On the whole, the few hundred years of early, unwritten Buddhism seems to have been a reformist movement with an emphasis on moral teaching over superstitions such as belief in supernatural forces and in the efficacy of ritual. It also seems to have been a movement of liberation from the Hindu class system. If that is right, then Buddhism can be as relevant today or in any time, as it was then. The struggle to maintain Buddhism’s credibility as it is continually exposed to infection by new superstitions never ends. The latest superstitions include amulets and expensive dolls with supposed supernatural power. Going back to the earliest texts is a cure for superstitions Buddhism has acquired since they were written, but it means re-infection with the superstitions and punitive barbarism of those times. (What better examples can we see of this than Salafist Islamism and American Christian fundamentalism?).
Human nature evolves slowly enough for the most basic of culturally successful rules of behaviour to remain current since Buddhism’s early time. Those are the good old ideas that have stood the test of time. It looks very much to me as if the tradition of how to build temples could be amongst them. But huge man-made changes in social and physical environment since then mean that moral rules need to evolve in detail if they are not going to drag a culture down. The same principle applies to all religions. They need to keep evolving towards currently relevant, evidence-based moral systems in order to survive in a changing world. If Buddha was such reformer, it is probably true to say that his teaching was characterised by that kind of wisdom in his day. If I were a Buddhist I would wish Buddhism to operate very largely as a source of effective moral guidance to the people of today and tomorrow, with a minimum of the baggage that would cause well-informed people of good will to abandon it, as they have done with most of the other religions of the world. That baggage includes superstition, monastic corruption, money-laundering, and abuse by corrupt dynastic power. Buddhism largely stripped down to the time-relevant moral teachings of an outstandingly wise and benevolent man means asking, what would Buddha have taught us if he were alive today?
That kind of religion is much better able to survive in the future than Christianity or any religion tied irrevocably to belief in the magic powers of an omnipotent, immortal, invisible, feudal lord somewhere in the sky, who knows what everybody is up to, as if he had spies everywhere. The educated people of the modern world are already liberated from magic and feudalism.
The problem with Liej’s suggestion of course is that no one is doing any such thing here.
A few thousand people in Thailand, an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, are using dolls in a way that is consonant with normal daily Buddhist practice in Buddhist Thailand.
How does that become “allowing anything to be defined as Buddhism”?
It’s a straw man. And come to think of it, the use of such a doll in place of a real argument might actually resonate with this discussion.
The real question is whether Liej and DHL will be able to buy airline tickets for the little fellow and offend more reasonable travelers.
One trend I also noticed is Burmanization of ethnic regions. When I was young, my father usually spoke Mon with a group of his friends. As I grew older, such occasions became a rarity. That means ethnic parties cannot face head on with NLD under current first-past-the-post system.
Despite this, the decision that has had, and will have, grave consequences in the foreseeable future comes from Shwe Mann: He decided to rally against PR proposal. Under PR, USDP would definitely have good prospects, and ethnic parties would have fielded better as well. The fact that Shwe Mann opted against PR made me think he had an agreement with NLD, but that was not the case. Most likely, it appears Shwe Mann miscalculated, or he trusted NLD more than his own party members.
In order to have a meaningful conversation, scholars must arrive at some sort of agreement as to the conceptual boundaries of the topic of inquiry.
Yes, here I agree with Llej: if you allow all and anything to be defined as Buddhism (or Christianity or whatever) just because somebody calls it so, meaningful discussion becomes impossible. There is a – admittedly – fuzzy border ‘before’ and ‘beyond’ which things are NOT Buddhism. The same applies to language: They do segue into mutually (un)intelligible variants across time and space, but I doubt that people in Europe would be at a loss to distinguish French from German, quotation marks or no quotation marks. Same with religion. And remember: good fences do good neighbours make, something religious reformers in Northern Sri Lanka drew attention to when arguing with Christian missionaries!
As for the statement, “we are too distracted by the national politics and the national language we study to know much about the rest of the region until we have to teach it,” it is often only by going outside of the region completely that you can truly understand what is going on inside it.
