Introduction to the Study of Religion: Two New, Essential Books

RODRIGUES, Hillary and John S. HARDING. Introduction to the Study of Religion. Oxford: Routledge, 2009.

HARDING, John S. and Hillary RODRIGUES. The Study of Religion: A Reader. Oxford: Routledge, 2012.

Transmission of Indic Traditions to Southeast Asia

I have just found this excellent bibliography – ‘BASIC BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE TRANSMISSION OF INDIC TRADITIONS TO S.E. ASIA AND THEIR SURVIVALS’ - written by Tim Lubin.

Introduction to the Religions of South Asia

I have just devised a new course “Introduction to the Religions of South Asia“. Feel free to download the course by clicking the link above. I would greatly appreciate any feedback. The outline is as follows:

This course provides a history of the pre-modern religious traditions of South Asia. By treating the religions of South Asia together, and not in isolation, this course aims to illustrate the cross-fertilisation of ideas, beliefs and practices among the religions of the region. In addition, the historical developments of each religious tradition are introduced alongside typological studies of various doctrines and practices. By combining both historical and typological methods in this way, the students will be able to situate the major religious traditions in South Asia historically, while also gaining a familiarity with the doctrinal and cultural backgrounds of these traditions.

Sri Lanka Journals Online

Charles Hallisey has just posted a very useful resource on the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies’ mailing list. Sri Lanka Journals Online is digitalising journals published in Sri Lanka in order to provide the world greater access to Sri Lankan scholarship.While the arts and humanities are not adequately represented, there are a few gems worth reading. For instance, Sandagomi Coperehewa’s article “Colonialism and Problems of Language Policy: Formulation of a Colonial Language Policy in Sri Lanka” (Sri Lankan Journal of Advanced Social Studies) is well worth a read. My favourite journal so far though has to be the Journal of the Coconut Research Institute of Sri Lanka!

Magical Language or Legal Language?

I have just read some comments made by von Hinüber (SII 13/14 1987) that the Theravada Buddhist care for the pronunciation of Pali in the ritual sphere can be understood as a legalistic transformation of the old magical and ritual concerns of Vedic Brahmanism. This dichotomy between magical and legal made me think of Mauss’ distinction between the two in his Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie:

“Les pratiques traditionnelles avec lesquelles les actes magiques peuvent être confondus sont : les actes juridiques, les techniques, les rites religieux. On a rattaché à la magie le système de l’obligation juridique, pour la raison que, de part et d’autre, il y a des mots et des gestes qui obligent et qui lient, des formes solennelles. Mais si, souvent, les actes juridiques
ont un caractère rituel, si le contrat, les serments, l’ordalie, sont par certains côtés sacramentaires, c’est qu’ils sont mélangés à des rites, sans être tels par eux-mêmes. Dans la mesure où ils ont une efficacité particulière, où ils font plus que d’établir des relations contractuelles entre des êtres, ils ne sont pas juridiques, mais magiques ou religieux.” (p.11)

I can’t help feeling that both von Hinüber and Mauss are creating a false distinction between the two, since legal language does have a creative function beyond the act of judicial administration. For instance, in a Pali ordination ritual, while the ritual formulae merely set out the practicalities of ordination, such as asking whether the ordinand has parental permission etc., the form of the ritual clearly has a purpose beyond the articulation of information. It contains rhythm, repetition and, for the ordinand, is often incomprehensible. Its form divorces it from worldly language and it attains a register that induces a sense of awe in the ordinand due to its strangeness. It is this parasemantic coercion of the ordinand that I would still classify as magical.

This distinction between meaning and form in legal language has also been recognised in modern studies of legal linguistics. For instance, Mattila (2006) in his Comparative Legal Linguistics has observed that part of the coercive power within legal language has to do with its “magical character”. He states:

“It is the legal order that gives the meaning of a speech act to words expressed orally or to a signed document: in this way, it links rights and obligations to those words or to that document. When we say ‘B has made a rental agreement’, this sentence expresses an institutional fact, that is , a fact that  can be perceived by interpreting the behaviour of B in the light of a constitutive rule concerning the entry into force of a rental agreement. In the final analysis, it is the supernatural power of the Word that stands in the background of the effects of a speech act. That is clearly visible in the fact that ritual expressions were once of great importance in realizing speech acts: if, in Ancient Rome or in medieval England, the claimant made even a small mistake in reciting  the required form of action, then he lost the case. Equally, without the word spondeo ['I promise'] being pronounced, a contract of stipulatio character did not arise under Roman law.” (p.32)

Perhaps, then, “magico-legal” would be a better description of Pali ritual formulae?

How is the Pali Canon a Sacred Text? Exploring Answers from 12th Century Sri Lanka and 18th Century Burma

The recording of my recent talk given at the Oxford Centre of Buddhist Studies is now online here.

Update on Current Projects

I thought I would use today’s post to go over some of the projects I am currently working on. At the moment, I am in the last few months of writing up my PhD thesis “Buddhism and Grammar in Twelfth Century Sri Lanka”, though, as always, I am finding time to work on/procrastinate with some other projects that interest me.

