Buddhism, religious authority and nationalism
Torkel Brekke, University of Oslo
It is a great pleasure to give the introductory talk on the first day of our work-shop
about nationalism and militarism in Buddhist societies. As we are at the very beginning
of what we hope will be a long-term research cooperation, I believe that one of the goals
of this seminar is simply to discuss what should the important strands of research
initatives in the future. Nationalism and militarism in Buddhist societies is potentially a
very large field and a number of outstanding scholars have contributed to it. What are the
interesting questions and problems for us? What lines of research fall outside the scope
of our initative?
In this paper, I suggest that one line of research should focus on issues concerning
the links between Buddhism, religious authority and nationalism from the mid-18th
century. The reason why I find this exceptionally important is that the changes in
religious authority in Buddhist societies that took place in the second half of the 18th and
the early parts of the 19th century were preconditions for the development of Buddhist
nationalism. In fact, parallell shifts in religious authority were precondtions for
nationalism in all Buddhist societies from Japan and Korea to Sri Lanka and Burma and
Thailand.
Before this period there were certainly a number of specifically political ideas
associated with Buddhism in several Asian societies. Kings and monks entertained ideals
about dharmarajya (righteous/Buddhist rule) and the link between political and religious
authority was often a key political institution. However, nationalism is not about kings
and monks. Nationalism is about nations. It is about the people and their willingness and
ability to identify themselves as a cultural and political unity. Sometimes it is also about
their willingness to sacrifice their lives in furthering the interests of the nation, although
the militaristic aspects of modernity will not be part of my talk.
I follow Anthony Smith and define nationalism as an ideological movement for
attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed
by some of its memberss to constitute an actual or potential nation. This ideology, and
the political programs derived from it, developed in Europe from the 18th century.1 It
1
Smith, Anthony (1991). National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin Bookds Ltd. p. 72-3.
1
was exported to educated elites in the rest of the world during the colonial period, in
particular in the intense phase of globalization in the second half of the 19th century.
There has been wide variety in how and to what extent colonized elites used
imported ideas about national identity to mobilize against colonizers in the 19th and 20th
centuries. There has also been great difference in how and to what extent the postcolonial political regimes have used religious traditions to build cultural and political
autonomy, unity and identity. Still, there are some broad patterns in how nationalism was
grafted onto local religion in Buddhist countries in Asia. If we want to explore the
development of nationalism and militarism in Buddhist states and societies from the late
19th century, we need to understand the fundamental ideological shift in views about
religious authority that was a precondition for the political use of Buddhism in the
nationalist age. In particular, we need to understand the changes in general attitudes to
the social and political roles and positions of 1) monks and 2) lay people. This shift can
be summed up in the concept of Protestantism.
Buddhism and the universalization of priesthood
My contention is that the process that we can call Protestantism was a precondition
for Buddhist nationalism in all or most of the Buddhist societies of Asia. Briefly stated
this process created a new kind of identity for Buddhist lay people. Lay people in all or
most Buddhist societies were ascribed a new religious authority simply by being born
into the Buddhist nation. Agrarian, pre-nationalist societies were divided along many
lines defined by clans, families, geography, caste, profession etc. In the new nation, all
these dividing lines were ideally broken down. Lay Buddhists were elevated to
membership in a nation defined by selective use of high culture and religion.
This is what Max Weber called the universalization of priesthood. Every member of
a nation must take part in and nourish the high-culture that nationalism imposes on a
people within the boundaries of the state. When an elite chooses elements from a
Buddhist tradition for the construction of such a modern high-culture, and when such a
modern high-culture is accepted by large section of an emerging literate middle class,
Buddhist nationalism can emerge as a force in national and international politics. I want
to suggest some questions that we need to address if we want to understand these
changes and how they created the conditions for the development of nationalism and
militarism in Buddhist societies.
