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Buddhism, Power, Modernity. Gathering

leaves and lifting words: Histories of
Buddhist monastic education in Laos
and Thailand
Ananda Abeysekara
a

Virginia Tech, USA

Available online: 07 Dec 2011

To cite this article: Ananda Abeysekara (2011): Buddhism, Power, Modernity. Gathering leaves and
lifting words: Histories of Buddhist monastic education in Laos and Thailand, Culture and Religion,
12:4, 489-497
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Culture and Religion

Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2011, 489497

REVIEW ESSAY

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Buddhism, Power, Modernity

Gathering leaves and lifting words: Histories of Buddhist monastic
education in Laos and Thailand, by Justin Thomas McDaniel, Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2008, 392 pp., $24.69 (paperback), ISBN: 9780-295-98849-8
Seemingly belonging to the specialised area-studies subject of Buddhist monastic
education in Southeast Asia, this text by historian of Theravada Buddhism
McDaniel (2008) seeks to intervene in (and reorient) the broader debates and
questions about colonialism, power, post-colonial life and religion by making a
set of grand theoretical claims. The text critiques a presumed post-colonial
argument about the relationship between colonial power and vernacular
religion, and between elite power and non-elite (Buddhist) life. Central to this
critique is the conceptualisation of power in general and modern (colonial and
post-colonial) power, as something distinct from, and opposed to, some local
Buddhist monastic life in particular. This critique is based on the presumption
that elite power is never total (p. 18). This presumption more or less forms the
basis of the argument. Perhaps unaware of the well-known Foucauldian
productive notion of power, which does not negate, repress or control but
enables and authorises, the author understands power in a negative moralist,
repressive sense of being elite, separate from non-elite life. However, if power
is something only (colonial and post-colonial) elites exercise, elite power must,
by necessity, constitute an excess of life, in which power becomes something
abnormal and external to life. According to this logic, since non-elite Buddhist
monks do not have and cannot exercise power, they must be more normal and
ordinary than elites. And since elite power is not total, non-elite life then
constitutes the normal total life. Despite the frequent use of the term in the
humanities and popular discourse today, who can possibly determine what
constitutes an elite life, let alone elite power, unless one thinks of power in
terms of some excess of life such as violence? If so, non-violence, as opposed to
power/violence, would constitute the normalcy of life!
Governed by this moralistic sense of elite power, the author speaks of an
internal colonialism to refer to the supposed takeover (pp. 220, 292) of Buddhist
educational institutions by local Marxist and royal elites, who ultimately sought
to colonise and control non-elite life by way of specific monastic reforms in
Laos and Thailand. Given this sense of power, despite the texts claim to disavow
any sense of orthodox Buddhist life, non-elite life eventually becomes a form of
orthodox, historical life that must be separated and liberated from the violence of
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elite power. This orthodox, non-elite life is one in which local Buddhist monks
were creative agents (p. 18), who, though influenced, were not impacted by
powers external to local life. The practice of local monastic life was based on
their own traditions, histories and experiences, which changed on their own terms
over time. This creative monastic life involved the practices of lifting words
(yok sab) from Pali canonical and non-canonical texts and creatively engaging
with them (p. 7). We find this local monastic creativity in (pre-modern)
pedagogical texts such as vohara, nissaya and namasadda, which are
idiosyncratic lecture and sermon notes around the selected translation of
words and passages from individually chosen canonical and extra-canonical Pali
texts (p. 122; emphasis added). In a culture of translation unique to Lao and
Thai monkhood, the vernacular practices of learning and teaching Buddhism
have changed in modern times. This change is found in the shift from texts to
media-based approaches to learning Buddhism today. The modern study of
Dhammapada (verses), separate from their traditional commentarial narratives, is
one example; a similar change is seen in the way Abhidhamma texts are used for
ritual purposes. All this change reflects the dynamic agency and creative ways
in which monks expressed themselves (pp. 122, 168), even using trans-local
methods in modern times, without aping the West (p. 209). The Pali canon as
such plays no role in these practices of learning Buddhism. Some monks do not
even know Pali. What matters is the vernacular translation and manipulation of
Pali texts and words.
Here, following the lead of other historians of Buddhism such as Anne
Blackburn and Anne Hansen, McDaniel accuses other scholars of being
orientalist for trying to remove creative agency from monastic life. The
prejudice for the original true meaning or original intention over the living,
evolving traditions still plagues much of the early and Theravada Buddhist
scholarship and does not acknowledge the creative work of individual Lao
monastic teachers and scholars. The preference for Pali has caused the Lao
vernacular and Buddhist-inspired literature and ritual to be overlooked (p. 178).
Tradition evolves; what evolves lives; what lives becomes creative. Creativity
supposedly becomes the internal essential condition of Buddhist monastic life
that resists and overcomes the impact of external elite power. Indeed, creativity
becomes its own condition and predicate. Monks were creative because they were
motivated to be creative (pp. 51, 84, 122). This becomes one of several
tautological arguments that occur repeatedly in the text. One wonders about
individual Buddhist monks who fail or are not motivated to live a Buddhist
life of creativity, since every individual monk, like every human being, cannot be
creative, inventive or expressive! Consider living a life always trying to be
creative, inventive and expressive. This is why Nietzsche (2002) argues that one
often mistakes inventing (Befindung) for discovering/finding (Erfindung).
This is also why Heidegger (1996) argued against an entire Western tradition,
that life is not something one lives by way of being creative or expressive; rather
one finds oneself in life/existence (Befindlichkeit), into which one is thrown

