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Doctrine, Practice, and Belief in Theravda Buddhism
F. K. Lehman
The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 31 / Issue 02 / February 1972, pp 373 - 380
DOI: 10.2307/2052605, Published online: 23 March 2011
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021911800160127
How to cite this article:
F. K. Lehman (1972). Doctrine, Practice, and Belief in Theravda Buddhism. The Journal of
Asian Studies, 31, pp 373-380 doi:10.2307/2052605
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DOCTRINE, PRACTICE, AND BELI EF IN THERAVADA BUDDHISM
F. K. LEHMAN
Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and its Burmese Vicissitudes. BY MELFORD
E. SPIRO. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. xiv, 510 pp. Appendix, References,
Index. $17.95.
I
T is now customary for anthropologists studying religion to pay at most lip service
to formalized religious doctrine. Such works, in a functionalist tradition, tell us a
great deal about the social and economic organization of religious action and about
the postulated social background of religious ideas. But they pay less attention to the
ideas themselves or to the question of how religious practice and practitioners, lay
and clerical, are ordered with respect to those ideas. It seems tacitly held that doctrine
as a system of ideas is the proper domain of theology or philosophy, and that in as
much as anthropology and these other disciplines have different premises, a concern
with their domains might involve anthropology in a counter-empiricist stance. There
remain several distinguished exceptions to this tendency, e.g., such German theolog-
ical ethnologists as Scharer,
1
and also exceptions to the general tendency to play down
scholarly apparatus for dealing with literate traditions and ideologies. One thinks in
this connection especially of the pronouncements of Dumont and Pocock and
Dumont's own work
2
at the interface between anthropology and Indology, and of
the growing school of Levi-Straussian structuralism. But this school is often held
open, e.g. by Spiro, to the criticism that in devoting attention to systems of ideas it
subordinates a needed consideration of the relation between ideas and behavior,
thereby losing touch to some degree with the very empirical controls that distinguish
scientifically oriented work from brilliant and suggestive idealist speculation.
At least in the British and American anthroplogical traditions we have generally
tried to focus upon the relation between ideology and practice, and on the whole we
seem to have bound ourselves to a proposition that religious ideas arose as a super-
structure on ritual practice.
3
This of course is good pseudo-Marxism and good Durk-
heimian positivism. Ideas are supposed to reflect the irreducible collective, society in
action.
4
It is finally sound behaviorism, and while British social anthropology may
come to its position via the positivist tradition, American anthropology has long been
associated with psychological behaviorism.
Within this general tradition there have been countertendencies. Forde
5
consti-
tuted a forceful plea within British anthropology for the study of religious ideologies
F. K. Lehman is Professor of Anthropology at
s
See E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland
the University of Illinois, Urbana. Burma, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1
H. Scharer, Ngaju Religion (R. Needham, trans- 1954) pages 13-14.
lator), (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1963). Sec also * See Rodney Needham's critique in his trans-
H. Scharer, Der Toten\tdt der Ngadju Daya\ in lator's Introduction to E. Durkheim and M. Mauss,
Siid-Borneo, (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1966). Primitive Classification, (Chicago: University of
2
See L. Dumont and D. Pocock, "For a sociology Chicago Press, 1963).
of India," Contributions to Indian Sociology, 4
6
D. Forde, ed., African Worlds, (London: Ox-
(1960) 82-89, and L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, ford University Press,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
373
374 F. K. LEHMAN
in their own right, though it skirted rather than face up to the relation between idea
and practice, a question necessarily opened up by taking ideology seriously. More
significantly, the impact of Chomskian linguistics and the rise of an empirically based
cognitive psychology has resulted in America in a structural semantic ethnographic
school overtly concerned with the description of systems of ideas in the context of
behavioral observations from the field. The trouble with this school seems to be that
it has nonetheless maintained certain behavioristic assumptions, or at least positivistic
ones, about the task of cognitive ethnography and the whole definition of culture,
insisting
6
that an underlying system of ideas provides whatever one needs to know to
make one capable of behaving as a member of the society. Yet knowledge does not
generate behavior. It only gives it meaning and at most constrains whatever generates
actual behavior within broad limits of interpretability. This is the Chomskian dis-
tinction between competence and performance. So once again, by making a very tra-
ditional appeal to the notion that cultural ideas are normative in the sense of ideal
descriptions of action the problem has been effectually avoided, even down graded
in favor of what Spiro realizes is a fairly sterile preoccupation with ideas as simply
systems of classification describing empirical reality. Classification, moreover, of closed
bodies of fact, so that the semantic ethnographers are open to the same charge as are
the Levi-Straussians: that the cognitive saliency of their descriptions is untestable
(cf. the idea that a formal semantic description must not predict any facts other than
those initially addressed) .
