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860–1945. Copenhague: nias Press, 2008. Kamala Tiyavanich. Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-­Century Thailand. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 1997. Karpelès, Suzanne. “L’institut d’Études Bouddhiques au Cambodge et au Laos.” Académie des sciences coloniales, Comptes rendus des séances, communications XVI (1931): 419–426. Khing Hoc Dy. “Suzanne Karpelès and the Buddhist Institute.” Siksācakr 8–9 (2006–2007): 55–59. Kourilsky, Gregory. “L’institut bouddhique au Laos (1930–1949), les circonstances de sa création, son action, son échec.” MA dissertation, Section des Sciences religieuses, École pratique des hautes études (Paris), 2006. Kourilsky, Gregory. “De part et d’autre du Mékong: le bouddhisme du Mahā Sila,” Péninsule 56 (2008): 107–142. Ladwig, Patrice. “Prediger der Revolution: Der buddhistische Klerus und seine Verbindungen zur Kommunistischen Bewegung in Laos (1957–1975).” Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 15/1 (2009): 181–197. Lejosne, Jean-­Claude. Journal de voyage de Gerrit van Wuysthoff et de ses assistants au Laos (1641–1642). Metz: Centre de documentation et d’information sur le Laos, 1993 (second edition). Léon, Antoine. Colonisation, enseignement et éducation. Étude historique et comparative. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991. Lévy, Paul. Histoire du Laos. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974. Lorrillard, Michel. “Quelques données relatives à l’historiographie lao.” Bulletin de l’École-française d’Extrême-Orient 86–1 (1999): 219–232. Lux, J. L’Indochine, Histoire d’un siècle, 1943–1944. Les grands dossiers de L’Illustration. Paris: Le livre de Paris, 1993. Marini, Romain de. Relation nouvelle et curieuse du Royaume de Lao. Vientiane: Institut de recherches sur l’art, la littérature et la langue (IRALL), 1990 [1666]. Maspero, Georges. “Say-­Fong. Une ville morte.” Bulletin de l’École-française d’ExtrêmeOrient 3 (1903): 1–17. McDaniel, Justin Thomas. Gathering the Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos. Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 1999. Meyer, Roland. Le Laos. Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient, 1930. NAC, “Le Secrétaire général du Royaume à Monsieur le Commissaire du Gouvernement à Luang-­Prabang),” Kingdom of Luang Prabang, n°68, 28 April 1937, signed by King Sisavang Vong).  Prince Phetsarath. “Le calendrier lao.” France-­Asie 12, special issue Presence du Royaume du Laos, pays du million d’éléphants et du parasol blanc (1956): pp. 787–814. Renaud, Jean. Le Laos, Dieux, bonzes et montagnes. Paris: Aléxis Redier, 1930. Sila Viravong. Chao Maha Uparad Phetsarath—[S.M. viceroy Phetsarath]. Vientiane: Dokked, 2003. Sila Viravong. Jivit phukha attajivapavat khamkorn Buddhatamnay 16 kham lae kornlam jumpi 2487—[“My Life,” Autobiography, 16 Buddhist prediction texts, together with poems written from 1944]. Vientiane: Douangdeuane Bounyavong, 2004.

186   Gregory Kourilsky Singaravélou, Pierre. L’École française d’Extrême-Orient ou l’institution des marges (1898–1956). Essai d’histoire sociale et politique de la science coloniale. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. Skilling, Peter and Jason A. Carbine, Claudio Cicuzza, Santi Pakdeekham (eds), How Theravāda is Theravāda: Exploring Buddhist Identities. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012. Somlith Phathammavong. Laos, pays du million d’éléphants. Vientiane: Laophanit Prining house, 1950. Sulak Sivaraksa. “Venerating Maha Sila Viravong.” Seeds of Peace 21/2 (2548 [2005]): 41–43. Zago, Marcel. Rites et cérémonies en milieu bouddhiste lao. Roma: Università Gregoriana Editrice, 1972.

Part IV

Students of the empire

10 Beni Madhab Barua and the study of Buddhism in Calcutta c.1918 to 1948 Gitanjali Surendran

In the main, there are two types of literatures on the modern Buddhist revival movement in India. The first, what I call the “British Discovery of Buddhism” school, examines the many achievements of Western and particularly British colonial, archaeologists, philologists, cartographers, missionaries and adventurers, in unearthing India and indeed Asia’s Buddhist heritage.1 This body of texts focuses on the Victorian fascination with the figure of the Buddha and his faith. The outcome of this surge in interest in the Buddha was a series of archaeological and philological undertakings that traced Buddhism’s rise and fall in India and its subsequent spread to other parts of Asia. It was during the second half of the nineteenth century that British archaeologists and historians suggested that there had been a “Buddhist period” in Indian history and that some of India’s finest artistic, literary, and social achievements occurred during that purportedly golden period. A second type of literature examines the Buddhist conversion of B.R. Ambedkar, chief draftsman of the Indian Constitution and prominent Dalit leader, in 1956 as a watershed moment in modern Indian history.2 Written in the light of caste politics and that of the disappointments of many with the post Independence state, this literature examines Buddhism’s impact on the Dalit movement as a liberation theology of sorts. I argue that there was an important intervening modern history of Buddhist revival, a veritable “Indian Discovery of Buddhism,” from about 1891–1892, the year of the establishment of the Mahabodhi Society headquarters, until 1956, the year of Ambedkar’s conversion. This “native” discourse was many layered and involved members of the emerging public sphere. In fact, from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, Buddhism was “discovered” and “rediscovered, “imagined” and “reimagined” in India. The double bind of modernity and colonialism were critical to these processes of imagination. In the colonial context, the British claims to superiority were certainly most evident in the arena of the material which included modes of economic and political organization and science and technology.3 While many Indians seemed to agree that the West dominated the material domain, they initiated a range of discussions around the Indian spiritual and staked a claim for their own identity and superiority in this realm. I argue that one such response was carried out through the

190   Gitanjali Surendran pretext of discussions on Buddhism, the native study of Buddhism, attempts at its revival as a religion of practice, and its resurrection in the nationalist and popular imagination. Yet to view this discourse as merely a reaction to colonialism or to the interest in Buddhism in the West would be problematic. Through a careful reading of the texts produced in the wake of these discussions, we have a window to a broad range of concerns and adventures of vision on the part of the “native” discussants that challenge nationalist and post-­colonial narratives of this period’s history.4 In this phase, marked by the activities of various revivalists, academics, nationalists, and writers united in their admiration for Buddhism and their commitment to its revival in India, certain ideas of Buddhism took hold in the public sphere. These very ideas appealed to Ambedkar and resulted in his own adoption of Buddhism as a potentially emancipatory faith for the lowest and most disenfranchised in the caste hierarchy and thereby, in Indian society. The spread of ideas about Buddhism took place through a discursive process involving intellectuals, scholars, activists, journalists, writers, and ordinary members of the public who discussed ideas on Buddhism in venues like study groups, social and religious reform societies, universities, and in their drawing rooms. Ideas circulated among them and made their way into newspapers, textbooks, journals, and lectures, into the broader public thus casting the relationship between Buddhism and Indian modernity as seamless. During this phase India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, often cited Buddhism as India’s greatest contribution to human history and framed many of his early foreign policy initiatives related to India’s international standing, in terms that drew attention to India’s Buddhist history.5 Consequently, from the 1890s onward, Buddhism emerged both as a major field of research in Indian universities and as an important topic of discussion in the emerging public sphere. Edwin Arnold’s long poem-­ode to the Buddha, The Light of Asia, published in 1879 was a runaway success not only in England, but in India too. Within a few decades of its publication it was translated into emerging Indian print languages. The first Pali department (that later became a full-­ fledged Buddhist Studies department) was set up in Calcutta University in the first decade of the twentieth century. Many other universities followed suit. In the early 1880s, the Theosophical Society set up its offices in Adyar. Anagarika Dharmapala, the activist from colonial Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) and sometime disciple of the Theosophists Henry Olcott and H.P. Blavatsky, founded the Mahabodhi Society and established its headquarters in Calcutta in 1891. Dharmapala became friendly with Swami Vivekananda, the star of the 1893 World Parliament of Religions and the founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, while at the Parliament in Chicago in 1893. By 1895, Dharmapala had launched his campaign for a Buddhist reclamation of the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya from the Saivite sect that had occupied it. In Calcutta, Sarat Chandra Das, a former British spy in Tibet, had started the Buddhist Text Society on the lines of the Pali Text Society headed by the Buddhologist T.W. Rhys Davids in England. By the early twentieth century, the emerging traffic in Buddhist ideas was matched by an emerging traffic in Buddhist relics as well as the development of a

The study of Buddhism in Calcutta   191 Buddhist pilgrimage trail. In 1909, the Peshawar relics were unearthed by archaeologists and something of a public debate ensued in Calcutta about where these relics should be housed.6 At a gathering in Presidency College in Calcutta that year, protestors asked that the relics remain in India. Eventually, the British distributed them to Burma, Siam (modern day Thailand) and Sri Lanka in a kind of relic diplomacy later deployed by the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who sent the Sanchi relics to parts of Southeast Asia as well as the Himalayan regions of the subcontinent. In the meantime, in the beginning of the twentieth century, Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kusinara among other sacred Buddhist sites were settled by monks from Burma (modern day Myanmar), Sri Lanka, and other parts of the Buddhist world. By the 1910s and 1920s, Buddhism was often the subject of public discourse with numerous journals, revivalist societies, and study circles focused on Buddhism. It is in this period, just as the Indian nationalist movement for freedom from British colonial rule took off, that Buddhism offered to nationalists and every hue of political activist a kind of homegrown religion or philosophy that appeared to provide an answer to some of the most pressing issues of the day as varied as caste, lack of rational thinking, Hindu-­Muslim violence, modernization of the economy, social reform, and even the emerging arms race in the Western world. The colonial context of this recapture and the rehabilitation of Buddhism is of course crucial to the story of modern Indian Buddhism. The British themselves saw the return of a seemingly vanished Buddhist history to India as one of the great gifts of British colonialism. The colonial study of archaeology, philology, and history made certain aspects of Buddhist revival possible in India. First, it provided a clear sense of origins. India’s historical role in Buddhism, while always intuited, was now elevated to the realm of fact. Archaeological and philological evidence supported claims that India was where the Buddha was born, where he attained Enlightenment, where he preached his famous sermons and performed miracles and finally, where he passed into mahaparinibbana, i.e., where he died.7 It was also in India where the Buddhist canon, in Pali and Sanskrit, were scripted. Second, with this knowledge of India’s role in the emergence of Buddhism, India was placed firmly at the heart of the new sacred geography, scholars of Buddhism plotted the route by which Buddhism left India’s shores and traveled to East and Southeast Asia thus creating a palpable idea of a Buddhist world. Third, with Buddhism’s secular history plotted and various inscriptions and texts deciphered and translated, new figures emerged from the light cast upon them, of academic history for possible public consumption. These included the Buddha himself, and a number of his disciples and royal propagators including the all-­important figure of the Mauryan king, Asoka. Fourth, with Buddhism now “empiricized,” exact numbers of followers were known, exact routes and texts were known and Buddhist statues/images/artifacts dated. Fifth, colonialism established modern educational institutions in India and a new era in the academic study of India was inaugurated in the late nineteenth century. The study of India occurred through modern Western academic disciplines like history, literature, and Indology, deploying particular protocols of

192   Gitanjali Surendran evidence and inquiry. It was at these new educational venues that Indians too were trained in these disciplines and themselves undertook the study of Indian history and religions. Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown that the modern study of history in India began at the crucible of the arrival of modern knowledge regimes and the emergence of cultural nationalism, both a result of India’s colonial connection.8 Hence calls for a deep engagement with the “science of history” from men as varied as the poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore and the Indologist R.G. Bhandarkar were premised on the superiority of the West in the area of knowledge. These calls were meant to ignite Indian research into Indian history. The assumption was that a kind of universal narrative would emerge that could simultaneously inform and stimulate ordinary people’s understanding of their history. This was envisaged as a top-­down affair but as an increasing number of people became involved in nationalist politics, the universalist impulse of the history-­writing endeavor began to be questioned. As Partha Chatterjee and Ranajit Guha have shown, for the emerging educated class in Bengal, this study of Indian history was an act of power and reclamation.9 Often, these scholars (amateur and professional) followed European schemata in positing a glorious ancient past which they contrasted with a venal and effete present. In the pursuit of a “scientific” and universal history, Buddhism emerged as a significant part of the “ancient glory” of India. Consequently, in Calcutta, in the 1910s through until the 1950s, the study of Buddhism thrived. Calcutta University was the first in the country to institute a Pali Studies program in 1907 that shortly thereafter became a full-­fledged department. The creation of a Pali Studies program speaks too of the Theravada origins of Buddhist revival in India. In fact, the two chief revivalists in Calcutta, Anagarika Dharmapala who started the Mahabodhi Society and Kripasaran Mahathera who started the Bengal Buddhist Association, were both deeply invested in Theravada Buddhism though both were careful to project a reformed Buddhism that on the face of it was not aligned to a particular school of Buddhism. In India, the study of Buddhism through the study of Pali and Sanskrit played an important role in the public imagination of Buddhism. I will examine the investments in Buddhism on the part of a well-­known Buddhologist based in Calcutta named Beni Madhab Barua from about 1918 when he published his first major work on Buddhism to 1946, shortly before he died, when he took part in the Indian Philosophical Congress at Delhi. Not only was Barua an active academician, publishing numerous articles and several important books, he was also a prominent member of the Mahabodhi Society and the Bengal Buddhist Association. Besides, he was part of a group of professional and amateur scholars who studied and discussed Buddhism to various ends. Barua therefore was both a scholar and an activist.