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(geworfen). And compare this with what Asad (1993) has called disciplinary
practices that constitute religious life. One can find no creativity to life, much
less any individually chosen expression of it, in such disciplinary practices of
life.
These questions of life/existence/practice are lost on the author as he is too
quick to supplement Buddhist life with a Western secular attribute like individual
creative agency, the very Western attributes from which the text ironically seeks
to liberate Buddhist monastic life. This liberal sense of Buddhist life remains at
work throughout the texts moralistic conception of power, which in turn
translates into a number of other moralistic distinctions and divisions: canonical
Buddhism vs. non-canonical Buddhism, Western modernity vs. non-Western
modernity, discourse vs. power, internal life vs. external force and central state
vs. vernacular life. These distinctions and divisions are continuously and
repetitively asserted throughout the text even as it claims to do away with them.
Despite the authors occasional attempts at qualifying a few terms by way of
putting quotation marks around them, these distinctions remain decisive to the
text. However, this repetition, by way of the logic of determination if it can be
called a logic is presumed to pass for a historical empirical actuality about the
difference in and divisibility of human (Buddhist) life in general.
The author of course wants to tell us otherwise: the story he tells is
supposedly based on a complicated Buddhist history that he locates on the
ground, undermining trendy scholarly orientalist presumptions about modern
power.
There is a trend in Southeast Asian studies to focus on the rupture between the
present and the past, the early modern and the modern, the precolonial and the
postcolonial, the preprinting press and printing press periods. For the Buddhist
history of Northern Thailand, the question of when modernity began is complicated.
Northern Thailand was only tangentially colonized, although there was influence
from American Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, and from British,
Dutch, and French traders and travelers as early as the sixteenth century.
Industrialization, global advertising, and tourism did not seriously impact the region
until the late twentieth century. Marking the advent of modernity with the arrival of
the Westerners in the region reveals an orientalist Eurocentric perspective, however.
Can one talk about modernity without talking about the West? (p. 97; emphasis
added)

Here, the questions of who/what (the West) influenced, and who/what did
not seriously impact whom and until when, are quite boldly and self-evidently
determined. This is ultimately an attempt to determine the innate difference and
opposition between the West and the East. Once qualified with quotation marks,
the influence of the West is acknowledged, as if one cannot escape it and as if it
is something that merely passes or flows by. But the influence (of the West) on the
East is denied the seriousness of an impact. There is flawed logic here: An
impact becomes an impact by virtue or shall we say the law? of it being
serious. That is, an impact is something that can be determined because it does
not merely pass by; an impact stays around, long and visibly enough for the