7
Anyhow, in modern ethnography most work on religion remains sociological, pay-
ing little attention to doctrine. Most exceptions to this are not concerned with literate
traditions and so fail to offer clear cut ways to deal with highly explicit doctrinal
elaboration, first because in such societies doctrine is frequently not sharply distin-
guishable from practice, second because there is little native scholarship to come to
grips with. Still, as we noted, so far as Hinduism is concerned we have had something
important along these lines for the Indian religious tradition. So far as Buddhism,
particularly Theravada is concerned we have until just recently had almost nothing
not strictly sociological by anthroplogists.
8
Spiro's book together with the nearly contemporary book by Tambiah
9
is a strik-
ing exception to a dismal picture. Spiro starts from the right position. He addresses
the problem of the relation between canonical Buddhist doctrine, contemporary Bur-
mese belief, and action. He recognizes that religion can be neither just a set of textual
doctrines (p. 4) nor just a social practice with ideational spin-off. Moreover, in a
sense the canon is frozen in a classical literature largely common to several different
cultures and countries (Ceylon, Thailand, Burma, Laos), each with its own interpre-
tation (s) of the canon and different ritual practice.
Spiro takes off from a Redfieldian distinction between Great and Little Tradi-
tions. He treats canonical Buddhism as an instance of the former and tries to take up
the question how different societies with different action systems but with the same
6
For example, W. H. Goodenough, Description Nash, Anthropological Studies in Theravada hud-
and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology, (Chi- dhism, (Yale University Southeast Asia Program,
cago: Aldine Press, 1970). Cultural Report 13, 1966).
7
For example, as stated in H. W. Scheffler and S. J. Tambiah, Buddhism and Spirit Cults in
F. G. Lounsbury, A Study in Structural Semantics, North-East Thailand, (Cambridge: Cambridge
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1971). University Press, 1970).
8
A good example is the collection edited by M.
THERAVADA BUDDHISM 375
canon come to have different actual beliefs and to ask what kind of social action
system seems to motivate and perpetuate beliefs related to the Buddhist canon. That
is, why is the canon an institutionalized thing that recorded action systems never fol-
low closely and recorded belief systems always diverge from in some measure?
Spiro's answer follows a line taken in all his work
10
on Burma and other topics.
Discrepancies between contemporary belief and canonical doctrine are seen as
(directly?) explained, and perpetuation of belief accounted for, by the affective results
of such social action systems as those having to do with the social conditioning of
children. Spiro realizes that doctrine is normative not in the sense of providing ideal
specifications of actual behavior but in the sense of providing inputs to actual belief.
Yet here he leaves himself in the behaviorist-positivist position: if action does not
explain belief, then at least it explains the difference between canonical tradition and
belief. Moreover, he insists on equating belief with overtly expresses propositions,
thus raising several questions, not the least of which is the classical but probably
vacuous one of what we mean when we say that someone truly believes (has internal-
ized) something, and how we can use evidence of action to decide the matter.
