Buddha in the Crown This page intentionally left blank Buddha in the Crown Avalokitesvara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka JOHN CLIFFORD HOLT New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1991 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1991 by John Clifford Holt Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holt, John, 1948- Buddha in the crown : Avalokitesvara in the Buddhist traditions of Sri Lanka / by John Clifford Holt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-19-506418-6 1. Avalokitesvara (Buddhist deity)—Sri Lanka. I. Title. BQ4710.A84S724 1991 294.3 '4211 '095493 dc20 90-6835 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper In Memory of Winifred Wick Holt This page intentionally left blank PREFACE Buddha in the Crown has been written primarily for students of religion. The argument I have set forth about the nature of religious change in Sri Lanka is one that need not be regarded as culture-specific, but one that can be tested in a number of other religio-historical contexts. It analyzes how elements of one religious culture are assimilated into another and then legitimated. It is illus- trated by an extended case study of the manner in which the Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva Avalokitesvara was incorporated into a religious culture dominated by Theravada Buddhism, but it also suggests that similar processes of transformation can be found in Christian, Muslim, Hebraic and Hindu contexts. The central theoretical question of the study is this: what are the conditions and principles of religious assimilation? In Buddha in the Crown, I have argued that new religious forms are incorporated not only because they are understood to be immediately efficacious, but because they can be ra- tionalized within the soteriology of the tradition of which they have become a part and related to its telos. The implication of this argument is that soteriology (the process by which the spiritual summum bonum of religion is experienced) is what finally defines religion; it is religion's ultimate raison d'etre and the quality distinguishing religion from other modes of culture or other kinds of ideology. Specifically, soteriology, the process leading from dukkha ("conditioned unsatisfac- toriness") to nibbana in the Buddhist context, is foundational for meaningful modes of Sinhala religious experience and expression in Sri Lanka; knowl- edge of it is also the means to decode the symbology of religious art and ritual. Religious soteriology, then, is what puts religious experience, practise, and expression into an ultimate perspective. It follows from this that if soteriology is foundational, then it is the consum- mating standard by which new assimilations are measured, incorporated or rejected. If the potential assimilation fails to be related to soteriology (in the Sinhala Buddhist context, if the assimilation is wholly laukika [ "of this world; viii Preface temporal"] bearing no relation to lokottara ["supramundane; eternal"]), it will not be sustained in religious culture. Or, if it is sustained, it will not be regarded as "religious." Thoroughly laukika gods, for instance, become deux otios in the religious sense. In Sri Lanka, this will remain the case until Theravada soteriology, the ultimate frame of meaningful reference in Sinhala Buddhist religious culture, is supplanted. Paradoxically, this also means that thoroughly laukika-oriented gods could survive nicely within a thoroughly secularized ideology and culture. Without commitment to a soteriology, a religious culture loses definition. A recent study by Gombrich and Obcyesekere [1988] of religious change in urban Colombo during the past 25 years suggests that this may be happening in some segments of contemporary Sinhala Buddhist culture. In reading Buddha in the Crown, it will be evident that the cult of Ava- lokitesvara became part of Sinhala religious culture because it proved, in general, to be efficacious in response to the central problem of human exis- tence identified by the Buddha as dukkha ("unsatisfactoriness, suffering"). Suffering, of course, takes many forms, and ways to counteract it are as legion as the forms it takes. The assimilation and transformation of the cult of Avalokitesvara then, is but one extended example of how concepts of re- ligious action and religious authority function inclusively to meet the needs of the historical situation. When Avalokitesvara, transformed into the medieval Sinhala national deity Natha, became identified with the future Buddha Mai- treya, he came to symbolize the very soteriology and telos into which his cult had been assimilated and legitimated. This book was also written for students specializing in the study of Bud- dhism: Mahayana, Theravada and Vajrayana. These readers will learn that the cult of Avalokitesvara not only had an extensive and important history within India, but in Sri Lankan religious culture as well, a country that confesses the preservation of Theravada tradition and, as such, is rarely studied by those whose primary subject of interest is Mahayana or Vajrayana. For students of Buddhism whose primary interest is Theravada, this study documents how many elements of Avalokitesvara's cultus were absorbed into wider frames of Sri Lankan religious culture, subordinated to and identified with Theravada soteriology and cosmology, and continue to be articulated today in various fashions. For all students of Buddhism, I think this study about how and why bodhisattva Avalokitesvara came to be identified with the future buddha Mai- treya through the expressive vicissitudes of art, political history, myth, ritual and symbol will be of considerable interest. Much of Buddhist studies, partic- ularly the study of Mahayana, has been framed very narrowly according to philological, quasi-philosophical and apologetic agenda. At the very least, this book will raise questions among students of Buddhism regarding the very Preface ix utility of the terms Mahayana, Vajrayana and Theravada as designating wholly distinctive religio-historical constructs (since the Avalokitesvara cult apparently spanned them all). It will also raise questions about how the umbrella of Buddhist soteriology has subordinated and legitimated a variety of religious beliefs and actions in cultures where it has become a foundational ideology. I hope it invites similar studies of religious cultures throughout other parts of Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia) where Mahayana and Theravada have interacted in various de- grees of encounter and intimacy throughout history. Finally, this book was written with and for Sri Lankans, especially Sinhala Buddhists, to join them in realizing how their traditional culture, now being frayed and strained by ethnic chauvinism, political violence, and economic deprivation, is an extraordinarily interwoven fabric of religious variegation. I am aware that some Sri Lankan readers may hesitate to accept my thesis about assimilation and inclusivity within Sinhala Buddhist religious culture. It is a controversial claim to make in the current context, or even historically, be- cause: (1) contemporary Sri Lanka has been raked by the fires of emergent ethnic consciousness and class alienation for the past several years and the current political scene has hardly witnessed a spate of inclusivity on anyone's part; that is, the current sociopolitical climate in Sri Lanka is clearly one of exclusivity and separatism; (2) the history of monastic Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka was periodically marked by clerical purgings effected by kings ostensibly for the purpose of maintaining the sangha (order of monks) as a purely soteriological (rather than political) community; contemporary Sinhala Theravadins, both lay and monastic, usually stress that the reason their tradi- tion continues to survive after 2,500 years is that it has been repeatedly purified and purged. Buddhist ecclesiastical history, and its modern apolo- gists, always present the tradition within such an exclusive framework. But in looking closely at the internal legitimations for these purgations, these actions of exclusivity, one finds that they are almost always legitimated by appeals to Buddhist soteriology, for the sake of the vitality of the Buddha sasana (tradition). I have no intention of denying the presence of exclusivity as an ethos operative historically and currently in Sinhala culture. However, this particular aspect of the religio-cultural dynamic has been continuously overplayed, especially due to its recent politicization. It has even become an objectification in much scholarship on the history of Buddhism, Western and Sinhala. Surely it is an overly simplistic explanation for the longevity of Sinhala Buddhist culture. Even trees need more than pruning to continue to bear fruit. What I am arguing, to the contrary, is that the almost continuous historical assimilation of Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist