Buddhism beyond the nation state

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London, UK -- Concern with the limitations imposed by presuming contemporary geo-political divisions as the organizing principle for scholarship is not new, nor is it limited to Buddhist studies. Jonathan Skaff opens his recent Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580–800 by quoting Marc Bloch’s 1928 address to the International Congress of Historical Sciences (1928): “It is high time to set about breaking down the outmoded topographical compartments within which we seek to confine social realities, for they are not large enough to hold the material we try to cram into them.”

Skaff is not alone in his intention to overcome “the normal practice of professional historians to take the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis.” At the recent Association for Asian Studies (ASA) conference, four scholars, each in their own way, spoke to the constraints imposed by privileging geo-political categories as the structures by which Buddhism is apprehended, raising issues directly relevant to the discussions made here regarding the rhetorical and lexical consequences of categorizing Buddhism according to the convenient artifice of the nation-state.

They propose instead to explore Buddhism in the broader context of Asian history as a civilization that introduced new social institutions and languages, established new agricultural technologies and trading relations, and transformed the environment beyond national borders and ethnic categories.

Reflecting on the problematic organizational hierarchy of contemporary Buddhist studies, which employs regional categories based on the ‘area studies’ model subdivided further into national categories, David Gray (University of Santa Clara) questions the category Tibetan Buddhism. In his essay “How Tibetan is Tibetan Buddhism? On the Applicability of a National Designation for a Transnational Tradition,” he points out that today there is no Tibet to which this label can refer.

Additionally, arguably the majority of practitioners of “Tibetan” Buddhism neither are ethnic Tibetans, nor do they speak or read Tibetan. More significantly, while Tibetans considered themselves Buddhists and had a sense of Tibet as a distinct geo-political category, “they simply did not conceive of their tradition in nationalistic terms.” Since there is no equivalent for “Tibetan Buddhism” in premodern Buddhist literature from Tibet, Gray suggests “Vajrayana.”

This is itself an emic category (rdo rje theg pa), and also identifies a form of Buddhism that stretches across many national boundaries. Thus, it allows for further designation as needed, but without precluding meaningful comparisons. For example Kukai and Tshong Khapa can be juxtaposed as Vajrayana teachers, rather than separated as Japanese and Tibetan respectively.

Anya Bernstein (University of Michigan) further examines the way in which Buddhist social identities can be both formed by and recognized in terms of lineage and reincarnation, rather than nationality or ethnicity. In her essay “Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Mobility, Authority and Cultural Politics in Buryat Buddhism,” she focuses on two ethnically Tibetan monks from the (new) Drepung Monastery, who are recognized by Buryat Mongolians as having Buryat “roots.” The first is a reincarnated Buryat lama who had gone to Tibet in the late 1920s and died while incarcerated by the Chinese. He reincarnated in a Tibetan expatriate family in Nepal, and is now a member of the Drepung monastery. The second was the disciple of a Buryat monk. Both lineage and reincarnation serve to establish connections with the Buryat Buddhist community on bases distinct from nationality or ethnicity.

That the convenient nation-state model is inadequate for an accurate in-depth understanding of Buddhism in the context of Asian history is also made obvious by Tansen Sen (Baruch College, City University of New York). Focusing on the works of several figures from the 1920s and 1930s, Sen shows that the idea of peaceful cooperation between India and China on the basis of Buddhism was invented by projecting back the contemporary nation-states into the ancient past. The consequence of constructing this imaginary history is that the contributions of all the other peoples - Sogdians, Tokharians, Uighurs, and so on - were left out. Instead we find “simplistic models and misperceptions that continue to have considerable impact on contemporary views about the pre-colonial interactions between South Asia and the region that is now within the borders of the People’s Republic of China.”

