and Buddhism as Translocal Religions

In 2005-6 a controversy erupted in California over history and social studies textbooks. The controversy was not about Christianity, though; this time, the issue was how Hinduism was being portrayed in proposed new curriculum guidelines. Groups like the Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic

Foundation complained that the classroom standards in relation to Hinduism were flawed with

“stereotypical, demeaning and inaccurate representations of Hindu history, theology, and practice: poorly and patronizingly written explanations, tacit validation of the Aryan Invasion theory of Hindu origins and migration, assumption s about the treatment of women and about the institution of caste”

(Reddy 2012: 224). A struggle ensued over not only what was “true” about Hinduism but about who had the authority to pronounce the truth— themselves or scholarly “experts” on Hinduism.

Readers may be surprised to learn that Hinduism even has a presence in the United States, let alone that it can be so public and vociferous. However, by our best reckoning there were more than 1.2 million

Hindus in the U.S. in 2011 and probably roughly as many Buddhists. There are also significant Hindu populations in the Caribbean, such as on the island of Trinidad, and on the Pacific island of Fiji (where almost forty percent of the residents claim South Asian origins); likewise, there are over two million

Buddhists spread throughout Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.

While Chapter Eight of Introducing Anthropology of Religion concentrates mainly on Islam and

Christianity as translocal or “world” religions, those two faiths are not the only translocal religions nor the first nor certainly the last. Nor are they the only ones to which anthropology has committed significant energy. Indeed, in the twenty-first century dozens if not hundreds of religions are translocal, and many make a justifiable claim to being world religions (present throughout the world) while also claiming to be universally true.

According to Adherents.com (www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html), Christianity (2.1 billion) and Islam (1.5 billion) are by far the largest religions on earth, although as discussed in the chapter they are dizzyingly diverse. After those two grand families of sects and denominations,

Adherents.com lists the following religions (or non-religions):

 Secular/nonreligious/agnostic/atheist: 1.1 billion

 Hinduism: 900 million

 Chinese traditional religion: 394 million

 Buddhism: 376 million

 “Primal-indigenous”: 300 million

 African Traditional and Diasporic: 100 million

 Sikhism: 23 million

 Juche: 19 million

 Spiritism: 15 million

 Judaism: 14 million

 Baha’i: 7 million

 Jainism: 4.2 million

 Shinto: 4 million

 Cao Dai: 4 million

High on that list are two of the other classic “world religions” by the reckoning of religious studies scholars—Hinduism and Buddhism—which have also been the subject of significant anthropological research. For example, in 1906 W. H. R. Rivers published The Todas, a study of a group in southern India, based on some of the earliest anthropological fieldwork ever conducted. In 1948 Louis Dumont commenced two years of fieldwork in the Tamil region of India, resulting in his hugely influential 1958

Homo Hierarchicus on Indian religion, caste, and personhood. Even so, Milton Singer argued in 1968 that

India and South Asia generally were “thought of by many social anthropologists as peripheral to the mainstream of social anthropology” (1968: vii). Any such unfortunate neglect might be attributable to anthropology’s traditional commitment to the “isolated village society” compared to the complex civilization of India; it is also largely the case that India and especially Hinduism may have been claimed by the “religious studies” departments and scholars, who left the “indigenous religions” to anthropology.

A more serious and complex problem is that anthropologists have not been sure that Hinduism, as well as Buddhism, even exists: as recently as 2004, one of the great students of the anthropology of

Hinduism and Buddhism, David Gellner (see below), ventured to say that many anthropologists and other social scientists ask, “Hinduism certainly exists in villages, but does it exist as an institution spanning millennia and the whole of South Asia?” (2004: 367). In other words, is there such a thing as

“Hinduism,” or is it just a category and boundary that Western researchers have invented? “Many Sikhs,

Buddhists, and Jains used to be happy to be considered as a variety of Hindu, and some still so consider themselves today,” he wrote, while some people in India “describe themselves as ‘secular Hindus’”

(367).

