 | Buddhism and the spirit cults in North-east Thailand |  |
21
THE PAST AND PRESENT IN
THE STUDY OF RELIGION: CONTINUITIES
AND TRANSFORMATIONS
In Chapter 19 I gave a synchronic structuralist outline of village religion
based on analysis of the distinctive and contrastive features of four ritual
complexes. But this book has also been concerned with another analytical
perspective. The village rituals and festivals have a demonstrable past and
are linked to the grand Buddhist tradition, especially the literary tradition,
much of which is common to many countries of South-east Asia. Thus
wherever it was relevant, when I engaged in elucidating the symbolism
of ritual acts and the message contents of ritual words, I referred back to
cosmologies, myths and doctrinal texts of the literary tradition of Pali
Buddhism shared by such countries as Ceylon, Thailand, Burma, Laos, and
Cambodia. And referring to this domain of facts has contributed an
additional dimension of meaning to my presentation.
In this concluding chapter, therefore, it is appropriate and necessary
to state systematically what I see as the relation between grand literary
Buddhism and village religion, and the methods I have used in linking
them. This particular problem and its solution have a direct relevance
for cognate issues: the relation of the present to the past, the relation
between synchronic and diachronic procedures, between anthropology
and history, between anthropology and Indology, between the anthropologist's
observations about a small-scale universe and the facts pertaining
to the wider stage of the total society.
There have been in recent years two approaches toward resolving the
classical question of how the anthropologist's field observations relate to
the religious tradition represented in the literary texts. Both refer to
India, but their formulations have wider implications. One is the Chicago
school represented by Redfield and his associates. McKim Marriott's
essay `Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization' (Marriott 1955)
is a fine example of this approach, and I would include Srinivas' concept
of Sanskritization as constituting a parent idea in the development of
this approach. Opposed to them have been the views of Dumont and
Pocock as expressed in Contributions to Indian Sociology; their distinctive
view of Indian sociology has at its heart the problem of how India's past
We are wiser now than when Marriott's pioneering thoughts were set
down, and I concur with the criticisms of them made by Dumont and
Pocock: to conceive of the problem in terms of the village versus the
great tradition of civilization is a false opposition because the village as
such is not the unit of social life and therefore it has little sociological
reality; the postulated processes of universalization and `parochialization'
that describe the exchange between village and wider civilization relate
to disembodied elements of religion and not to the structure of the religious
system itself.
There is another criticism that can be made: Marriott's own analysis
led him to realize that the little tradition/great tradition distinction is not
at all coterminous with the village/civilization distinction. The great
tradition is a major component of village religion and what is unique to
a village is truly residual. We should keep this qualification in mind.
How differently have Dumont and Pocock approached the problem?
In Contributions to Indian Sociology a critical axiom for them, in fact the
cornerstone of their approach, is that India is one and that its unity lies
in reiterated relationships (rather than isolated elements) which can be
discerned in different areas of Indian life. Now Dumont and Pocock, like
Marriott and Srinivas, employ for some purposes the notion of two levels
of Indian culture: the traditional higher Sanskritic civilization (which
demonstrates that India is a unity), and the lower or popular level of
culture and Hinduism (Contributions no. I (1957), p. 9; no. III (1959),
pp. 7-8). We should note, however, that they are fully aware of the
complexity which prohibits a simple reduction to these two levels. Thus
Popular Hinduism (i.e. the religion of the Hindu people as it is observed
today), strictly speaking, `forms only a part of, or consists of only one level
of Hinduism' (Contribution no. III, p. 7). Nor does literary Hinduism
comprise all of Hinduism, for there is a great deal that is not codified which
yet belongs to Hinduism. Some idea of the complex nature, the levels
and constituent units of Hinduism is conveyed by Dumont in his essay
`World Renunciation in Indian Religion' (ibid. no. IV, 1960), in which
he contrasts observed Hinduism and Brahmanism, discusses the influence
of the philosophy of the renouncers on Brahmanism, and concedes that
a place must be found for Tantric Hinduism, for Bhakti worship, and
for sects.
