Religious Motivation and the Origins of Buddhism
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RELIGIOUS MOTIVATION AND THE ORIGINS OF BUDDHISM Why did North Indian people from the fifth century BC choose to leave the world and join the sect of the Buddha? Were there common themes in the religious motivation of these early Buddhists? Is it possible to illuminate motivational themes using social psychology? This is the first book to apply the insights of social psychology in order to understand the religious motivation of the people who constituted the early Buddhist community. It also addresses the more general and theoretically controversial question of how world religions came into being, by focusing on the conversion process of the individual believer. Torkel Brekke holds a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford on the politics of religious identity in colonial South Asia. He is currently a research fellow funded by the Norwegian Research Council. His main research interest is the interaction between religious ideas and processes of political and historical change. General Editors: Charles S. Prebish and Damien Keown The RoutledgeCurzon Critical Studies in Buddhism Series is a comprehensive study of the Buddhist tradition. The series explores this complex and extensive tradition from a variety of perspectives, using a range of different methodologies. The series is diverse in its focus, including historical studies, textual translations and commentaries, sociological investigations, bibliographic studies, and considerations of religious practice as expressions of Buddhism’s integral religiosity. It also presents material on modern intellectual historical studies, including the role of Buddhist thought and scholarship in a contemporary, critical context and in the light of current social issues. The series is expansive and imaginative in scope, spanning more than two and a half millennia of Buddhist history. It is receptive to all research works that inform and advance our knowledge and understanding of the Buddhist tradition. THE REFLEXIVE NATURE OF AWARENESS Paul Williams BUDDHISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS Edited by Damien Keown, Charles Prebish and Wayne Husted ALTRUISM AND REALITY Paul Williams WOMEN IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE BUDDHA Kathryn R. Blackstone THE RESONANCE OF EMPTINESS Gay Watson IMAGING WISDOM Jacob N. Kinnard AMERICAN BUDDHISM Edited by Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher Queen PAIN AND ITS ENDING Carol S. Anderson THE SOUND OF LIBERATING TRUTH Edited by Sallie B. King and Paul O. Ingram BUDDHIST THEOLOGY Edited by Roger R. Jackson and John J. Makransky EMPTINESS APPRAISED David F. Burton THE GLORIOUS DEEDS OF PU¤RNA Joel Tatelman CONTEMPORARY BUDDHIST ETHICS Edited by Damien Keown INNOVATIVE BUDDHIST WOMEN Edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo TEACHING BUDDHISM IN THE WEST Edited by V. S. Hori, R. P. Hayes and J. M. Shields EMPTY VISION David L. McMahan SELF, REALITY AND REASON IN TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Thupten Jinpa RELIGIOUS MOTIVATION AND THE ORIGINS OF BUDDHISM Torkel Brekke RELIGIOUS MOTIVATION AND THE ORIGINS OF BUDDHISM A social–psychological exploration of the origins of a world religion Torkel Brekke I~ ~~o~!~~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2002 by RoutledgeCurzon Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2002 Torkel Brekke Typeset in Times by Prepress Projects Ltd, Perth, Scotland The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-0-7007-1683-8 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-7007-1684-5 (pbk) CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 The historical value of the Khandhaka of the Vinaya Pit>aka 5 2 Religious motivation and the relationship between the early Samgha≥ and the laity 21 3 Religious motivation and the theme of conversion in Buddhism 45 4 Social psychology and the religious motivation of the early Buddhists 57 5 Religious motivation and the role of fear 71 6 Religious motivation and the merit of giving 97 Notes 121 Bibliography 137 Index 147 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The articles on which this book is based were written between 1996 and 1999. During this time I was a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, writing a thesis on religious change in South Asia during the colonial period under the supervision of Professor Richard Gombrich. His writings are a constant source of inspiration. I have been lucky to have studied under generous and encouraging teachers both at the University of Oxford and at the University of Oslo. I wish to thank Professor Jens Braarvig and Professor Georg von Simson, who taught me Sanskrit and P¯ali. An earlier version of the second chapter of this book was written as an MPhil thesis under