That belief can provide meaningful expression for affective tensions generated by
conditioning within an action system does not strictly imply motivation or explana-
tion of belief. Belief operates upon affect, action, doctrinal tradition and other inputs,
and gives them interpretation, generating therewith, as it were, its own perpetuation
and orderly change. We have to understand what cognitive representations are, not
reduce them to total or partial functions of affect. And cognition represents a problem
in neurophysiology; until that can be solved, cognitive theory must be developed on
more or less its own terms. I have noted that affect is given expression by, through
and in terms of beliefs and concepts, which have their basis in all sorts of behavioral
facts including previously learned ideas. Doctrine, after all, is not itself composed of
ideas but of often very indirect expressions of underlying cognitions. The distinction is
approximately that between a cliche and a deeper analysis of something, and we can
usefully avoid confusion inherent in the structuralist tradition, such as Levi-Strauss's
characterization of jural propositions as native cultural models and Leach's argu-
ments
11
against jural as compared with statistical observations as accounts of social
structure, by thinking of verbal expressions as behavioral cliches rather than as ideas.
Spiro is no help here. He fails to appreciate that Burmese "doctrine" however
much it differs from the canon is still cliche rather than belief. This is why the
Great Tradition/Little Tradition dichotomy is unusable. Little Tradition is not belief
but input to belief much as is Great Tradition. The Buddhist canon does this as
Great Tradition for a very widespread social system in which Burmese society inter-
acts with India and with the other Theravada countries; Burmese Buddhist doc-
trine does it for Burmese society. And Spiro forgets that there are culture-bearing
social systems above the level of the individual society.
12
All this is obscured for us
by Spiro's injecting personality as a supposedly explanatory entity into ethnographic
theory Actually, child raising practices if not in part conditioned by belief are at least
10
Se especially his book, Burmese Supernatu- gories in Burma and the theory of social systems,"
ralism, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967). chapter 2 of volume 2 in P. Kunstadter, ed., South-
11
In E. R. Leach, Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon, east Asian Tribes, Minorities and Nations, (Prince-
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). ton: Princeton University Press, 1967.
12
See especially F. K. Lehman, "Ethnic cate-
376 F. K. LEHMAN
given meaning by it, and affect is highlighted, even given differential emphasis by,
beliefs and ideas. Hence it is questionable whether we can legitimately invoke person-
ality as a factor independent of the idea system.
13
Pointing this out is by no means
the same as talking vaguely about "feedback" between the personality-and-action
system and the idea system, since the latter is to avoid the issue. Thus we may assume
that nearly any behavior system, say cultural conditioning system, may provide quite
a range of affective consequences in the individual, and that any idea system will be
likely to find some affective basis in nearly any society. This is as good an assumption
at least as Spiro's, which postulates an independently defined affective bias as a moti-
vational foundation for ideas. It is also probably the more parsimonious assumption.
It does not deny the relation between affect and idea or that idea systems have a
profound affective referent. It rather relegates the affective referent of ideas to the level
of universals in a theory of ethnographic descriptions. It assumes that these things do
not help us explain cultural differences and particulars. It asks us to suppose that ideas
can indeed impart selective emphasis to affective traces of childhood conditioning.
14
Therefore, to show in terms of psychological theory the affective component expressed
in a culture is a proper and essential part of ethnography. Spiro is right in explaining
that, e.g., certain discontinuities in emotional relations between many Burman parents
and their children, and certain differences in the treatment of the sexes in childhood
and afterward, create personal tensions reflected and expressed in the idiom of Bur-
mese witchcraft and possession. But this is not cause and effect, requires no invoking
of personality as a construct, and must not distract us from the problem of the rela-
tion between interpretative idea and action. Here Tambiah's work is to be preferred
to Spiro's on account of the former's greater methodological parsimony while address-
ing as does Spiro the anthropological problem of the connections between canonical
Buddhism, local ideas and social action.
We need not ask why we believe but rather what, in the action system, ideas organ-
ize and give meaning to. That in giving meaning to action belief also interprets affect
changes nothing of this. It is certain that without a previous set of traditions a given
affective system of action offers us no way of predicting current belief, though this is
no reason to retreat into historicism; both these courses make the mistake of thinking
that explanation is something radically different from description. It is at least ques-
tionable that a given affective tension need have quite the same prominence in two
societies with very different cultural traditions. What is wanted is replacement of a
behaviorist paradigm of learning-as-conditioning with a Chomskian-cognitivist one,
16
in which, from a fairly small input of affect, action and precept observed, the human
organism actively, even if unselfconsciously, constructs a conceptual representation of
the world and of itself. And one has to make the additional assumption that a society
is more likely than not to produce a fair range of affective material in its members,
because everything we know about human and cultural variability and plasticity in
evolution and in direct observation demands this assumption.
