Juliane Schober

This keynote lecture was delivered at SOAS in July 2015 and can be viewed through this link:http://www.soas.ac.uk/saaap/events/02jul2015-how-can-the-study-of-theravda-buddhism-define-its-subject.html

In it, I seek to locate the intellectual aims of the Theravada Civilizations Project within the literature of the field.
Theravada traditions shaped ancient civilizations and continue to inform modern practices in many regions of Asia. In this lecture, Juliane Schober summarises recent initiatives in the study of Theravada civilizations that are centered on Steven Collins' notion of a Pali Imaginaire and chart new academic inquiries through interdisciplinary and multi-sited scholarly collaborations.

Juliane Schober is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University (US) where she also Director of the Center for Asian Research.  Her publications include her recent book on Modern Buddhist Conjuncture in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies and Civil Society (University of Hawai'i Press, 2010).

For centuries, Burmese have looked to the authority of their religious tradition, Theravada Buddhism, to negotiate social and political hierarchies. Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar examines those moments in the modern history of this Southeast Asian country when religion, culture, and politics converge to chart new directions. Arguing against Max Weber s characterization of Buddhism as other-worldly and divorced from politics, this study shows that Buddhist practice necessitates public validation within an economy of merit in which moral action earns future rewards. The intervention of colonial modernity in traditional Burmese Buddhist worldviews has created conjunctures at which public concerns critical to the nation s future are reinterpreted in light of a Buddhist paradigm of power.

Among Burmese Buddhists, and indeed throughout the Theravada world, an invitation to participate in rituals is often followed by a common intention, "let's make merit" (B.: kutho ya-aun). Making merit is a central feature in the repertoire of Theravada Buddhist practices that gives expression to the religious agency of laypeople seeking ethical rewards for virtuous deeds in order to ensure prosperity in this and future lives. Especially merit-making that accrues from the performance of generosity, a virtue that according to the Vessantara Jataka, the future Buddha perfected in his penultimate life, is a constitutive element in the social reality of Theravada Buddhist communities. This chapter explores the work of merit and the practices of generosity (dana) in cultural contexts of Theravada civilizations. I argue that merit-making is not merely about good or bad ethics. Rather, it is best understood as a social practice, discourse, and cultural mediation about ethical conduct and giving. In the Theravada-dominated countries of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka, where Theravadins constitute a majority of the population, meritmaking and the ethics of giving are integral to the production of social capital, authority, and hegemony. In historical and traditional contexts, merit-making practices often involve giving and produce social hierarchies. Merit-making communities sharing in such ritual performances therefore live within a field of merit or social power. As promising career paths beyond the sanġha become increasingly attainable for young people in contemporary Myanmar, meritmaking practices are also changing. Monks (sanġha) are no longer the sole sources of merit for laypeople, as new forms of giving are becoming popular among socially engaged Buddhists and others whose religious practice emphasizes the welfare of others (P.: parahita). While the emphasis on parahita practices is still quite recent in Myanmar, making merit by serving others is a more established practice elsewhere in the Theravada world where modernity has already fundamentally restructured social relationships and mobility. Yet defining just what merit is has been challenging. In conversations, the Pali scholar Steven Collins declared provocatively that merit (P.: kusala, B.: kutho), despite its frequent mention in Pali and vernacular Buddhist literature, could not be seen, had no material reality, and therefore did not exist. My essay concludes with a discussion of previous explanations of merit-making to foreground merit's socially mediated qualities over its material forms. In contrast to earlier research on Buddhist altruism and on the material value of the gift and its circulation, this

ABSTRACT: " To be Burmese is to be Buddhist " is a slogan commonly identified with the dawn of nationalism in the country known today as Myanmar, where violence between Buddhist, Muslim, and ethnic communities has increasingly jeopardized liberalizing reforms. How do contemporary forms of Theravada Buddhist discourse shape ideas of belonging in a multi-religious and ethnically diverse Myanmar following the dissolution of military rule in 2011? How do digital technologies and globalizing communication networks in this nation influence rapidly changing social identities, anxieties, and imaginaries that Brigit Meyer identifies as 'aesthetic formations'? In this article, I trace diverse genealogies of belonging to show how contemporary constructions of meaning facilitate religious imaginaries that may exacerbate difference by drawing on past ideologies of conflict or may seek to envision a new and diverse Myanmar.