2
Protestantism as a cross-cultural category
Thus, I am suggesting that we take an approach to the beginnings of nationalism in
Buddhist socieites through the category of Protestantism. Robert N. Bellah constructed a
scheme of religious evolution in his essay Religious Evolution, where he suggests five
stages of religious development: primitive religion, archaic religion, historic religion,
early modern religion and modern religion. I will not enter a discussion about the
defintion Bellah uses of evolution or of the seemingly telic overtones in his scheme when
he says that his idea of religious evolution is based on the assumption that “at each stage
the freedom of personality and society has increased relative to the environing
conditions.”2 What is of interest here is the category early modern religion because this
ideal type is based on the Protestant Reformation of Europe.
Bellah emphasizes immediate salvation, the break with mediation, the direct relation
between the individual and transcendent reality. Bellah, then, seems to position himself
firmly within the tradition of Enlightenment interpretations of the Reformation. It is this
ideal type of Protestant religion, abstracted from any historical situation or any particular
denomination within the Protestant tradition, that has informed the use of the concept in
Asia. It is the stress on the breakdown of traditonal forms of religious authority and
hierarchy as well as the right to immediate salvation that is seen to be the essence of
Protestant Buddhism.
The term “Protestant Buddhism” was coined by Gananath Obeyesekere and has
gained currency in the discussion of important developments in Theravada Buddhism
from the 1880s-90s. In the study of Theravada Buddhism the term is used about a
modern form of Buddhism which was espoused by Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933).
His ideas became influential among an emergent middle class and his ideas of religion in
general and Buddhism in particular were based on the religious outlook of Protestant
Europe and America. One of the most important traits of Dharmapala's Buddhism was
the blurring of the traditional roles of monk and layman and, as a consequence, the
redefinition of religious authority in Sinhalese society.
Stephen Prothero has questioned the use of the term because he believes scholars
tend to overlook the historical sources of Protestantism by conflating that complex
historical phenomenon with Weber’s ideal representation of it. Prothero uses the example
2
Bellah, Robert N. (1970). Beyond Belief. Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper
& Row. See chapter 2.
3
of Henry Steel Olcott to show that what we describe as “Protestant Buddhism” was in no
way a simple amalgamations of Theravada Buddhism and an ideal Weberian
Protestantism but a messy mix that included other important Western elements, such as
modernism, metropolitan, gentility and academic Orientalism.3 However, if we stick to
the basic characteristics of Protestantism as it has been used by Ernest Gellner to
describe general features of modern cultures it cann be useful in an analysis of the
conceptual background of Buddhist nationalism.
Protestantism and new religious authority in Buddhist societies
Protestantism as an ideal category for comparison across cultural boundaries is
about religious authority. It is about who has the right to direct access to the knowledge
and the values which are sacred in a society. As an ideology that preaches the
distribution of these assets to as many people as possible, its links with nationalism are
essential. If we see the changes in Buddhism in the second half of the nineteenth century
in the large historical perspective, one striking feature of the developments is the new
forms of authority.
In the argument of classical modernist theories of nationalism, one characteristic
feature of the social organization of agrarian society as opposed to industrial society is its
internal boundaries.4 Both lateral and vertical cultural borders are obstacles to a feeling
of unity and national identity. Two individuals are not of the same nation if they do not
have a common culture; a modern society requires a degree of cultural homogeneity.
Thus, the leaders who brought Buddhist societies into the modern world had a twofold
task: both horizontal and lateral cultural boundaries had to be broken down or at least
lowered for a feeling of shared culture and shared fate to arise among people from
different parts of the large territories.
Sri Lanka
Let us take an example from Sri Lanka in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One aspect
of Anagarika Dharmapala's work concerned the collective identity of the Sinhalese
nation. S.Amunugama has pointed out the importance of Dharmapala's construction of an
3
Prothero, Stephen (1995). “Henry Steel Olcott and ‘Protestant Buddhism’ Journal of the American Academy of
Religion LXIII/2, pp.281-302.
4 See Gellner's model in: Gellner, Ernest (1996). Nations and Nationalism. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA.
p.9.