It has become something of a truism to assert that Hinduism and Buddhism did not exist as explicit categories and as integrated “religions” until the colonial era of the nineteenth century. For example,

Jon Zavos quotes the 1891 General Report on the Census on India, which declared, “By the process of exclusion, we reach the conclusion that Hinduism is the large residuum that is not Sikh, or Jain, or

Buddhist, or professedly Animistic, or included in one of the foreign religions” (2012: 6). In 2002 Pankaj

Mishra was adamant that “before the 19th century, no such religion existed” as Hinduism (2002: 19), which is not to say that there were no religious beliefs or practices in India prior to colonialism but they were not systematized as—or known to the local population as—“Hinduism” until much later. Jeffrey

Long calls Hinduism “a tradition (or, perhaps more accurately, a collection of traditions) indigenous to the Indian subcontinent” (2013: 17), and Pratap Kumar suggests that we use the name “Hinduism” to gloss a number of “traditions that do not pretend to a common ancestry, nor deny that they have crisscrossed each other at one time or another. Instead of viewing the idea of Hinduism as a unitary concept, it might be more analytically fruitful if we accept it as a federal notion” (2013: 261).

According to Mishra, British colonists and scholars stepped into an Indian context of more than three thousand years of literate religion and a convoluted field of contemporary religions, including Hindus,

Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Muslims. For intellectual and administrative reasons, “the British in India sought and imposed uniformity” (2002: 20), classifying people into discrete named religious communities and organizing “religion” in terms of “canonical texts,” explicit “beliefs,” and modernistic

“morality.” “Together, the British scholars and their [the traditional Indian priestly caste] interpreters came up with a canon of sorts, mostly Brahmanical literature and ideology, which they began to identify with a single Hindu religion” (20). Indian scholars and religious leaders like Rammohan

Roy (who, according to Mishra, was a Unitarian Christian) and (who was central to bringing Hinduism to Western attention in the late 1800s) helped to settle Hinduism into its modern form—and status as a “genuine world religion.” In the twentieth century, the Maharishi Mahesh and his acolytes the Beatles raised the profile of Hinduism in the West yet again.

Interestingly, in 1999 professor of religious studies David Lorenzen addressed the Hindu colonial-origin story, pronouncing that “the claim that Hinduism was invented or constructed by European colonizers, mostly British, sometime after 1800 is false” (1999: 631). Instead, he found documentary evidence that the word “Hindu” was in use in India itself several centuries before, at least since the time of Muslim rule over north India (although some late medieval Western/Christian sources called the people of India

Gentoo, from the word “gentiles” or pagans). The more important question than the presence of the word is the presence of a self-consciousness as Hindus, that is, as belonging to a single religion or religious tradition. Lorenzen argued that hundreds of years before colonialism at least some people in

India possessed such self-awareness of a unified tradition, even if this awareness was spurred by contact with non-Indians and non-Hindus. Therefore, “Hinduism” had not been invented by Europeans but had developed gradually over millennia.

Whatever is true about the origins of the concept of Hinduism, two things are certain. First, anthropology has accumulated a lively literature on Hinduism (as well as other aspects of Indian culture). A seminal book was Bernard Cohn’s 1971 India: The Social Anthropology of a Civilization (which maintained that Hinduism had never coalesced into a single orthodoxy, whether or not it was a single

“religion”), Gloria Goodwin Raheja’s 1988 The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant

Caste in a North Indian Village, Jonathan Parry’s 1995 Death in Banares, Diana Eck’s 1998 Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, and C. J. Fuller’s 2004 The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in

India.

Second, as these titles begin to allude, Hinduism is indeed highly diverse and only becoming more so.

For instance, in P. Pratap Kumar’s 2013 edited volume Contemporary Hinduism, he divides Hinduism into its north and south Indian varieties, as well as its “diaspora” in the Caribbean, the United States, and even Europe (specifically Norway). Hinduism also long ago diffused to parts of southeast Asia, most notably the island of Bali but also the much larger island of Java, as documented in Robert Hefner’s 1990

Hindu Javanese. Of course, to this regional diversity must be added an incalculable array of devotional cults and practices, including individuals who follow particular Hindu gods (most commonly ,

Vishnu, or , but also divinities from to Ram to ). Some Hindus, as in Tamil Nadu, venerate the snake goddess, while others revere Lord Ayyappan. Hindu practice is also variegated by caste and by gender, not to mention the distinction between the full-time ascetics versus the ordinary householders.

Not surprisingly, much of the anthropology of Hinduism has focused on ritual. William Sax, for example, described a religious pilgrimage (see Chapter Five of Introducing Anthropology of Religion for comments on pilgrimage as ritual) in northern India, in which worshippers carried a physical instantiation of the regional goddess Nandadevi to her husband Shiva’s homeland in the Himalayan mountains. Sax was able to relate the ceremonial travel to political relationships between villages as well as to local institutions of marriage, family, and gender. Theodore Gabriel (2010) documents the Muttappan cult on the southeast edge of India, which includes a Teyyam ritual which appears to have pre-Brahmanical or extra-

Brahmanical origins. Most interestingly, the lower castes take the lead in this event, not only celebrating the figure Muttappan who is something of a champion of the lower castes but literally impersonating him. Gabriel explains that “the rituals of the Muttappan consist in invoking the spirit or deity into the kolakkaran [god-impersonator] and then interacting with the devotees before sending the spirit back into the central shrine and divesting the kolakkaran of the divinity or spirit by which he was temporarily possessed” (70).

