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ABSTRACT
The act of giving is among the most fundamental acts within the Buddhist world, particularly in the Theravāda communities of Southeast Asia. In many of these communities, lay followers give food and other dāna (merit-making gifts), providing monastics with the ‘requisites’ that they need to survive. Yet there is relatively little discussion within Buddhist or scholarly communities about what should be given, with formulaic lists representing the majority of discussions about these gifts. However, sometimes, the gifts given to monastics are not always appropriate, even bad. What to do in those cases is not always clear. In this article, I explore the ways in which monks in Thailand and Southwest China think about gifts that are not good. What becomes clear is that, despite the prevailing view that discipline is a universal process based on the vinaya (disciplinary code of Buddhism), monks have different views about what constitutes a ‘bad gift’ and what to do about it. I argue that paying attention to bad gifts allows us to see that lay communities have significant voice—although this is often implicit rather than explicit—about what constitutes ‘proper’ monastic behavior.
Acknowledgments
This article has benefited significantly from the critical input of a number of people, especially Erick White, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, and the referees of the Journal of Contemporary Religion. My thoughts on the material also benefited greatly from comments by Charles Keyes, Juliane Schober, and Alicia Turner. An earlier version of this article was presented to the Theravada Civilizations group in Toronto in 2012. I would like to thank Keping Wu, Michael Feener, and the staff at the Asia Research Institute for organizing the conference as well as Francis Lim for helpful feedback. However, any failures in this article remain my own. Importantly, this article would not have come into existence if the monks of sanghas throughout Tai communities had not been willing to answer questions that might otherwise have seemed impertinent.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. ‘Tai’ refers to the ethno-linguistic community which stretches from Southwest China to Southern Thailand and from Vietnam to Assam. The Thai and the Lao, for example, are a sub-set of the Tai.
2. Buddhism is generally discussed in the contemporary world in terms of having three streams: Theravāda—associated with Southeast Asia nation-states, Mahāyāna—associated with East Asian nation states, and Vajrayāna—associated with Central Asia, in particular Tibet. In this article I am primarily concerned with Theravāda communities, not with Buddhism as a whole.
3. The Pāli Vinaya followed in Theravāda Buddhism has 227 rules for monks, 253 for nuns, 10 for novices; female renunciants in contemporary Southeast Asia such as the mae chi of Thailand usually follow 8 rules. Lay followers are typically responsible for 5 precepts (sin hā). The order of nuns ended hundreds of years ago, but there has been a struggle in recent decades to establish an order of nuns, which has been complicated by both religious rules and the wider dynamics of the role of women in Southeast Asian societies.
4. Defining a lay Buddhist is surprisingly complicated, in part because, in most parts of the world, Buddhist temples have not kept membership rolls or registered births and deaths (in the way e.g. Christian churches have done throughout European history). Some ways of looking at who counts as a lay Buddhist include: anyone who venerates the teachings of the Buddha (Buddha-sāsanā), one who makes offerings to the sangha, someone who follows the five precepts (refraining from killing, stealing, sexual improprieties, taking intoxicants, lying). Modern states often define ethnic groups as being Buddhist so that anyone who is not a monk or a nun is considered to be a lay Buddhist. In much of mainland Southeast Asia, majority populations are assumed to follow Theravāda Buddhism, which means that the status of being Buddhist is often a passive, rather than active, form of membership.
5. Thai monks are not allowed to drive, although many of them have cars at their disposal. A recent senior monk came under investigation because he had not paid taxes on luxury cars that, according to a monk I talked to, had been given to him. The investigation played a public role in this monk not being promoted to the position of chief monk of the Thai Sangha. See Thai PBS (Citation2016) for further details on the case.
6. See e.g. John Holt (Citation1983) and Janet Gyatso (Citation2005). There is a shift taking place, however, toward a more expansive understanding of disciplinary processes by considering them in relation to legal structures. See some of the essays in the volume edited by Rebecca French and Mark Nathan (Citation2014) and the recent conference at the Law School of the University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, on “Buddhist Law and State Law in Comparative Perspective”, October 2016.
7. In a discussion about discipline and ‘police monks’ (tamruat phra) in Thailand in the early 2000s, Julian Kusa has commented that “Generally the Vinaya acts as a yardstick in determining monastic etiquette and behavior and it is usually left to the individual monk to act accordingly to what is prescribed by the Vinaya” (Kusa Citation2007, 196).
8. The material for this article is primarily based on ethnographic work carried out in Thailand and in Sipsongpannā, a Tai region of Southwest China, between 1994 and 2017. It should be noted that, while Sipsongpannā is a part of China, the Theravāda Buddhists who live there, the Dai-lue, have long-standing ties with Southeast Asian communities and have followed Theravāda traditions and lineages for at least 500 years. There are differences between the regions, just as there are between Burma and Thailand, but they draw from comparable religious resources. I conducted formal conversations with monks and novices about ‘bad gifts’ in Yunnan Province in June 2011 and in Bangkok between February and May 2014.