Take studying Pali literature from Sri Lanka, which few interest themselves in perhaps because Sri Lanka is located outside of SEAsia, is absolutely essential for understanding Burmese intellectual history and the development of Burmese literature from Nissaya parallel translations.
Ming Annals (translated by Geoffrey Wade) covering events in the Tai states of Yunnan during the post-Pagan Ava period of Burma provide a much-needed benchmark to measure the veracity of the Burmese chronicle.
How could we find out if Southeast Asia is really a coherent idea?
How about going beyond the Braudelian practice of collating scattered references across the geographical expanse of the Mediterranean or SEAsia over hundreds of years.
Instead, follow the lead of analytical sociology and posit a network of connections of people, businesses and organizations across Southeast Asia.
Then determine in a scientific (& falsifiable) way how coherent and interrelated this network is, and thus a region called “Southeast Asia” actually is compared to other possible regional groupings. Then use this finding to answer the question of whether the region warrants study as an entity in itself, that is outside of the imagined diplomatic community of SEATO, ASEAN & finally the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC).
Contemporary connections between Thailand and distant Indonesian seem to be rather sparse, at least based on news articles, but between Singapore and Indonesia they are obviously a lot stronger. Filipinos coming to work in the Thai education and tourism sectors would account for many connections between the Philippines and Thailand, but there don’t seem to be many business, trade or scholarly connections.
People here in the Bangkok Post office suggest that the connections between China and mainland SEAsian states actually swamp any interconnections between SEAsian states, that is connections of business, work, cultural or otherwise.
You should add Europe to the list! Antiquity was based on the mediterranean, christianity goes beyond Europe (and within we have three different versions), modernization was a feature of the north-west etc. One hardly ever finds an overlap between geography, culture, society etc. The idea of such an overlap only evolved with nationalism, and a nation is not a region.
Of course it is the middle calss, less so the upper class and elite. The middle class is now in between hopes for social mobility and a better standard of life or rathere more consumer goods to express status, and the fear of status decline. In such a situation anything that might help is welcome. Interesting is in Thailand that it is always connected to money and getting richer. Perhaps we should look at Freud’s personality types. He regards the identification with money as a trait of the “anal personality”. Another feature is the strong authoritarian belief. I guess, the angel dolls are not a cosmology from below, but rather an expression of an anal orientation!
When living upcountry, one finds that this doll superstition is mostly The central Bangkok middle and upper class who are desperately seeking an escape from reality.
Enough already! Why have we spilt more ink and energy debating this issue than any other group of regional scholars around the world? The environmental coherence of Southeast Asia is far more obvious than that of Africa or Latin America; even China and India are more profoundly divided between wheat-growing dry north and rice-growing wet south. The “fundamental anxiety” of Southeast Asian studies lies not in the region’s lack of coherence but in the Southeast Asianists. We are too distracted by the national politics and the national language we study to know much about the rest of the region until we have to teach it. But enough has surely been written to allay this anxiety. Go read it.
Amazing that Najib is still standing as Malaysia’s PM. I have no doubt that Najib would be on a full court press of intimidation, strongarm policing and terrorizing of his outraged critics.
But if history is any guide, blatant multi-billiion corruption by a holder of a country’s highest office scandalizes to the extreme and provokes a very massive people-power escalating response to drive out the rogue leader by any and every means necessary.
Goodbye Najib. Take your cue from Marcos, Suharto and Thsksin. Exile yourself and be a fugitive to enjoy your lucre.
Thank you for your reply. On the first point you could probably also include the likes of Ieng Sary, Son Sen and even Ieng Thirith, as key figures in the Khmer Rouge setup.
What I find extremely interesting about the situation in contemporary Cambodia is that while the state per se may have limited presence, the party (the CPP and its various incarnations), which is intricately intertwined with the state, has a significant presence, especially in rural areas. Under the People’s Republic of Kampuchea this took the form of the Party Working Groups that acted as a sort of parallel structure to the official administrative structures of the state. Also, I’m currently looking into party-state relations and its impact on service delivery at the sub-national level so will be able to say a bit more in the near future.