Another recurring theme in the anthropology of Hinduism is gender, as evinced by Sax’s pilgrimage study. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, a religious studies scholar who conducted ethnographic research in southern India, chronicles a ritual cycle dedicated to the goddess Gangamma during which men publicly dress as women, taking on the vesham or “guise” of Gangamma’s various forms as ascetic, snake charmer, herder, “ruffian,” merchant, and princess. Examining the experiences of different participants in the proceedings, Flueckiger discovers within the ritual a notion of the goddess’ ugram or “excessive hunger/desire, which has the potential to become dangerous if left unsatisfied, but is not inherently so”

(2013: 2-3), which is related to a sense of the wild power that human women have which few men can satisfy or control. But the alleged spiritual power of women does not translate automatically to social and political power, as discussed by Kalpana Ram in her study of spirit possession. Key to women’s spiritual experiences in this case are the “injustices” that women suffer, such as a death in the family, a personal tragedy (especially infertility), and the unkindness of husbands, sons, and in-laws. Interestingly, it is not male but female spirits that afflict women and “converge on every phase of a woman’s life”

(128) from menstruation to marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth. However, spirit possession is not all negative for women, as the victim potentially acquires a power and a nobility from the spirit or goddess that in ways approximates a court. A possessed woman may actually “hold court,” providing cures or adjudicating social disputes while performing the very gestures and speech patterns of the goddess. As

Ram concludes, “The modes by which women lament, narrate their lives, petition the goddess, or, in turn, become goddesses who narrate the suffering of the petitioner to gathered witnesses are all a mean of both elaborating and assuaging a very particular dimension of justice” (220).

Moving on to Buddhism, Gellner noticed scholars struggling under the exact opposite assumption from the one affecting Hinduism. That is, “with Buddhism the assumption seems to be: it does exist, but village Buddhism isn’t really it” (2004: 367). In other words, observers are comfortable declaring that there is and long has been something called Buddhism, reflected in a body of literature and a set of institutions, but they have had trouble finding it in actual local practice. What ostensibly Buddhist villagers appear to be doing diverges more or less dramatically from what “Buddhism” is supposed to be.

One of the clearest anthropological examples of village Buddhism straying from official Buddhism is

Stanley Tambiah’s (1970) classic study of the Thai village of Baan Phraan Muan. In this setting, Buddhism not only shared the religious domain with local or traditional religion but actually cooperated with it in various ways. Buddhist and pre-Buddhist spirits, specialists, concepts, rituals, and institutions both had their place in the overall religious system. In some ways, the two religious views functioned parallel to each other: local spirits (phii) coexisted with Buddhist beings (thewada), and a local Thai conception of the soul (khwan) existed beside a Buddhist notion of it (winjan). Buddhist monks (bhikku) were only one of a myriad of types of religious specialists, most of them focusing on the “traditional” spirits and spiritual matters.

In fact, part of the survival of parallel religious systems was based on the literal physical separation of the Buddhist monastery (wat) from the village: “monks and novices live apart—the villagers visit them rather they the villagers. A monk kept his visits to the village settlement to a minimum; he did not socialize with villagers and he entered a home primarily to conduct rites,” particularly funeral rites

(1970: 141). Other rituals that concern life events like marriage or sickness, the sukhwan ceremonies

(obviously related to the local concept of khwan), were handled by other specialists, significantly known as paahm, a name derived from the word brahman for a Hindu priest. And the role of the paahm was

“reminiscent of the classical brahman priest” (254), including making vegetarian offerings called kryang bucha after the Hindu word for sacrificial offering. Thus, precontact roles and practices had clearly been influenced by postcontact ones.

But, as distinct as they were, the two religions also intertwined with and supported each other. For instance, ordination as a monk was a common but temporary arrangement for most young males;

Tambiah emphasized that “the vast majority” of males left the monastery after a short period and returned to “lay life, marriage, and the founding of a family,” which he recognizes as a “remarkable divergence” from Buddhist orthodoxy (1970: 99). The brief tenure of monkhood was viewed as a sort of rite of passage for males, as well as a “rite of instruction” in which they would acquire some literacy and other education. Finally, as a religious mission, both laypeople and the monks themselves understood the period of monkhood as primarily a service to their elders: “becoming a monk confers merit on one’s parents,” with the first year’s merit going to the mother and the second years going to the father (102).