While the epistemological issue of contemporary intellectual concerns molding historiography is well-recognized, Sen reveals something more blatant. The political goals held by individuals in the early twentieth century created a pan-Asianist rhetoric, including a mythology of peaceful relations between two continuously existing unitary nations. The representation is false on both counts; not only were the relations not peaceful, but the contemporary nation-states also do not constitute continuous political entities stretching back to the second century CE. This representation was created to serve divergent political purposes. When the goal was resistance to the European colonial powers, Japan was included as part of the pan-Asianist rhetoric. When the goal was China requesting India’s help in resisting Japan’s invasion, the rhetoric was restructured to emphasize only the Buddhist connection between these two countries.

Johan Elverskog (Southern Methodist University) has addressed the ecological impact of Buddhism across the entire landscape of Asia in a paper entitled “The Buddhist Exchange: Irrigation, Crops and the Spread of the Dharma.” The term “exchange” here, borrowed from environmental studies, refers to the way expansion of human societies transforms the environment by transmitting new crops and agricultural technologies from one region to another.

Clearing the misconception of Buddhism as inherently environmentally friendly, a “green” religion, Elverskog then provides a panoramic overview of the impact of the expansion of Buddhism across the entirety of the Asian continent. The expansion of the monastic institution was not simply a “religious” event, but included introducing wet-rice agriculture, and irrigation technologies into new regions. This affected vast regions across Asia, simultaneously creating population growth and the conditions for urbanization. Seen thus, Buddhism is not only a collection of abstruse doctrines, but a complex social institution affecting people’s lives and transforming the environment in very concrete ways across national boundaries.

As organizing principles, lineage and reincarnation can work across ethnicity and nationality. “Tibetan Buddhism” is neither emic to premodern Tibet, nor does it identify a presently existing nation-state, nor were the forms of Buddhism called “Tibetan” ever delimited by either ethnic or national boundaries. The mythology of Buddhism as a peaceful bridge between India and China ignores the important roles played by other groups that were the links between the two.
The Buddhist civilization that spread across Asia brought new crops and new technologies. The categories that have long served to organize Buddhist studies have been largely based on nation-states, giving us such familiar categories as Chinese Buddhism, Thai Buddhism, Korean Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism. The recent work by these scholars and others reveal that such categories are problematic. While there may be particular research programs for which they are appropriate, they cannot simply be presumed and used by default.

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Richard K. Payne is the Dean of the Institute of Buddhist Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley; serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Institute’s annual journal, Pacific World; is chair of the Editorial Committee of the Pure Land Buddhist Studies Series; and is Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism. He also sporadically maintains a blog entitled Critical Reflections on Buddhist Thought: Contemporary and Classical.

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Self-immolation cases spread beyond monks, nuns in Tibet over Chinese repression

On Wednesday, two more young Tibetans, a mother and a monk, set themselves on fire in protest against the continued exile of the Dalai Lama and the lack of freedom in Tibet, raising the number of Tibetan self-immolations to 45, most of them having taken place since March 2011.
The immolations started with Buddhist monks and nuns, who see themselves in an increasingly desperate struggle for the ancient land and its people, and who say that their Tibetan identity and faith is being stamped out by aggressive Chinese policies and actions.

Yet, 13 of the self-immolations in Tibet this year suggest that ordinary Tibetans are starting to torch themselves, and that the cases appear to be spreading geographically and are less confined to a few dissident monasteries.
"The self-immolations have now jumped a number of fences. There are more of them and they are more diverse," Christian Science Monitor quoted Steven Marshall, a member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in Washington, who had extensive experience in Tibet in the 1980s and 1990s, as saying.

"We are seeing immolations in the lay community, not only among monks and nuns where it started. It is also spreading into a greater area, not just the [Tibet Autonomous Region], but Qinghai and Gansu [provinces abutting the Tibet Autonomous Region]."

While the Dalai Lama has consistently opposed self-immolations as a violation of the sacredness of life, Tibetans are continuing to do it in an act seen as indicative of their depth of desperation."They are calling for Dalai Lama's return because they are in this very serious moment, very serious, in which the Tibetan nation, identity, culture, the spiritual tradition, are all being closed down by Chinese aggression," Kate Saunders, the spokeswoman for International Campaign for Tibet in London, said.