I’m a big fan of Michael Vickery, too. Also, if you do have the time, check out Prof. Snyder’s full lecture, a really compelling listen. Thanks again for your comments.
Scott has provided quite an interesting analysis although I would add Khieu Samphan to Nuon Chea: the latter more brutal but regimes just don’t rely on one idelogue for the most part.
However, what I find is that in much of rural Cambodia compared to neighboring Vietnam or Thailand is that the state does have a very limited presence even today. There are some state imposed “legal and rational norms” that influence relations between state and civil society but they are much less clearly pronounced than in either Vietnam or Thailand or even perhaps the Lao PDR. This is probably one of the reasons why understanding not just structures but culture/s as well is very important.
Still good stuff Scott but if were you I would not just consult the likes of David Chandler but look up on old sage who is more of a leftist than Chandler, Michael Vickery. The latter has a lot of interesting anecdotes that I am not sure the former would be happy to share. And of course seek out Cambodians – not many of them who are left I know – that remember Cambodia before Pol Pot, especially in the rural areas.
As a linguist, you must have some inkling of the meaning of “worth her salt” and therefore that I was suggesting that my disdain for the constant calls for “true Buddhism” vs the real variety practiced by millions around the world is matched by my sense of the quasi-fascist ridiculousness of the Acadamie’s doomed attempt to beat back the waves of Franglaise.
Petain would be spinning in his grave, I’m sure.
I wonder how he would feel about Mickey Rourke being cast in The Immortals whereas he was just cast out?
Ah another day another HR related article that make the author feel if not righteous blinded or rather distract other from the real definition of HR must be.
I do laud and thank the 2 author, Mr Gomez and Mr Ramcharan for bringing up the subject.
SEA is so different from the western countries that Pursue of Human Right must be under more pertinent definition.
Just as in Christianity and other religion human right is defined by the DIGNITY od fellow Human being.
Dignity most common denominator is:
“poverty of basic materials as well as spiritual concepts”
Yes the dignity of imprisonment due to politics is HR related, however the most egregious of all HR violation is witnessing the suffering and dying of humanity due to poverty of basic materials.
Human Rights the west espouse must entail the most fundamental that no longer exist in the west but rampant in SEA and else where.
This protagonist state that the poverty of Spirit that create poverty everywhere, in Myanmar only the abundance of spirituality make this HR violation possible.
That, of course, would be because, like the ridiculous notion of there being some “true Buddhism” or “pure Buddhism” that can be used as a cudgel with which to beat the superstitious and the constructivists [sic] simultaneously, there is no such qualified version of French that a linguist worth her salt would not find equally ridiculous.
And again, while I find such linguistic prescriptivism to be wrong-headed, I do not deny the existence de facto and de jure of a standardized, prestige variety of French that is propagated by L’Académie fran├зaise.
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Predicting Myanmar’s next president
Will Dr Zaw Myint Maung be nominated President come Mar 17? For the second time he has accompanied Daw Suu to meet the CiC.
If I were a betting man my money’s on him.
Silencing by means of “superstition”
Buddhism and Superstition
On the whole, the few hundred years of early, unwritten Buddhism seems to have been a reformist movement with an emphasis on moral teaching over superstitions such as belief in supernatural forces and in the efficacy of ritual. It also seems to have been a movement of liberation from the Hindu class system. If that is right, then Buddhism can be as relevant today or in any time, as it was then. The struggle to maintain Buddhism’s credibility as it is continually exposed to infection by new superstitions never ends. The latest superstitions include amulets and expensive dolls with supposed supernatural power. Going back to the earliest texts is a cure for superstitions Buddhism has acquired since they were written, but it means re-infection with the superstitions and punitive barbarism of those times. (What better examples can we see of this than Salafist Islamism and American Christian fundamentalism?).