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scholar to determine its presence, its actuality. This logic comes by way of the
following repetitive, tautological claim: an influence was not an impact because
said influence had only little effect or little lasting effect; or said influence had
no effect, lasting effect, or no long-term or widespread effect (pp. 27, 48, 56,
90, 105, 110, 113); or more simply, the actual effects of [elite] control were
minor (p. 110). Thus, for an impact to be an impact, said impact must have an
effect (p. 201). In plain tautological terms: the influence of colonial and postcolonial elite power did not have an impact because it had no effect! The claim is
repeated so frequently that one loses count.
Thus, the text makes the seriousness of determining an actual impact
seemingly more serious by saying that it must have an effect. But, as Nietzsche
argued in many instances, what constitutes an effect cannot be determined by the
most discerning, without the impossible task of determining what supposedly
gives rise to an effect, the effect of all effects, the origin of origins, if you will, the
cause (Ursache). The task of determining an effect and its origin/cause becomes
more serious for the text because it is an attempt to determine an effect across an
expanse of time and (geographical) space in Laos and Thailand. (Recall that the
text assures us that the West had no long-term or widespread effect on the East.)
Here, since the question of effect is always a question of origin, the text
reproduces the same problem of being concerned with original true meaning
or the original intention over the living. Also, as it seeks to understand Buddhist
living/life in terms of the question of cause/effect, the text becomes implicated in
a long Western logocentric problem. Again it is an irony that a text that claims to
talk about [Eastern] modernity without talking about the West already
subsumes Eastern lives into a Western problematic.
The author ostensibly resolves this problem by providing a history of the
traditions of vernacular Buddhist monastic education. Here this history, followed
by conjectures and suspicions, becomes the medium through which the
relationship between cause and effect is presumably determined. He tries to
position these vernacular traditions against, and separate them from, the efforts
(by both colonial and local royal [precolonial] and post-colonial individuals and
states) to reform monastic education. The story here becomes redundantly
familiar. In Laos, French colonisation had little impact on how the local Buddhist
monks taught, learnt and practiced Buddhism. There were Western travellers and
missionaries who made pejorative, derisive (p. 34) and condescending (pp. 26,
45, 58) commentary on what they saw as the great pomp, ritual and ceremony of
Buddhist monastic life. Even the French administrators spent more time setting
up coffee plantations, mining tin and cutting trees, and less time building schools,
hospitals and roads (p. 27). The French administrators of course sought to
separate secular schooling from religious. However, once again: Generally the
French separation of secular schooling from ritual, festival, and community
religious life made little impact on monastic approaches to education (p. 27).
This is so because much of it was mere rhetoric that did not amount to making a
real impact: There is a difference between the rhetoric of modernity and the

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ideology of reform and initiation and implementation of reform on the ground

(p. 22; emphasis added). (An effect is also determined by way of
implementation! After all, to implement something is to put something into
an effect! No social political discourse would have any impact until it is
implemented). Further examples of the lack of such effect/implementation are
given. Some French scholars of Buddhism came to Laos (from Cambodia) to
promote the study of Pali because of the general attitude that Pali was the
original and superior language of learning (p. 40). They even established
institutions such as the Institut Bouddhique and the Pali school; The Pali school
was one small part of the hopes of the French linking Cambodia and Laos
culturally as well as economically and politically (p. 43). But again none of this
made any real impact/effect because there certainly seems to be little direct
colonial influence on Lao monastic education (p. 42). After all, the colonisers
never forced (pp. 48 51) monks to study Pali; they did not oppress or
discourage the monastic education (p. 31). Rather, the French encouraged the
monks to study (p. 39); so there was no explicit oppression (p. 63).
The absence of this explicit colonial oppression in Laos leads to a new
perspective on the nature of colonialism:
The Lao case presents a new perspective on the nature of colonialism and
Orientalism. There was not an overwhelming and internally consistent colonial
ideological machine that attempted to change all modes of Lao intellectual and
religious expression. The motivation of many EFEO scholars was not simply
orientalist. That is, they were not simply trying to discount the local . . . (p. 42;
emphasis added)

Here, I need not remind the reader of the vast amount of literature
demonstrating why colonialism never was or never had to be internally
consistent in any colonised place. But what needs to be noted is the texts logic
of understanding colonialism: colonialism made no impact because there was
neither direct implementation nor motivation; nor was there an overwhelming and internally consistent colonial machine to change local
Buddhist expression. An impact is also then to be determined by the consequence
of it being overwhelming and internally consistent. Here, the bar is set very
high for colonial power to do anything to produce an impact on local life.
However, the sense of thinking that supposedly denies colonial power having an
impact on local life ironically grants that colonial power unlimited freedom. By
this logic, colonial power can do almost anything and everything and still not
count as having impacted or changed the local Buddhist culture. Given the
unlimitedly broad and expandable senses of the words, no action would ever
qualify for the criterion or the consequence of being overwhelming and
internally consistent. True to the definitions of the words, even if colonialists
did overwhelm an entire Buddhist local culture if such a thing were possible
such action still would not qualify for being overwhelming since it must be
internally consistent as well. That is, for an action to be internally consistent,
it must meet the impossible criterion of being unchanging over a period of time.

