Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus Princeton University
In an article published on 19th October in the Island, the Venerable Dhammavihara refers to my discussion of Buddhist ethics regarding marriage as a "criminally serious error." This is an interesting take on Buddhist ethics because the Buddha always referred to an opposing position as micchaditthi ("wrong views") and not criminal acts. I have ignored the Venerable Dhammavihara when, over the last twenty years he has quoted this same statement of mine in periodic newspaper articles. I thought the good monk would over time give up Obeyesekere bashing but unhappily the repressed has returned in his recent article.
I write this response, not just in respect of the monk’s article but because often enough my work has been read in bits and pieces and criticized in local journals in polemical terms. Unfortunately my books for the most part are not available in libraries or bookshops here. Nevertheless, it is an elementary postulate that a scholar’s work has to be read as a totality and in context before any serious criticism can be made. Hence this response even though I believe that the issues the Venerable Dhammavihara raises can best be dealt with in scholarly journals.
Here is the obnoxious Obeyesekere in The Cult of the Goddess Pattini on p. 445: ‘Tor example, virginity and chastity in females is not associated with ethics and doctrine: one consequence of this is that marriage is a secular affair in Buddhist Sri Lanka whereas it is a sacrament according to Brahmanic values." Bhikkhu Dhammavihara finds it "amazing" that a Sri Lankan sociologist should write this. Let me express my counter-amazement at his picking a choice bit from my book but failing to read it in context.
First: the book deals with the Goddess Pattini, the exemplar of wifely chastity who, in spite of her husband’s infidelity, destroyed the city of Madurai and the bad king of Pandya and reinstituted moral righteousness. I describe in detail the complex rituals where Sinhala Buddhists worship Pattini as the ideal wire and extol her virtues and elevate her into a Bodhisattva, the only female Bodhisattva in the popular Sinhala Buddhist pantheon. Second: Bhikkhu Dhammavihara conveniently ignores the next two sentences following the above passage. "Nevertheless, even in Sri Lanka these values are part of a secular ideology; but in so far as these ideals have no religious sanction their practical applications show a great deal of variability. In practical reality they are more the concern of high status groups than of peasants, though they remain ideals for all. "It is these ideals that are celebrated in the rituals of the Pattini cult.
Third: Rev. Dhammavihara ignores the sentence that precedes the quotation that raised his ire: "What I have called the ‘Brahmanic scale of values’ is not, in Buddhist Sri Lanka anchored to a scheme of religious values as in Hindu India." It is in relation to my discussion of Brahmanic values that I made the statement that Rev. Dhammavihara quotes.
We now know that the Buddha was thoroughly familiar with Vedic thought and that early Buddhism carried out an oppositional dialectic with Brahmanism both with regards caste and sacramental religion. "Sacrament" is of course a Christian term originally meaning a vow taken by military personnel in Roman times but later, to quote The Encyclopedia ‘of Religion "was increasingly used to refer to baptism" and the Eucharist, and then was extended by analogy to related ritual actions including confession and penance, confirmation, marriage, ordination and unction." (pp. 502- 03) Indologists quite reasonably apply this term to Vedicrites. For example, one Dharmasutra roughly contemporaneous with Buddhism mentions forty "sacramentary rites" including the following: "Impregnation rite, quickening a male foetus, parting the wife’s hair, birth rite, naming first feeding with solid food, tonsure, and initiation; the four vows associated with Vedic study marrying a helpmate in fulfilling the law" and many more.
It is this rejection of sacramental religion in Buddhist doctrine and ethics that I dealt with in Pattini and in other publications on Buddhism. Rev. Dhammavihara quotes at length the many moral norms that are emphasized in Buddhist texts. He is right; Buddhist texts and Jatakas deal extensively with right and wrong moralities but, as Bhikkhu Dhammavihara himself says they are the values that were appropriate to the societies of the time. In other words these Buddhist texts emphasize the moral codes on which the orderly conduct of social life depends. Rev. Dhammavihara himself admits that no Buddhist monk officiates at marriage ceremonies and that marriage is a civil affair.
