The Authorization of Religio-political Discourse: Monks and Buddhist Activism in Contemporary Myanmar and Beyond

Through the example of contemporary Buddhist nationalist groups in Myanmar, this article draws attention to the cultural authorization of religio-political discourse. The symbolic power of a monk's pronouncements is amplified because of the cultural reverence attached to his vocation as a Buddhist monk, even without doctrinal references or ritual practices. A monk’s cultural position within Burmese Buddhism particularly strengthens his authority when he frames his preaching and actions as a defense of Buddhism. Without attention to these cultural institutions and the religious authority they confer, the resonance and influence of monks' words cannot be completely understood. Furthermore, without directly responding to the logic of these authorizing discourses, responses intended to counter the violence emerging from Buddhist nationalism and promote tolerance will be ineffective. Introduction The Burmese Buddhist monk U Wirathu sits with legs crossed on an ornately carved wooden throne on a raised platform in front of hundreds of lay Buddhists. He is wrapped in the dark maroon robes of his office and holds an ornamental fan in his lap, a remnant of earlier times when monks hid their faces to give sermons to separate the perfection of the dhamma--the Buddha’s teachings--from the morally imperfect and almost incidental person conveying it. Just a few minutes ago he had entered the crowd of people as any other monk does before preaching a sermon, passing through their midst preceded by young men carrying Buddhist flags with the insignia of the sāsana (a term for the Buddhist religion in its entirety) as the assembled laypeople chanted together, bestowing blessings of good health and freedom from suffering on the revered monk. Once seated, he reciprocates the blessings by chanting in Pāli (the language of the Theravāda Buddhist scriptures) before leading the assembly in taking refuge in the Three Jewels (the Buddha, the dhamma, and the sangha--the community of monks) and the five precepts: vows to abstain from taking life, taking that which is not given, sexual misconduct, lying, and taking intoxicants. The renewal of these vows is common to most Buddhist rituals in Myanmar, where monks lead participants away from their focus of worldliness and the everyday (lokiya) to prepare the reception of the Buddha’s teachings, which speak to the otherworldly perception of ultimate truth (lokuttara). With the standard components of the ritual complete, U Wirathu begins his sermon. Some monks are traditional in the content and structure of their sermons, taking a passage from a sutta (episode from the Buddha’s life) and expounding on its meaning. Others adopt a more contemporary approach, illustrating a Buddhist virtue with reference to everyday situations, maybe even making reference to a popular singer or local gossip to keep the listeners engaged. Some monks have a sing-song “call-and-response” style of preaching, where they repeatedly have their listeners repeat a phrase that they want to emphasize. Whatever the style, throughout any sermon, mumbled choruses of “Hman ba, hpaya” or “Tin ba, hpaya” (the polite way of saying “Yes, reverend monk” in Burmese) form an almost constant backdrop to a monk’s words, as devoted followers nod along, listening to and confirming what he says. In this particular case, U Wirathu has chosen a topic that many would consider to be political, almost unthinkable several years ago under Myanmar’s former military government, but increasingly common as restrictions on public speech are gradually lifted as part of a program of political reforms. His subject: the dangers of Islam and the need for Burmese Buddhists to conduct themselves in appropriately nationalist ways or risk losing both their religion and their country. “These days, whatever you do, you need to do it from a nationalist perspective,” he begins. “Our existence as a Burmese Buddhist nation has been threatened,” he declares a few moments later, still preaching in a calm, almost recitative manner. Eventually, he comes to the subject of Buddhist politicians, asserting that they are not doing enough to defend the religion. “Once these so-called Buddhist politicians like Aung San Suu Kyi control the government our Buddhism is doomed. They will ban the Buddhist ceremonies in any government functions just to please their Muslim supporters in their parties...We need to be aware of what will happen once the Buddhist ceremonies are banned unofficially by the government. It will affect our religion directly and eventually Buddhism will disappear from our day-to-day lives.” U Wirathu goes on to warn about the dangers to Buddhist women, repeating claims that have circulated in Myanmar for decades: “They [Muslims] have a lot of money and no one knows where that money mountain is. They use that money to get our young Buddhist women. They show that money to attract our young women.” But the threat does not end there: “[The money that you spend at a Muslim-owned shop] will be used to get a Buddhist-Burmese woman and she will very soon be coerced or even forced to convert to Islam. And the children born of her will become Bengali Muslims and the ultimate danger to our