On the other hand, the elders provided services to the young. Thus, there was reciprocity of roles and rituals, in which “village youth become temporary monks before marriage to make merit for their elders and community members [. . .] While the young are going through monkhood it is the elders and householders who support them and who play the leading lay roles in Buddhist rites,” including bringing food to the wat (259). Beyond that, in exchange for Buddhist ceremonies, the elders offered sukhwan or

“life-affirming” rituals, through which “the parental generation initiates the young into various statuses and helps them assume the role of successful householders” (259). Ultimately, the boundaries between the two religious dimensions were not even strong, as a traditional paahm specialist would be a former bhikku. Thus, in more ways than one, Tambiah concludes that the various roles and ritual were

“differentiated and also linked together in a single total field” (2).

Melford Spiro’s (1978) equally famous fieldwork on Burmese Buddhism found roughly the same situation (see Chapter Two of Introducing Anthropology of Religion). In the Burmese village, purported

Buddhists also believed in leikpya or mischievous spirits of the dead, not to mention witches, demons, and of course the notorious “thirty-seven nats.” Observations such as these, confirmed in many locations, led Gananath Obeyesekere to formulate his thinking on the distinction between elite or official or orthodox religion versus popular or lay religion. Yet, as he stressed (see Chapter Nine of

Introducing Anthropology of Religion) based on his own research on Sinhalese Buddhism, the ordinary folks do not see themselves as practicing two different religious traditions but, quite the opposite, see their village religion as a single integrated (and generally consistent) system.

Another problem plaguing the study of Buddhism, as Gellner wrote in an essay introducing a special issue of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford on the emerging anthropology of Buddhism, is that most scholars “have focused on Theravada Buddhism,” which is “the most conservative” (1990:

95) form of the religion—although it was allegedly only one of eighteen early schools of Buddhist thought.

One reason why Theravada Buddhism has received greater anthropological attention than

Mahayana Buddhism is simply that it is easier to get to grips with. In particular, it has a more or

less clearly defined canon, all of which has been translated into English. Not all Mahayana

Buddhist scriptures have even been edited, let alone translated. Further, if the relationship of

precept to practice, or of text and context, is always problematic, it can be argued that the

relationship of Mahayana scriptures to practice is even more problematic than usual. Thus,

within Mahayana Buddhism there are many local variants, laying very different stresses on

different parts of the scriptural corpus (98-9).

It is no wonder, then, if experts have concentrated on the most orthodox and standardized version of

Buddhism, that Buddhism has seemed to be more orthodox and standardized than Hinduism—and that they have been so disconcerted by the local and lay deviation from this orthodoxy.

Buddhism traveled further in its early history than Hinduism, generating many local (Chinese, Japanese,

Tibetan, Thai, Sri Lankan, etc.) and unorthodox or syncretic Buddhisms. Religious studies professor John

Nelson, for instance, recently surveyed Buddhism in Asia generally and Japan specifically, insisting that while “many people in the West tend to associate Buddhism with meditation and the quest for enlightenment, for most of its history in Asia it has emphasized merit, salvation, , healing, and benefits in this world (genze riyaku). All of these themes are cultural adaptations of a set of core teachings” (2013: 28-9).

Fueled by faith, patronage, and innovation, the expressions of Buddhism we see today—the

architecturally significant temples, beautiful gardens, and impressive painting, calligraphy, and

sculpture—can be thought of as edited versions of a complex religious heritage, adapted to suit

and receive support from the audience at hand.

To put it differently, stereotypes about Buddhism in Asia, and especially those characterizing

Japanese Buddhism as “Zen and everything else,” have to be shelved in order to see Buddhism

as a dynamic social, economic, and sometimes political force (29).

As in the Thai and Burmese villages just mentioned, in Japan the spirits or kami “associated with rivers, mountains, natural phenomena, and rice plants were assimilated into Buddhism through a process called shinbutsu shūgō or ‘the syncretization of kami and buddhas” (32).

Still worse for the conventional view of Buddhism orthodoxy, Shayne Clarke (2014) contends that a more thorough reading of neglected texts indicates greater flexibility and worldliness even in early

Indian Buddhism and its key institution, the monastery. Inspecting monastic rule books, Clarke discovers that Buddhists—even Buddhist monks and nuns—hardly “wandered alone like the rhinoceros,” as the Buddhist cliché goes. Instead, monks often maintained contact with their wives and kin and sometimes entered the monastery with other members of their family; nuns occasionally bore and raised children after taking their vows. In a word, classical Indian Buddhism, like Thai village Buddhism, was often

“family friendly” and distinctly worldly.