Despite these qualifications, it is nevertheless the case that Dumont and
Pocock have by and large substituted for Marriott's problem another one,
formulated as the relevance of Sanskritic Hinduism for Popular Hinduism,
and the relation between them. The importance of the higher Sanskritic
no. I, 1957): `In our opinion, the first condition for a sound development
of a Sociology of India is found in the establishment of the proper relation
between it and classical Indology.' A sociology of India is seen as lying at
the point of confluence of Sociology and Indology, and it is necessary
for the sociologist to be acquainted with Indian literature and the works
of classical Indology.
But Dumont and Pocock also affirmed that as anthropologists and
sociologists they take their `point of departure from life itself, not from
texts, from rites and belief, not from speculation and philosophy' (ibid.
no. III, 1959, p. 7). This, of course, is not to mean the disregarding of
brahmanical literature nor ignoring the intimate relation between religion
and speculative thought.
Where Dumont and Pocock thus differ from Marriott is first on how to
demarcate the two levels and secondly on the nature of the relationship
between them. They rightly repudiate Marriott's notion of village religion
as made up of great-traditional and little-traditional elements. As far as
the villagers are concerned there are not two traditions but simply one,
`which is their life'; for them village tradition is not conceptually separable
into different elements. Thus for the sociologist little tradition is not
a residual category of festivals not found in other villages, but is the
whole cycle of festivals studied in their social context.
What, then, is the relation between popular religion (that which the
anthropologist studies and observes in the field) and Sanskritic literary
Hinduism? On this question Dumont and Pocock have made no sustained
systematic statement, but they make several ad hoc assertions which are
brought together below:
1. An important and challenging idea is that the lower (popular) level
has `to be taken as being in some way homogeneous with the higher one'
(italics mine). Elsewhere they say that there is `constant interplay' between
the levels and `some degree of homogeneity between what we know from
direct observation and from the literature' (ibid. no. I, 1957, pp. 9, 15).
To put it in slightly different words, what they are stating is that homologous
structures of ideas and relationships can be discovered at the two
levels, though their idiom may be different. If there is some homogeneity
between popular practice and literary disquisitions, then "Sanskritization"
does not consist in the imposition of a different system upon an old one,
but in the acceptance of a more distinguished or prestigious way of saying
the same thing' (ibid. no. III, p. 45). I suppose the point they are making
is that the three basic complementary relationships in Hinduism: the
pure/impure distinction, the double relationship to the divine through
deities in cults are reflected both at the level of Sanskritic literature and
in everyday Hindu ritual action.
2. Another and rather different relation is postulated as well between
the two levels. A guiding premise for discovering the underlying similarity
of relations is the following statement: `The Indian sociologist must keep
his attention upon a constant interaction between a general idea and the
local working out of that idea' (ibid. no. III, 1959, p. 25). One suspects
that in this statement primacy is being given to the general ideas propounded
in the texts, the field situation being seen as a concrete manifestation of
these ideas. This formulation, by the way, is not dissimilar to Marriott's
`parochialization' process. It is not at all clear how this conforms to the
previous assertion that as anthropologists they take their point of departure
from actual life, not from the texts.
3. Dumont and Pocock also postulate a third kind of relationship
between the two levels, signified as that between the past (represented in
literary texts) and the present (represented by the anthropologist's data).
They say that `the set of relations of "structures" discovered in the
present can be fruitfully applied to the understanding of past evidence'
(ibid. p. 15). An example which Dumont cites is how contemporary
prestigious and non-prestigious marriage forms in South India throw
light on the concept of mixed unions in the old law books. This method
of using the present to understand the past, `an operation that demands
a critical approach', might be regarded by the fully-fledged historian as
problematic if not questionable. Yet looked at more closely the implications
of the procedure are perhaps no different from those contained in Croce's
view that all history is contemporary history, and Collingwood's view
that `The past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which
in some sense is still living in the present'. I think Dumont is right that
one of the contributions an anthropologist can make is to illuminate by
analogies drawn from the living present the obscurities of ancient texts;
most of such work, however, will be at the level of inspired guesswork.