Beni Madhab Barua’s formative influences Barua was born in 1888 in a Mahamuni Pahartali village in Chittagong, into a prominent family that was interested in Buddhism. A competent student, he

The study of Buddhism in Calcutta   193 matriculated with excellent results and entered Chittagong Government College in 1906, eventually completing a Masters degree in Pali with a first class in 1913. He traveled to England to begin doctoral studies in 1914 after receiving a state scholarship. In 1917, he was awarded a Doctorate of Literature for a thesis titled “Indian philosophy—its origin and growth from the Vedas to the Buddha” from the University of London, reputedly the first Asian to receive this degree. In 1918, his essay Prolegomena to a History of Buddhist Philosophy was published by Calcutta University Press shortly after winning an appointment there as University Lecturer. In 1925, he was appointed University Professor of Pali. He was affiliated to other universities in India, Burma and Sri Lanka but it was as a professor at Calcutta University that he published most of his work. Besides this, he was an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal and was closely associated with the Bengal Buddhist Association, the Mahabodhi Society, and Ramakrishna Mission among others. He served as editor of Jagajjyoti (the journal of the Bengal Buddhist Association) and Viswabani for a time, and was founding editor of the short-­lived Buddhist India and the slightly longer­lived Indian Culture. Barua was born more than two decades after a major Buddhist revival had begun in Chittagong, the last outpost of Buddhism in Bengal, and indeed one of the only places in undivided India with a substantial Buddhist following. In 1855, a prominent Arakan monk, Saramitra Mahasthavir, the sangharaja of the Arakan Theravada Bhikkhu sangha, arrived in Chittagong and set up a new sangha which he called Sangharaja Nikaya.10 His aim was to reform Buddhist practice in Chittagong which at that time was heavily influenced by Tantrism. He enforced the laws of vinaya among monks and began a movement to expunge practices like animal sacrifice and idol worship, which he declared to be not in keeping with pure Theravada Buddhism. While little else is known about this revival, it certainly could not have taken place without considerable local tension. Yet it also produced a number of important Buddhist monks who in turn became important local leaders of the somewhat beleaguered Buddhist community in Chittagong. Barua therefore grew up at a time of great ferment and change in Chittagong. Early on, we are told that he dropped the family title of “Talukder” (which implied that his family had held an administrative post in the area and possibly controlled some land) in favor of “Barua,” a much more recognizably Buddhist title emanating from Chittagong.11 He occasionally referred to the problems that Buddhists faced in Chittagong as a minority community in Bengal.12 In London, Barua’s main teacher was the British orientalist T.W. Rhys Davids, who had been a colonial official in Sri Lanka and later turned to the study of Buddhism, a field in which he left his mark with a number of well-­ known publications. By all accounts, Barua got along well with Rhys Davids and the latter’s influence on his early work is unmistakable. Rhys Davids often bemoaned the lack of a “connected” history of India13 (though he cannot be credited with being the first to make this observation). Rhys Davids’ reading of Indian history was a sympathetic one in which he discerned cultures of intellectual

194   Gitanjali Surendran reflection and distinct intellectual trends and schools.14 He criticized existing work on Indian philosophy for what he perceived as an overemphasis on Brahmanical, Sanskrit texts15 to the neglect of lay movements. He too discerned Buddhism as originally a lay movement rather than a priestly one.16 He viewed Buddhism as a kind of civilization-­giving force, a sentiment that Barua too held as we shall see below.17 But perhaps Barua’s most important formative influence was the scholarly peer group he enjoyed in Calcutta from the 1920s up till his death in 1948. Men like Hara Prasada Sastri, Satis Chandra Vidyabhusan, Nalinaksha Dutt, Bimala Churn Law, D.R. Bhandarkar and later Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan were formidable scholars in their own right. They published extensively on subjects relating to Buddhist studies, ancient India, and Indian philosophy. They were often members of the same revivalist organizations, regularly held office in these societies and addressed gatherings of like-­minded middle-­class, educated men. Thus, Barua was part of a discursive community18 in the public sphere of colonial Calcutta in the 1920s to the 1940s. The group comprised mostly, but not exclusively, English educated elite men who were mostly, but not exclusively, Bengali. Some were professional scholars who held positions in the famous Calcutta University but others were amateur scholars with enough of a body of work behind them to enter these discussions at various fora—formal and informal. While the Royal Asiatic Society provided those so inclined with a forum for interaction with European scholars, this group created their own platforms where the European presence was considerably less but which none the less looked international. One such organization was the Mahabodhi Society established in Calcutta in 1891 by Anagarika Dharmapala (see above). Over the years, the Mahabodhi Society saw the active participation of a host of well-­known academicians, well-­known members of the legal profession, famous nationalists, and international figures, some from the West certainly, but many from Southeast and East Asia (i.e., Burma, Japan, China). The prominent members of the Mahabodhi Society from the 1910s to the 1940s all knew each other well and were often very good friends, dedicating books to each other, jointly editing journals, discussing ideas and sharing experiences. Many of the prominent participants in the Mahabodhi Society were also office bearers in that other important though much less famous Buddhist revivalist organization—the Bengal Buddhist Association. In fact, one could go as far as to say that being part of one or another organization in colonial Calcutta’s prolific and prolixic public sphere was a sign of a sound education and a mark of prestige. Membership of these societies and study circles also gave these men the opportunity to ideate with like-­minded men. In modern Calcutta, new forms of urban sociability in new venues, like the university, mushrooming research institutes and reform and revival organizations, emerged, and men like Barua and his peers interacted at these venues.19 B.M. Barua was one of the more prominent participants in these fora. As one of Calcutta’s foremost scholars of Buddhism over a three-­decade long career, he often wore two hats. His publishing career represents a keen attempt to understand Buddhism historically and philosophically, as well as a living religion with

The study of Buddhism in Calcutta   195 positive implications for the future of India and her inhabitants. Although colonialism and nationalism did not figure overtly, his scholarship bore the stamp of both contexts. His interest lay in understanding the history and current state of Indian society and finding solutions to its manifold problems, through his knowledge-­project of investigating Buddhism. He wrote therefore both highly academic pieces on Buddhist and Indian thought as well as more political pieces for popular consumption deploying his research on and personal belief in Buddhism in various ways. A sympathetic reading of his work reveals very real attempts at tackling the problems of history according to the methodologies of his discipline as well as the ethics of his faith.

Barua’s academic Buddhism Barua made a distinction early on between Buddhism as a religion and Buddhism as a philosophy. His academic career, in its first phase which began with the publication of Prolegomena to a History of Buddhist Philosophy in 1918, was absorbed with understanding Buddhism as a movement of thought, as pure philosophy in the Indian context. (He frequently emphasized Buddhism’s distinctly Indian origins). He placed Buddhism among a constellation of other Indian schools of thought to try to present a “connected” picture of Indian thoughts systems with an emphasis on how these influenced each other. He suggested that understanding pre-­existing designations like “Hindu,” “Vedanta” or “Buddhist” as fully finished products in history had little value. A more enabling approach was to think of them as philosophies-­in-the-­making, never complete, always in dialogue. Therefore, any Hindu who believed that “everything was done for him in a finished form by the Risis of old, long before the appearance of two powerful heresies, known as Jainism and Buddhism”20 would be disappointed if he seriously surveyed the history of Indian thought. Thus he was keen to carve a place for Buddhism in the history of Indian philosophy. Rather than see Buddhism as something that stood out of Indian history as a single beacon of light in an otherwise bleak landscape (as some commentators were apt to do), he championed a study of Buddhism that saw it as an outcome of various thought currents, and as living on in Indian thought, and social and religious institutions long after it was said to have “declined” as a religion. The implication of his approach was that Buddhism as a religion too had a history anchored in the history of Indian thought. So while the Buddha was certainly an “author of religion,” religion itself was an unintended outcome of his philosophy.21 He used textual traditions, the Buddha’s preoccupation with the law of causation and genesis and Buddhism’s resonance with Upanishadic ideas to support these claims. To this he added historical evidence related to the Buddha’s context—that he lived in a time of tremendous philosophical and speculative ferment in Magadha and quite remarkable receptiveness to various shades of opinion—and it is clear that he was first and foremost a philosopher. Following Carolyn Rhys-­Davids, he too saw the Buddha’s ideas as a “milestone in the history of human ideas.”22

196   Gitanjali Surendran Therefore, Barua saw both the development and decline of Buddhism as philosophy as “processes.” It was in his view that Buddhism was “a distinct movement of thought realizing itself through different channels. The beginning and the end of the movement are unknown.…”23 These processes had to be studied in conjunction with changing social, political, and economic contexts. An understanding of Buddhism following the method of a history of philosophy was therefore, for him, a sounder method for interpreting Indian literature, religion, sciences, and arts that followed. This was the precise gap in the scholarship into which he wished to insert himself. To provide two examples of conclusions that he reached using this method that proved to be a departure from the general trend of thinking on the subject at the time, he argued that though Sankaracarya’s movement is viewed as ringing the death knell of Buddhism in South India, in fact many of Sankaracarya’s ideas could themselves be seen as originating in Buddhist philosophical thinking. The second example can be found in his work on the Ajivika sect.24 He argued that a number of heterodox sects came and went, and morphed into other configurations leaving traces behind for the discerning scholarly eye. After tracing the historical and intellectual denouement of the Ajivika sect, he argues that their ideas were absorbed and assimilated to such a degree so as to make them redundant. This placed the issue of the decline of schools of thoughts and sects on a different terrain. Such was the inter-­ connectedness and dynamism of thought currents in ancient India. Like many scholars of his time, he was very preoccupied with understanding the ancient period in Indian history as the time of true breakthroughs in thought—as a time of philosophy. In an era dominated by Buddhist and Vedantic thought, thinkers engaged in “the rigorous treatment of problems and vigorous grasp of principles.”25 The modern period, in his opinion (which comprised the last 1,000 years or so) was an age of poetry and epics; i.e., it was an epoch of “religion” characterized by song, legend, ecstasy, prayer, and superstition. Chaitanya, Ram Prasad and Vivekananda were certainly fine poets/prophets in his view but they were not men who handled questions methodically with an inquiring mind. Furthermore, the existence of vibrant Indian philosophical thinking and traditions in the ancient period debunked the then current views of an “unchanging East” (he cites Matthew Arnold in this regard26). In sum, he makes a case for an Indian philosophy quite on par with that of the West. Though he never explicitly says so, embedded in this assertion of an Indian philosophy was a call for more “Indians” to engage in such scholarly undertakings. In a publisher’s preface to Barua’s work on Barhut, Satis Chandra Seal notes that previous European scholarly accounts on the stupa were “detached.”27 Indian scholars would instead imbue their research and scholarship with a special affect borne of the simple fact of their Indian-­ness. The next phase of Barua’s writing involved the writing of “total history” using not just philosophical texts but also different Indological methods and a variety of sources to interpret and understand the object under study. So Barua departed from pure textual study as was the style of Buddhist studies, to explore a wider range of disciplines and sources including archaeology, folklore studies,

The study of Buddhism in Calcutta   197 and art history. Besides studying language and literary forms, he used epigraphical sources, material remains, local legends and other scholarly works in his monographs on Barhut (a famous Buddhist stupa that was discovered by Sir Alexander Cunningham and housed in the Indian Museum in Calcutta), Gaya and Bodh Gaya and on Asoka. His monograph Barhut was published in 1934 by the Indian Research Institute in Calcutta. A very detailed work on the art, structure, and inscriptions of the Barhut stupa, methodologically he again emphasized the need to view the making of structures like Barhut as a process. Using “stone as a story-­teller” he weaves a detailed history of the stupa applying a model of successive accumulation to the structure and placing it squarely in the history of the rise and fall of Buddhism. In a similar vein, his work on Gaya and Bodh Gaya (also published in 1934) refers to prior scholarship and accounts of the pilgrimage site to make a case for why it was so important to Buddhists. Sources included Chinese travelers’ accounts, the Sri Lankan chronicles, Asokan inscriptions, literature, actual field visits, art history, and close study of actual material remains. Shortly after this series of publications, Barua also wrote his monumental work Asoka and His Inscriptions though it was finally published only in 1946. This phase of scholarship was dominated, in a Hegelian vein, by the “widening of historical vision” deploying the “scientific” and philosophical study of history as a comprehensive view of the “collective life-­movement” of a society (in this case, India). Just before the publication of Asoka, Barua delivered the presidential address of the Ancient India section of the Indian History Congress in December 1945 at Annamalai in the Madras Presidency. In it he describes what he means by “collective life-­movement” and his increasing stress on the historical method, namely, the chronology of events and the study of geography: If we agree to understand by the history of a country, its collective life-­ movement shaping the course and determining the character of a distinct form of culture and type of civilization with certain territorial limits and a definite period of time, it becomes incumbent on the historian as much to define spatially the territorial limits as to make a clear chronological setting of events in terms of time.28 In “widening” the historical vision, Barua sought to juxtapose the histories of religion, philosophy and politics with attention to precise geographical location and spatialities, and development of historical chronologies. This required a wide-­ranging use of sources with a keen critical eye on existing historiography and scholarship across a number of relevant fields, to write as complete a history of Asoka as was then possible. In this late phase in his career, he defined Buddhism thus: by Buddhism is meant a distinct body of culture or a distinct movement of civilization with its historical background in the literature, religions and philosophies, as well as in the social, educational and other institutions of India. This body of culture or movement of civilization has for its vital force