Spiro's book is divided into five parts. Part I, a single chapter, sets out Theravada
13
Sec especially D. Pocock, "Psychological ap- University of Chicago Press, 1953), for the effect
proaches and judgements of reality," Contributions of ideas about the father role on perceptions of
to Indian Sociology, (1961) 44-96. fathers in pre-War Germany.
14
Sec especially M. Mead and R. Mftraux, eds.,
X6
Chomsky, N. A., Aspects of a Theory of
The Study of Culture at a Distance. (Chicago: Syntax, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1965).
THERAVADA BUDDHISM 377
doctrine as an anthropological problem. In part II, four chapters on Buddhist doc-
trine, Spiro tries to explain doctrinal variation in terms of a distinction between Bud-
dhism as a religion concerned with ultimate salvation (Nibbanic), a religion con-
cerned with proximate salvation (Kammic) and with attaining a more useful rebirth,
a religion concerned with providing magical protection in this life (Apotropaic), and
one concerned with achieving chiliastic-millenarian changes in the world through
ritual action (Esoteric). This fourfold distinction is illuminating up to a point, but it
imposes a Weberian strait jacket on synthetic description. Furthermore, it is obvi-
ously motivated by Spiro's psychological framework. This obscures in an unfortunate
way the complex web of interconnections among all these aspects of the doctrine,
especially the fact that a desire for improved rebirths is directly justified in terms of
ultimate salvation. For although Spiro notes that his informants mentioned this, he
discounts it by citing evidence that they find difficulty in identifying emotionally
with the idea of Nibbana as a goal. Yet they also worry about not feeling they want it,
and the canonical doctrine predicts that few persons can truly desire it. So it is impor-
tant that doctrine gives them a way of postponing attempts at ultimate salvation and
even justifies this on the grounds that one almost never knows where one is in the
round of births, hence whether reaching Nibbana from the present life if even pos-
sible. Spiro cites King's A Thousand Lives Away
1
* with approval in several places, but
seems here not to have understood the meaning of the title.
Section III is about Buddhism as a ritual system. It is divided into four chapters:
one on the theory of ritual action and a synopsis of Buddhist ritual forms and objects
that is long on texts and short on symbolic paraphernalia, one on calendrical rituals,
and on life cycle rites and one on crisis rites. IV treats the monastic system in seven
chapters, in many ways not only the longest but the best part of the book. For once we
are given something more about monks and temples than a sociological analysis of who
become monks, who does and does not attend services and whether or not the mon-
astery is a focal institution in village life. We get rather a thorough and insightful pic-
ture of the monk in relation to religious thought. If the monk's average intellectual
motivations and attainments are low, his intellectual setting is shown to be a concern
with the categories of doctrine. Moreover the layman is portrayed as equally, often
more directly, involved with these matters. We also learn about what kind of persons
become monks, although I am doubtful that we can be as sure as Spiro is that the
relatively poor canonical knowledge of contemporary monks was also characteristic of
the monarchical period. Spiro, in any case, is careful to point out that given the almost
inevitably rural personal background of monks and given the other psychological
facts about persons who choose a celibate, reclusive life, their general intellectual
level is no indicator of the degree to which concern with and knowledge of canoni-
cal doctrine is important to Burmese Buddhist religious life. And because he goes
into these facts, Spiro is able to improve upon previous analyses of the action system
between monks and laymen. He shows how the ambivalence toward monks and the
unevenness of lay participation in institutionalized church activities is determined by
the layman's assessment of monk and monastery in the light of his knowledge and
understanding of Buddhist canonical doctrine.