While one admires the stimulating assertions of the editors of Contributions,
one can, I think, partly on the basis of my study of Thai village
religion, advance further in some respects than the editors managed to do.
To begin with, the very idea of two levels in religion—the higher
Literary and the lower Popular—and the attempt to uncover their links
can be criticized as being in some respects static and profoundly a-historical,
inasmuch as the notion of Sanskritic or Literary Hinduism is posited as
a single uniform category or level, when the fact is that the texts range
over vast periods of time and show shifts in principles and ideas.
The idea of Sanskritic Hinduism (which in other places he called
`philosophical Hinduism', `All India Hinduism') came to us originally
from M. N. Srinivas in Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South
India. How did he represent this phenomenon in his book? On close
scrutiny it turns out to be a hodge-podge made up of the Vedas, the
Upanishads, and early philosophical thought; of mythology, especially
the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, and the Puranas (which are the
Scriptures of a later, more exuberant Hinduism); of feasts, fasts, pilgrimages,
the sacred cow and sacred geography; of ethical and religious ideas such
as karma, dharma and moksha; of practices such as vegetarianism and
teetotalism; and finally of rituals such as worship of trees, rivers and
mountains. (See Srinivas 1952, pp. 213, 220, 226, 227.) Similarly, if
`Pali Buddhism' were thus decomposed it would be seen to consist of
highly miscellaneous, varied and non-contemporaneous elements. Srinivas'
notion of Sanskritic Hinduism violates history in that it is all-embracing
and includes everything from the early Vedas to the Puranas of later
times. No meaningful entity exists in fact (except in the sense of a library
of diverse works). It is a fabrication of anthropologists which they have
bequeathed to the modern Indian consciousness. Nor can the mythical
Sanskritic Hinduism be equated with All India Hinduism, which again
is neither a real entity in the consciousness of Hindus, nor a useful
analytical concept, because it simply stands for the lowest common
denominator of shared Hindu religious beliefs and customs.
I submit that the idea of two levels is an invention of the anthropologist
dictated not so much by the reality he studies as by his professional
perspective. By definition an anthropologist goes into the field to study
live action, and from the observations made over a short period of time
he tries to derive a systemic pattern or order. He takes for granted that
the piece of reality he has studied is both an autonomous and a meaningful
universe capable of exhibiting order. Because he is already committed
to an anthropological level of reality and social facts, the anthropologist who
works in complex `historical' societies is likely to view the literary culture
of that society as constituting another `level' or order equivalent to the
level of `live action' he has managed to record. Moreover, this static view
of the literature and recorded history may be an inevitable result of the
fact that an anthropologist is not primarily interested in them; they are
the province of the Orientalist or the Indologist and the historian. An
anthropologist is first and foremost preoccupied with the problems turned
up by his own field data, and sometimes their solution may lead him into
the realm of literary tradition and recorded history. When this happens,
there is the danger that he may walk around the library in cavalier fashion
he wants to make.
Embedded in the anthropologist's notion of two levels is the serious
danger of the past civilization represented in the classical literature
being imagined as a static and consistent whole expressing clear-cut
principles. The historian may well find this orientation naïve: for him
there are periods, eras, continuities and changes, not a single unbroken
tradition. To demonstrate an overall unity in the literature ranging through
the Vedas, Upanishads, Brahmanas and Puranas, would be an impossible
intellectual feat, even for a brahman dialectician, whether Kashmiri,
Madrasi, or Bengali. Such an anthropological perspective may well
postulate a theological view of the society in terms of a timeless architecture,
whereas an historian tuned to an open-ended future and a dynamic
perspective may think of India as essentially diverse, a diversity that is
the result of unevenness in society and the unequal play of competitive
forces, in themselves a result of antecedent events.