198   Gitanjali Surendran an inspiration and guidance ever sought to be derived from contemplation of the personality, the message, the teaching, the example, and the tradition of a highly gifted individual called the Buddha.… Thus to contemplate Early Buddhism is mainly to consider that vital energy or inherent force of Buddhism in the earlier phases of its articulation and development by which various aspects of human culture or civilization gradually developed or could develop at all.29 In 1946 he delivered a lecture at the Indian Philosophical Congress in Delhi titled “Role of Buddhism in Indian Life and Thought.” In it, Barua once again addressed the issue of whether Buddhism was a philosophy or a religion. At the end of his career, it is clear that Barua had somewhat modified his earlier stance. Taking a cue from Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, the eminent Indian historian of philosophy and second President of India, Barua agreed that Buddhism was psychological, logical, and ethical. Yet he disagrees with Radhakrishnan on one point. Unlike the latter, he felt that Buddhism did indeed have a metaphysical component and was indeed a religion if by religion was meant a “search for truth and the path of progress and salvation” and “a right endeavour of man to rise above himself and the world.”30 He concluded by suggesting that Buddhism was important after all as both a philosophy and a religion, a position with which he was not satisfied in 1918. While Radhakrishnan took religion and rationality to be two opposite ends of the spectrum, by this stage in his career, Barua rejected this binary. Barua felt that Buddhism was something more than a philosophy and a religion, something he called a “life-­movement,” something akin to an entire cultural and civilizational force. His search for a precise characterization of Buddhism reflected a struggle to reimagine Indian religions as worthy of philosophical study. In their scholarly training, religion was represented as the opposite of rationality and therefore philosophy. There was a recognition on the part of many Indian scholars of their own troubled suspension between Western philosophy and Indian religion, presented as opposite poles of the spectrum. A duality emerged—in their journeys to develop new scholarship they also strove to create a new identity for India and for themselves as Indians. Hence did Radhakrishnan declare “the tradition of India does not demand intellectual death as the essential prerequisite for spiritual life.”31 Rather than deny altogether that Indians were driven by a profound belief in the efficacies of tradition, they sought to instead address the question of thought in tradition (and religion) in order to portray tradition as backed by a discernible thought process if not philosophy. Instead of denying altogether that Buddhism was a religion, they sought to interpret it as a religion originating in philosophy. Thus, even after a lifetime of study, for Barua, the question of how to characterize Buddhism remained uppermost on his mind. In resolving this dilemma, Barua was partly rebelling against disciplinary and epistemological constraints that arose from his own training in methods and disciplines primarily sourced in the European academy. Yet while the study of Buddhism served as a means for

The study of Buddhism in Calcutta   199 him to reimagine Indian history and philosophy and indeed India’s past, it also served as a means for him to reimagine India’s future. He achieved the latter through his activist work.

Barua’s activist Buddhism In his activist career, Barua’s primary concern was with Buddhism as a fitting faith for a nation coming into its own. Barua’s writings in revivalist journals and transcripts of his speeches to various audiences were dominated by the idea that Buddhism was completely modern. Like other scholars and activists, Barua suggested that the Buddha was a man before his time as his ideas and theories had immense relevance for the modern day, strife-­ridden world. Many modern ideas that were seen as products of Western philosophical endeavors were in fact already circulating in Buddhist philosophy and practice. Everywhere he lectured, he highlighted the specific qualities that Buddhism had to offer modern society. These included tolerance, scientific rationality, egalitarianism (i.e., abandoning caste, racial or ethnic distinctions), compassion, gender equality, brotherhood of human-­beings, and finally, freedom. These qualities of Buddhism made it a perfect faith for the times, completely in sync with ideas of democracy and ethics. Therefore, the widespread practice of and conversion to Buddhism could solve many of India’s and indeed, the world’s problems. When he propagated the spread of Buddhism as a practical religion, as he often did, he advocated Buddhism’s universalism. As a scholar, he engaged in the study of Buddhism to understand it as a distinctly Indian philosophy and as an outcome of the Indian historical context. As an advocate of the Buddhist revival, he suggested that Buddhism was primarily a universal religion. However, to understand Buddhism’s universal aspects, Buddhism had to be removed from history. The Buddha had to be thought of as an abstract personality both located in but also exceeding Siddhartha’s actual historical biography. Similarly, in thinking about Buddhism as universally appealing, historical specificities such different sects, texts, and traditions also had to be set aside. Buddhism as an abstract concept could mean many things to many people and admit many different opinions. Buddhism in practice had no place for the dogmatist, skeptic, or formalist.32 This was the model of Buddhism that he projected in practice. Thus, though he leaned early in his academic career toward Mahayana Buddhist textual traditions, later he was very careful to avoid coming down on either side of the divide between Sanskrit Mahayana and Pali Theravada. This emphasis on Buddhism’s universality did not mean that he stopped emphasizing India’s position in Buddhist history. In various speeches and lectures as well as in his academic work, Barua drew attention to India’s place as the land of the Buddha’s birth and of Buddhism’s origin. In a series of lectures in Sri Lanka, he made frequent mention of India’s so-­called civilizational contributions to Sri Lanka that extended, in his view, beyond culture to include commerce, industry, administration, philanthropy, linguistics etc. He often spoke of “common national bonds” and “common culture and civilization.”33 Further, he

200   Gitanjali Surendran had by then developed an idea of “Indo-­Aryanism” which was a broad designation for the civilizational context from which Buddhism arose. He went so far as to say that the way for Buddhism was paved in Sri Lanka by other itinerant Indo­Aryan preachers who had visited the island prior to the coming of Asoka’s missionaries. This idea of Indo-­Aryan civilization as subsuming all thought currents was one that was regularly discussed in Barua’s study and revivalist circles. Buddhism as being the best of Indo-­Aryanism and being a vehicle for its spread to other parts of Asia was a rather fashionable idea at this time.34 But it tied in with his argument that Buddhism was a culture-­giving, civilization-­bestowing, life-­movement. He promoted this idea in his activist work tirelessly. Upon these foundations was built the idea of a Buddhist world that stressed allegiances between Buddhists across Asia based on a shared faith. Dharmapala was instrumental in pushing for this idea of a united Buddhist world to revitalize Buddhism. The issue used to rally Buddhists around Asia and the world was the campaign he led to place the management of the Mahabodhi temple in Bodh Gaya, believed to be the place of Buddha’s Enlightenment, in Buddhist hands. Barua therefore had to negotiate both the calls for Buddhist internationalism and his own commitment to Indian concerns. In 1927, after having already become a quite regular figure at the Mahabodhi Society and Bengal Buddhist Association gatherings, Barua established his own academic-­activist journal in partnership with Dharma Aditya Dharmacharyya called Buddhist India. Though we do not know for sure, it is probably not a ­coincidence that it was named after one of Rhys David’s most popular books. The quarterly journal was short-­lived, publishing just three volumes from 1927, 1928, and 1929. But in its short life it brought together a number of Buddhist studies scholars and advocates of Buddhist revival. The goals of the journal were quite ambitious. In the first issue, the editors declared that the journal was not an organ of any particular Buddhist mission and made no distinction “between Hinayana and Mahayana, Pali and Sanskrit, ancient and modern.”35 It also aimed at providing a cultural link between India and the “Far East” and was meant to promote an exchange of ideas between peoples in the Buddhist world. The journal had both international and national concerns. While the position of India in Buddhism’s history was always foregrounded, Barua and Dharmacharyya were also keen to promote a vision of a united Buddhist world, an idea then current in revivalist circles.36 Barua and Dharmacharyya made attempts to substantiate their claim that Buddhism already contained the values and ethics of the modernity. Buddhist India regularly carried news of some of the most important debates of the day. For instance, in the late 1920s, the age of consent for women was a hotly debated topic in Calcutta. In an editorial in March 1928, the two editors point out that among Buddhists, marriage was a civil contract rather than a sacrament (as among Hindus). With regard to the actual age of marriage, the Buddha himself was married at the age of 20 to Yashodhara who was 16. Even as long ago as the sixth century bce, the bride and groom were conscious of their duties and enjoyed some element of choice with regard to their life partner. Their only son

The study of Buddhism in Calcutta   201 was born when she was 25 years old and he, 29. Child marriage and child widows were unheard of at this time apparently. They go on to endorse Harbilas Sarda’s Child Marriage Restraint Bill which aimed to raise the age of consent to be raised to 14 years.37 Here again, they made the case that a practice that was completely modern and appropriate in the most civilized of societies was already in vogue among Buddhists centuries ago, starting with the Buddha himself! By way of a substantial plan, they suggested that certain important days on the Buddhist calendar be declared as holidays, that an international Buddhist university be established, that Buddhist educational schools be set up for Buddhist missionaries, that there be more facilities for the study of Pali, Sanskrit, and Buddhist literature and that some education in either or both be made compulsory, that Buddhist texts be translated and published widely, that Buddhist libraries, museums, and societies be set up and that travel be encouraged to Buddhist pilgrimage sites. Through the journal, they made a number of appeals for support for an international Buddhist conference that, however, never quite materialized. While little is known about Barua’s own personal practice, he certainly considered himself a Buddhist. He advocated widespread conversion to Buddhism in order to ensure a more modern, peaceful, and just future for India. Buddhism in his view would pave the way for the development of modern institutions in India and ease the path of a potentially fraught transition to modernity.

Conclusion Barua’s work was not always received warmly. To give an example, his lecture in Sri Lanka called “Buddhism as Buddha’s Personal Religion”38 provoked at least one strong reaction evidenced in the pages of the Mahabodhi Society journal.39 H.D. Ratnatunga, mentioned as a Crown Proctor in Tangalle, reacted sharply to Barua’s lecture. He criticized Barua on the grounds of his application of scientific, philosophic, and logical methods to interpret Buddhism. He completely rejected Barua’s analytical lens of placing Buddhism among the constellation of Indian schools of thought. He also dismissed the view of Buddhism as a system of ethics. Besides, he accused Barua of suggesting that Buddhism had a theory of “soul/self ” or “atta” where in fact, Buddhism’s chief characteristic was “anatta” or “not self.” True Buddhist insight was only possible through deep contemplation of Buddhist doctrine in solitude with instruction either from the Buddha himself or someone who can trace his lineage to him in some way. Of course, this attack constituted a complete dismissal of the study of Buddhism in the manner in which Barua and other scholars had attempted it. Barua responded sharply to this critique in detail.40 Denying altogether that he was ascribing a theory of soul to the Buddha, and reiterating his own belief in the efficacy of Buddhist thought, he defended his analytical approach and criticized Ratnatunga’s seemingly un-­probing faith in Buddhist doctrine. Ratnatunga’s critique signals a tension between those who studied and analyzed Buddhism in the relatively new formal university and education

202   Gitanjali Surendran structures and those who undertook the study of Buddhism in the older mode of the teacher-­disciple relationship. It revealed the tension that still existed in an era when Buddhism was being deployed to many different ends, as a salve for the pain of modern living and hope for a better future. Barua sought to defend the methodologies that he had worked so hard to elaborate in his scholarship on Buddhism. It was precisely through this methodological reflection that he could make the claim of having carried out a “scientific” study of Buddhism, producing universal knowledge. Thus, through his study of Buddhism and his Buddhist activist involvements, Barua reimagined Indian history and philosophy and India’s future. Like many other Indian scholars, Barua undertook to find a solution to an identity crisis that he as a scholar faced while also trying to solve India’s manifold problems. At a time of anti-­colonial nationalism and competing visions of nation, society, and history, scholars like Barua were faced with the same crisis of “self-­identity” that “national culture” faced.41 The West’s dominance in the material sphere was widely accepted by Indian nationalists but this was not the case in the spiritual arena. In that domain, a case for Indian superiority was made. For Barua too, Buddhism was a “new vehicle of expression”42 through which he could express his concerns both as a scholar and as an activist, and make assertions about the superiority of Indian thought, reject modern categories like “religion” itself and the distinction between religion and rationality, and make a social reform program drawing on the best of Indian history and religion with Buddhism at its core.