4
ethic for the Sinhala laity.5 Dharmapala had a feeling of responsibility for maintaining
and strengthening the religious identity of Sinhala Buddhists. There was the need to
create unity among the members of the nation across internal boundaries. The most
obvious strategy was to erase the differences between monk and layman and diffuse
Buddhist culture, which to a large extent had been the property of members of the
religious elite. Thus he presents the Buddhist religion as a democratic and inclusive
institution. Buddhism is, in Dharmapala's rhetoric, a system uniting lay people and
religious specialists into one religious nation. He goes as far as to totally erase the
differences between monk and layman. "The Blessed One made no distinction of
Bhikkhus and Bhikkkunis, upasakas and upasikas. They were all to learn the Pali
Dhamma and study it and proclaim it for the welfare of others. The consummation of the
Brahmacariya life was not only for the Bhikkhu and the Bhikkhunis, but also for
upasakas and upasikas. The door to Nibbana is open to all."6 There was always a
distinction between monks and lay people in Theravada Buddhist societies. Lay people
were not expected to learn the Pali Dhamma to the extent that the monks and nuns were,
nor to lead a celibate life devoted to religion, and the door to Nibbana was not open to
them.
But Dharmapala's goal was to affirm and strengthen the cultural identity and the
unity of the Sinhalese nation. Through the history of Sri Lanka, the kings have ensured
the maintenance of legal-political community. The Buddhist religion may have formed
an ethical basis for the common civic culture of the Sinhalese, but the Buddhist texts
themselves take hardly any interest in the affairs of the world. The most obvious reason
for this is that Buddhism originated as a salvation technique for those who were prepared
to leave the world. Obviously, the early Buddhists could not have foreseen the
phenomenal geographical spread of their system from Ashoka's times onward, nor could
they have had any notion of the vast spectrum of cultures onto which Buddhism was to
be grafted. Earlier in the history of Sri Lanka the silence of the texts on lay ethics was not
a problem. However, when the institution of Buddhist kingship was discontinued in
1815, the basis for national unity disappeared. Dharmapala wanted to secure national
unity based on the Buddhist religion. In order to unite as one nation the Sinhalese needed
a code of ethics for the laity. So Dharmapala wrote the Daily code for the laity, in which
5
Amunugama, Sarath (1985). "Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and the transformation of Sinhala Buddhist
organization in a colonial setting." Social Science Information. 24, 4. pp.697-730.
6 Return to Righteousness. p.224-225.
5
he gave a number of rules on how lay people should behave in their daily life.7
Essentially, the code was an attempt to give a common ethical basis for a united Sinhala
people.
Thailand
In Thailand, we see very similar concerns in the nationalist ideology that developed
in the middle of the nineteenth century. King Mongkut (ruled 1851-68) was very
concerned to forge a united Thai people including both monks and laity. Thus, he was
not happy with the way of life of the introvert forest-dwelling monks because religion
should be a standardized ideology uniting the Thais. He put great emphasis on
scripturalism, tracing all that was important to scriptures, i.e. the Pali canon, and at the
same time editing out the elements that did not conform to his rational and anti-ritualistic
stance. At the same time he created new rituals, which may be seen as the new elements
of a civil religion in Thailand. The function of the new rituals was to bring lay people
together and make them take part in and adhere to the same state religion. The monks
should preach more and create stronger ties between the religious elites and the laity.
S.R. Tambiah writes: “All these features are elements in a new activism whereby religion
was not merely to be confined to the monastic libraries and cloisters but should be
actively propagated and taken to the people.”8
The most important common ideological denominator among the religious leaders
of this period is the belief that the division between religious leaders and common people
must be broken down. The social and political impact of this stance has been explored by
H.L. Seneviratne in his classic study of Dharmapalite missionaries, as he calls several
leading activist monks who took their inspiration from Dharmapala. 9 In all Theravada
Buddhist countries, the need to use religion to create nations resulted in the blurring of
the boundaries between religious and political roles during the last parts of the 18th
century and the early parts of the 19th. It also resulted in religious authority for the laity.