Perhaps the most important criticism that can be made of the analytical
usefulness of the two levels—higher literary and lower popular religion—
stems from my study of Thai religion, which is that the distinction is
frequently inapplicable to the anthropologist's field data and experience.
It is surely inappropriate in the case of an Indian village to talk of popular
Hinduism and Sanskritic Hinduism as separate levels, when the local
Brahman priest and perhaps educated members from other castes with
literary traditions are active members in the local community and are
using texts and orally transmitted knowledge which are directly or indirectly
linked to the classical forms. It seems to me that if anthropologists in
India had been oriented to the collection and recording of ritual texts and
the literature used by rural specialists, they might have formulated the
question differently.
We have seen that in our remote and humble Thai village the ordinary
Buddhist monk preaches sermons the words of which are taken from
and relate to the suttas and the Jataka tales; he chants paritta verses
which are adapted and elaborated from similar source texts; he recites
fortnightly, preferably from memory, the Patimokkha, which is an old
classical statement of the rules of monastic discipline; he is to some degree
formally indoctrinated in the rules of the Vinaya, with elaborate commentary
on discipline; finally in one way or another the village monk of
some duration of service may deal with secondary elaborations of doctrine,
and with myths, local and classical. That even the lowliest village monk
has some kind of access to the corpus of Pali literature of Buddhism is
due to the fact that the monk's practice of his vocation demands some
is a place where literacy in the sacred language is acquired and sacred
knowledge is transmitted.
The spread of Buddhist doctrinal knowledge and sacred lore is not
uniform among the monks placed at various levels of the society just as
it is unevenly spread among the lay social strata. At this point I must
depart from the village to take account of the entire Thai society. If one
wants to plot the distribution of religious knowledge among the monks
in Thailand one has to take into account at least three hierarchies:
(1) the formal ecclesiastical hierarchy, from the patriarch and the council
of ministers to village abbot and monk, which is mainly related to the
exercise of administrative authority but partially correlates with learning;
(2) the historically older hierarchy relating to the distinction between
royal wat and commoner wat. The former not only enjoyed royal patronage
but were the agencies which carried out the king's sponsorship of programmes
for reviving and promoting religious zeal, for translating and
editing classical Pali texts, etc.; (3) the third hierarchy relates to the
differences between and stratification of wat as institutions of learning
and repositories of knowledge. In Thailand today one can progress from
the lowly village wat to provincial centres of learning and from these to
national centres in Bangkok, culminating in universities for monks.
A network of learning exists, with channels for geographical, intellectual
and social mobility for monks.
In short, what needs to be emphasized is that anthropologists dealing
with complex literate societies should pay greater attention to the role
of literacy and the traditional networks of learning and transmission of
knowledge. Important to understand are the institutional arrangements
for the production of literate specialists who retain certain kinds of
knowledge, mediate on behalf of non-literate masses, and in some respects
hold the total society together within a common framework. If we had
proper knowledge of this, we would be less confident in holding naïve
views about literary versus popular religion. In a complex society like
Thailand or Ceylon or India, various kinds of written sacred literature
have a referential basis for the whole society, even for the unlettered
masses; hence the need to understand the mode of transmitting this
knowledge and the manner in which the literate specialists are recruited
and trained. This is an issue to which I have given some attention in
Chapter 8, but primarily only as it is manifest in a single village.
This might be the place to pay homage to Hocart who, if he thought in
terms of kingship and court culture and distinguished it from peasant
culture, did so to show the influence of the former on the latter and their
`Sanskritization', Hocart had proposed a notion equally as important and
which portrayed a contrary process. Hocart propounded the concepts of
`nationalization' in his book on Caste (1950) and of `centralization' in
Kings and Councillors (1936), to describe the process by which certain
customs and styles of life became diffused in society. The notion of
nationalization is an elitist view: `...every new custom or idea begins
with the leaders whether kings, priests, professors or merchants, and
spreads to the crowd' (1927, p. 157); or again, `The King's state is
reproduced in miniature by his vassals...' (1950, p. 68).