Notes   1 See for example, Almond, British Discovery; Allen, The Search; Franklin, The Lotus.   2 See for example, Ahir, Buddhism in Modern India; Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution; Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar; Zelliot, From Untouchable.   3 For more on this, see Chatterjee, The Nation, especially pp. 119–121.   4 For instance, discussions often reference what Kris Manjapra has referred to as “deterritorial” frames, i.e., attempts were made to think of communities quite apart from or exceeding the purely territorially bounded national one of “India.” Anagarika Dharmapala, the founder of the Mahabodhi Society, advocated a brand of Buddhist internationalism that stressed allegiances between people across national boundaries on the basis of a shared Buddhist faith. Standard nationalist narratives have written out these attempts at imagining transnational ties and communities. See Manjara, M.N. Roy.   5 See his speeches in volumes 19, 29, 30, 31 in Gopal (ed.), Selected Works. He often prefaced his speeches in gatherings in Southeast and East Asia with a claim to a shared culture based on the spread of Indian Buddhism.   6 The Journal of the Mahabodhi Society, 17:10, October 1909.   7 To be clear, in fact, the Buddha was born in Lumbini which is in current day Nepal, very close to the Indian border. There has been some debate about the Buddha’s place of birth. As recently as December 30, Times of India, a widely read Indian newspaper carried a story about some new research from Orissa that suggests that the Buddha was born in that province!   8 Chakrabarty, “The Public Life of History.”   9 See Chatterjee, “Alternative Histories,” and Guha, An Indian Historiography.

The study of Buddhism in Calcutta   203 10 Details from Barua, Devapriya. “Role of Kripasaran.” 11 The Buddhist priests or raulis of Chittagong had two titles—Barua raulis from Chittagong and Chakma raulis from the Chittagong Hill Tracts. 12 In the first lecture of a series that he delivered in Sri Lanka in 1944, he referred to the “pathetic story of the struggle of my people for keeping burning the lamp of the Sadharma in secluded corner [sic] against tremendous odds,” in Barua, Ceylon Lectures. 13 See Rhys Davids, Buddhist India. 14 Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, pp. 43–44. 15 Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, p.  2. He writes that scholars had thus far “relied for their information about the India peoples too exclusively on the Brahmin books.” 16 Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, p. 159. 17 For instance, he feels that the hillmen tended to be attracted to “forward” movements like Buddhism as it segued well with their notions of independence. See Buddhist India, p. 33. 18 By this I mean communities of discussion of which there were many in colonial India. Some were short-­lived and some still exist today. Some of these communities existed prior to the colonial period. The numbers involved varied as did the caste, class, and gender of these communities over both space and time. In this instance, I am referring to the broad discoursing groups like the “nationalists,” “Buddhist revivalists,” and “scholars of ancient India.” These communities overlapped and were sometimes broad-­based and sometimes more narrowly focused. But it is helpful to think about different discursive communities to signal layers of discussion and the spillage and circulation of ideas, as well as the nature of the intellectual milieu of scholars like Barua. Ideas about Buddhism were discussed and exchanged within these circuits of intellectuals who then conveyed them to the broader public at meetings of Buddhist revival societies and study circles. The publics here included other literate men interested in rhetoric and involved in journalism and education. These ideas made their way into universities and schools (through textbooks authored by scholar-­members of the discoursing group) and to the public through newspapers, journals, and the literature of some of the trendsetters of the day like Rabindranath Tagore. Thus, somewhat standard sets of ideas about the general outlines of Buddhist history emerged among a much broader public. 19 A fuller discussion of the new forms of urban sociability, see Sarkar, Modern Times; and “Adda, Calcutta.” 20 Barua, The Ajivikas, Part I, p. 76. 21 Barua, “Prolegomena,” p. 31. 22 Barua, “Prolegomena,” p. 29. 23 Barua, “Prolegomena,” p. 57. 24 See Barua, The Ajivikas, Part I. 25 He is therefore quick to criticize what he saw as the indiscriminate use of the epithet “philosopher” for a range of thinkers ranging from Solomon to Chanakya to Confucius. All men of genius in his opinion were not philosophers. 26 Barua, “Prolegomena,” p. 33. 27 Seal, “Publisher’s Note.” 28 The Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, p. 3. 29 Barua, “Early Buddhism,” p. 12. 30 Barua, “Role of Buddhism,” pp. 341–342. 31 Radhakrishnan, “Foreword.” 32 Barua, “Universal Aspect.” 33 Barua, Ceylon Lectures, p. 236. 34 Again, Dharmapala reconciled his attachment to Sinhala exclusivism and Buddhist internationalism by deploying this idea of Indo-­Aryanism. Both the Sinhala ethnic culture and Buddhism were, in his views, among the best representatives of the “Indo­Aryanism” on the Indian subcontinent.

204   Gitanjali Surendran 35 Barua and Dharmcharyya, eds., Buddhist India, p. 80. 36 Anagarika Dharmapala was very absorbed in promoting a kind of Buddhist internationalism that projected the idea of a united Buddhist world. He and the Mahabodhi Society made a number of appeals to other Buddhist sanghas and organizations in Buddhist countries using the return of the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya to Buddhists, to ignite passions. This attempt at generating an international community of Buddhists passed, however, and Buddhism was channeled back into distinctly nationalist narratives. The Buddhist world as Dharmapala envisioned it never materialized in any concrete form. 37 This Bill became an Act in 1929 and was a landmark piece of legislation. 38 Lecture in Colombo printed in Barua, Ceylon Lectures, March 14, 1944. 39 Ratnatunga, “Atta (Soul) Theory and Buddhism.” The Mahabodhi 54, no. 3; and Ratnatunga, “Atta (Soul) Theory and Buddhism.” The Mahabodhi 54, no. 4. 40 Barua, “Atta (Soul).” 41 Chatterjee, The Nation, p. 120. 42 Barua, Ceylon Lectures, p. 133.

References Ahir, D.C. Buddhism in Modern India. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1990. Allen, Charles. The Search for the Buddha: The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. Almond, Philip. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Barua, B.M. The Ajivikas. Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1920. Barua, B.M. “Atta (Soul) Theory and Buddhism: A Reply to Mr. H.D. Ratnatunga.” In The Mahabodhi 54, no. 4 (1944): 230–234. Barua, B.M. Ceylon Lectures. Studies on Sri Lanka Series No. 5. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1986 [First edition 1945]. Barua, B.M. “Early Buddhism.” In Dr. B.M. Baua Birth Centenary Commemoration Volume, 1989, edited by Hemendu Bikash Chowdhury. Calcutta: Bauddha Dhammankur Sabha, 1989. Barua, B.M. “Universal Aspect of Buddhism: Presidential Address Delivered at Bombay on the Occasion of Buddha-­Jayanti on 28 May 1934.” In Journal of the Mahabodhi Society 42, no. 7 (1934): 299–313. Barua, B.M. and Dharma Aditya Dharmacharyya, editors. Buddhist India: the Premier Illustrated Buddhist Quarterly and Buddhist Gazette 1, no. 1 (1927). Barua, Devapriya. “Role of Kripasaran in the Resurgence of Buddhism.” In Hundred Years of the Bauddha Dharmakur Sabha (The Bengal Buddhist Association), 1892–1992, pp. 27–32. Calcutta: Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha, 1992. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Public Life of History: An Argument out of India” in Public Culture 20, no. 1 (Winter 1999). Chatterjee, Partha. “Alternative Histories Alternative Nations: Nationalism and Modern Historiography in Bengal,” in Making Alternative Histories: Archaeology and History in Non-­Western Settings, edited by Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson. Santa Fe: School of Amer­ican Research Press, 1995. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Franklin, J. Jeffrey. The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008.

The study of Buddhism in Calcutta   205 Gopal, S. (ed.) Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series. Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 2002. Guha, Ranajit. An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-­Century Agenda and its Implications. Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1987. Jaffrelot, Christopher. Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analyzing and Fighting Caste, London: Hurst and Co., 2005. The Journal of the Mahabodhi Society 17, no. 10 (October 1909). Manjara, Kris. M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. Omvedt, Gail. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994. The Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Ninth Session, Annamalai University, Annamalainagar, 1945, p. 3, Allahabad: The General Secretary IHC, 1946. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, “Foreword.” In Brahmachari Kuladananda, Vol. 1: Early Life and Training Under Bijoykrishna, edited by B.M. Barua. Calcutta: The Thakurbari Committee, Puri, 1938. Ratnatunga, H.D. “Atta (Soul) Theory and Buddhism.” The Mahabodhi 54, no. 3 (1944): 135–144. Ratnatunga, H.D. “Atta (Soul) Theory and Buddhism.” The Mahabodhi 54, no. 4 (1944): 222–229. Rhys Davids, T.W. Buddhist India. Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2002 [First edition 1903]. Sarkar, Sumit. “Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (Winter 2008). Sarkar, Sumit. Modern Times. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014. Seal, Satis Chandra. “Publisher’s Note” in Barhut, edited by B. M. Barua. Calcutta: Indian Research Institute, 1934. Zelliot, Eleanor. From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement, Delhi: Manohar, 1992.

11 Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia A colonialist legacy?1 Ian Harris

Introduction Khieu Chum had been born into a poor peasant household in 1908. He became a monk at Wat Langka, Phnom Penh in 1926 but struggled to get a decent education until he was taken under the wing of the pagoda’s chief monk (cau adhikar), Lvi Em (1879–1957). Under Em’s guidance Chum rapidly progressed through the monastic curriculum and established himself as a disciplined and competent student of Pali and related matters. By 1934 he was sufficiently well educated to take up a number of teaching jobs in provincial monasteries, continuing to do this throughout the 1930s and early 1940s by which time he had also built up some competences in a variety of languages both Asian and European.2 Chum’s arrival in the new capital coincided with a crucial period of intellectual and political ferment within the Buddhist monastic order. A modernist monastic grouping called the Thommakay or “new Mahanikay” (mahanikay thmi) led by Mahavimaladhamm Thong (1862–1927) had recently been established and members of this new movement were beginning to employ the modern methods of critical and historical scholarship in the interpretation of Buddhist doctrine and practice imported into Indochina by the colonial power. Furthermore, several of Thong’s most able younger protégés, such as Chuon Nath and Huot Tat, had benefited from intensive study in this new methodology under the tutelage of the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi and they were already well progressed on the path that would, in time, lead them to become the highest ranking monks in the kingdom.3 In the late 1930s the colonial government of Cambodia, as part of a general modernization program, began to consider the romanization of official documents written in Khmer.4 A decree to introduce the measure was signed in 1943. However, shortly before, in April 1941, King Sisowath Monivong died and the French decided to appoint an adolescent prince, Norodom Sihanouk, as his successor. Many commentators have supposed that opposition to the Romanization measure focused on Hem Chieu, a monk-­teacher at the École Supérieure de Pāli in Phnom Penh.5 He had been arrested on July 17, 1942 and subsequently charged with eight offenses including the planning of an anti-­French uprising,

Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia   207 involvement in secret meetings with the Japanese and “using witchcraft to make Cambodian troops invincible.” A police search of Hem Chieu’s monastic residence (kuti) had also revealed a signed though undated document containing a list of 16 political demands. The document actually fails to allude to the romanization issue but it does make a number of surprising references to an un-­named king. According to its author this king “is not a Buddhist” [item 13—my italics]. Monks, furthermore, should refuse to be involved in kathen ceremonies organized by the king at the end of the rainy season (vassa) [item 14] and should “have nothing to do with him” [item 15]. Indeed, laity associating with the king should be subject to a monastic boycott [item 11]. On the face of it Hem Chieu’s opposition is contrary to an important element in the Theravada tradition that emphasizes the need for good reciprocal relations between the monastic and worldly orders as an indispensable condition for the thriving of Buddhism conceived in institutional terms. His outlook also appears antagonistic to another dominant notion, namely that the socio-­political realm should ideally be directed by a monarch, conceived of as either a wheel turner (cakkavatti) or a righteous ruler (dhammiko dhammaraja).6 Since we can safely assume that Sihanouk was the object of Hem Chieu’s ire, this chapter seeks to discover why this prominent Theravada monk was so bitterly opposed to his rule, and whether this attitude was shared with other members of the sangha? It also argues that the events of 1942 would have a lasting impact on the development of the Cambodian polity, to such an extent that Hem Chieu’s latent Buddhist republicanism—an ideal that I  have previously suggested is present as a subaltern ideology in early Pali ­literature7—would crystallize in the formation of the Khmer Republic.