I am in the middle of translating a medieval Pali poem called the “Telakaṭāhagāthā” (Lit. The Cauldron of Oil Verses) alongside my dear friend Aleix Ruiz Falqués. This poem has been fantastic to translate and I hope Aleix and I can push on, write a lengthy introduction, and find a publisher for this work before September.

In addition, I have begun work on creating a comprehensive Pali reader for intermediate students of Pali, one that will include prose, poetry, commentarial, and sub-commentarial literature. It will aim to introduce the student of Pali to the various styles of Pali found across its long history. In addition, I hope to write a short grammar of Pali that will accompany this reader.

A good Pali reader has been long desired by students. I enjoyed carrying Dines Andersen’s A Pali Reader  (1917) for most of my time as an undergraduate  and I must have read it countless times. However, the passages Andersen chooses are not representative of the huge diversity of language found in the canon and also commentarial literature is ignored. Much the same can be said for the recent Buddhavacana: A Pali Reader by Glenn Wallis (2010). The latter work has been recently reviewed in Buddhist Studies Review (28.2 2011) by Tomoyuki Kono.

Lesser-known Books in Buddhist Studies #1

I would like to start a series of posts about lesser-known publications in Buddhist Studies that I have found stimulating, innovative or challenging. Through these posts I hope to draw more attention to works that I believe provide new direction to the field of Buddhist Studies. The first work (in two volumes) I would like to introduce is “Sacerdotal Succession of Sri Lankan Buddhist Monks” by Kapila P. Vimaladharma:

Vimaladharma, Kapila P. Sacerdotal Succession of Sri Lankan Buddhist Monks. Vol. 1-2. Kandy: Varuni Publishers, 2003.

In these first two volumes of a planned five-volume series on sacerdotal succession, Vimaladharma explores the ordination lineages since 1753 of the Malwatte and Asigiriya fraternities, two sub-divisions of the Siyam Nikaya order of Sri Lankan Buddhism. In tracing these monastic ordination lineages, Vimaladharma is able to map with great accuracy the movements and activities of the monks of these orders, while also tracing their relationship to social, religious and political power structures.  This innovative use of  archival records of monastic lineages provides an incredibly rich picture of the development of the monastic sangha during this period.

A review of the work by Prof. Anuradha Seneviratne can be found here.

‘Equivalent but Different’: Cultural Contact as a Dialogic Mechanism

According to the great semiotician Juri Lotman, semiotic structures, which can equally be included under the more general rubric of ‘culture(s)’, interact by means of dialogic mechanisms. The notion of ‘dialogic mechanism’ views cultural interaction as an act of communication between a transmitter and recipient. He states that at the basis of any act of communication there lies the contradictory formula, ‘equivalent but different’.

For interaction to take place, there has to be a certain amount of symmetry or similarity between the semiotic structures that are part of the communication process. To put it simply, there has to be some shared background between the transmitter and recipient for a message to make sense. On the other hand, there needs to be difference, since if the information conveyed by the transmitter is already known by the recipient then communication is redundant. This difference cannot be absolute, however, as the first principle of ‘equivalence’ needs to be maintained.

For Lotman, the influence of one culture on another can be viewed as a complex example of these simple principles of communication. For instance, the transmitting culture generally occupies a central position in the discourse it is conveying. The recipient cultures, due to some level of similarity, are able to understand the information that is being conveyed. However, this information is usually perceived as ‘strange’, ‘novel’, ‘beautiful’ etc. In receiving the information, the recipient restructures it  within its own semiotic sphere and is also restructed by it. Often, a point of saturation is reached whereby the restructured information is rehabilitated in its new environment, and creates a new semiotic system in which the recipient occupies a central position. The recipient then takes the position of transmitter and produces new texts and ideas that are communicated to its own periphery.

The Lost Verses of the Telakatahagatha

The first edition of the Telakatahagatha, published by Goonaratne in the Journal of the Pali Text Society (1884), contains only 98 verses. It is from this edition that the first English translations of the poem were published by B.C. Law (1938) and Sameresingha (????). Law and Sameresingha note that one would expect the poem to contain a hundred verses and both speculate that the final two verses of the poem were probably lost.

Goonaratne does not mention the manuscript sources used for his edition. However, he does refer to an earlier edition of the text, with a “word-for-word” interpretation in Sinhalese, published by Hikkaduwe Sumangala  in 1872. If Sumangala’s edition of the text had contained more than 98 verses, it would seem likely that Goonaratne would have acknowledged this discrepancy in his own edition. Therefore, I suggest that it is possible that these early Sri Lankan editions of the text were based on a common manuscript with the same lacunae.

It is only recently, with the publication of the CSCD Tipitaka, that these lost verses have been recovered:

99.

laddhāna buddhasamayaṃ atidullabhaṃ ca

saddhammamaggam asamaṃ sivadaṃ tatheva,

kalyāṇamittapavare matisampadañ ca

ko buddhimā anavaraṃ na bhajeyya dhammaṃ?

100.

evam ‘pi dullabhataraṃ vibhave suladdhā

maccheradosa viratā ubhayatthakāmā,

saddhādidhammasahitā satatappamattā

bho! bho! karotha amatādhigamāya puññaṃ;