Abstract
The introduction to Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism includes a propitious thesis. Turner notes the abiding inclination in scholarly work to draw connections between early nationalist movements and similar movements in the mid-20th century, in that each find motivation as political actions taken against the colonial state. In this way, contemporary Buddhist nationalism is said to have its roots in Buddhist anti-colonial movements. Instead, Turner proposes a study that seeks to understand Buddhist identity and identity discourse constructed in such a way that it is distinct from the nation. Turner suggests that the ordering discourse was neither nation or modernity, but the sasana, that is, the life of the Buddha’s teachings. Turner argues that Burmese in the colonial period reinvented Buddhism according to their own interests, reclaiming and defining their own narrative. Turner finds that the communities she studied were able to integrate Buddhist mechanisms for reform with modern institutions, constantly recasting their ideas about Buddhism and its active role. In this way, certain projects that attempted to ‘discipline’ Buddhist practice within colonial governance failed, and the tensions of this clash produced new interest groups and a distinct identity politics. Her aim in focusing thus is to disclose the ‘diverse modes of belonging’ that are found at work in colonial Burma. For Turner, the ‘worldview and inner workings of sasana stand as one alternative framework that oriented Burmese in the colonial world’ (p. 4). In a step that some may see as somewhat provocative, Turner suggests that neither colonialism nor modernity exert singular or authoritative agency.
Doing so allows Turner to perform a rigorous study not only of Buddhist clerics and scholars, but also of education reform, and also the lay institutions, movements and individuals who populate the complex drama of religion in Burma. With regards to the latter, Chapter 4 provides a meticulous examination of how lay associations and campaigns were able to develop a moral community and how a perceived crisis of morals within the community fostered new modes of Buddhist subjectivity. Of particular joy is the section titled ‘Disobedient and disrespectful lads’ that discusses the growing ‘deviance’ of Buddhist schoolboys, and of Buddhist parents’ concern over the harmful effects of colonial education on impressionable teenagers. Turner relates this issue using historical narration, humour and scholarly insight, all the while providing relevant and vivid excerpts from letters and reports that make the tensions of the time come alive.
Turner’s focus also opens up the analysis to underline a critical and much needed understanding for all of religious studies. This is that those of us who undertake the study and analysis of religion must resist the temptation to see a religion as fixed, homogenous or universal, but to pay close attention to the shifting definitions, frames and political manoeuvring that can affect religion and religious phenomena. Religion, after all, can be simultaneously conformist and defiant, definitive and unbounded. In the concluding chapter, Turner points to this herself, highlighting, in particular, Partha Chatterjee’s discussion in The Nation and Its Fragments that certain cultural projects provided a platform through which the colonized could formulate an identity outside of the bounds of colonial subjectivity. Religion – in this case Buddhism – allowed for ‘modes of imagining’ that defied colonial governmentality. This, too, is a salient point. In my own work on political Buddhism in Sri Lanka, I have seen this alternative identity as a definite manifestation among laypersons, although not clerics or leaders, who formulate much of their rhetoric within colonial framing. Turner sees this occurring in more broad strokes. Arguably, most scholarship will discuss Christianity and Islam as having such alternative and liberating possibilities, and so it is refreshing to see how Turner’s work further emphasizes the arguments of those who point to the fact that such internal reform and resistance manifest also in eastern traditions. Assuredly, there is a strong social reformist stance embedded within Buddhism; a materialistic analysis of Gautam Buddha’s teachings makes us keenly aware of his strong challenge to the systemic injustices prevalent in Brahmanism.
Yet, while Turner’s premise is a significant one, it is also equally valid to see these projects as part of responses to colonialism and nation-state making. There is much extant academic literature that ably illustrates this, especially work that seeks to understand modern tensions between Buddhists and other religious groups. In more contemporary scholarship, of note are Ananda Abeyesekera’s The Colours of the Robe (2002) and KM De Silva’s edited volume on Ethnic Conflict in Buddhist Societies in South and South-East Asia (2015). That all of these arguments have validity is further substantiation of what one feels is Turner’s vital emphasis; that the study of religion whether through political, theological, anthropological or sociological lenses necessitates taking on a complex, multiplicitous, incongruous beast.
One must also applaud Turner’s nuance of understanding the relationship of Buddhism as religion in the European sense, as well as not a religion in this same sense. Indeed, her study of Buddhism in colonial Burma highlights that there was an effort to deploy a premodern category that was similar to, and yet distinct from ‘western’ categorization. Certainly, Buddhism’s more technical existence as a philosophy that has religious trappings and signifiers is what makes Buddhist political thought an inexhaustible field to study.
Saving Buddhism is valuable reading for students of Buddhist political thought, colonialism and, especially, those interested in the history of religious imaginings. Written with a great degree of accessibility, the book also allows itself a wider scope, and will be of appeal to those wishing to have a more informed understanding of the tensions between Muslims and Buddhists in Burma, as well as those generally interested in wishing to inquire into the intricacies of the Buddhist political world.