In Tibetan monasteries, China continues to oversee aspects of religious instruction, control the appointment of teachers, give patriotic loyalty tests-actions that many Tibetans protest as serious infringements by Beijing on the faith.
Photos of the Dalai Lama in Tibet are forbidden.

"All monasteries must display pictures of Mao Zedong and Chinese President Hu Jintao and fly the Chinese flag. In numerous monasteries, forced patriotic reeducation campaigns are under way," states Lobsang Sangay, who now heads a newly democratic government in exile in Dharamsala, India, in a statement this week.

Some Tibetan experts say the past year of self-immolations represent a "tipping point" in the deepening clashes between locals and Chinese authorities.
The region, meanwhile, is shut off from most foreign and Western journalists, NGOs, and human rights groups.

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Book review: 'Beyond Religion' by the Dalai Lama

For most of his 76 years, the 14th Dalai Lama has been the spiritual light for followers of Tibetan Buddhism, his every word parsed for guidance to living a better, more fulfilling life. Awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama has been an outspoken advocate for compassion, meditation and religious tolerance.

Now, as he steps down as leader of Tibet, the perpetually smiling monk in saffron and burgundy robes makes in "Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World" what some may regard as a heretical pronouncement: You don't need religion to lead a happy and ethical life.

Amid the clash of global, multicultural societies and religious values today, he argues in his new book that what is more important is "an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally accessible to those with faith and those without; a secular ethics."

A metaphor the Dalai Lama likes to use goes like this: The difference between ethics and religion is like the difference between water and tea. Ethics without religious content is water, a critical requirement for health and survival. Ethics grounded in religion is tea, a nutritious and aromatic blend of water, tea leaves, spices, sugar and, in Tibet, a pinch of salt.

"But however the tea is prepared, the primary ingredient is always water," he says. "While we can live without tea, we can't live without water. Likewise, we are born free of religion, but we are not born free of the need for compassion."

This is anything but a book denouncing faith. But some readers, particularly those with strong religious beliefs, are bound to find the Dalai Lama's argument troubling. Even the power of prayer has dissipated in his eyes. "In fact, I consider prayer to be of immense psychological benefit," he says. "But we must accept that its tangible results are often hard to see. When it comes to obtaining certain, direct results, it is clear that prayer cannot match the achievements of, for instance, modern science."

This volume could be viewed as the distillation of the Dalai Lama's lifelong interest in science and its evolving understanding of consciousness, subjective experience, rhythms of nature and the fabric of the universe. It draws heavily from personal recollections and regular meetings with researchers in the fields of physics, cosmology, biology, psychology and neuroscience.

In language that is relaxed and clear, the Dalai Lama suggests that a concern for the welfare of others, "when combined with reflection on our personal experiences and coupled with simple common sense, can, I believe, offer a strong case for the benefits of cultivating basic human values that does not rely on religious principles or faith at all. And I welcome this."

Buddhism, which has a history of adapting to changing times and cultures, was founded by Siddhartha Gautama in India about the 6th century BC and then spread to China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and Vietnam. It arrived in the United States in the 19th century and was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s by the likes of Buddhist missionary D.T. Suzuki, author Alan Watts and beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Today a new American hybrid of Buddhism is blossoming, fed by a large representation of Jewish practitioners.

Some may disagree with the Dalai Lama's perspective, but he does a credible job of arguing why we should "move beyond our limited sense of closeness to this or that group or identity, and instead cultivate a sense of closeness to the entire human family."

"The sequencing of the human genome, for example, has shown that racial differences constitute only a tiny fraction of our genetic makeup, the vast majority of which is shared by all of us," the Dalai Lama writes. "In fact, at the genome level, the differences between individuals appear more pronounced than those between different races. The time has come I believe for each of us to start thinking and acting on the basis of an identity rooted in the phrase 'we human beings.'"

Given that the Dalai Lama has given more time to getting in touch with his inner-Buddha than anyone else alive, his book offers a fascinating approach to moral guidance in an age of technological globalization and multicultural societies.

louis.sahagun@latimes.com

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