Section V, Buddhism and the World, has two chapters dealing with the Weberian
10
W. L. King, A Thousand Lives Away: Bud- 1964).
dhism in Contemporary Burma, (London: Cassircr,
378 F. K. LEHMAN
question whether Buddhism serves in the modern world as a bar to economic develop-
ment and political consciousness, and related questions, such as whether Buddhism
is a possible means to collective social action. Spiro is to be congratulated on making
clear that a religion such as Buddhism is shot through with paradox, and therefore is
a rich source of motivation or at least rationalization for all sorts of things, often con-
tradictory things. Thus if Buddhism in its Nibbanic (transcendental) aspect is ulti-
mately focused on negation of the world and detachment from it, it also teaches that
to reach Nibbana one has to achieve a good rebirth through meritorious action; and
good rebirths are explicitly identified with prosperity and well-being in Burma and in
the canon. Also, if doctrine and practice identify merit making with "uneconomical"
depletion of one's resources, the practitioner is allowed to look on this as a form of
saving, on the assumption of transmigration. Nash
17
makes the point metaphorically,
Spiro comprehensively.
Unfortunately, nowhere more than in these final chapters are the limitations of a
Weberian framework more apparent. The division of Buddhism into four religious
systems does not, in my view, aid in pointing up the sense of paradox. Rather it hides
paradox. Moreover, it leads Spiro, as it did Weber, to over rate the transcendental
as against the cosmological-sociological-political aspects of Buddhism as an ideology
(p. 437) having regard to their effects on social action. This is too bad because in
general Spiro is good at making us see, as few social scientists writing on Buddhism
have, the futility and scholarly oversimplification of equating canonical doctrine
with a few soteriological cliches. To do so is to see Theravada in Burma and Southeast
Asia as the proverbial thin veneer over a foundation of native animism. It is becom-
ing increasingly clear that there is no historical basis for this view, since the rapid
spread of the Indianized polity during the early centuries of our era could not have
taken place without a deep commitment by the general population to just the doctrine
that gave meaning to the ritual symbols of the court. The pervasive stories of early
Buddhist missionary activity in Southeast Asia should not be discounted. Spiro, as
well as Mendelson (see references in the book under review), finally makes us see that
in the modern world too the people of these countries are deeply involved with the
Buddhist canon.
Yet Spiro, unlike Mendelson, cannot quite avoid dividing Burmese religion into
a Buddhist and a non-Buddhist part (e.g., p. 12 and Spiro 1967)
18
very like the layers
of the veneer theory except for admitting that both are very important to the people.
The Weberian framework seems at fault here as well as the psychological theory. That
is, Spiro argues from a plurality of affect to a mixed ideology, and from people's
obvious confusion about how to rationalize paradoxes verbally to underlying cog-
nitive dissonance in belief itself. This is again to confuse belief with cliche. Paradox
is not out and out dissonance, but is frequently reflected in doctrinal proposi-
tions that contradict each other on one level of interpretation but not on all. The
example cited earlier of whether informants have "internalized" the idea of Nibbana
is a case in point. Similarly (1967), Spiro notices that the nat (spirit) cult requires
one to act in ways that are sometimes counter to canonical precepts, e.g., to propitiate
beings with alcohol and meat. He also finds that many informants notice and worry
about this. So, if they continue it, he argues that they serve two conflicting religions.
17
M. Nash. The Golden Road to Modernity,
1 8
Op. cit.
(New York: Wiley, 1965).
THERAVADA BUDDHISM 379
Yet he also notices that the canon itself defines the domain of spirits. What Spiro fails
to observe is that the matter is complicated beyond the capacity of his framework to
describe. Thus, e.g., the canon not only defines spirits, it also requires of a Buddhist
society (monarchy), as a necessary condition of the religion's social survival, that the
spirits of the country be converted or subverted by the doctrine. The paradigm, as
Tambiah
19
understands, is the ]ata\a stories of Gotama's conquest of and preaching
to the host of Mara and various demons who tried to keep him from reaching en-
lightenment. Yet the doctrine cannot say what spirits one may encounter or what their
character may require one to do to overcome and convert them. Therein lies the para-
dox. Mendelson sees this and avoids the two religions theory.
This is a very important and satisfactory book, and I trust that the foregoing crit-
icisms do not hide this fact. Its use of the scholarly literature on Buddhism and on
Burma is exemplary. I think Tambiah does a bit better on the texts by integrating the
implicit doctrine of the ]dta\a and related cosmological and mythological parts of the
canon, but Spiro comes out ahead in respect of theology and philosophy. There are
remarkably few typographical errors, and the few I caught casually, e.g. Sutta Nip ta
for Sutta Nipata, on page xiii, are not bothersome.
