Buddhist Vernaculars: Anthropology of Buddhism and the Problem of Orthodoxy in Buddhist Studies

What might lay-Sri Lankan Buddhists who engage in charitable giving to the poor as merit-making practice and American convert-Buddhists who engage in mindfulness practice to explore racialized dukkha share in common? They both consist of Buddhists practicing the Theravada tradition in vernaculars that depart widely from the normative philological evaluative take on what does and does not constitute “real” Theravada Buddhism.

Between 2008 and 2010, while conducting ethnographic research on humanitarian and charitable work in post-war Sri Lanka through the case study of a local NGO in the country, Author NG was struck by the innumerable occasions in which local Sinhalese NGO workers articulated the personal significance of their labor in Buddhist spiritual terms. Namely, that their involvement in transnational humanitarian work to help the poor and vulnerable consisted of good karmic actions with special merit-making significance. In this way, merit from doing good was not only cultivated by the philanthropic donors, but also for the NGO workers who facilitated the donor giving through their institutional labor and care-work to aid fellow Sri Lankans in need. Yet, while fieldwork in Sri Lanka’s humanitarian field offered Author NG innumerable occasions to observe how taken-for granted the idea was among Sinhalese Buddhists that engaging in charitable work to the poor was meritorious, academic scholarship on merit-making only focused on the practice in terms of lay-giving to monastics.

Indeed, a number of ethnographic works on the subject of merit-making in Sinhalese Buddhist (and other Theravada Buddhist contexts like Thailand and Burma), the analyst most often envisaged a suitable recipient as one who is advanced or advancing on the path to nibbana and who is—at least when judged against the standard set forth in the Vinaya—ethically “pure”. In contrast, in everyday contemporary social life of Sinhalese Buddhists, author NG observed how for many of her interlocutors, giving and helping the sick, the poor, the elderly, and disaster stricken vulnerable subjects, were routinely considered karmically beneficial good works resulting in merit (pina).  These interlocutors included individuals working within NGOs but also those engaging in aid efforts through informal local mutual aid groups.

Moreover, in their articulation of the meritorious significance of this work many Sinhalese Buddhists would frequently refer to the affective dimension of doing good, highlighting how the quality of merit cultivated through aid work was directly related to the emotional satisfaction experienced as a result of doing this work. In this way, many Buddhist described how the emotional quality of happiness (satuta) experienced in the heart (hita) was a determinant of the level of merit in the action. The virtuosity of the recipient—according to their advancement on the Buddhist soteriological path of nirvana—while perhaps emphasized in the Pali canonical and commentarial text, was not a factor in how lay-Buddhist evaluated their own actions. 

For Author NG, the question thus arose: Had philological pre-occupations of scholars with determining who a suitable, ideal, recipient of dana was according to terms set in Pali canonical and commentarial images (that emphasized the qualities of the ideal monk), excluded and made illegible these aspects of Buddhist social life from the ethnographic record? With most ethnographies documenting dāna solely on the exchanged between laity and privileged class of monastics, little work has been done on dāna outside of monastic involvement.  In this context, Author NG, reflects on how their own ethnographic project and the social life of their interlocutors seemed to fall to the marginalia of the anthropology of Buddhism, when textual and philological preoccupations suggested these lived practices compromised Buddhist orthodoxy.

Several years later, in an ethnographic project focusing on the racialized experiences of practitioners and teachers within meditation-based convert Buddhist communities in North America, Author NG found themselves confronting this sense of marginalia once again. This time in a separate geographical location in a vastly different socio-historical context, dealing with different subject matter.  Doing research on this subject brought Author NG as a cultural anthropologist into the emerging field in Buddhist Studies on Buddhism in the West and work on meditation and mindfulness in North America.

A prominent concern for some scholars in the field was on the fidelity of contemporary mindfulness in relation to canonical or classic definitions and objectives mindfulness. Questions were being raised by these intellectuals, monastics, and scholars alike, on how popular framings of mindfulness in convert- Buddhist communities uncoupled the practice from Theravada ideals of awakening and liberation. Relatedly, there was the assessment by Buddhlogists of the Western focus on scientific Buddhism that critically calls into question a reduction of Buddhism to a set of techniques for self-discovery, self-discipline, and self-transformation. An indirect implication of this evaluative approach of convert-Buddhist practice was the relegation of these groups and their practices from what counts as real Buddhism. Indeed, if the therapeutic approach to mindfulness, was in the eyes of some scholars, a departure from tradition, the subtext of this stance was that the study of these practice groups themselves fall outside the remit of Buddhist Studies. Indeed, Author NG’s own ethnographic work, focusing on how non-white practitioners in convert-Buddhist communities were pushing the boundaries of white normative approaches to meditation, once again seemed to fall on the marginalia of the anthropology of Buddhism.

The proposed paper thinks comparatively on ethnographic research conducted in these widely different socio-historical contexts to reflect on how as an anthropologist, the Buddhist social life exemplified by these two contemporary case-studies, surface an important problem in the field of Buddhist Studies. Namely, the tendency to judge contemporary Buddhist vernaculars against a canonically based conception of orthodoxy; a move that relegates Buddhists themselves and the phenomenological feel of the tradition into the marginalia of the discipline. There are implications of this felt in the academy itself; with scholars doing ethnographies of Buddhist marginalia also being marginalized to the outer perimeters of what counts as real Buddhist Studies disciplinary matter. Author NG also reflects personally on this issue, as they consider their own role as both ethnographer and native “Buddhists,” studying contemporary Buddhist marginalia.