9. Emblematic of this is the place of Buddhism within constitutions, such as the constitution of Sri Lanka or Thailand (see Schonthal Citation2016).
10. Nirmala Salgado (Citation2013) has forcefully argued for the need to avoid imposing narratives on local Buddhist actors. While she focuses on the dynamics of gender and female renunciants in Sri Lanka, her critique of the ‘globalatinized’ forms of Buddhism embedded within much international scholarship has profound implications for the wider study of Buddhism.
11. It is worth highlighting that I draw on discussions of dāna from canonical and post-canonical Buddhist sources (Heim Citation2004; Ohnuma Citation2005) and ethnographic resources from Thailand and Sipsongpannā, implying perhaps a natural connection between them. Contemporary Tai Buddhist cultures do draw on resources from ‘classical’ traditions, but the genealogy of this process is complicated and addressing it is beyond the scope of this article.
12. Katherine Bowie argues against this position, noting that, in northern Thailand, people are just as likely to give to the poor outside their doors as they are to give to monks. Moreover, she notes that gift giving to the sangha, such as in the context of building new temples, is not always lauded (Bowie Citation1998, 473), which I heard articulated in Sipsongpannā in 2001–2002. However, in my experience, these criticisms normally occurred in private.
13. There are other ways that dāna can either create or rupture communities. When lay people in Thailand or Sipsongpannā make donations to the construction of a building in a monastic complex, their donations are often written down and may be memorialized on a plaque. In the opposite direction, in 2007, the ‘Saffron Revolution’ in Myanmar (when monks protested against the military government) was precipitated by monks refusing dāna from family members of the military government. While monks are generally supposed to accept what is given to them, rebuking lay folk in this form is seen as appropriate if, for example, the lay person is seen as engaging in acts which are detrimental to Buddhism (and if s/he stops this, the sangha is to ‘right the bowl’; see Vajirañāṇavarorasa Citation1983, 220–221).
14. This list may itself be a reference to earlier statements, as, for example, in the Milindapanha (The Questions of Malinda—the title of a well-known text). In a discussion of the appropriateness of Vessantara’s gift (from the widely known story of the Buddha’s second to last life), the same list of intoxicants, festivals, women, bulls, and suggestive decorations is described as being followed by a “goer to the sorrowful ways”. The list also includes weapons, poison, and false weights and measures. This is a list that is not specific to monastics but the items on it are “disapproved of as gifts by the world”. Interestingly, Nagasena, in his explanation to Nagasena’s question, further asserts that there are no gifts that are inappropriate “when someone meriting a gift of faith be there” (Horner Citation1964, 101–102). My thanks to Christoph Emmrich for this reference.
15. “Lay Guide to the Monks’ Rules” in “Buddhist Studies: Buddha Dharma Education Association and Buddhanet” (http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhistworld/layguide.htm, accessed 30 August 2014).
16. I have also heard of monastic activities that might be described as phit kalatesa, in aesthetic terms, as being unattractive (in Thai, may suay).
17. This was not the only monk who made this point. In the Entrance to the Vinaya, a normative text used in monastic high schools, Prince-patriarch Wachirayān notes that the training rules on drinking liquor discuss the drinking of fermented liquor. While all varieties are a problem, there are distinctions between drinking alcohol, drinking something that looks and tastes like alcohol but is not, and drinking small amounts in curry or as a flavoring agent. He also notes that intention is not as important as it is with other precepts. Thus, a monk who does not intend to drink alcohol, but still does, has committed a transgression (Vajirañāṇavarorasa Citation1969, 167).
18. Cetanā is an important concept in classical Buddhist articulations of human ethics and/or agency. It is sometimes translated in terms of ‘volition’ but, at least in contemporary usage in both Thailand and Sipsongpannā, it is probably better understood as ‘intention’ (see also note 17).
19. Prince-patriarch Wachirayān states that the “Things which are prohibited for a bhikkhu to have as personal belongings are clearly indicated in Pāli: silver, gold, killing instruments, and unallowable requisites” (Vajirañāṇavarorasa Citation1973, 150). Counter-intuitive as this may seem, just because something cannot be possessed by an individual monk does not mean that such an object cannot be given to the sangha as a whole.
20. Michael Chladek (Citation2017/2018) has suggested that Thai monks use the idea of an ‘imagined laity’ to reinforce their own discipline. For example, when a monk is training a novice, he will invoke lay supporters to clarify the need for the novices to act in certain ways. I think this is a fruitful formulation, although in this context I am thinking of a more active engagement between monastics and lay supporters.
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Thomas Borchert
Thomas Borchert is a Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA. His research interests focus on Buddhism and politics, monastic education, and the dynamics of citizenship and monasticism in contemporary Asia, particularly China, Thailand, and Singapore. He is the author Educating Monks: Minority Buddhism on China’s Southwest Border (Citation2017) and the editor of Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts (2018). CORRESPONDENCE: Department of Religion, University of Vermont, 481 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05405, USA.