their supervision in 1995. As all my teachers must have realized, my greatest problem as a student was that I tried to do too many things at the same time. This book, which attempts to say something both about Buddhism and about the psychology of religion, is probably symptomatic. I would like to thank Professors Charles Prebish and Damien Keown, the editors of the series Critical Studies in Buddhism at Curzon Press, for their positive response when I approached them in the winter of 2000/1 with my proposal for this book. I am also grateful to Jonathan Price, chief editor at Curzon Press, for his constant optimism regarding this and other projects. I am indebted to the publishers who authorized the use of articles that had appeared in their journals. The details of these previous publications are given in the introduction below. During the years when the research for this book was carried out my work was generously financed by the Norwegian Research Council. As always, I owe many thanks to my family – Margrete, Kristian and Iris – for their patience and support. This book is dedicated to my friend and mentor Chung Lu Tsen. ix INTRODUCTION The aim of this book is to explore whether and how a social– psychological approach may further our understanding of religious motivation in Buddhism, primarily early Buddhism, that is Buddhism at the time when the Buddha or his direct disciples still lived. The basic questions that it seeks to answer are: • Why did people choose to join the Buddha? • Why did they become monks or nuns? • Were there common themes in the religious motivation of the early Buddhists? • Is it possible to illuminate these motivational themes by applying the theoretical insights of social psychology? In general terms, this is a book about the social psychology of religion and, in more specific terms, it is a book about religious motivation in Buddhism. I believe that in order to understand why a religion comes into being, and why it succeeds in becoming a world religion, we should devote more attention to the religious motivation of individuals than is usual in the study of religious history. Needless to say, in historical studies it is often difficult, or even impossible, to say anything about cognitive processes of individuals. However, when there is a possibility, we should try to understand the motivation of the people who initiate change. Of course, there are a number of problems connected with a social– psychological study of Buddhism. I will discuss some of these problems in the book, but there will still be many ways to criticize this type of study both from the angle of philology and from the angle of social psychology. The kind of approach that I have taken here is not very common and it involves the risk of making mistakes in several academic fields at the same time. 1 INTRODUCTION The book consists of six chapters, each of which has previously appeared elsewhere. They are all attempts to illuminate the religious motivation of Buddhists and they share the fundamental approach of social psychology. Chapter 1 is based on the following article: ‘The Skandhaka of the Vinaya Pitaka and its Historical Value’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens und Archiv für Indische Philosophie, XLII, 1998: 23–40. This chapter is an argument for the use of the Khandhaka section of the Vinaya Pit>aka in the study of the origins of Buddhism. The argument is that these texts are likely to be very close to the life of the Buddha and therefore their historical value is greater than previously assumed. The other chapters of the book take the Khandhakas as a main source, and Chapter 1 therefore serves as a legitimation for this approach as well as an introduction to the most important source. In the concluding pages of his survey of Vinaya literature, Prebish wrote that the character of the new publications on this literature – those of the 1990s – is interpretive rather than simply informative. ‘It is only now that we can say that Vinaya study has come of age’, he wrote.1 Although religious motivation is my subject here, it is my hope that this book may be seen as a small contribution to the interpretive study of the Vinaya. Chapter 2 is based on the article ‘The Early Samgha and the Laity’, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 20 (2), 1997: 7–33. This chapter uses the Khandhakas, as well as selected texts from the Sutta Pit>aka, to argue that the Buddhist Samgha≥ went through some very fundamental changes in its earliest stages as a response to its peculiar relationship to the laity. In it I also apply some basic concepts from the social psychology of religion, such as extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, to illuminate the relationship between monks and lay people and argue that the Sam≥gha moved from a conversionist to an introversionist relation- ship to the world.