Colonialist knowledge production and fragmentation in the sangha Angered that Hem Chieu had been forcibly defrocked by the colonial authorities and, more crucially, without the Buddhist rituals deemed necessary before a monk re-­enters the lay life, around 1,000 persons gathered for a demonstration on July 20, 1942. Given the fact that around half of the gathering consisted of umbrella-­carrying Buddhist monks, the event is sometimes called the “Umbrella War.” A number of individuals, both lay and monastic who, variously concerned about questions of religious and political authority would in due course rise to prominence in the fledgling Cambodian nationalist movement, were either arrested or temporarily fled the country in the event’s immediate aftermath. For these reasons the July 20 demonstration has generally been regarded as the first coordinated act of anti-­colonial protest in modern Cambodian history. The following year Hem Chieu died on the prison-­island of Poulo Condore (Koh Tralach) aged 46. In his post-­mortem state he would soon transmogrify into the country’s pre-­eminent national hero. Khieu Chum’s autobiography tells us that he had known and admired Hem Chieu. Indeed, as a relatively young monk he had been selected by Son Ngoc Thanh,8 organizer of the July 20 demonstration and a key figure behind Cambodia’s

208   Ian Harris “first” newspaper, Nagara Vatta—an organ that had emerged from a circle working at the Buddhist Institute, alongside the École Supérieure de Pāli another of the key institutions of modernist learning recently introduced into the country by the French9—to join Hem Chieu and a few other monks to preach the nationalist message around the country.10 Now Khieu Chum’s preceptor, Lvi Em, had become the second director of the École Supérieure de Pāli in 1928, following Thong’s death and further markers of the colonial power’s esteem were to follow. On December 14, 1929 Em became director of a newly created Tripitaka Commission, a body charged with the production of a Khmer translation of threefold collection of Theravada canonical writings (tipitaka), and he was awarded the Chevalier du Légion d’Honneur in 1934.11 But Em had been Hem Chieu’s superior at the Pali school and may also have been his monastic preceptor. Immediately after the Umbrella War and in protest at the colonial power’s meddling in the sangha he resigned from his posts at the High School and the Tipitaka Commission.12 By contrast, Thong’s most prominent disciples, Nath and Tat, made no public complaint and their support for the French appears to have given no indication of wavering. From this point on we can discern the beginnings of a rupture between the pro-­ French modernizers, like Nath and Tat who had emerged from the Thommakay, and a new segment that, although it was prepared to accept the forms of scholarship introduced under colonial influence, was far less enthusiastic about continuing colonial influence in the country. The split severely impacted the two most influential Mahanikay monasteries in Phnom Penh. Wat Unnalom, one of the capital city’s most ancient monasteries and location of an important and powerful Buddha relic had, since at least the end of the nineteenth century, been the residence of the country’s supreme Buddhist patriarch.13 It was also the alma mater of Hem Chieu, as indeed it was of Nath and Tat. But in the aftermath of the Umbrella War I think that we can begin to detect an oppositional tendency focused on Wat Langka. The role of Prince Sisowath Monireth (1909–1975) is relevant here. When Sisowath Monivong died on April 24, 1941 Monireth was his eldest son and the “legitimate” successor. But, as we have noted, Admiral Decoux, Governor-­ General of Indochina, decided to place the crown on the head of the 18-year-­old Norodom Sihanouk instead. Monireth was already a royal patron of Wat Langka, another of Phnom Penh’s handful of premodern Theravada foundations, and in this capacity he was later to preside over Lvi Em’s cremation rites in 1957.14 We know that he had originally been opposed to Son Ngoc Thanh and the Nagara Vatta group but that he started to support them after he lost out in the fight for the throne.15 Indeed, a rumor that he was planning to lead a troop rebellion is said to have precipitated the French decision to arrest Hem Chieu.

Toward a Khmer Republic As one of Lvi Em’s most celebrated students, and as a monk naturally in sympathy with Monireth, Khieu Chum would in time become the most powerful and explicit champion of the Wat Langka line. He had returned to Cambodia from an

Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia   209 exile in Bangkok precipitated by events that unfolded in the aftermath of the Umbrella War in 1954 following the country’s independence, but his links with Hem Chieu and Son Ngoc Thanh meant that Sihanouk suspected him of seditious activity and wanted to have him expelled from the monastic order. Lvi Em, however, wrote to Queen Kossamak in Chum’s support and this seems to have had the desired effect. For some time, Chum kept a low profile and gave all outward signs of supporting the royal family, probably as a means of ensuring that his books could be published.16 He only seems to have deviated from this line after 1966 when things started to go badly awry in the country. Around this time, he also became publicly associated with some of the key figures behind the eventual overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970, such as Lon Nol, In Tam and Long Boret. He claimed to have written his book Uttamgati jivit (The Ideal of Life, 1971) at the request of Lon Nol and he had clearly known others, like Hang Thun Hak and Son Ngoc Thanh, both of whom would subsequently hold high office in the Khmer Republic government, since the early forties. Given these links, it is not surprising that, by now the country’s most famous and accomplished Buddhist preacher, Chum should have broadcast his support for the coup plotters immediately after Sihanouk had been deposed. It seems that many young Phnom Penh-­based monks supported his outlook and around the same time Lon Nol bizarrely suggested that he disrobe and take up the role of a two-­star army general! Khieu Chum refused but offered to advise Lon Nol on anything within his broad area of expertise. We know, for instance, that he ended up writing many of Lon Nol’s subsequent speeches. Soon after the coup Lon Nol’s brother, Lon Non, roped Khieu Chum into his Republican Committee, an organization designed to gain the support of ex-­ rightist independence fighters within the Khmer Serei in an on-­going conflict with Sirik Matak. He was also tasked with bringing about a rapprochement between Lon Nol and Son Ngoc Thanh.17 Chum and his ex-­Umbrella War veteran colleague, Pang Khat, also drafted a manifesto for the Khmer Republic and had a hand in composing a national anthem for the new regime.18 Although this may seem a strange thing for a Buddhist monk to do, Chuon Nath had actually been the author of the previous Sihanouk regime’s anthem. Chum was also the main organizer of a series of demonstrations made by Phnom Penh monks on October 21, 1971 demanding that Lon Nol be appointed Head of State. Such activities elicited a considerable degree of adverse criticism. A US Embassy report around the time described Khieu Chum as the “most outspoken Buddhist monk in Cambodia”19 and it was quite common now for his opponents to accuse him of being a communist monk (lok sang kommunit).20 In March 1972 the country’s supreme patriarch, Huot Tat, also described Khieu Chum as a revolutionary monk. The gist of his criticism was that Chum had become a “political monk” and that this was contrary to the teachings of the Buddha. Chum responded by arguing that there is nowhere in the Tripitaka that says monks should not be involved in politics and that, in any case, the Buddha encouraged his followers to exercise their judgement in all matters.

210   Ian Harris Given the gulf that had opened up between Wat Langka and Wat Unnalom we might also surmise another bone of contention between the two. Through his support of the French, and of Sihanouk, Tat was himself a “political monk” and his criticisms of Chum were an obvious example of “the pot calling the kettle black.” The issue was also brought into relief by Khieu Chum’s attitude to the acceptance of ecclesiastic titles and honors, all of which he rejected. He criticized those who did—he had been at loggerheads with Chuon Nath over that monk’s use of an “official” Mercedes when he served as supreme patriarch—no doubt earning himself a deal of enmity from his fellows.21 Indeed, when Lvi Em died in 1957 Chum refused requests to take up the reins as cau adhikar at Wat Langka.22 He also rejected the offer of promotion to the rank of preah pothivong, the third-­highest position in the Mahanikay hierarchy, vacated by Huot Tat when he became supreme patriarch following the death of Chuon Nath.23

Justifying republicanism24 Khieu Chum’s oeuvre is very extensive and most works have been republished in large print runs in recent years. The early writings tend toward conventional exposition of the dhamma and need not detain us unduly. But as he got into his stride as a writer he began to draw on wider themes. Khieu Chum reveals himself as a thoroughgoing modernist and there is no hint of premodern millennialism in his output. Stylistically he is typical of other nationalists who grew out of Thanh’s previously mentioned Nagara Vatta group. One indicator is the very frequent use of the word “our” (yoeng) to define something distinctively Cambodian, as in his short book on grammar for children, Veyyakar yoeng (Our Grammar, 1966).25 With Sihanouk out of the way Khieu Chum was able to express his political preferences more openly. All of the formulaic expressions of support for the royal family found in his pre-­1970s works are now absent and a new leitmotif, that the Buddhist religion does not depend on the institution of kingship, takes center stage. The basic message is that the Buddha decisively rejected the institution of monarchy when he left his palace to live the life of a recluse. Notwithstanding the fact that the Cambodian people had endured “thousands of years of absolutism, arbitrariness and tyranny”26 the time was now ripe to support the Khmer Republic on the grounds that its political philosophy reflected the fundamental insight of the Buddha. Clearly this perspective can also be regarded as a response to and exposition of Hem Chieu’s view that “the King is not a Buddhist.” Khieu Chum is aware of the importance of the Mahasammata-­related social contract arrangement, as expounded by the Buddha in the Aggaññasutta, that ought to exist between ruler and ruled. As if to underline this, he speaks approvingly of Rousseau, Europe’s prime exemplar of the doctrine, and notes that unfettered sovereignity (adhipateyybhab) is a dangerous thing (AD 122–125).27 The problem for the king who does not observe the social contract, and Khieu Chum is inclined to feel this applies to all monarchs without qualification, is that

Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia   211 he rules through his “own power” (aṃnac rapas’ khluon) and that this is distinctly anti-­Buddhist. In this sense, then, kings are like the gods (devata). They are “self-­appointed” and their high office is contrary to the actual constitution of the universe (dhamma). Kingship is also “unconstitutional” in a more narrowly legalistic manner (UM 269–270). Like the devata, furthermore, kings use various forms of trickery. For example, they claim that they will “save the country” even though “salvation” (sroc-­srang’) is a “cheating term” (BDR 33). They also assert that everything belongs to them. They may “eat the realm” on the grounds that “heaven has ordained it.” But in his view kings have no right to take common property like water, etc. to themselves (UM 673–675). Such claims humble the people and make them frightened, easily controlled and ignorant (UM 703). In their ignorance the populace has been coerced into assuming that heaven has a positive value without bothering to enquire whether it exists or not (BDR 34). If they did they would discover that the popular preoccupation with heaven, hell, deities, astrology and the sprinkling of holy water is without basis and the metaphysical foundations of kingship when probed by the enquiring mind melt into thin air (UM 230–266 and 673–675). In this manner Khieu Chum indicates how traditional Buddhist cosmology has been used as an instrument of political control. In fact, kings are nothing more than beasts (tiracchana). They are intestinal worms in the body politic (brun rastr).  The Buddha at the time of his enlightenment found out that all kings fail to follow the law and fail to exercise pity for the people. They drink the blood, eat the flesh and consume the energy of the people like a leech. (UM 707) Khieu Chum’s most innovative idea occurs in his treatment of the doctrine of the “ten duties of the king” (dasabidha-­rajadhamma), one of the restraints placed on the exercise of monarchical power by the Jataka tradition. He argues that the Buddha used the dasabidha-­rajadhamma as a revolutionary weapon. No individual in the past, present, or future could live by these rules and remain a king. Indeed, the power of the dasabidha-­rajadhamma is such that their practice transforms any individual into a Buddhist lay-­follower (upasak)28 and, as such, they are corrosive of the spirit of kingship (BDR 65–68; UM 708–709). The corollary to this is that a king cannot be a Buddhist lay disciple until he has renounced the throne and for Khieu Chum eliminating kings is better than paying homage to the Buddha a billion times (UM 673–675)! However, there is no indication that he is in favor of regicide. Rather, his prescription for an alternative polity follows the logic of Buddhist modernism. It involves an extension of the traditional sense of the term sangha to cover the entire populace. The argument takes place in several stages. In the first place the Buddha is said to have recognized that “bhikkhus knew well enough about human problems to make laws” (BDR 29 and 64) and, as such, they could become legislators after his death.29 Furthermore, the sangha has had a long history of debate. Traditionally,

212   Ian Harris Buddhist monastic discipline has allowed for elections and ballots and all monks have had the right to express their opinions. Moreover, if full agreement could not be reached then a decision could be made “according to the majority” (yebhu­yyasika) (AD 33–46). All of this points to the monastic order’s democratic credentials. The task, then, is to adopt the democratic processes of the monastic order, or to put it another way, to inflate the conception of the sangha so that it comes to define society as a whole. But Khieu Chum is not sanguine about the efforts required to accomplish this transformation. He is very well aware that the Cambodian people are poorly educated. As we have seen, he attributes the people’s inclination to see Buddhism in magico-­materialistic terms to their lack of a proper education and this is bound to lead to problems in the political domain where, for example, unscrupulous politicians are never challenged for offering bribes for votes (AD 71; UM 666). There are no easy fixes here. The answer must come from a general advancement of learning, understood in Buddhist modernist terms, combined with the hard work that is education’s indispensable precondition.

