From Weikzahood to Mediumship: How to Master the World in Contemporary Burma” Bénédicte Brac De La Perrière

”From Weikzahood to Mediumship: How to Master the World in Contemporary Burma” Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière To cite this version: Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière. ”From Weikzahood to Mediumship: How to Master the World in Contemporary Burma”. Religion Compass, Wiley, 2011, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00329.x. halshs- 03066479 HAL Id: halshs-03066479 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03066479 Submitted on 15 Dec 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Religion Compass (2011): 1–10, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00329.x 1 2 3 4 [BD]From Weikzahood to Mediumship: How to Master 5 6 the World in Contemporary Burma 7 Be´ ne´ dicte Brac de la Perrie` re* 8 Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CNRS ⁄ EHESS) 9 10 11 Abstract 12 13 In this paper, I bring into focus the biography of a Burmese ritual specialist who combines in her practice different spiritual resources in order to master her changing world. By analysing the way 14 in which she positions herself between different fields of practice, namely the weikza path and the 15 spirit possession cult, I aim to show that beliefs and practices considered normatively distinct 16 according to their relative distance from the core of Buddhism actually converge in her personal 17 history. By bringing to light the evolution of such a specialist in terms of a ‘‘spiritual career,’’ I CE: Thahirunisha 18 seek to illuminate changes in the religious landscape that reflect those of the overall social context. 19 Finally, this case demonstrates that magic, as a field of practice, is fully constitutive of the way the 20 Burmese Buddhists of today think about and manage their lives, even if it has often been regarded 21 as deviant from normative Buddhism. 22 23 24 The Ambiguity of the Weikza Path 25 When Buddhists from Burma want to act upon their world or deal with affliction, they Dispatch: 3.11.11 Journal: REC3 26 Toc head: Buddhism No. of pages: 10 PE: Pushpa 27 may go to ritual specialists who are linked to spiritual figures known as weikza: these 28 healers are the representatives of the weikza in this world. Although often labelled ‘‘wiz- 1 B 29 ards’’ in literature, in reality they attain their qualification through Buddhist practices, 30 such as the strict observance of the moral precepts and intensive-concentration medita- tion, as well as through the mastery of specific knowledge, such as alchemy, exorcism 31 2 32 and the arts of potent diagrams and formulae. These various practices are classified by 33 the Burmese according to the main normative dichotomy prevalent in the Theravadin 329 34 world, between renouncement of and involvement in this world (Paˆli lokuttara⁄lokiya). 35 Actually, weikza followers combine both kinds of practices with the twofold aim of 36 acting upon the world and of attaining spiritual perfection. Some of them are supposed 37 to have reached such spiritual accomplishment that some Burmese think they have gone 38 out of the rebirth cycle while remaining available in this world to rescue people. They 39 are the weikza beings characterized by this extraordinary ontological status. Roughly 40 speaking, they are soteriological figures emerging from the Burmese field of occult 41 practices, and they are devoted a cult by the practitioners of this field, identified as the 42 ‘‘weikza path’’ (weikza lan). The ritual specialists pertaining to the weikza path are usually initiated in cult groups linked to one or more of these spiritual beings, whose potency is Journal Name Manuscript No. 43 REC3 44 crucial to their own efficiency and legitimacy. 45 One has to admit that the field of practice linked to the weikza does not easily fit into 46 the normative categories prevalent in Burmese Buddhism. Not only the practices of the 47 ritual specialists, but also the ontological status of the weikza as spiritual figures, cannot 48 be classified as exclusively in-worldly or out-worldly. Moreover, the weikza path practi- 49 tioners –religious virtuosi, yet not withdrawn from the world into the religious order ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2 Be´ ne´ dicte Brac de la Perrie` re 1 (sangha) – do not fit into either category of the main statutory distinction prevalent in 2 Burmese society, which posits a radical difference between monks and laity. 