While Hocart no doubt overworked and exaggerated his thesis that
there was a prototype form of kingship which by diffusion spread to
different societies and became particularized in each, it was by no means
inappropriate for depicting some historical processes in the Indianized
kingdoms of South-east Asia, where certain customs, styles and rituals,
originating with the court appear to have spread in ever-widening
circles to the outer margins of the society. The value of Hocart's version
of the relation between high and low culture was that he specified the
political structure of the society as providing the grid and the channels
of transmission, a view superior to later formulations of diffusion and
`parochialization' because it was sociologically well grounded. And the
fact that the high or elite cultures from Burma to Indonesia share conspicuous
patterns and themes, and that in the societies of this belt the
high culture was and is a yardstick for the peasantry tempts us to look for
similar underlying processes which they may also share.
Let me, in the concluding paragraphs, return to the problem of levels,
taking note of the criticisms already made and building on the shoulders
of the writers cited. In the study of religion in societies like Thailand
I would make a distinction between historical religion and contemporary
religion without treating them as exclusive levels. Historical Buddhism
would comprise not only the range of religious texts written in the past,
but also the changes in the institutional form of Buddhism over the ages.
Contemporary religion would simply mean the religion as it is practised
today and should include those texts written in the past that are used
today and those customs sanctified in the past that persist today and are
integral parts of the ongoing religion.
Thus, if the question of the relation between historical and contemporary
religion interests us, we should look for two kinds of links, namely
continuities and transformations.
Continuities are evidenced in contemporary Buddhism by the use of
suttas, Jatakas, and liturgical texts in rituals. Furthermore, as we have
(Vinaya rules, the basic form of the ordination ceremony, the observance
of Lent (Vassa), the recitation of the Patimokkha confessional, etc.) which
have been handed down from the classical past, and as such exhibit a
structural logic inhering in southern Buddhist monastic institutions that
tends to persist through time.
Another kind of continuity that we witnessed was the conspicuous role
of symbols like the Naga (and the Garuda and hamsa) both in grand art
and mythology, and in village ritual, artifacts and legends. The prasaat
and the chedi and the seven-tiered umbrella of kingship, and the monumental
Buddhist centres of worship, also play their role in village life,
even if they are only materialized as palaces and palanquins of coloured
paper and bamboo strips.
But there have been important transformations as well. One kind stems
from the great historical change in Buddhism: the change in the way of
life of most monks from that of homeless wanderer to one of monastic
habitude; from that of personal salvation quest without obligations to
society to one in which the laity have been allowed to cultivate the Sangha
as a `field of merit'. All these transformations finally add up to the double
relation in which the bhikkhu, on the one hand in theory is not of this
world and has cut himself loose from its ties, pleasures and passions,
whereas the layman, on the other, is positively in this world and aspires
to be born again in more sumptuous circumstances. Thus are world
renunciation and world affirmation conjoined in institutionalized Buddhism.
A fascinating chain of historical changes leads us to the present-day
structural relationship, in the form of the co-existence in the village of
the monk (bhikkhu) and the paahm (brahman). The Theravada monk made
his way from India to Ceylon and thence to Siam;[1]
the court brahman of
Thailand came by a different route—from India via Cambodia to Siam.
The classical bhikkhu and brahman, antagonists in their home of origin in
India, co-exist in Thailand in a transformed state.
There is another set of transformations, the evidence for which is not
to be found in historical treatises but is the discovery of anthropological
study of contemporary social life. This book has in several places displayed
these gems sifted from the muddy facts of everyday life. For instance, we
have seen that, although the office of monk and the norms of monastic
life can be referred to the past, there are nevertheless a number of features
which derive their logic from the interwovenness of classical Buddhist
a sense owing their maintenance to the institutional logic of village life.