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This is an impossible thing to decide. No one can ever decide what is internally
consistent in terms of the scope, reach and expanse of time. Here, time becomes
an excess of itself that can never be determined as it can expand itself infinitely.
More simply put: How much time would count for something to be internally
consistent? How much time should something have had to qualify for having
remained unchanged for a consistent period of time: 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 or
many more years? But ironically it is this impossible thing that the text claims to
know and determine when it uses the above language, to decide what did and did
not cause an impact/effect. I point out the decisive importance of this flawed
choice of language to the text because this is a work by an author versed in many
languages who claims to be attentive to the complex use of languages in terms of
languaging that goes into monastic practices of lifting words from texts.
This so far is the upshot of understanding power in moralist terms.
Unchanged by (underwhelming) colonial power, monks educated themselves
in Buddhism, without much interest in the study of Pali or canonical texts of
Buddhism. After all, Laos is the only Theravada country where there is no
complete Pali canon. Most monasteries have no canonical texts. Even if there
are canonical texts, they remain dusty and unopened (p. 66). The monastic
curriculum is one in which Pali is not taught except through gloss and
explanation of Pali words in sermons (p. 67). This creative task of lifting words
from the texts and commenting on and explaining them in sermons is the
languaging of Pali. Again, these creative monastic agents were hardly
impacted by external efforts to standardise the monastic curriculum in Laos,
either by the colonial state or by the Marxist regime. Despite decades of
French, American, Russian and Thai influence, Lao monastic education has
developed and maintained its own, unique curriculum (p. 67). Even the Marxist
state could have no impact on monastic practice: Marxists who came to control
the monastic institutions not only encouraged monks to get involved in politics,
but they also forced the monks to attend indoctrination seminars aimed at
demonstrating the relationship between Marxism and Buddhism, trying to
dismantle their power base and structure (p. 58). Note in particular the
comparison/contrast here: like the French, the Marxists encouraged monks;
but unlike the French, Marxists forced monks. Force ultimately belongs to the
native Marxists, not to the French colonialists. Even the force of the Marxists
had no impact because the Lao Sangha has had a long tradition of overcoming
reform, repression, economic and demographic declines, and government
interference (p. 63). The Buddhist monastic life is ultimately not affected by
elite power. The effect of monks own uniqueness is the effect of their own
history of overcoming reform.
All this does not mean that Buddhism is apolitical by nature in Laos or other
places; indeed it is often highly political and revolutionary in many Buddhist
countries and cultures (p. 63). However, Buddhism is not political in Laos as it is
in other places because there is simply no evidence that links Buddhism to
rebellion (p. 63). There is no evidence because there was no large-scale or

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consistent rebellion (p. 63). The author writes with familiar logic: In short, Lao
monastic educators have never fostered large-scale or consistent rebellion
against king, colonialist, or communist (p. 63). In this definition of what
constitutes political Buddhism, the very idea of the political/politics is strangely
equated with rebellion (Based on this logic, think how large scale any action
by any person or group must be to ever be considered to qualify as political, as it
must involve consistent rebellion! By the same logic, the so-called religious
right in the USA would never be considered as political since it has never
engaged in rebellion? By the same logic, Buddhist monks in other places like
Sri Lanka, who are inevitably different from the uniquely Laotian apolitical
monks, must be political/rebellious). Now my point here is not that Buddhism is
political. Rather, the very idea that Buddhism is not apolitical makes possible
the separation between Buddhism and politics in the first place. The idea is part of
the general secular story that religion can be politicised. That story, as we know,
has broad and sinister implications, particularly when it concerns questions of
Islam today. The idea that religion is or can be political in turn makes possible
questions (comparativist or otherwise) about which religion/religious life at
which time is or is not political. In such questions, political/politicised religion
not to mention the politicised lives of those who supposedly live it can become
an object needing rectification. Given the texts equation between political
religion and rebellion, political/rebellious religion then can face whatever
(necessary, legal or military) force of rectification, a force that can decide not
only what counts as rebellion but also if rebellion is large scale or consistent,
warranting the force of law. Thus, the notion that Buddhism is not apolitical is
not an innocent or an isolated academic gesture. It reinforces the force of law to
decide what does and does not constitute political Buddhism. The force of law is
always a force of decision.
The story of Sangha life continues in the ensuing discussion of pre-colonial
Thai (Siam) royal and post-colonial attempts to reform monastic study in
Thailand. Thailand has a long history of efforts by royal powers to reform the
monastic life and curriculum, which this text traces from the sixteenth century
onwards. Among them, the Sangha Act of 1902 sought to introduce sweeping
changes into monastic life including standardising the monastic curriculum and
making monks sit for particular examinations. But once again these efforts had
little effect outside the capital and did not fundamentally change the lives of the
urban and the rural poor. The new Buddhist education created by the elite has
had little commerce among the vast majority of monks and novices in Thailand
today (p. 105). To demonstrate further how none of this had any effect, the
author also gives statistics of a vast number of monks who did not take
the royally mandated examinations. Number becomes important in determining
the lack of elite impact on poor monks as it decides between vast and small,
and between majority and minority. Even though a small number (some 3%)
of monks took the examinations, that small number does not simply count as a
real impact/effect. The author takes this to be a self-evident fact, even as he