Restrained speech
Restrained speech, extolled in Buddhist texts, is not the venerable monk’s forte because his diatribe on abortion is expressed, strangely enough, in language reminiscent of the Christian Right in the US. For example he says: "The only easy and ingenious way out of it which our pig-headed society knows is abortion, i.e., the brutal dragging out of a mother’s womb a human fetus, no matter at what stage of its growth, when pressure and persuasion is brought upon those medical mechanics, accompanied by a gratifying purse large or small. A heartless Satan scores a bulls-eye with the skill of his God given hands. More and more dressed chicken in our supermarkets and more and more aborted babies in the garbage bins of the abortion clinics in the city of Colombo, known and unknown. Glory be to this culture of the day. We know the vulgarity and the brutality of this inhuman act of abortion is publicized worldwide. We have seen with our own eyes in many parts of the world, outside of Sri Lanka."
Is chicken the equivalent of aborted babies in the Venerable Dhammavihara’s conception? It seems as if the good monk not only castigates doctors working in non-existent abortion clinics in Colombo, but he seems to agree with some early Indologists and Theosophists that Buddhism is a Theistic religion, for otherwise one cannot explain a Buddhist monk talking about Satan and Man’s "God given hands," not to mention "glory be" that surely seems to echo "Glory be to God." It is possible, of course, that he is borrowing this language from the Christian right currently campaigning on behalf of George Bush.
Not only does Rev. Dhammavihara ignore the larger context of the Pattini book but he is also unaware of my extensive work on Buddhist ethics found in the Jatakas and in the main doctrinal tradition. Much of the latter work appears in my, recent book, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth (University of California Press, 2002). In it I mention that the kinds of proper conduct between husband and wife and so forth that Bhikkhu Dhammavihara recounts is not unique to Buddhism or for that matter Christianity because similar values are found in the simplest of tribal societies the world over, sometimes even more strictly enforced than in the so-called historical religions.
No human society, however small in scale, can function without moral norms that govern human relationships, such as those pertaining to domestic responsibilities and fidelity at marriage. In this recent book I point out that Buddhism is a radically ethical religion such that moral and immoral acts become religiously right or wrong acts, producing bad karma-and affecting one’s rebirth and eventual salvation. This is quite unlike the situation in tribal societies and to some extent in early forms of Greek rebirth where the secular morality is not articulated to a doctrine of salvation. Moreover, Buddhism is not a theistic religion and therefore the moral norms embodied in the Five Precepts are not Coirnandments, injunctions given by God, the violation of which leads to an alienation from Him. Buddhist precepts do not contain a "categorical imperative" of the Kantian variety either; and they are carefully formulated such that "the moral codes of the local community could be incorporated within the percepts and given Buddhist meaning."
"Historically viewed, the Five Precepts showed a Buddhist tolerance for the values of the local community, which could, without too much conflict, be incorporated into the precepts. This in turn led to the spread of Buddhism, among people with different moral codes, such that one found Buddhism existing in easy harmony with, for example, polygyny [multiple wives] and polyandry [multiple husbands]. In some key texts a courtesan like Ambapali is accepted without negative moral criticism or judgment... This did not mean that Buddhist values had no impact on social groups. The injunction on ahimsa, or nonviolence, was particularly effective in the near elimination of animal sacrifices, helping in the long run to absorb hunting communities into pastoralism and agriculture." (p. 141)
If Buddhists want to develop a sacramental form of religion it is up to them to do so and the Venerable Dhammavihara is not alone in this regard. Take the case of marriage. Prior to the colonial period, especially the British advent, marriage was entirely a non-religious, non-sacramental affair. All the sociological evidence suggests that most ordinary people simply took a wife without any religious ceremony whatever, but with the consent of both sides and with much secular feasting. Divorce also was by mutual consent and its frequency has been noted even in modern times among those who opt-for Kandyan marriage or in common law marriage. Among some there was simply engage the ceremony of the poruva; but this too was a simple affair though aristocratic families certainly had elaborate ones.
The poruva is the flat board generally made of jak (a milk oozing tree or kiri gaha) and used in smoothening the paddy field after it has been cleared and ploughed; it is the preparatory act prior to the sowing of the seed. In older poruva ceremonies this very board was used with a cloth placed over it and some paddy sprinkled around it. The rich fertility significance of the sowing of the seed after the marriage is emphasized.