In these countries the shift in religious auhtority came with new responsibilities: political
responsibilites for monks and religious responsibilities for lay people.
7
The code is discussed in Amunugama, "Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and the transformation of Sinhala
Buddhist organization" p.719ff.
8 Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer, p. 215.
9 Seneviratne, The Work of Kings, p.93.
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Burma
In Burma, Buddhist nationalism started in the same period, i.e. during the two first
decades of the twentieth century. The pivotal organization Young Men’s Buddhist
Association was founded in 1906 and in 1920 it was transformed into the General
Council of Burmese Associations and became an essential tool for the spreading of
political and religious awareness in the country. In 1908 U May Oung, advocate and one
of the founders of the important Burma Research Society, gave a speech called “The
Modern Burman: His Life and Notions”, in which he asked, among other things, what it
meant to be a Buddhist for the modern English educated Burmese.10 The answer was the
typical nationalist idea about a people united in religious tradition. In 1909, progressive
politicians who were members of the YMBA started The Burman and in 1911 The Sun
Daily, the first English language newspapers in Burma. Sayadaw U Ottama, the famous
political monk, was a contributor to these political publications.11 This was also the time
when the infamous shoe-question came to a head.
In Burma under the British, the English-educated class associated with the Young
Men’s Buddhist Association proved unable to appeal to popular sentiments in the
creation of a national movement in colonized Burma. The westernized leaders were
replaced by the less westernized leadership of the General Council of Burmese
Associations in the second and third decades of the 20th century.12 In fact, the people who
proved most effective in the anti-colonial struggle were closer to the religious
traditionalism of the villages and many of them were monks, like U Ottama, who
asserted that it was the duty of monks to defend Buddhism against the British. In other
words, monks took on new political roles in Burma, as they did in Sri Lanka in the same
period.
It is important to be aware of the enormous changes in the very idea of what religion
is that took place in the late 19th and ealry 20th centuries in Buddhist societies like
Burma. U Nu had ideas about religion in general and Buddhism in particular that were to
a large extent based on the religious outlook of Protestant Europe and America. One of
the most important traits of his Buddhism was the blurring of the traditional roles of
10
J.S. Furnivall and U May Oung (1959). “The Dawn of Nationalism in Burma” Journal of the Burma
Research Society, Vol. XXXIII, Part 1, April. pp. 1-7.
11 Htway, U Tin (1972). “The Role of Literature in Nation Building” Journal of the Burma Research Society,
Vol. LV, December. pp.19-46.
12 Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds, p. 129-135.
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monk and layman. His Protestant Buddhism was about the right of lay people to engage
in the high soteriological religion of Buddhism and to strive for nirvana or salvation. He
actively universalized priesthood, to use Weber’s terminology.
A corollary of this emphasis on individual religious responsibilities was a
privatization and internalization of religion. Traditional Indian religions, including
Theravada Buddhism, is often said to stress orthopraxy, right practice, which basically
means participation in the proscribed rituals, whereas the modern strand of Buddhism
professed by U Nu as well as other Asian leaders, rather emphasized piousness in private
life and the personal aspects of religion. In Protestant Christian fashion the locus of
religion for modern, educated Burmese Buddhists shifted from religious action in a
collective context to private religious contemplation and morality. The development and
transformation of religion was a precondtion for the development of religious
nationalism in early independent Burma because without it Buddhism and Buddhist
monks would never have taken on a political role in society.
Burma achieved independence in 1948. U Nu was the first Prime Minister of Burma
and the leading politician in the country from the assasination of Aung San and other
members of the Governor’s Executive Council in July 1947 until the military coup of 2
March 1962. Morality was at the heart of religion for U Nu and he was an eager
proponent of rather strict morality based on his own modernist ideas of Buddhist ethical
principles. In 1948, he took a vow of sexual abstinence and he and his wife started living
in different buildings.13 U Nu was very austere in his life-style. He was a vegetarian, he
spent the evenings counting the beads of his Buddhist rosary and he seems to have been
remote even to his closest family-members because he believed that attachment causes
suffering.14 In other words, he was a typically Protestant lay person taking on religious
responsibilites and habits traditionally the domain of the religious elit, i.e. the monks.