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doubts that statistics provide an entirely actual account. I cannot get into all the
problems associated with this statistical sense of majority/minority, which
scholarship has discredited. The privileging of statistics/number to determine an
impact is symptomatic of the separation that the text makes between discourse
and power. In so doing, the text reduces the idea of reform to a difference
between what is done and what is said, and between what is actual and what is
rhetoric and ultimately between writing and speech itself (On this view, any
monk who talked about these reform efforts would not count as having been
affected by them, as what they said does not appear in and is irrelevant to real
statistics). But we know that this separation between discourse and power is not
tenable. And this is why some of us (Abeysekara 2002) have argued that reform
is not a feature of a determinable reality but a feature of a discourse. Discourse
is power irreducible to a determinable effect manifesting in number. Imagine
saying that a discourse like racism has no effect/power because it is mere
rhetoric and not an implemented law. But given the texts above sense of
effect/reality, nothing becomes real unless it is really implemented, on a large
scale and in internally consistent ways. And since even implemented things
like the Sangha Act eventually ended up having no real effect on monks, it
seems that nothing (external) ever makes an impact/effect on monastic life.
However, that nothing has an effect on monastic life is ultimately the effect of a
more original cause, which is the monks own, internal history of overcoming
reform. The effect becomes its own cause. Nietzsche (1968) would say that this
happens when a habit confuses a consequence for a cause.
I am not denying at all any of the monastic practices that the text presents.
To some of us who are at least familiar with Buddhist monasticism in other
places, there is of course nothing new, vernacular or dynamically creative about
some of these practices. We know that in places like Sri Lanka, for example,
many poor and even wealthy monks do not have a Buddhist canon or
canonical texts; they too lift or take words from texts in their sermons and
writings. Also I am not suggesting that the texts argument is flawed because we
should see such monastic practices as effects of a larger context of political
reforms discussed here. Rather, the kinds of logic employed above make it
impossible to think of monastic practices/lives in ways other than the
problematic divisions into which they are inserted. These divisions are not real;
the text decides them to be real because it simply assumes them be opposed to
each other. The truth of what really happened (i.e. what did and did not affect
what) is then determined from such opposites. Needless to say, we hardly learn
anything new about these monks or these oppositions apart from the
assumptions on which they are based. In some instances, such divisions are
merely the product of the misreading of works of well-known figures. For
example, in one final touch, the text tries to reiterate a widely criticised notion
of hybrid modernity (p. 249) i.e. Western modernity is not the same as
modernity everywhere only by misconstruing a short eight-page
interview/article by Asad (1996) on modern power. Asads entire body of

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work is precisely against such a division of modernity, the division that remains
central to this texts organising normative sense of power.

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References
Abeysekara, A. 2002. Colors of the robe: Religion, identity, and difference. Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina.
Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity
and Islam. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Asad, T. 1996. Interview: Modern power. Stanford Electronic Humanities Review 5, no. 1:
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Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY.
McDaniel, J.T. 2008. Gathering leaves and lifting words: Histories of Buddhist monastic
education in Laos and Thailand. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Nietzsche, F. 1968. The will to power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale.
New York: Vintage.
Nietzsche, F. 2002. Beyond good and evil: Prelude a Philosophy of the future, trans. Judith
Normann. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ananda Abeysekara
Virginia Tech, USA
E-mail: ananda@vt.edu
q 2011, Ananda Abeysekara