Buddhist nation as they will eventually destroy our race and our religion. Once they become overly populous they will overwhelm us and take over our country and make it an evil Islamic nation.” It is easy to frame U Wirathu’s speech as part of a larger cultural mosaic that does not directly pertain to Burmese Buddhism. He does not cite specific scriptures in his sermons on Burmese nationalism and Islam, nor does he perform rituals that sacralize the nation or demonize Islam. However, the power of U Wirathu’s words and their resonance among his listeners are enhanced by a set of factors that often go unexamined in studies of the interaction of religion and politics. This article draws attention to the cultural institutions that authorize religious discourses and practices. The cultural reverence attached to the vocation of a Buddhist monk amplifies the power of U Wirathu’s pronouncements. He draws on narratives that make reference to Buddhism, but not directly to its doctrine; he appeals to a more nebulous notion of Buddhist cultural and political identity, and an even more specific Burmese Buddhist identity. This identity is rooted in a particular historical self-understanding, yet is affected by a set of global narratives about Islam, Buddhism, and Burmese Buddhists’ places in the world. His cultural position within Burmese Buddhism particularly strengthens his authority when he frames his preaching and actions as a defense of Buddhism. Without attention to these cultural institutions and the religious authority they confer, the influence of U Wirathu’s words cannot be completely understood. Furthermore, without directly responding to the logic of these authorizing discourses, responses intended to counter the violence emerging from Buddhist nationalism and promote tolerance will be ineffective. Cultural Institutions and Religion There has been critical work by sociologists and anthropologists on the general role of culture in religious traditions. Sociologist Peter Berger (1967, 25) considers religion the human enterprise of meaning making, “by which a sacred cosmos is established.” Anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz also account for the ways in which religion affects peoples’ worldview beyond doctrinal understandings or ritual practice. Geertz argued, “As we are dealing with meaning, let us begin with a paradigm: vis, that sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos—the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style or mood—and their worldview— the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order” (1966, 3). The tandem between ethos and worldview captures the reverence that adherents of a religion have for their religious intermediaries, the ways in which they understand certain places or contexts to be imbued with meaning, and the way that they understand their own place in the world, both cosmologically and politically. But in general treatments of culture and religion there has been very little attention paid to the authoritative role of culture beyond the discussion of ethics and ritual. In related fields, political scientists and some sociologists often have been guilty of either ignoring or essentializing culture, presenting it and its influence as primordial and unchanging within society or epiphenomenal. Modernization theorists saw religion and its anti-liberal effects on culture as allegiances to be overcome as a society progressed along the teleological path towards a modern, politically secular state. Political scientists studying religion and politics in Southeast Asia also have often failed to view prominent political actors as themselves embedded within particular religiously-influenced worldviews. They instead assume an instrumentalist perspective that political leaders merely use religion to manipulate the masses. Even when it appears that a leader or a regime is using religion politically, the efficacy of these methods is by no means guaranteed; this leaves open important questions such as what factors determine the resonance or acceptance of a particular religio-political argument or action? For instance, while Burmese Buddhists might have remained skeptical of the intentions of the country’s former military leaders who supported extravagant public donation ceremonies over the past few decades, the mere fact that these officers were acting as proper Buddhist authorities ought to (supporting the monkhood and creating opportunities for the laity to donate and make merit), meant that there was also some degree of acceptance of their actions (Jordt 2007, Schober 1997). One possible reason why the cultural dimension of authority has been under-recognized in scholarship on religion and politics is the unconscious Western bias toward interpreting religion through Christian frames. Among Western academics, early investigations saw doctrine and scriptures as foundational to religion. The conflation of doctrine and scriptures follows with modern interpretations of Judaism and Christianity – and the long-standing practices of hermeneutics – but is not necessarily valid for all religions. In his critique of the presumed parameters of the field, the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith (2012, 43) charges that Religious Studies is dominated “by Protestant concerns and