3 4 The Weikza Path in Burma Studies on the Religious Field 5 6 This impossibility of classifying the weikza path according to Burmese normative catego- 7 ries calls into question analyses made in line with emic dichotomies without asking what 8 they are made for. The opposition common to the Theravadin world between what is 9 in-worldly and what is out-worldly found a particularly eloquent expression, in the Bur- 10 mese context, in the writings of Melford Spiro. The best known of the anthropologists of 11 Burma, Spiro conducted his field research in villages surrounding Mandalay, at the turn 12 of the 1960s, in the heyday of American cultural anthropology in Southeast Asian rural 13 societies. He produced an ambitious analysis of religious phenomena in Burma, known 14 through its critics, particularly Stanley Tambiah, as the ‘‘two religions theory’’ (Tambiah 15 1984, p. 345). While Tambiah was attempting to produce a comprehensive scheme link- 16 ing together all the religious facts pertaining to a local community of Northeast Thailand 17 (Tambiah 1970), Spiro insisted that ‘‘supernaturalism’’ (as he called it) and Theravada 18 Buddhism constituted two distinctive religions. He dealt with each of them in two sepa- 19 rate books, Burmese Supernaturalism (1967) and Buddhism and Society (1970), and responded 20 to his critics, arguing that Burmese themselves saw both categories of facts as pertaining 21 to two different religions. While Spiro did not include the weikza path in Burmese Super- 22 naturalism, he categorized it as ‘‘apotropaı¨c,’’ compared to ‘‘nibbannic’’ and ‘‘kammatic’’ 23 oriented practices and beliefs of Buddhism that he found in Burma, further subdividing 24 the field of religious practices and beliefs according to their relative distance from the 25 core of doctrinal Buddhism (Spiro 1982). 26 Indeed, by elaborating on this conception of the religious field in Burma, Spiro was 27 doing nothing but reinforcing Burmese views on the matter – not just any views, but the 28 dominant views through which Burmese hegemony is asserted (Brac de la Perrie`re 2009). 29 However, other lesser known, though by no means less important, works, published dur- 30 ing and after Spiro’s time, allow us to draw a somewhat more balanced picture of the 31 religious field in Burmese studies. For instance, Manning Nash takes a more encompass- 32 ing stance on religion, stating that ‘‘the interplay of these oppositions (between this world 33 and the other world) makes up the religious system rather than their opposition’’ (1966, 34 pp. 112–3). 35 Among scholars, the compatibility of the weikza field of practice with the Theravadin 36 brand of Buddhism has been repeatedly debated. The question of its affinities with the 37 Mahayanist figure of bodhisattva has surfaced as well. Some works, particularly those of 38 Michael Mendelson (1961), John Ferguson and Michael Mendelson (1981) and Juliane 39 Schober (1989), have dealt specifically with the practices and beliefs linked to the Bur- 40 mese figure of weikza without relegating it to the margins of mainstream Buddhism. 41 More recently, Keiko Tosa, Patrik Pranke, Niklas Foxeus and Guillaume Rozenberg have 42 contributed to the discussion with reflections on how to locate the weikza figure in Bur- 43 mese Buddhism, still puzzled by its hybridity.3 44 John Ferguson and Michael Mendelson hypothesized that the weikza figure developed 45 its soteriological dimensions during the 19th century in the context of the confrontation 46 with modernity and colonial rule (1981, p. 74). At the time, practices linked to this figure 47 would have coalesced into the articulation of the monastic and the lay domains as a dis- 48 tinctive field in the process of the rationalizing reconfiguration of the religious landscape. 49 Whatever the case may be, the result has been that modernity has made these practices ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Religion Compass (2011): 1–10, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00329.x Magic and Buddhism in Southeast Asia-EUROSEAS 2010 3 1 1 pertaining to magic more apparent and more in contrast with Buddhism than they used to 2 be, rather than to cause their fading away according to Weber’s theory of a disenchanted 3 world. 4 Thus, the question is not only whether the weikza field of practice belongs to the Ther- 5 avadin brand of Buddhism, historically and normatively; it is also one of its place in the 6 broader context of the Burmese religious landscape. Actually, to evaluate the place of the 7 weikza in Burmese culture and society, one needs to distinguish this field of practice from 8 other contiguous ones. It is necessary to consider, for instance, how the practitioners of 9 the weikza path build their position and their legitimacy against those of other ritual spe- 10 cialists, such as Buddhist monks or spirit mediums. This kind of approach reveals that 11 these positions, so well identified and generally contrasted in Burmese ideas and practices, 12 actually emerge from the interplay between seemingly heterogeneous fields of practice.

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