There are several Burmanological matters that one might quarrel with, but it is a
measure of Spiro's scholarship that my cavils are at a fairly esoteric level of detail. For
instance, (p. 18) Spiro claims, citing Coedes, that there is no clear evidence for the pres-
ence of Buddhism in Burma prior to the fifth century Pyu evidence. The word "clear"
is certainly equivocal, but he might have mentioned evidence
20
that the earliest in-
scriptions in Mon, being already fully evolved, betoken a considerable history of local
development in the Indian tradition prior to the inscriptions themselves. At the same
place, in order to make the point that after the eleventh century A.D. Theravada has
always been predominant in Burma, Spiro glosses over the subtle survival of non-
Theravada currents in Burmese Buddhism; not just the problematical art monks.
21
This sort of thing is especially apparent in Spiro's occasional oversimplification
in glossing a Burmese word. For example, at pages 62-63
n e
overemphasizes the dis-
parity between the Mahayana idea of the Bodhisattva as a future Buddha currently
serving as an intercessor, and the Theravada idea of the coming Buddha that is called
in Burmese hpaya: laung:, who will, if we can be alive when he comes, preach us
to salvation. He says that although the Burmese translate the term Bodhisattva in the
]ata\a with hpaya: laung:, the latter means "Embryo Buddha." But while hpaya:,
in this usage, means Lord (Buddha), laung: means to bring someone or something
into an immanent state, and this implies that he has brought himself to this condition
and will now await the day when his coming is required by the predicted disap-
pearance of Gotama's teaching. This is not all that different from the Bodhisattva ideal,
even though a hpaya: laung: cannot actively intercede. The coming Buddha, Ari-
metaya, is in fact adverted to in prayer and sermon as a saint at least in the sense of
of an exemplary being who has held off his own salvation for man's benefit. Further-
more, it would have been useful, in connection with his section on Esoteric Buddhism,
for Spiro to have gone, as at page 171, into the close relationship between hpaya:
19
Op. cit. culture," Journal of the Siam Society, 53:2/(1965)
20
See for example G. H. Luce, "Rice and 139-152.
religion: A study of old Mon-Khmer evolution and
2 1
See N. R. Ray, Sanscrit Buddhism in Burma,
(Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1936).
380 F. K. LEHMAN
hung: and min laung: or immanent (wheel-turning) monarch; for one cannot
understand the ideal of the immanent Buddha without also understanding the fact
that Buddhas and ideal monarchs are equally necessary to the religion as, respectively,
sacred and secular representatives of dhamma, the universal law. In fact they are,
as in Gotama's own life story, largely interchangeable, as Mendelson has clearly com-
prehended in his work.
Again, at page 311, the word hpoung:ji: (Greater Glory, or Merit) is poorly dealt
with. Spiro cites Cochrane to the effect that this became a general word for monk only
after the end of the monarchy. But we know it was used this way at least as long ago
as the time of Syme's mission of 1795.
22
T^
e
problem is that a monk does not accumu-
late merit. Properly, the title was that of the king, secondarily that of an abbot incum-
bent of a monastery, and by extension it is used for all monks. Spiro ought to have
asked why the usage arose. It is, roughly, that the king is pre-eminently patron of the
religion and of the samgha, the monastic order. As such, he is the great accumulator
of merit, since if monks are the "field of merit" for laymen, making it possible for
everyone to gain merit by supporting them, they are above all the king's "field of
merit," and that is the source of their title of hpoung: ji:.
But all these are mere quibbles and do not detract from the value of this book that
for once combines explicit and up to date anthropological theory and method with
a rich and scholarly corpus of detail, and thus contributes not only to the relatively
sterile domain of methodology but also, illuminatingly, to our knowledge about
Burma.
22
Michael Symes, An Account of an Embassy to edition (Westmead, Hants., England: Gregg In-
thc Court of Avo (1795, a reprint of the 1800 ternational Publishers, 1969).