models.” These Protestant concerns and models have precluded Western scholars from properly assessing the role and influence of cultural authority for religious traditions such as Burmese Buddhism. In her study of “collectivistic religions,” Slavica Jakelic criticizes the assumption that religion is a choice and that the merging of religion and nationalism necessarily indicates a secularization process. In fact, most of the world’s religious population would fit into the category of collectivistic religiosity, that is, being born into a religious practice and identity. The implicit theory of religion that Jakelic identifies as underlying most analyses of religious nationalism incorrectly “understands religion to be about beliefs and rituals (i.e. theology) and not about the kind of belonging that shapes communal boundaries (i.e. identity, culture, or politics)” (Jakelic 2010, 9-10). Yet the fact that these identities are more culturally-based does not make them any less “religious.” And Jakelic’s warning, although present in a study of Christianity in Europe, would appear to be particularly relevant for the study of Buddhism; most Buddhists in the world are born into their religious identities, whereas most Western scholars or practitioners come to the religion as a matter of choice, often failing to recognize the “complex relations of religion to collective identities” (Jakelic 2010, 11). An explanation that moves beyond individualized accounts of cultural authority relates to structural patterns, particularly communication. In his seminal work Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward Hall places cultures on a communication continuum that ranges from high-context to low-context. On this continuum, Western cultures and their Abrahamic traditions exhibit low-context communication that requires nominal supplements to interpret verbal and written sentiments. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Asian Buddhist societies such as the Thai, Japanese and Chinese reflect high-context cultures, which demand a greater degree of common, collective understanding, which Hall refers to as the programming of individuals to each other (1989). The distinction between low-context and high-context cultures is intended to be mostly value neutral; however, problems arise when people assume that communication styles are uniform worldwide, such as Westerners who assess U Wirathu’s sermons in the same way as U.S Christian sermons. Hall writes, “In general, high-context cultures-those which call for considerable programming of individuals to each other-have greater mass and are therefore more predictable, if, and only if, one is familiar with the system. On the other hand, to the observer who doesn’t know there is another system, a strange high-context culture can be completely mystifying...The force of his own cultural stereotypes will be so strong that it will distort what he sees; he will delude himself that he knows what’s going on before his eyes” (Hall 1989, 53). It is due to this confusion that Guo-Ming Chen, Akira Miyahara and Min-Sun Kim (2013, 472) underscore the dangers of imposing Western concepts, theories and methodologies onto Japanese communication research; a similar argument applies to an analysis of U Wirathu’s sermons. Some academics and journalists have linked U Wirathu’s work and the nationalist 969 movement to the larger discourse on religious fundamentalism and its dynamic Christian ministers, imams, and rabbis. While there are shared characteristics between U Wirathu and conservative U.S. Christian ministers like Scott Lively, U Wirathu’s sermons are interpreted by his listeners through a very different framework than a Christian sermon in the United States. Since many Asian Buddhist cultures are characterized by high-context communication, Burmese Buddhists listening to a monastic sermon hear different connections and implications than nonBurmese listeners. Not only that, the dynamics and weight of monastic cultural authority (and the response of a Burmese Buddhist to a monk in the context of a sermon) are different than in other religious traditions (for example, the way U.S. Christians might respond to pastoral sermons). This criterion alone significantly changes the way in which the laity respond to U Wirathu. Analogous to this discussion on communication patterns, cultures contain different levels of religious authority in and against doctrine and ritual, an aspect of cultural authorization that we explore further below. Among the few scholars to include cultural authority in their assessment of religious systems is Max Weber. In his larger work on authority, Weber theorizes three different varieties: bureaucratic, legal and charismatic. Among the three, charismatic authority is inextricably part of religion. In his seminal work The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Weber writes, “the term 'charisma' will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader” (Weber 1947, 358-9). In this explanation, the treatment of the cultural pertains to the perception of an individual and the context within which he or she acts. Christopher Adair-Toteff (2005, 191) notes that for Weber, “[c]harisma is extremely personal, it is highly irrational, it is very temporary, and, above all, it is especially