Sources of Khieu Chum’s republicanism It is clear that Khieu Chum’s post-­1970 oeuvre provides a Buddhist justification for those who successfully plotted to overthrow Sihanouk. But his anti-­ monarchical outlook is a very unusual position for a Buddhist monk to have adopted and one perhaps unique in the modern history of the Theravada tradition. How did it come about? One possibility lies in the psychology of the man and in his personal circumstances. Another is that it is an understandable reaction to the very poor governance that marked the later stages of Sihanouk’s rule in Cambodia. But I would like to suggest that his political philosophy is best characterized as a synthesis of notions deeply rooted in the Theravada textual tradition30 combined with elements from European political philosophy imported into Cambodia by the French. As has already been noted, Khieu Chum was part of a wider circle that in the late 1930s and 1940s clustered around the Institute bouddhique and the École Supérieure de Pāli. Both institutions were colonial creations, the former directed by the politically engaged Suzanne Karpelès, the École française d’ExtrêmeOrient’s (EFEO) first permanent female member.31 Karpelès, like her friend and fellow student, Paul Mus, was “a child of the Third Republic.”32 She had been brought up in Calcutta where she learned Hindi and Bengali and became aware of the Bengal renaissance and its contribution to the rise of Indian nationalism. On returning to Paris she studied under Sylvain Lévi whose own support for the more illiberal aspects of the colonialist project was far from whole-­hearted. Indeed, as France’s foremost Indologist, Lévi had encouraged his “fellow Sanskritists to turn away from Aryan- or Indo-­European-centered Indology” in an effort to understand Indian civilization in its own terms. He had also construed India’s influence in Southeast Asia as one that involved the “active agency of the

Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia   213 indigenous peoples who … made their own critical contributions to the long-­ term processes of ‘Indianization’.”33 It is hardly surprising, then, that Lévi argued for mutual cooperation between the French and their colonial subjects.34 Karpelès and her fellow students35 shared Lévi’s outlook, combined with a Durkheimian humanism that inclined her toward “the study of living and dynamic cultural systems rather than textual artifacts of culture in isolation.”36 She did not mistake a “library” for a “country,” to paraphrase Mus. In consequence she soon came under pressure to resign as head of the Institut bouddhique. Résident superieur Thibaudeau was suspicious of her potentially subversive links with the emerging Cambodian nationalist literati and in March 1941 Admiral Decoux dismissed her from her post. Vichy anti-­Jewish laws were partly to blame—she was Jewish—but misogyny was another factor.37 But let us also not forget that Decoux would be responsible for another unpopular decision, certainly as far as Khieu Chum’s circle was concerned, 1 month later when he selected Sihanouk as Cambodia’s new king. The influence of Lévi and like-­minded colleagues ensured that most French scholars of Southeast Asia were highly critical of some of the policies of their government. Mus, for example, was hostile to Decoux’s patronizing attitude toward the peoples under his control,38 and after the war he is said to have compared French rule in Indochina with the German occupation of France. These attitudes were undoubtedly transmitted, although how consciously and at what level of reflexivity is a matter for further debate, to indigenous co-­workers within the new institutions of higher learning that were sprouting up in the region. Members of the EFEO played a major role in this development. The house journal of the EFEO, its influential Bulletin, was available to the emerging Buddhist intelligentsia based at places like the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh. As well as publishing academic articles on archaeological and historical matters, the Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient (BEFEO), unlike equivalent organs in the English-­speaking world which were purely antiquarian in nature, had since its inception, regularly reported on current affairs in Asian countries, often covering nationalist movements in a semi-­sympathetic light.39 But other French language publications also appear to have been a vector of transmission. The journal Esprit had been founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier to promote “personalism,” a social philosophy that claimed to represent a middle path between communism and liberal capitalism. We know that the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs subscribed for a bulk order to be distributed around the colonies40 and that the review was read by prominent Cambodian and Vietnamese intellectuals who appear to have appreciated its frequent attacks on colonial abuses as a deviation from true republican norms.41 Esprit’s emphasis on “middle way thinking” would also have been an especially felicitous point of contact for a Buddhist audience. In the pre-­war period the EFEO appears to have been a bastion of republicanism, and perhaps it still is.42 Republicanism as a political ideology is notoriously difficult to define but there can be little argument that it stands opposed to “imperial and monarchical conceptions of political order.”43 In addition it champions

214   Ian Harris the centrality of reason, the crucial role of education as the basis upon which mass participation in the political process can be built, the notion of the nation or fatherland (patrie), the transformational power of good laws, anti-­clericalism or “laïcisme” and a quasi-­mystical emphasis on the equality of “the people.” I would like to suggest that we find all of these elements to a greater or lesser extent in the writings of Khieu Chum. We have already discussed his views on kingship at some length and have concluded that his position was not purely a reaction to the specific circumstances of Sihanouk’s personal rule, but rather a principled opposition to the exercise of kingly power as such, determined in part by his understanding of the Theravada literary tradition, but also through the influence of new forms of knowledge production emanating from French Buddhist educational initiatives in Cambodia. We have also alluded to the key role he believed education and democratic law-­making should play in Cambodia’s new post-­monarchical order. His antipathy toward imperialism and strong support for the nation emerged out of his involvement with Hem Chieu and can be inferred from links with Son Ngoc Thanh and other members of the first generation of Cambodian anti-­colonialists, while a strong emphasis on reason stands at the heart of his argument with Tat over the nature of the “political monk.” A commitment to “equality,” implying the abolition of all privileges based on rank, is entirely consistent with his repudiation of honors and titles. It also ties in with an emphasis on citizenship as opposed to race or ethnicity when theorizing the nation. In France this had become a significant republican theme in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair and it, in part, explains Khieu Chum and Son Ngoc Thanh’s relaxed attitude toward Cambodia’s minority groups as opposed to Lon Nol and members of later generations of Cambodian nationalists who tended toward xenophobia or holy war rhetoric when contemplating the non-­Khmer “other.”44 Finally, it might be odd to find a Buddhist monk expressing anti-­ clerical views but Khieu Chum’s negativity toward the ecclesiastical hierarchy seems to me to be a form of laïcisme, as is his strongly expressed modernist view that Buddhism is most accurately defined as a philosophy consistent with a progressive social agenda, rather than as a religion. For this reason he opposed the teaching of Buddhism in public schools and was hostile toward those who wished to promote its status as the “national religion.”45 It seems clear that any forum in which such ideas could be thought or debated would not be attractive to the Cambodian royal family and its supporters. As we have seen, Sihanouk had started his career as little more than a figurehead, but by the end of the Second World War he had effectively broken free from French tutelage and had reconceived Cambodia as a modern kingdom in which he would serve as both monarch and “father of national independence.” It is, perhaps, for this reason that his Minister of Education, Princess Norodom Yukanthor, strongly opposed the EFEO when, in 1947, it wanted to renew its connection with the country’s institutions of Buddhist higher learning by creating a new Institute of Pali and Sanskrit learning. In essence Princess Yukanthor raised a number of objections to the forms of knowledge production represented previously by the EFEO. In her estimation

Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia   215 the value of Pali learning is “practically nil” and in any case there were already enough monks around who knew it. Yet to her mind these young monks made no contribution to society, they were possessed of a “bad spirit,” they spread the “sacrilege of modernism” and were corruptors of the Khmer language.46 She got her way and the stable door was locked. But figures like Khieu Chum had already wandered far away from that protected environment and it was too little too late. The horses had already bolted.…

Abbreviations AD BEFEO BDR EFEO UM

Prajādhipateyy cās’ duṃ Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient Buddhasāsanā prajādhipateyy sādhāraṇaraṭṭh  École française d’Extrême-Orient Sakal cintā gaṃnit srāv jrāv 

Notes   1 “Colonies (nos): s’attrister quand on en parle” (Colonies [our]: Show sadness when speaking of them) Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues.   2 Khieu Chum, Jīv pravatti.   3 For more on Thon, Nath, and Tat and their roles in advancing the colonialist project within the Cambodian Buddhist sangha, see Hansen, “Modernist Reform,” pp. 33–37 and How to Behave, pp. 138–146.   4 The expectation was that these would be first composed in French.   5 For biographical details, see Locard, “Achar Hem Chieu,” p. 71.   6 For a fairly exhaustive treatment of the two forms of rule, see Tambiah, World Conqueror, pp. 39–53.   7 On the “implicit republicanism” of some strands of the Pali tradition, see Harris, “The Monk and the King,” pp. 84–88.   8 Thanh served as Prime Minister of Cambodia twice, in August–October 1945 and again March–October 1972.   9 For discussion of the ways in which the Institute, and other centers of European-­style Buddhist learning, were established by the colonial authorities as a means of both modernizing the sangha and of reducing previous Siamese influence in Cambodia, see de Bernon, “Le rôle,” Edwards, Cambodge, pp.  190–197 and 203–209 and Hansen, How to Behave, pp. 142–144. On the Institute in Laos, see Kourilsky in this volume. 10 Sorn Samnang, L’Évolution de la société, p. 370. 11 Edwards, Cambodge, pp. 195–196 and 203. 12 Chheat Sreang et al., The Buddhist Institute. p. 58. 13 For a fascinating discussion with some bearing on the age of Wat Unnalom, see de Bernon, “Le plus ancien édifice.” 14 See Pravatti vatt laṅkā braḥ kusumārām, p. 22. 15 Englebert, “The Enemy Needed,” p. 140, n.24. 16 Khieu Chum’s pre-­1970 writings are generally very respectful toward Sihanouk and his mother Queen Kossamak. The final chapter of Jivit taŝū (Life Struggle, 1969), for example, concludes with a panegyric to Sihanouk’s success in bringing about progress in the country. 17 Corfield, Khmers Stand Up! p. 108. 18 Anak jāti niyum (The Nationalist) Vol 12, No. 425, August 13–September 6 1970: 17.

216   Ian Harris 19 US DoS 3345, dated December 11, 1970. 20 Interview with Meach Pon, Phnom Penh, February 24, 2009. 21 In the autobiography he makes the point that, unlike many monks, he had almost no friends. His close association with Venerable Pang Khat appears to be the exception. Pang Khat had come to Phnom Penh from Wat Phnom Del, Batheay district, Kompong Cham and was a Sanskritist who had joined the Tripitaka Commission in the 1940s and participated in the Umbrella War. He confessed his involvement, disrobed and was tried in Saigon. Subsequently Pierre Dupont, Secretary of the Buddhist Institute after Karpelès’ dismissal, intervened on his behalf and he was reordained (Chheat Sreang et al., The Buddhist Institute, p.  52). He later taught Sanskrit at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. 22 Kao Sim subsequently became cau adhikar of Wat Langka (Pravatti vatt laṅkā braḥ kusumārām 1967 p. 25). 23 My interview with Chum Kanal, Phnom Penh, May 14, 2009. 24 In this section I use abbreviations for three of Khieu Chum’s important post-­1970 works: BDR = Buddhasāsanā prajādhipateyy sādhāraṇaraṭṭh (Buddhism, Democracy and Republic, 1971). AD = Prajādhipateyy cās’ duṃ (Ancient Democracy, 1972). UM = Sakal cintā gaṃnit srāv jrāv (Universal Mind: Thoughts for Research, 1972). 25 Népote, “Pour une reconsideration,” pp. 153–154. 26 Manifesto of the Committee of Intellectuals for the Support of the Salvation Government March 18, 1970; quoted by Penny Edwards, Cambodge, p. 387. 27 For another reference to Rousseau, see BDR 71. In fact, Chum’s writings are full of allusions to western luminaries. These include Darwin, Dalton and Mendel (Buddhavidyā rīoeṅ puṇy-pāp [Buddha’s Knowledge of Merit and Demerit], 1969), Bergson and Comte (Jivit santibhāb [Peaceful Life], 1970), Napoleon, Bossuet, Emerson, Roosevelt, Virgil, Shakespeare, Stephenson, Faraday, Henry Ford, Johnny Weissmuller and William James (Jivit taŝū [Life Struggle], 1969), Voltaire (Pañhā anāgat [Problem of the Future], 1961), Tennyson, Mill and Arnold (Sakal cintā [Universal Mind], 1972), Mendel and Haeckel (Dassanaḥ sākal [Universal Vision], 1968), DeValera, Mussolini, Hitler, Gandhi, and Lenin. 28 For a discussion of the semantic range of the term upasaka, see Crosby, “A Theravāda Code,” pp.  177–178 who makes the point that it is active practice rather than mere passive approval of the Buddha’s teaching that defines the upasaka. We might say that for Khieu Chum the king may “protect” Buddhism but he does not “practice” it. 29 This seems to be a reference to his ruling that monks might modify the “minor rules” with the full agreement of the community (D. ii.154). 30 These are discussed in detail in Harris, “The Monk and the King.” 31 Singaravélou, L’École française d’Extrême-Orient, p.  272 and Khing Hoc Dy, “Suzanne Karpelès.” 32 Chandler, “Paul Mus,” p. 161. Karpelès was a lifelong friend of the Mus family and godmother to their son Emile. In April 1928 she accompanied Mus on his first visit to Borobudur and Bali. 33 Bayly, “Imagining ‘Greater India’,” pp.  719–721. This is an important theme in Lévi’s 1938 work, L’Inde civilisatrice: apercu historique, originally a series of lectures delivered in 1919–1920. 34 ‘Une heure avec Sylvain Lévi’ I’Indochine no. 5, 1925. This outlook was reiterated by Lévi, André Breton, André Gide et al. in the February–March special edition of Cahiers du Mois (Singaravélou, L’École française d’Extrême-Orient, p. 270). 35 Edwards (Cambodge, p.  183ff.) characterizes Karpelès, Nath, and Tat as the “holy trinity” in the development of modernist Buddhism in Cambodia.

