On Michael Aung-Thwin’s “Those Men in Saffron Robes”

The word saṁgha is literally a “going together,” thus something like “association.” It is commonly rendered into English in Pali and Sanskrit dictionaries, as “community,” but as for the Sangha (technically, translating from the Pali, “the Sangha of the Four Quarters”), it is only, as it were, a community of communities. In fact, each monastery is itself a sangha and the same for each “order” (“sect”). And in the latter case, an “order” (ordination group or tradition), either a nikaya (lit. “separated body”) or a gaṇa (Burmese gaing), and only this latter word means “community” in the literal sense of a commensal grouping.¹ So, as said above, the Sangha (Aung-Thwin’s official or mainstream Sangha) is just a community of communities and not at all a unified body. This does not mean that it is incorrect to talk of the Sangha in the country (Burma/Myanmar) as an entity; it may imply, though, that it is an institution rather than a unitary organization. As such, its various parts can indeed be organized under an umbrella organization, say, under the primate as in royal times. This means that, after all, Aung-Thwin is not at all incorrect in describing it as the Sangha, in as much as the umbrella organization in effect defines the mainstream, in Aung-Thwin’s sense, since his “fringe” groups of monks essentially act in disregard of the mainstream’s rules and its interpretation of Buddhist Canon Law (vinaya).

Of course, each order lays some claim to being or representing the idea (or ideal) of a unified community — what it should or might be and not a claim to be that ideal totality. And historically, as Aung-Thwin documents nicely, whenever there was an official (political) attempt to unify the Sangha or sāsana, it almost invariably involved the political favoring or even the rise into existence of a particular order (in Burma, in Siam, and so on). The “other” orders in such cases were either made by the state to fall under the favored order, or more or less put outside of State-favor — or put themselves there, escaping, as it were, from state jurisdiction and control as an ideal for not just Sangha but Sāsana itself.² Is this clear evidence of traditional non-unity? Indeed, the mainstream Sangha is recurrently defined by royal favor. And as I have long since tried to show, the relation between the nat cult/animism and Buddhism is really very complicated.³

Buddhism has always recognized the existence of all sorts of beings. In Burma, the nat are in that category. Belief in nat is not disjoint from belief in Buddhism. Here it is possible to misunderstand Mendelson. If the laity feel (it is a matter of lay perceptions, not of measurable fact) that there is some current inability to use Buddhist doctrine and merit-making effectually, perhaps because civil life and economy seem in bad shape, they may suppose that such beings have been interfering with religion and with the secular world. (There is scriptural precedent for this notion of course, as when Gotama, Himself, had to do things to stop such supernatural interference.) In such cases, the laity may indeed turn to the nat to placate such beings or keep them from interfering. It has little if anything to do with any idea of an historically supposed “pure Buddhism,” except again as to lay perceptions based upon the way they feel their lives are going at any period of time. If they feel things are bad, then they may, in fact they do, imagine that something is the matter with religion so that it is not protecting them. Of course, one cannot measure “animism’s triumph.” One can, however, measure how the laity feel about things. It certainly has nothing at all to do with versions of scripture — Buddhism, or indeed any scripturally given doctrine or conceptual system is necessarily always given particular meaning in specific cultural terms — although it can and often does have to do with...