We have always been modern: Buddhism, science and the new genetic and reproductive technologies in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This paper explores the traffic in ideas concerning new reproductive technologies in contemporary Sri Lanka. It attempts to locate the responses to the moral challenges posed by the new biotechnologies within wider political, religious and cultural traditions. In particular, it considers the way that embryogenesis is talked about by a variety of interested parties: infertility doctors, members of ethics committees, Buddhist priests and concerned lay people. The paper discusses a distinctive historical alignment between Buddhism and science before moving on to locate recent advances in biotechnology within an emergent Buddhist embryology and ontology of the person. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between science, ethics and pluralism in the post-colonial state. The paper seeks to throw light on how a rhetoric of acceptance and endorsement is constructed among sections of the medical and scientific community and how, in turn, this is presented as the ‘Buddhist’ response. Although the attitudes and beliefs described are held by a relatively small number of people, they nonetheless represent a tributary into a much more powerful ideological flow based on the claim that there is a distinctive ‘Asian bioethics’ which is at once different from a ‘western bioethics’ and more congenial to the people of Asia.

Keywords:

• Buddhism
• embryogenesis
• cloning
• science
• ethics

Notes

 1. A report in the Washington Post by Rama Lakshmi an Indian correspondent began with the headline ‘India Plans to Fill Void in Stem Cell Research. Scientists Say Restrictions in U.S. May Give Them Advantage in Development’. The thrust of the article was that India is well advanced in this field and is unhampered by many of the ethical problems that beset this area of research in the USA. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4518-2001Aug27)

 2. The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka has nearly 20 million inhabitants. The majority of the population are Buddhist (69%) and are drawn from the Sinhala ethnic group (74%). Hindus (15%), Roman Catholics (7%) and Moslems (8%) make up the remainder of the population. The second main ethnic group are Tamils who make up approximately 19% of the population.

 3. Sri Lanka has developed a small and growing research capacity in the new reproductive and genetic technologies. IVF has been available locally since 1998. Stem cell research is planned in the near future. The renowned stem cell scientist Professor Ariff Bongso who was the first person to isolate embryonic stem cells from human embryos was born in Sri Lanka and worked there prior to emigrating to Singapore in 1985.

 4. The research on which this article is based was carried out as part of a wider exploration of the reception of new reproductive and genetic technologies in Sri Lanka. This research was funded by the Wellcome Trust in the form of a fellowship under the Medicine in Society Programme (Biomedical Ethics GR067110AIA) for the year 2002–03. This work was preceded by a pilot study carried out in the summer of 2000 funded by the Nuffield Foundation (Social Science Small Grants Scheme).

 5. In similar vein, Fujimora has suggested that Genomics in Japan has become a way of re-inventing East and West and with a similar role being played by Confucianism, Shinto and Buddhism (Fujimora 2003).

 6. During the late nineteenth century Buddhism acquired a flag, a printed ‘catechism’, a focal ritual celebration of the Buddha's birth, life and death (Vesak), the founding of Buddhist schools, the formation of the Young Men's (and Women's) Buddhist Association (Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988).

 7. Attempts to make sense of this aspect of the Buddhist renaissance movement also chimed with the much vaunted analytical separation within sociology and anthropology between traditions variously described as ‘great’ and ‘little’, ‘canonical’ and ‘folk’, ‘Buddhist’ and ‘animist’ and the extent to which these are stratigraphic, syncretic or hybrid. For example, see Gombrich (1971), Obeyesekere (1966), Southwold (1983), Tambiah (1970) and Van der Veer (1995) for just some of the attempts to account for the relationship between theory and practice in Theravāda Buddhism. Also see Daniyel (2002) for an analysis of the way that Christianity as a ‘prototypic religion’ has structured such debates.

 8. This might explain the contradiction between a sangha's vehement opposition to abortion reform on doctrinal grounds on the one hand and an extremely high rate of illegal terminations on the other.

 9. Catholics in particular seem to have effective links to a ‘party line’ via churches, their congregations and media communication such as newspapers and the internet. Conversations with Catholic doctors on reproductive ethics would frequently involve reference back to missives from the Vatican, which present the official response to NRGTs. See for example http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdlife/index.htm

10. Schlieter makes a similar point claiming that Keown's work is ‘most likely the first systematic attempt to apply Buddhist ethics to biomedicine and biotechnological procedures’ (2005, 183).

11. ‘Were consciousness (vinnāna), Ananda, not to fall (okkamissatha) into the mother's womb, would the sentient body (nāma-rupa) be constituted there?’ ‘It would not Lord.’ ‘Were consciousness, having fallen into the mother's womb, to turn aside from it, would the sentient body come to birth in this present state?’ ‘It would not Lord’ (Digha-nikāya II 62-3 cited in Harvey 2001, 184).

12. See Simpson et al. (2005) for reports on surveys among medical doctors and medical students that indicate a generally permissive attitude towards NRGTs among Buddhists when compared with doctors from other religions.

13. Discussion with doctors about complex matters of Buddhist dogma would often be referred on, in the sense that a priest would have to be consulted. It appeared that many doctors had their individual, and often idiosyncratic, consultants on matters of ethics and the new technologies. It was important to listen to ‘what the priests say’, even though they rarely spoke with one voice.

14. The Korean research (Hwang et al. 2004) was reported with great acclaim at the http://www.aaas.org/ American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in 2004. One of the team members, Professor Yong Moon from http://www.snu.ac.kr:6060/engsnu/index.html Seoul National University opined to a science reporter: ‘Cloning is a different way of thinking about the recycling of life, It's a Buddhist way of thinking’ (http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1046974.htm).

15. The Buddhist Dictionary prepared by Nyanatiloka Mahathera (Nyanatiloka 1980) defines opapátika as follows: lit. ‘accidental’ (from upapáta, accident; not from upapatti, as PTS Dict. has); ‘spontaneously born’, i.e. born without the instrumentality of parents. This applies to all heavenly and infernal beings. ‘After the disappearing of the five lower fetters (samyojana, q.v.), he (the Anágámi) appears in a spiritual world (opapátika)’.

16. The Raelians achieved notoriety when in December 2002 their Director claimed that a baby girl, ‘Eve’, had been secretly cloned (Battaglia 2007).