In order to achieve unity and morality, U Nu took the responsibility of organizing a
great council of Theravada Buddhism from 1954 to 56 in connection with the 1956
celebration of the birth of the Buddha. The 2500th year of the Buddhist era had great
impact on politics in the Buddhist countries of South- and Southeast Asia. In Sri Lanka,
the 1956 elections were deeply marked by the expectations linked to this occasion.15 In
13
Butwell, Richard, U Nu of Burma. p.61-3.
ibid. p. 62.
15 Monks were active in the election campaign and books like the infamous The Betrayal of Buddhism were
published. See Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja (1992). Buddhism Betrayed? Chicago: Chicago University Press.
14
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Burma, the occasion had consequences for the Goverment policy on matters of religion;
it was as the pious host of the conference that U Nu decided that Buddhism must become
state religion of the country.
Thus, in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand the same forces and pressures created
similar transformations in religion and society. The social and scientific revolutions
brought about by colonialism led naturally to a strong feeling of national consciousness
among the Buddhists of the Theravada countries, Heinz Bechert asserts in his work on
Buddhism, state and society.16 Because of the changes in society there developed, says
Bechert, a distinct feeling for the close relationship between their national existence and
the Buddhist religion, which they saw as their national religion. The close relationship
between national consciousness and religious consciousness should be analyzed in the
light of the reaction against the colonial power, in Bechert’s view.17
Conclusion
My contention was that a broad process that we can call Protestantism was a
precondition for Buddhist nationalism in all or most of the Buddhist societies of Asia.
This process created a new kind of identity for Buddhist lay people. They were elevated
to membership in a nation defined by selective use of high culture and religion. This is
what Max Weber called the universalization of priesthood. At the same time, but not
necessarily for the same reasons, new roles were created for and by monks. They were
now expected to step in as political guides, or even leaders, where traditional Buddhist
kingship had been crushed by imperialism, as in Sri Lanka or Burma, or to serve the
political authorities in their work to attain and maintain autonomy, unity and identity, as
in Thailand. I have looked at very few and limited examples from the world of
Theravada Buddhism but I believe that these basic observations about the preconditions
for nationalism raises certain basic research questions about religious roles and religious
authority in all Buddhist societies in Asia from the mid 19th centuries:
Firstly, when, how and why was the role of the monk changed? In particular, who
were the leaders that defined new roles for the Sangha? How did they argue for a new
political role for monks? What historical documents or religious symbols were used to
defend the innovations in religious and political authority? How did the politically
16
Bechert, Heinz (1966). Buddhismus, Staat und Geschellschaft in den Ländern der Theravada-Buddhismus.
Erster Band, Allgemeines und Ceylon. Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Alfred Metzner Verlag. p. 117.
17 ibid.
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engaged monks perceive the state and its obligations? How did they perceive the role of
the nation in a wider world of nations?
Secondly, when, how and why was the role of the lay Buddhist changed? Who were
the lay leaders, including political leaders, that defined new roles for the Buddhist lay
man and woman? What were their views on literacy and scripturalism? How did they
argue for the use of religion to attain unity? To what extent did they argue for the
spreading of practices like meditation, celibacy, pilgrimages etc. among the lay people to
attain greater religious identity? What were their views on gender-roles in the building of
national unity?
The list of research questions could be extended in many directions. However, I
believe that it is important to focus on these and related issues concerning the ideological
background and the very conceptual preconditions for nationalism and militarism in
Buddhist societies before one moves ahead to explore the more sinister aspects of
nationalism as it developed in the first decades of the 20th century or how Buddhist
nationalism continues to shape ideas about national identity today.
10