Thus, in Baan Phraan Muan the sociological transformations are to be
detected in the union of monkship (renunciation) with the concept of
filial obligation and merit transfer, the union of lay sponsorship of religion
with parental support of sons in robes, and the union of temporary
monkhood with the exigencies of a life cycle rooted in this world.
It is this perspective which permits us to appreciate how the classical
distinction between monk and layman has been transformed, the two
roles now being dynamically linked in a life cycle during which a young
man shifts from ascetic monkhood to marriage and family life and then
becomes an increasingly pious layman who in old age begins to approach
monkhood again. (And this product is not so dramatically different from
the classical Hindu formulation of four stages.) Furthermore, the dynamic
integration of religion and lay life is revealed in the rewards of monkhood
and in the preparation of the monk for leadership in lay life by means
of his acquisition of literacy and of ritual knowledge for use in domestic
rites.
There are certain circumstances in which classical ingredients exposed
to the fire of contingent human life and its needs synthesize into intriguing
compounds. The metaphorical and metonymical basis of the monkish
use of sacred words, especially the paritta, and the sociological basis for
the congregation's belief in the power of sacred words is an absorbing
problem which engaged my attention. Or again it is tempting to see the
exorcist, in the light of the classical concept of mystical power (iddhi), as
the inversion of a monk; but we must also take the precaution of going
beyond this and examining the effectiveness of the exorcist's art in terms
of the logic of the ritual itself as a communication device in a living
social context.
Having so far distinguished continuities from transformations, both
historical and sociological, let me now deal with instances of their coexistence
and simultaneous manifestation—primarily as homologous
structures at different levels of culture and civilization. We have seen how
seemingly bizarre cosmological schemes developed in theological tomes
come to life in village myth as a parade of supernaturals and a succession
of Buddhas. Or again, ideas expressed in abstract verbal form in the
texts are activated in ritual through a sequence of events with metaphorical
import and through the manipulation of concrete objects invested with
symbolic properties. Thus cosmic ideas of the three forms of existence
or worlds make their poignant point in a mortuary rite as three circumambulations,
or the throwing back and forth of funeral cloth over the
Phraawes festival, played by humans turned into cosmic actors. The
distance that separates the highly sophisticated and verbalized Tibetan
Book of the Dead and the cruder village mortuary ritual is not so great as
appears on first sight. Finally, in myth and its associated ritual we see
a dialectical relation between two modes, one expressed in language and
the other in action.
Village religion is expressed in rituals and these rituals in turn clothe
abstract philosophical ideas. The underlying rationale of ritual is that the
ideas so represented and made concrete can be manipulated realistically
in an instrumental mode. In this perhaps lies the difference between ritual
and philosophy.
I conclude with a gloss on the remark made earlier that the anthropological
study of the present can illuminate the past. There is a preeminent
advantage in studying a phenomenon in its live social context.
The trouble with old texts is that they are fragmentary; and since in
addition they accumulate over time, the student is hard put to reconstruct
what the total field of religion at any point of time was, how the constituent
cults and rites related to one another, what weight one belief or practice
had in respect of another, and when if ever a particular myth or sermon
or discourse was brought to life by association with a ritual. The virtue
of a synchronic structural account of contemporary religion is that this is
what it precisely accomplishes—the construction of a total field. And the
structural relations of hierarchy, opposition, complementarity and linkage
between Buddhism and the spirit cults arranged in one single field in
contemporary life can therefore give insights into the historical processes
by which Buddhism came to terms with indigenous religions in its march
outwards from India. The relation between the rocket festival addressed
to the guardian spirit and the festival of Bun Phraawes may well be the
model of a general process of durable, if not timeless, mutual accommodation
between Buddhism and the spirit cults.
| Buddhism and the spirit cults in North-east Thailand | |