History and the Dialectic of Meaning and Experience

While I believe Tambiah's "totalistic" approach to have had positive results, I also maintain that it is limited in a fundamental way. I agree with Tambiah that if Theravada Buddhism is to be a "world religion"

then it must embody a "worldview" (to use a term I prefer) which structures in a fundamental way the nature of existence as it is con- ceived of by large numbers of people, the vast majority of whom are not committed to leading permanently the life of religious virtuosi.

I disagree, however, with Tambiah's assertion that the Theravada Buddhist worldview can be equated with a cosmology predicated upon the "two wheels of the Dhamma", the bhikkhu and the cakkavatti or universal monarch. I also disagree with his claim that the Theravada Buddhist worldview (his "total social fact") can be assumed to have structured the orientation towards life of all peoples of Sri Lanka, the various Thai states, Burma, Cambodia, and Laos from the earliest introduction of Buddhism in these societies to the present. My dissent from Tambiah's argument flows from a theoretical perspective in which history has a very different significance than it does for Tambiah.

I cannot in this essay attempt a general discussion of the constitutive elements of the Theravada Buddhist worldview. For the purposes of the present discussion, it is necessary to concern ourselves only with the importance of the Sangha and the cakkavatti in this worldview. While there is no question but that Theravada Buddhism depends upon, and requires the existence of, the Sangha, the predication of Buddhism's status as a world religion on the existence of a monarchy informed by the Dhamma creates a "parameter" (to use Tambiah's terms) which is not essential. Tambiah's assertion in this book notwithstanding, lay Buddhist ethics are not dependent on the existence of a monarchy.

Indeed, Tambiah is not true to his own previous work for in Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-east Thailand he argued that the monastic communities found in villages were "relatively autonomous" and were integrated into "the villages or towns which maintain them". 34 From that work alone, one would have to deduce that there exists a lay ethic of village householders which is "relatively autonomous" from and not

"encompassed" by the ethic of Buddhist kings.

While it is unquestionably true that for Buddhism to exist in society 34 BSC, p. 76.

it must shape and structure the quest for and manipulation of power, it does not follow that it is essential for the existence of Buddhism as a world religion that the power holders be Buddhist. One need only to point to the historical persistence of Theravada Buddhist communities (including both Sangha and laity) in the non-Buddhist polities of Bengal, the northern Malay states, southern China, and Vietnam or to take account of the more recently formed communities in Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, and a number of Western countries to establish the premise that a Buddhist monarch is not essential to the Buddhist world- view. Moreover, secularization of politics has certainly been taking place in societies which have traditionally been ruled by Buddhist monarchs.

In Sri Lanka, the triumph of Buddhist-based politics which appeared as- sured in the I950s and I96os now no longer seems so obvious. In Burma, following the neo-traditionalism of U Nu, the Ne Win government turned Burma on a secular socialist path and has maintained that course for a period longer than that during which U Nu held sway. Laos, and particularly Cambodia, perhaps the most traditional of the Theravada Buddhist societies, have been embarked on radically secularist and, in the case of Cambodia at least, violently anti-Buddhist, political trajec- tories since I975. Even in Thailand which remains the last stronghold of Buddhist-political conservatism, secularist trends can be identified.

The King himself in recent years has instituted patronage for Muslim, Christian, and non-Buddhist tribal peoples in Thailand and has had such patronage widely publicized in the country. Secular socialist parties have won seats in nearly all of the elections in Thailand since World War II. I would agree, nonetheless, with Tambiah when he says that

"Thai nationalism can wrap around itself a cloak of Buddhistic aura without fear of finding religious obstacles to the social objectives it may wish to promote." 35 However, I would argue that the reason this is so has to do with the particular historical interrelationship between Buddhism and polity in Thai society and not with any generic root paradigm established several hundred or thousand years ago. In short, I argue that the Buddhist monarch as a type is a consequence of histor- ical development and not of structural imperative.

I also argue that the Theravada Buddhist worldview can never be assumed for any particular people at any particular point in time, but

35 WCWR, p. 43I.

must always be shown in each case to orient the lives of that people.

I would begin by observing that what is considered to be the orthodox worldview in Theravada Buddhism did not emerge fully formulated at the time of the Buddha. The Pali canon, which is the source for the worldview, was composed over a period of several centuries after the death of the Buddha and it was not until the 4th century A.D. that the orthodox position was given its fullest and perduring theological ex- position in the commentarial writings of Buddhaghosa. ³⁶ Even after this formulation, orthodoxy did not immediately establish itself in all the areas where we find evidence of Buddhist influence. We know that Buddhism almost disappeared from Sri Lanka a number of times in the history of that nation, and in Southeast Asia Theravada Buddhism probably did not get established as the worldview of the populace until the I3th-15th centuries.

An example of where Tambiah wrongly assumes that an orthodox Theravada Buddhist worldview underlies a cultural tradition in South- east Asia can be found in his discussion of the Burmese kingdom of Pagan in the IIth-i3th centuries. Tambiah assumes that Pagan was prototypically Theravada Buddhist and cites Luce's study of early Pagan to that effect. ³⁷ In fact, Luce's detailed study clearly demon- strates that the great kings of early Pagan, Anorahta (Aniruddha) ^(1044- I077) and Kyanzittha (Io84-III3) drew on a syncretism of religious beliefs-Hindu, Mahayana Buddhist, animist, as well as Theravada Buddhist-to legitimate their reigns. 38 While it is true that the Pagan rulers followed some practices which were perpetuated in the practices of later Theravada Buddhist kings in Burma and Thailand, I think that the historical evidence strongly supports an interpretation which would make the relationship between the Pagan kings and religion fundamentally different from the relationship between later Burmese and Thai kings and Theravada Buddhism. 39 While I cannot make the case here, I also maintain that there are fundamentally important dif-

36 For further elaboration of this argument, see Richard F. Gombrich, Precept and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 40-43.