Buddhist republicanism in Cambodia   217 36 Bayly, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” pp. 194–195. 37 In a letter of January 25, 1941 Decoux had complained that working with Buddhist monks was not appropriate for a woman (Singaravélou, L’École française d’Extrême-Orient, p.  272). After a brief return to France following her dismissal Karpelès moved to the Aurobindo ashram in Pondichéry where she lived for the rest of her life. This recreated links back to her Bengali childhood. It is intriguing that her teacher, Sylvain Lévi, was one of the last people to talk with Aurobindo on an individual basis before he lapsed into decades of virtual silence (Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p. 362). 38 Chandler, “Paul Mus,” p. 165. 39 Singharavélou, L’École française d’Extrême-Orient, p. 188. 40 Kelly, “Emmanuel Mounier,” p. 208. 41 Viollis, “Pour la vérité,” p. 326. The Diem brothers became the most prominent exponents of personalism, and of republicanism, in Vietnam (Miller, “The Diplomacy of Personalism”), while in Cambodia Chau Seng, a late 1950s Minister of Education responsible for the Khmerization of the country’s school curriculum, and later Rector of the Buddhist University was a Mounier enthusiast (Sacha Sher Notices Biographiques—http://ice.prohosting.com/ssher/kkrnotices.html) Esprit campaigned for the centrality of republican values in the French civilizing mission. For a history of the journal, see Winock, Esprit. 42 It may be no coincidence that Olivier de Bernon, a recent director of the EFEO office in Phnom Penh has written a number of works on Condorcet (1743–1794), an early and major theorist of republicanism. See de Bernon, Condorcet, for example. 43 Hazareesingh, Political Traditions, p. 74. 44 Son Ngoc Thanh was not anti-­Vietnamese, possibly because he had been born in the Vietnamese-­dominated Mekong delta region (Kampuchea Krom). In 1938 he founded a youth-­hosteling association modeled on the French Auberges de jeunesse, called Yuvasala to foster good Khmer-­Viet relations. He may have been encouraged to do this by Suzanne Karpelès (Edwards, Cambodge, p. 229). For a discussion of the centrality of xenophobia in recent Cambodian political discourse, see Harris, “Rethinking Cambodian Political Discourse.” 45 Anak jāti niyum (The Nationalist) Vol 12, No. 425, August 13–September 6 1970: 17. 46 Letter of François Martini to Jean Filliozat (October 4, 1952)—held in the private archives of the Filliozat family and quoted by Singharavélou, L’École française d’Extrême-Orient, p. 282, n. 1.

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une tour angkorienne sise dans l’enceinte du Vatt Uṇṇālom.” Bulletin de l’École française d’ExtrêmeOrient 88 (2001): 249–260. de Bernon, Olivier. Condorcet: raison et connaisance. Paris: Riveneuve, 2009. de Bernon, Olivier. “Le rôle de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient dans la fondation des institutions savantes du Cambodge” In Archéologues à Angkor: Archives photographiques de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, edited by Bruno Dagens, Pierre-­ Yves Manguin, Olivier de Bernon, and Pierre Pichard, pp.  29–32. Paris: Musée Cernuschi, École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2010.

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Glossary

We have listed terms here as defined by the author. It should be noted that some of these are used in multiple locations, some in only one, so there might be multiple spellings that are quite close. For example, in Thailand and Sipsongpanna, a monastery is normally transliterated as wat; in Laos, the spelling is normally vat. There are also terms that have both Pali and vernacular usages. We have generally used the terms that would be more commonly used in any given context. Alajji  “shameless” or immoral monks, subject to discipline by the sangha or king Arahant  noble being, ideal figure in Theravada Buddhism Batha  national language Bhikkhu  monk Cau adhikar  chief monk/abbot Cakkavatti  “wheel-­turning” (universal) monarch Cetiya  reliquary Chat  nation Dagaba  pagoda, stupa, reliquary Dana  meritorious gift Dasabidha-­rajadhamma  Ten duties of the king Deva/devata  gods Dhammakatika  Dhamma instructor Dhammaraja  moral Buddhist king Dharmaduta (dhammaduta)  missionary propagation of the Dhamma Gaing  ritual communities gaing-­dauk, gaing-­gyok, gaing-­ok  local abbots and/or regional leaders of the sangha Ganawimot  group exemption from administrative control Hiet kong  tradition and custom Hua muat wat  leader of a group of monasteries Hua muat ubosot  leader of district, ten or more monasteries Institut bouddhique  Buddhist Institute jao muang  local lords

Glossary   221 jao phaendin  “lord of the earth,” traditional ruler of Sipsongpanna Jaonai  Lanna royalty Karaka sangha sabaha  council of monks Kathen (kathin)  robe donation ritual Khanan  former monks Khon muang  people of Lanna States Khuba/khruba  venerated teacher, can be formal or informal title in Northern Thailand or China Lok sang kommunit  “Communist Monk” mahadan-­wun  ecclesiastical censor Mahanayaka  chief monk Mahaparinibbana  the final extinction of the Buddha’s physical form Mahathera Samakhom  Supreme Sangha Council Muang (mueang)  polity of varying sizes Myo  sangha administrative district Nikaya  monastic fraternity Pabbajja  novice ordination; one gone forth from home into homelessness Phrai  commoners Pirivena  monastic college Pyinnya  reform education Sanad  deed granted to native princes in British India in exchange for allegiance Sangha  Buddhist community, especially consisting of the ordained Sanghakamma  ecclesiastical acts that establish a sangha Sanghanayok  head of the sangha Sangharaja  supreme monk of a polity Sasana  teachings of the Buddha; religion; Buddhism Temporalities  the secular possessions of a religious institution or clergy Thakin  master Thathana  Buddhism, teachings of the Buddha Thathanabaing  leader of the sangha Thathana pyu thi  propagating Buddhism Tipitaka  Buddhist canon Tusi  chieftain appointed by imperial Chinese state to rule local communities Uparaja  viceroy Upasak  lay follower of the teachings of the Buddha Uppatcha  preceptor of new monks Vesak (Wesak)  holiday representing the birth, enlightenment and mahaparinibbana of the Buddha, full moon usually in May Vidane  trustee, trusteeship Vihara (wihan)  worship or image hall Vinaya  disciplinary rules of the sangha Vipassana  insight meditation Wat/vat  temple/monastery in Thailand, Laos, and Sipsongpanna Wat long  central temple Wunthanu  grassroots groups

Index

Page numbers in bold denote tables. Names in the index have been presented as follows: Chinese, Thai and Cambodian names have been left uninverted, unless they have been westernized; Burmese names have been indexed under the first element; Indian and Sri Lankan names have been indexed by the last element; honorifics such as U or Phra have been put after the name and separated by a comma; Buddhist offices/positions have been put after the name and separated by a comma. Where Buddhist or Buddhism is referred without a qualifier, Theravada Buddhism is meant. Adam’s Peak see Sri Pada temple Ambedkar, B.R. 189, 190 Anglo-Burmese wars 2, 21, 139–140, 141 Anglo-Dutch Treaty 60 Appadurai, Arjun 125, 126, 132 Asad, Talal 8, 22 Aung-Thwin, Maitrii 35, 40n56 Barua, Beni Madhab: activist/internationalist Buddhism 199–201; Buddhism as religion and philosophy 195–196, 198; in Calcutta 194; and Chittagong Buddhist revival 193; definition of Buddhism 197–199; formative influences 192–195; Mahabodhi Society 194, 201–202; and modern Buddhism/social reform 200–201; scholarly work 195–199; “total history” 196–197 Bengal: independence fighters in Burma 40n56; and modern Buddhism 2, 6, 14, 192–194, 200 Berkwitz, Stephen 3, 8 Bigandet, Father Paul 139–140 Blackburn, Anne 5, 8, 15n13, 59, 134n12, 135n48, 156 Bowring Treaty 82 Brigg’s Plan 65–66 BTC (Buddhist Temporalities Committees) 124, 128–129, 134n14

Buddhist Association of Sipsongpanna 101, 107–110, 114n44 Buddhist millenarianism 40n56, 214 Buddhist republicanism: as Buddhist/ European synthesis 212–214; equality and citizenship 214; and king’s duties (dasabidha-rajadhamma) 211; and modern democracy 211–212; and reciprocity 207; social contract (Mahasammata) 210–211 Buddhist Temporalities Committees (BTC) 124, 128–129, 134n14 Burma: and Bengali independence fighters 40n56; Beni Madhab Barua 14; and British religious non-interference policy 2, 23–25, 35, 45; colonialism and urbanrural networks 21–24, 147–148; colonial-sangha conflicts in 3–4, 12–13, 25–26, 139–140; immigration influences 24, 25, 35–36; lower and upper 21–23, 21–24; Mandalay sangha (royal) 143–147; and modern identity construction 9–10, 25–26, 31, 38n14; rural vs. urban 21–24, 147–148; sangha reform 145–149, 150–157, 153; see also Anglo-Burmese wars; Diarchy; General Council of Burmese Associations; Young Men’s Buddhist Association

Index   223 Burmese nationalism: accommodationist 26–31; and anti-colonial traditionalism 23–24, 31–36; British repression of 35; as colonial/Buddhist synthesis 36–37 Cambodia 182n79; French-Anglo Treaty 2; nationalism 207–208; and Wat Langka monastery nationalism 208, 209–210; see also Buddhist republicanism; French-Indochina; Institut bouddhique; Khieu Chum CCP (Chinese Communist Party) 107 Ceylon see Sri Lanka Chakrabarty, Dipesh 192 Chatterjee, Partha 192 Chiang Mai Treaty 82–83 China: French-Anglo Treaty 2; immigration to Singapore 42, 43–44, 48–49; influence on Laos 164; and internal colonization of Sipsongpanna 2–3, 6, 11–12; Mahayana Buddhism in Malaysia 74n35; Mahayana Buddhism in Singapore 44–47, 50, 51, 53–54, 55n26; Nanyang Communist Party 64; Theravada Buddhism and 2–3, 42–43; see also Sipsongpanna Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 107 Chronicle of Chiang Mai 85 Chulalongkorn, King 90–91 civil Buddhism concept 26 Cold War 4, 6, 64–66 Colebrook-Cameron reforms 122–123 “colonial governmentality” see governmental technologies colonial subjects: as actors 4–5, 12–13; as colony/nation mediators 13–14; see also Beni Madhab Barua; Khieu Chum; K. Sri Dhammananda; specific countries/regions colony/nation concept 5–6, 9 communal riots (Burma) 35–36 Condominas, Georges 102, 106 Craddock Scheme (Burma) 23, 38n10, 40n55, 141 Dai-lue (“the Lue”) of Sipsongpanna 102 de Silva, David 62 de Silva, K.M. 129 Dhammananda, Venerable K. Sri: anticommunism of 65–66; and Christian missionaries 66–67; as dharmaduta (missionary monk) 59, 63–64, 66–69; in Malaysia 64–65; non-sectarianism of 69–71; in Sri Lanka (early years) 62–63; western (secular) education of 63

dhammiko dhammaraja (righteous ruler) 207 Dharmacharyya, Dharma Aditya 200 dharmaduta (missionary monk) 59, 63–64, 66–69 Diarchy 23, 32–33, 40n55 Dirks, Nicholas B. 132 disestablishment 110, 124 District Buddhist Temporalities Committees 128–129 DuBois, Thomas 5 East India Company 2 École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) 165, 166, 178, 206, 212–214; reconstruction of Sisaket monastery 171; and Romanization of Khmer documents 206 École Supérieure de Pāli 206, 208 “emboitement” 102 Faihin, Khruba 89–92 Finot, Louis 166 Forbes, CJFS 140 Foucauldian governmentality 122–123 Freedman, Maurice 43 French-Anglo Treaty 2 French Indochina: anti-colonialism in 175–179; cultural/geographical artificiality of colonial Laos 164; French-Lao collaboration 167, 171–175; and independence of Laos 178–179; religious relics 165–166; Royal Library 165; sangha educational reform (Pali schools) 166–168, 170–171, 172, 174; and unification through “national Buddhism” 164–167, 171–175 French-Siamese Treaty 164–165, 180n11 Frost, Mark 24 Furnivall, J.S. 24, 27, 31, 38n29 Fytche, Albert 140 Gaing, Thudama 152–157, 158n22 gaing-gyoks/gaing-oks 145, 146–147 gaings (local ritual communities) 143–145, 150–155 ganavimutti (group exemption) 145 General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA); anti-colonial monastic dominance in 33–36; British repression against 35; modern influences on 33; splinter groups of 34 General Council of the Sangha Samettgyi (GCSS): and anti-colonialism 35; and