Human nature evolves slowly enough for the most basic of culturally successful rules of behaviour to remain current since Buddhism’s early time. Those are the good old ideas that have stood the test of time. It looks very much to me as if the tradition of how to build temples could be amongst them. But huge man-made changes in social and physical environment since then mean that moral rules need to evolve in detail if they are not going to drag a culture down. The same principle applies to all religions. They need to keep evolving towards currently relevant, evidence-based moral systems in order to survive in a changing world. If Buddha was such reformer, it is probably true to say that his teaching was characterised by that kind of wisdom in his day. If I were a Buddhist I would wish Buddhism to operate very largely as a source of effective moral guidance to the people of today and tomorrow, with a minimum of the baggage that would cause well-informed people of good will to abandon it, as they have done with most of the other religions of the world. That baggage includes superstition, monastic corruption, money-laundering, and abuse by corrupt dynastic power. Buddhism largely stripped down to the time-relevant moral teachings of an outstandingly wise and benevolent man means asking, what would Buddha have taught us if he were alive today?
That kind of religion is much better able to survive in the future than Christianity or any religion tied irrevocably to belief in the magic powers of an omnipotent, immortal, invisible, feudal lord somewhere in the sky, who knows what everybody is up to, as if he had spies everywhere. The educated people of the modern world are already liberated from magic and feudalism.
Silencing by means of “superstition”
The problem with Liej’s suggestion of course is that no one is doing any such thing here.
A few thousand people in Thailand, an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, are using dolls in a way that is consonant with normal daily Buddhist practice in Buddhist Thailand.
How does that become “allowing anything to be defined as Buddhism”?
It’s a straw man. And come to think of it, the use of such a doll in place of a real argument might actually resonate with this discussion.
The real question is whether Liej and DHL will be able to buy airline tickets for the little fellow and offend more reasonable travelers.
How did Southeast Asia become a social fact?
The Chinese Question? Amy Chua or Caroline Hau, take your pick.
Misjudging Myanmar’s ethnic vote
One trend I also noticed is Burmanization of ethnic regions. When I was young, my father usually spoke Mon with a group of his friends. As I grew older, such occasions became a rarity. That means ethnic parties cannot face head on with NLD under current first-past-the-post system.
Despite this, the decision that has had, and will have, grave consequences in the foreseeable future comes from Shwe Mann: He decided to rally against PR proposal. Under PR, USDP would definitely have good prospects, and ethnic parties would have fielded better as well. The fact that Shwe Mann opted against PR made me think he had an agreement with NLD, but that was not the case. Most likely, it appears Shwe Mann miscalculated, or he trusted NLD more than his own party members.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30144214
Silencing by means of “superstition”
In order to have a meaningful conversation, scholars must arrive at some sort of agreement as to the conceptual boundaries of the topic of inquiry.
Yes, here I agree with Llej: if you allow all and anything to be defined as Buddhism (or Christianity or whatever) just because somebody calls it so, meaningful discussion becomes impossible. There is a – admittedly – fuzzy border ‘before’ and ‘beyond’ which things are NOT Buddhism. The same applies to language: They do segue into mutually (un)intelligible variants across time and space, but I doubt that people in Europe would be at a loss to distinguish French from German, quotation marks or no quotation marks. Same with religion. And remember: good fences do good neighbours make, something religious reformers in Northern Sri Lanka drew attention to when arguing with Christian missionaries!
How did Southeast Asia become a social fact?
As for the statement, “we are too distracted by the national politics and the national language we study to know much about the rest of the region until we have to teach it,” it is often only by going outside of the region completely that you can truly understand what is going on inside it.
Take studying Pali literature from Sri Lanka, which few interest themselves in perhaps because Sri Lanka is located outside of SEAsia, is absolutely essential for understanding Burmese intellectual history and the development of Burmese literature from Nissaya parallel translations.
Ming Annals (translated by Geoffrey Wade) covering events in the Tai states of Yunnan during the post-Pagan Ava period of Burma provide a much-needed benchmark to measure the veracity of the Burmese chronicle.