37 WCWR, p. 8I.

38 Gordon H. Luce, Old Burma-Early Pagan, 3 vols. (Locust Valley, N.Y.:

J. J. Augustin, Artibus Asiae Supplementum 25, 1969-1970), see I, p. 73, for example.

39 I have discussed this point briefly in The Golden Peninsula: Culture Adap- tation in Mainland Southeast Asia (New York: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 70-74.

ferences in the structure of the polities of Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, early Bangkok and the Lao state of Campasak which Tambiah conflates together. 40

As is evident in the above remarks, my view of history is quite dif- ferent from that of Tambiah. For me, dialectical tensions exist not only between conceptions but also, and more fundamentally, between meaning and experience, that is, between the cultural conceptions which are communicated from one generation to the next and the structure of the actual situations in which people find themselves. If the tension between meaning and experience becomes too great, than either the cultural conceptions or the structure of experience will be fundamen- tally changed. If a worldview persists, it is not because there are some fixed parametric barriers at the ideological level but because the tension between the worldview and the actual situations in which people find themselves has not become sufficiently acute to stimulate any radical problem of meaning.

Tambiah's ignoring of the conflicts between meaning and experience generated by situational factors is clearly evident in the inadequate treatment he gives to "infrastructure" (a term which he himself intro- duces 41). In the case of traditional Southeast Asian states he never mentions demographic conditions, and the nature of taxation levied against the peasantry is barely touched upon. While he recognizes the importance of the control of trade, he does not make enough of the important difference in the control of trade exercised by Ayutthaya, and later Bangkok, as compared with most other traditional polities in Southeast Asia. When he introduces his model of the "radial polity,"

he almost totally ignores the literature on the nature of the colonial political-economy and the rise of the "primate" (or "colonial") city.

Rather than taking into account Thailand's response to the intrusion of capitalism, Tambiah makes it seem as though the "radial polity"

which emerged in the kingdom was constructed entirely with reference to the ideas about political control held by the ruling elite.

Tambiah is better in his analysis of the infrastructure of the urban Sangha in Thailand. Yet, even in this case, he does not make the im- portant point, implicit in his own data, that there has been a radical shift in the class origins of the urban Sangha from the Igth-century,

40 WCWR, pp. 113-124.

41 Ibid., p. I29.

when most of the wats had abbots of royal or noble origin, to the present when most of the abbots of the same wats are of rural background.

He also does not discuss the economic basis of urban monasteries, although he does indicate that such an analysis will appear in a sequel volume. 42 Yet by ignoring this question in the present context, he makes it impossible to understand what interests the Sangha (or par- ticular monasteries) have in the economy, how these interests are po- litically handled, and how political figures further their interests through the support of important monasteries.

Tambiah does make an effort to characterize the class background of the ruling elite of contemporary Thailand in order to contrast this background with that of the urban Sangha. ⁴³ However, any conclusions made on the basis of brief biographical information on nine "top politicans" can hardly be accepted. Tambiah has not, in fact, established any social fact about the social background and the nature of the ruling elite. He might have been on sounder ground if he had drawn on existing relevant studies, notably those of Riggs (which he quotes elsewhere), Skinner, and Evers and Silcock, to name only the more obvious. ⁴⁴

His inadequate treatment of class also leads him to miss totally the significant clevages in Thai society which were developing in the ^I960s and which would lead to the political upheavals of the I970S. He does not recognize the tensions between civil and military bureaucracies, the increasing alienation of the urban middle classes, the developing activ- ism of urban laborers, the proliferation of criticism of the goverment in the presses and in thousands of books and pamphlets, or the emer- gence of the student movement as a new element in Thai politics. In short, while Tambiah gives great attention to a cosmologically-based hierarchy in the Thai social order, he gives no systematic attention to the historically-generated conflicts and tensions which provide a dyna- mic to Thai (and other Theravada Buddhist) societies.

In sum, I find Tambiah's "totalistic" approach reductionist and in- 42 Ibid., p. 379n.

43 Ibid., pp. 397-398.

44 F. W. Riggs, The Modernization of a Bureaucratic Polity (Honolulu: East- West Center Press, 1967); G. William Skinner, Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community in Thailand (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958); H. D. Evers and T. H. Silcock, "Elites and Selection," in Thailand:

Social and Economic Studies in Development, ed. by T. H. Silcock (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967), pp. 84-104.

adequate for the purposes of identifying the processes of change. Yet, while recognizing the limitations of the approach, his book still remains a work of considerable merit and cannot be ignored by anyone seriously interested in the relationship between Theravada Buddhism and polity in Southeast and South Asia.

Dept. of Anthropology and Asian Studies, ^CHARLES F. KEYES University of Washington, Seattle, Wash.

BEYOND ELIADE: THE FUTURE OF THEORY