224   Index “political monks” in Burma 32, 34–35; takeover of GCBA 33–34 Giersch, C. Patterson 102 Gladney, Dru 103 Gottschalk, Peter 8 governmental technologies: Buddhist Temporalities Committees as 128–129; charitable trust law as 125; “colonial governmentality” concept 121–123; and definition of vihara 129–130; District Buddhist Temporalities Committees as 128–129; impact on Kandyan institutions 124; Kandyan Convention as 125–126; as legacy for post-colonial state 131–132, 133; as legal-rational control mechanisms 121–122, 123, 128; monastic appointments and 126–128; South Asia studies and 125; Trusteeship as 125, 128, 130–131 Gunananda, Mohottivatte 62, 67 Gunaratana, Kamburupitiye (Venerable) 64, 70–71, 73n19 Hem Chieu 206–208, 210, 214 hiet kong (tradition and custom) 84, 86, 89, 91–92, 95, 96–97 Hinayana 7, 167, 181n38, 200 Hsieh Shih-Chung 105, 112n19, 113n23 immigration: of Chinese to Singapore 42, 43–44, 48–49; and communalism in Burma 35–36; Sinhalese diaspora 60–61; and Theravada/Mahayana cooperation in Singapore 42–43, 45, 47, 48–49, 53–54 impact-response model, and colony/nation concept 9 Indian Buddhist revival movement 189–192 Indian Home Rule 32, 35, 40n55 Institut bouddhique: achievements 179; Cambodian nationalism and 177–178, 208; and French colonial administration 162, 167–168, 170; and French-Lao agendas 13, 171–175; “Indochinese Buddhism” project 167–171; LaoKhmer relations 169, 175–177; as republican influence 212–214; and World War II 178 Institut indigène des Études du bouddhisme du petit véhicule see Institut bouddhique internal colonialism 6, 103–104, 110; see also Lanna; Siam sangha; Sipsongpanna

jaonai 82–84, 85, 97 jao phaendin 102, 103, 104–106, 110 Japan: European semi-colonization 1; influence on Burma 39n48; occupation of Burma 141; occupation of Laos 178; occupation of Malayasia 64; occupation of Singapore 45–46, 52, 54; surrender in Malaysia 64, 74n26; Dai-lue monks traveling to 109; meetings with Khemr monks 207 Ji Zhe 108 Kandy: monastic appointments conflicts 126–128; traditional royal/monastic relations 124; World Fellowship of Buddhists 74n32 Kandyan Convention 62, 71, 73n11, 125 Karpelès, Suzanne 166, 168, 176, 177, 212 Kemper, Steven 129 khanan 107 Khao Pi, Khruba 94–96 Khieu Chum 14; as Buddhist republican (modern) 210–215; formative influences 206–208; Lon Nol republicanism/coup 209–210; “political monk” 209–210; and Wat Langka monastery 206, 208–209 Khmer nationalism, pro-French vs. oppositional 208 Khmer republic 214–215 Khruba Faihin see Faihin, Khruba khrubas 85, 101, 105, 107 knowledge production: and agency of colonial subjects 155–157; and Buddhist revivalism 189–192; and Burma 138–147; and Cambodian nationalism 207–208, 212–215; and colonial control of sangha 140; colonialism as 13–14, 21; historical narrative as 138–143; and Indian history 192; and modern religion/ secular dichotomy 21–23; orientalism (Laos) 166, 181n38, 212–214; problematical assumptions of 142–143; and sangha disintegration theory 143–147; and Saya San rebellion 40n56 kyaung-taiks (authority complexes) 143 Lanna: and Burma 82–83, 97; Chiang Mai 82–83, 84–85; language 88–89, 97; missionary monks in 5, 89–96; peasant rebellions in 81, 83–84; reasons for Siamese colonization of 3, 6, 81–84, 96–97; resistance to reform of sangha 83–84, 89–96; and Sipsongpanna 2, 106,

Index   225 110; territories of 98n4; traditional sangha 84–86; see also Siam sangha Lanna sangha: hierarchy, roles and personnel 84–85; traditional independence and decentralization of 84 Lan Xang Kingdom (Laos) 164 Laos, precolonial 162–163 Laos, French colonial see French Indochina Ledi Sayadaw 21, 26, 32 Lincoln, Bruce 27, 38n16 Lon Nol 209–210, 214 Lvi Em 206, 208 Mahabodhi Society: Beni Madhab Barua 192–194, 200, 201; Bodh Gaya 73n17, 190, 204n36; Indian Buddhism 63, 189, 192; K. Sri Dhammananda 63; Sri Lankan Buddhism 73n17 Maha Ping, Phra 88, 89, 90–91 Maha Sila Viravong 173–179 Mahathera Samakhom (MTS) 86–87, 89, 91 Mahavimaladhamm Thong 206 Mahayana Buddhism: and Beni Madhab Barua 199; compared with Theravada 7, 42–43; in Malaysia 70–71; in Singapore 42–43, 45, 46–54; in Sipsongpanna 105; in Sri Lanka 49–51 Mahmood, Saba 22 Malalgoda, Kitsiri 124, 135n24 Malayan Communist Party (MCP) insurgency 64–65 Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) 64 Malaysia: Brigg’s Plan 65; Chinese Buddhism in 74n35; federation of 46, 48; first Buddhist temples in 61; Mahayana Buddhists in 70–71; Malayan Emergency 64–65; non-sectarianism of Buddhists 69–72; Pangkor Engagement (1874) 60; and Sinhalese diaspora 10, 60–61; Theravada Buddhism 3–4, 115n55 Malvatta monks 126–127 maximalist nationalism 26–31 maximalist vs. minimalist nationalism 26–31 May Oung, U 30, 32 Mendelson, Michael 21 merit-making: colonial indifference to 150; economy of 22, 109; and hiet kong 96; and Lanna opposition 92, 93, 94; and the thathanabaing 144, 146

Mindon reforms 21, 22–23, 25; see also thathanabaing minimalist nationalism 24–25 “Modern Burman, The” 30–31 modernity/colonialism: and nationalist imagination 189; “native” Buddhist revival 189–190; and transnational networks 22 monastic rules see vinaya Monireth, Prince Sisowath 208 muang temples 105, 106 Nagara Vatta 208, 210 Nath, Chuon (Thommakay modernizer) 206, 208, 209, 210 Nehru, Jawaharlal 190, 191 “new Mahanikay” monks see Thommakay monks Nissan, Elizabeth 132 Norodom Sihanouk see Sihanouk, Norodom Ordinance of Buddhist Temporalities (1905) 129, 130, 131 orientalism 166, 181n38, 212–214; see also Institut bouddhique Ottama, U 33, 34 Pali literature, subaltern ideology in 207 Panadura debate 62–63 Pangkor Engagement (1874) 60 Pannasara, Rambukpota, and vihara controversy 130 patronage, colonial/modern influence on (Burma) 146, 147–148, 149, 151, 153 Pavie, Auguste 165 Pels, Peter 123, 132–133 People’s Republic of China 102, 103–104 Phaya Prap rebellion 83 Phetsarath, Prince 172–173, 177, 178 Prakash, Gayan 122, 123 Pranee Sirithorn Na Phatthalung 84 PRC see People’s Republic of China pyinnya (reform education) 30 Raffles, Stamford 43 republicanism see Buddhist republicanism Rhys-Davids, Carolyn 195 Rhys Davids, T.W. 193–194 righteous ruler (dhammiko dhammaraja) 207 Sabaragamuva/Malvatta sectarianism 126–127

226   Index Sangha Administration Act of 1902 84, 86–87, 90; see also Siam sangha sangharajas 84–85, 166 sasana 124, 135n48, 138, 144, 146–149, 150–155; see also thathanabaing Saya San rebellion 24, 35, 40n56 Scott, David 122 Shan rebellion 83, 92 Siam: Chakri dynasty of 82; concept 98n3; and French in Laos 162; influence on Buddhism 13, 151, 162–165, 168, 170–175, 178; internal colonialism of Lanna 86–92, 96–97; Mahanikaya 155; and open door policy 82; Peshawar relics 191; semi-colonization of Thailand and 15n8; “Western Laos” in 180n4 Siam sangha: education reforms in 88; Khruba Faihin case 88–92; Khruba Kao Pi case 94–95; Khruba Sriwichai case 92–95; language and 88–90; Lanna resistance to 89–96, 96–97; restructuring of Lanna sangha 86–89, 87, 91–92, 173; Thammayut vs. Mahanikai sects in 87–89, 90 Sihanouk, Norodom 208, 209–210; “not a Buddhist king” 206–207 Sindhuprama, Vachara 89 Singapore: and British religious noninterference policy 43–45; “Charter of Justice” 44; Chief High Priest (Sangha Nayaka) 73n9; Chinese (Mahayana) immigration to 43–44, 48–49, 55n33; demand for laborers 43, 48; Japanese occupation 45–46, 52, 54; Mahayana Buddhism 42–43, 46–54; orderly decolonization of 46; and religious diversity/syncretism 55n26; Thai immigration to 42, 53; Theravada Buddhism in 3–4, 42–43, 46–47, 48–54, 115n55; Theravada immigration to 6, 53, 60 Singapore, Buddhism: cooperative institutional development of 47–50; early religious diversity and weakness 46–47; growth and establishment of 50–53; Mahayana/Theravada cooperation 10, 42–43, 45, 46–54; postcolonial period 53 Sipsongpanna: Buddhist’s Association (postMao) 101, 107–110, 114n44; Chinese scholarship on 103, 104, 106; compared with Lanna 106, 110; geography and demography 102; as internal colony 103–104; as neglected area of Buddhism

scholarship 110–111; society 103–104; Thai scholarship on 106; traditional Buddhist organization in 104–107 Sipsongpanna Sangha: and CCP political authority 107; disestablishment of 110; institutional organization and hierarchy 105–106; limits to centralization 109–110; and Mahayana monks 105; and political authority/aristocracy 104–105; post-Mao Buddhist education 107–108; post-Mao centralization of 101, 107–109; post-Mao relative autonomy of 110 Sisavang Vong, King (Lao) 165, 170, 171–172 Son Ngoc Thanh 207, 208, 209, 214, 217n44 Sri Lanka: anti-conversion bill 67; Buddhist/Christian antagonisms 62, 69, 126; Colebrook-Cameron reforms 122–123; immigration to Singapore 42–43, 47–48, 53; India’s contributions to 199–200; K. Sri Dhammananda’s early formation in 62–63; Mahabodhi Society 63, 73n17; Mahayana monks and 49–51; Malaysian immigrants 59–61, 64, 65, 66, 72; Peshawar relics 191; precolonial royal/monastic relations 124; print culture 67–68; Young Men’s Buddhist Association in (YMBA) 28, 38n18, 68; see also Kandyan Convention Sri Pada temple: annual income 133n3; Buddhist/British disputes over 126–128; and legal-rational control mechanisms 129–132; sectarian disputes over 134n23, 135n24; traditional management of 123–128; Trustees and 121–122, 128–129, 135n44; see also governmental technologies Sriwichai, Khruba 92–95 subaltern ideology, in Pali literature 207 Sulagandi-Mahagandi sectarianism 140 Sumangala, Hikkaduve 156 Supreme Sangha Council see Mahathera Samakhom Tan Leshan 106, 113n29 Tat, Huot (modernizer) 206, 208, 209, 210, 214 Taungdaw Hsayadaw 140, 141 Taunggwin Hsayadaw 12–13, 140, 147, 150–154, 156 Taylor, Charles 22

Index   227 Temple Land Ordinance (Public Trustee) 131 Templer, Sir Gerald 65–66 Thailand: anti-colonialism in 178; independence 162; Lue people 102, 112n4; name change from Siam 97n1; relations with Lanna 2; sangha 11, 106, 110, 114n38; semi-colonization 3, 6, 15n8; “Western Laos” 180n4 Thammayut/Mahanikai sectarianism 90 Thammayut order: in Lanna reform 86–90; in Laos 173–174, 175 thathanabaing: colonial discourse on 138–143; definition of 4, 21; hierarchical fluidity of 145–146; in lower Burma 22–23, 140–141; and sangha decline theory 139–140; Thudama reforms project 150–155; and traditional vs. colonial position of 140–141, 144, 148–149 Theravada Buddhism: as historical concept 7; as modern/universalist religion 7–8, 14, 199–200 Thibaw, King (Mandalay) 23, 140, 146 Third Anglo-Burmese war (1885) 141 Thommakay monks (modernist) 206, 208 transnational networks: and cultural diversity as influence 25; and modernization of Buddhism 22–23 Turner, Alicia 5, 15n5, 157 “Umbrella War” 207–208 Upper Burma: annexation of 140; see also Anglo-Burmese wars

Vesak 70–71 vidane 128 Vidyalankara Pirivena 62–63 Vientiane 163, 165–166 vihara and Sri Pada temple 129–130 vinaya (monastic rules): and colonial thathanabaing 149–155; definition of 21; in Lanna 84; and Mindon reforms 21, 22–23, 25; texts/knowledge 146, 166; and traditional thathanabaing authority 141, 145–146, 149–155 Wachiriyan, Prince 91–92, 93, 174 Wee, Vivienne 49 Whitaker, Mark 128, 132 wunthanu athin 32 Yahan Pyo Apwe (Young Monks’ Association or YBA) 36 YBA (Young Monks’ Association) see Yahan Pyo Apwe Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA): as civil Buddhism 26–32; in decline (popularity decreasing) 32–33; as mass organization 31; and modern (pro-western) Burmese identity construction 27–29; and moral selfreform 29–31; on race and Burmese identity 29, 38n28; in Sri Lanka 28, 38n18, 68; and western education 24–25 Zhuandao, Venerable 44–45, 47, 50–51