How could we find out if Southeast Asia is really a coherent idea?
How about going beyond the Braudelian practice of collating scattered references across the geographical expanse of the Mediterranean or SEAsia over hundreds of years.
Instead, follow the lead of analytical sociology and posit a network of connections of people, businesses and organizations across Southeast Asia.
Then determine in a scientific (& falsifiable) way how coherent and interrelated this network is, and thus a region called “Southeast Asia” actually is compared to other possible regional groupings. Then use this finding to answer the question of whether the region warrants study as an entity in itself, that is outside of the imagined diplomatic community of SEATO, ASEAN & finally the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC).
Contemporary connections between Thailand and distant Indonesian seem to be rather sparse, at least based on news articles, but between Singapore and Indonesia they are obviously a lot stronger. Filipinos coming to work in the Thai education and tourism sectors would account for many connections between the Philippines and Thailand, but there don’t seem to be many business, trade or scholarly connections.
People here in the Bangkok Post office suggest that the connections between China and mainland SEAsian states actually swamp any interconnections between SEAsian states, that is connections of business, work, cultural or otherwise.
How did Southeast Asia become a social fact?
You should add Europe to the list! Antiquity was based on the mediterranean, christianity goes beyond Europe (and within we have three different versions), modernization was a feature of the north-west etc. One hardly ever finds an overlap between geography, culture, society etc. The idea of such an overlap only evolved with nationalism, and a nation is not a region.
Silencing by means of “superstition”
Of course it is the middle calss, less so the upper class and elite. The middle class is now in between hopes for social mobility and a better standard of life or rathere more consumer goods to express status, and the fear of status decline. In such a situation anything that might help is welcome. Interesting is in Thailand that it is always connected to money and getting richer. Perhaps we should look at Freud’s personality types. He regards the identification with money as a trait of the “anal personality”. Another feature is the strong authoritarian belief. I guess, the angel dolls are not a cosmology from below, but rather an expression of an anal orientation!
Myanmar’s media flexes its muscle
I hope with all my heart for rapid change.
I hope too that those (oppressed?) Burmese living in Thailand can return home to a future, rich and rewarding.
I hope too that I can go there with my Burmese grandchildren and stay in a “private” home, with my relatives.
I live in hope on so many fronts, I fear I will die before I see it start to happen.
I see Thailand heading down the road we once trod – I hope I am VERY wrong.
Silencing by means of “superstition”
When living upcountry, one finds that this doll superstition is mostly The central Bangkok middle and upper class who are desperately seeking an escape from reality.
How did Southeast Asia become a social fact?
What ? And forego the academic angst ? Impossible. Why that is even less likely than UMNO being truthful.
How did Southeast Asia become a social fact?
Enough already! Why have we spilt more ink and energy debating this issue than any other group of regional scholars around the world? The environmental coherence of Southeast Asia is far more obvious than that of Africa or Latin America; even China and India are more profoundly divided between wheat-growing dry north and rice-growing wet south. The “fundamental anxiety” of Southeast Asian studies lies not in the region’s lack of coherence but in the Southeast Asianists. We are too distracted by the national politics and the national language we study to know much about the rest of the region until we have to teach it. But enough has surely been written to allay this anxiety. Go read it.
Malaysia’s ‘strongman’?
Amazing that Najib is still standing as Malaysia’s PM. I have no doubt that Najib would be on a full court press of intimidation, strongarm policing and terrorizing of his outraged critics.
But if history is any guide, blatant multi-billiion corruption by a holder of a country’s highest office scandalizes to the extreme and provokes a very massive people-power escalating response to drive out the rogue leader by any and every means necessary.
Goodbye Najib. Take your cue from Marcos, Suharto and Thsksin. Exile yourself and be a fugitive to enjoy your lucre.
Lawlessness and mass violence in Cambodia
Dear Shane,
Thank you for your reply. On the first point you could probably also include the likes of Ieng Sary, Son Sen and even Ieng Thirith, as key figures in the Khmer Rouge setup.