A final point worth noting is the different attitude toward religious “identity” and “membership” found in Buddhism (and Hinduism) compared to the standard approach in Christianity. Since both Eastern religions might more justly be characterized as “traditions” or “ritual systems” or “ways” than as

“religions” in the Western/Christian sense, they have tended to be less rigid about boundaries and more open to borrowing or cooperating. Gellner’s own work is representative here. His study of the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism in the Newar society in Nepal described a Newar religion which, like that of many societies, was the product of multiple layers of historical and demographic change. The result was a complicated social and religious field in which the Newar constituted an ethnic minority (around six percent of the population) within an officially Hindu kingdom. The culturally and politically dominant group was the Parbatiya, from among whom the king came. Although the Newar were associated strongly with Buddhism (specifically of the Mahayana type), there were also Hindu

Newars. However, Newars sometimes claimed that they were both Hindu and Buddhist, which led some observers to judge that the Newars were either confused about their identity or possessed a corrupted one. Rather, Gellner reasoned that the notion of a single total religious identity is “a Judeo-Christian definition of religion and religious allegiances, which hinders comprehension of Asian realities” (1992:

42). From the Newar perspective, it was neither contradictory nor confused to follow two religions at once. For practical purposes, “the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Buddhist’ are almost irrelevant. When Newars seek an urgent cure for some worldly ill, they usually do not stop to consider whether it is Hindu or Buddhist”

(68).

Beyond this, Gellner explained that the people themselves distinguished between three kinds of or religion. One was the religion of salvation, the Hindu-Buddhist focus on escape from the cycle of life and death. Another was “social religion,” including the key moments of nature and human life, like birth and marriage. The third was “instrumental religion,” referring to “magic” or efficacious ritual, such as healing. Salvation and instrumental religion were more individual, while social religion, as the name suggests, was more public and group-oriented. In addition to the two world religions and the three kinds or approaches to religion, we cannot understand Newar religion without some reference to caste. Like many South and Southeast Asian societies, the Newar were divided into occupational and religious castes. Certain castes were more closely associated with one religion than the other.

The two “most Buddhist” castes were the Vajracaryas and the Sakyas, who occupied a top rung in society. However, a parallel top rung was occupied by Sresthas, who were Hindus, including their priestly component called Rajapadhyayas. Below this upper level of castes were the Maharjan, who could be either Hindu or Buddhist. Vajracaryas and Sakyas were unambiguous Buddhists, but this was because they were actual or figurative monks—what Gellner calls “hereditary monks” (1992: 162). They might or might not actually take the vows, and even as monks they were part-time specialists and usually married, but they were “monks by birth,” however they lived their lives. They belonged to monastic communities and received alms from laypeople. For the laity, religious identity (if such a conception makes sense in their context) was determined by the individual’s or family’s hereditary priest. Some families were associated genealogically with Vajracarya priests, in which case they were buddhamargi or “followers of Buddha,” and other families were associated with Rajapadhyaya priests, in which case they were sivamargi or “followers of Shiva.” This arrangement ought to make religious affiliation fairly straightforward; however, since traditionally priests of both followings “inherited and sold rights over parishioners like other property” (53), a person or family could find themselves Buddhist one day and Hindu the next, or vice versa. The Newar religious attitude was best summed up in a proverb, “Jasko sakti usko ,” which meant roughly, “One tends to adopt the religion of whoever holds power” (54).

Gellner’s observations were not unique. Much more recently Steven Ramey (2013) detailed the

“Hindus” of Sindh in northwest India, who not only practice aspects of Hinduism (including classical

Vedic Hinduism) but also revere the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred book of the Sikhs, while additionally honoring certain elements of Sufi Islam. Finally, they worship Jhule Lal, “a specifically Sindhi Hindu god”

(2013: 119). Predictably, “Sikhs and some Hindus have questioned the assertions that Sindhi Hindus are

Hindu” (125), but at the same time Sindhi Hindu ideas and practices “challenge common assumptions of separate religions” (115). In the end, then, the anthropological study of Hinduism and Buddhism not only has the potential to clarify misconceptions about those two “religions” but more consequentially to allow and force us to rethink many popular and scholarly assumptions about religion as such, including religious “belief” and religious “identity.”

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