The act of legitimate marriage itself is simple: the bride’s maternal uncle or a stand-in for the uncle, gives away the bride after some very basic and important acts, like the mutual feeding by the bride and groom; the groom giving the bride a cloth, symbolically suggesting his support of her; the right circumambulation of the poruva; the tying of the little fingers of the’ groom and bride by the maternal uncle and a few other richly symbolic acts. None of these acts have the slightest religious significance.
Calvinist values
Several crucial changes in the colonial period transformed the simple meaning of the older marriage. First, there formalization in the Sinhala low country of the ghastly custom of inspecting the wedding sheet for the virginity test. This custom was well known in some southern Mediterranean nations in the 16th century and I suspect that the Sinhala practice was derived from Portuguese influence, but this is only a guess. What we do know is there is not an iota of evidence that this custom existed prior to colonialism; it still is not adopted by those marrying according to Kandyan law.
Second, after the late 19th century several other changes occurred in the low country. There was the implementation of the rigid Roman Dutch law of marriage in the courts, a law that was seeped in Calvinist values and patriarchal authority. The flexibility of the older norms of marriage and divorce was effectively undermined by this time. Along with this there was the challenge of the Christian missions and we now know that the Buddhists, like other colonized people, met this challenge by adopting those very missionary values, particularly those that dealt with sexuality and marriage. There was no way that Buddhists would Christianize their marriage ceremonies but under the missionary challenge they went some ways to "sacramentalize" their marriage by inventing new traditions. One was the introduction of Pali slokas known as mangala ashtakas, very high faluting utterances, giving an aura of profundity to the ceremony. The other was the introduction of the virginal girls, dressed in white reciting in Pali the triumphs of the Buddha, especially those over Mara or Death. This last event has come to stay and, whether we like it or not, it will continue as an intrinsic part of a Buddhist marriage ceremony.
The older mangala ashtakas with their sonorous and high sounding quality are hardly used today. Instead, what we have is an ubiquitous person, a kind of lay officiator (without a designation as yet) who comes in virtually every low country marriage and those marriages performed in hotels and reception halls and where he performs rituals on behalf of the two families. The role of the maternal uncle has become vestigial at best. The new officiators, mostly ex-dancers or exorcists or kapuralas, have taken over a kind of priestly role and it is they who now conduct what seems like a religious ceremony acting very much like an imagined Brahmin. They still utter something they call ashtakas of which neither they nor the audience know the meaning.
Sinhala Buddhist marriage
Often the invocations of the officiators are prefaced with, a statement to say that they are practising an old traditional Sinhala Buddhist marriage ceremony (even though invented only fifty or so years back at most). ‘Almost always the officiator invokes the Buddha; and almost all of them mention the ideal marriage of Prince Siddhartha with Yasodhara, something quite inappropriate to a marriage ceremony since the Buddha left his wife and child for the radical act of renouncing domestic life (and incidentally turning his back on Brahmanic values that gave those values salvific primacy). In several marriage ceremonies I have witnessed some officiators even mention the great penultimate life of the Buddha as Vessantara. Anything more inappropriate to a wedding could scarcely be invented because Vessantara gave away his wife and children to a greedy Brahmin, sacrificing those near and dear to him in order to extol the supreme value of renunciation. It is no accident that this painful and moving episode was sung traditionally ‘not at weddings, but at the funeral wake."
The upshot of the preceding argument is that those augment is that those officiators who are inventing new traditions are not very educated, quite unlike their counterparts in Christianity and Hinduism. I have interviewed several of them and find them thoroughly decent and likeable individuals, trying like most other people to make a legitimate living in changed cultural conditions and difficult economic times. Yet, unless contemporary Buddhist intellectuals wake up and invent joyful ceremonials of marriage consonant with the secular traditions of Buddhism, they are going to be saddled with rites that are sometimes anachronistic,. Sometimes plainly ridiculous. But worse: I have the feeling that monks will eventually displace the not - so — officiators and, adopting the role of Brahmins will in time produce a sacramental Buddhism. I can only hope that this prophecy will turn out to be wrong.