What I find extremely interesting about the situation in contemporary Cambodia is that while the state per se may have limited presence, the party (the CPP and its various incarnations), which is intricately intertwined with the state, has a significant presence, especially in rural areas. Under the People’s Republic of Kampuchea this took the form of the Party Working Groups that acted as a sort of parallel structure to the official administrative structures of the state. Also, I’m currently looking into party-state relations and its impact on service delivery at the sub-national level so will be able to say a bit more in the near future.
I’m a big fan of Michael Vickery, too. Also, if you do have the time, check out Prof. Snyder’s full lecture, a really compelling listen. Thanks again for your comments.
Scott
Lawlessness and mass violence in Cambodia
Scott has provided quite an interesting analysis although I would add Khieu Samphan to Nuon Chea: the latter more brutal but regimes just don’t rely on one idelogue for the most part.
However, what I find is that in much of rural Cambodia compared to neighboring Vietnam or Thailand is that the state does have a very limited presence even today. There are some state imposed “legal and rational norms” that influence relations between state and civil society but they are much less clearly pronounced than in either Vietnam or Thailand or even perhaps the Lao PDR. This is probably one of the reasons why understanding not just structures but culture/s as well is very important.
Still good stuff Scott but if were you I would not just consult the likes of David Chandler but look up on old sage who is more of a leftist than Chandler, Michael Vickery. The latter has a lot of interesting anecdotes that I am not sure the former would be happy to share. And of course seek out Cambodians – not many of them who are left I know – that remember Cambodia before Pol Pot, especially in the rural areas.
Silencing by means of “superstition”
As a linguist, you must have some inkling of the meaning of “worth her salt” and therefore that I was suggesting that my disdain for the constant calls for “true Buddhism” vs the real variety practiced by millions around the world is matched by my sense of the quasi-fascist ridiculousness of the Acadamie’s doomed attempt to beat back the waves of Franglaise.
Petain would be spinning in his grave, I’m sure.
I wonder how he would feel about Mickey Rourke being cast in The Immortals whereas he was just cast out?
Recognising restrictive regimes
[…] http://www.newmandala.org/2016/02/12/recognising-restrictive-regimes/ […]
Region’s human rights watchdogs lack bite
Ah another day another HR related article that make the author feel if not righteous blinded or rather distract other from the real definition of HR must be.
I do laud and thank the 2 author, Mr Gomez and Mr Ramcharan for bringing up the subject.
SEA is so different from the western countries that Pursue of Human Right must be under more pertinent definition.
Just as in Christianity and other religion human right is defined by the DIGNITY od fellow Human being.
Dignity most common denominator is:
“poverty of basic materials as well as spiritual concepts”
Yes the dignity of imprisonment due to politics is HR related, however the most egregious of all HR violation is witnessing the suffering and dying of humanity due to poverty of basic materials.
Human Rights the west espouse must entail the most fundamental that no longer exist in the west but rampant in SEA and else where.
This protagonist state that the poverty of Spirit that create poverty everywhere, in Myanmar only the abundance of spirituality make this HR violation possible.
Silencing by means of “superstition”
That, of course, would be because, like the ridiculous notion of there being some “true Buddhism” or “pure Buddhism” that can be used as a cudgel with which to beat the superstitious and the constructivists [sic] simultaneously, there is no such qualified version of French that a linguist worth her salt would not find equally ridiculous.
Again, the responses to my comment drip with irony. Currently, there are 40 linguists and other scholars of language, known as les immortels, who have been tasked with determining what constitutes true French and given the power of advisory to protect the purity of the French language from adulteration through contact with that linguistic pandemic, globalized English. Whereas, the 1st Sangha was dismissed around 2,500 years ago.
And again, while I find such linguistic prescriptivism to be wrong-headed, I do not deny the existence de facto and de jure of a standardized, prestige variety of French that is propagated by L’Académie fran├зaise.