Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture

Preface

Preface For thirty years my research and writing, as well as a good deal of my teaching , has focused on understanding Theravada Buddhists within the context of Sri Lanka’s religious culture. For that reason many of my reflections throughout this study of Buddhism and religious culture in Laos are comparative. Laos and Sri Lanka are important venues for Theravada’s persistence in the contemporary world, but their historical experiences, of course, have been quite varied,and so the manner in which aspects of the sasana (Buddhist tradition) have been cultivated in each has varied significantly as well. Buddhism was first introduced to Sri Lanka from India in the third century BCE, more than a millennium before any form of Buddhism reached the geographic area in Southeast Asia that is now Laos and more than a millennium and a half before Sri Lanka’s distinctive lineages of Theravada tradition were cultivated among the Lao. Moreover, the wider religious cultures within which Theravada has been domesticated in Laos and Sri Lanka respectively are also definitively unique when compared.Sri Lanka’s proximity to India has resulted in more sustained Hindu influence. Though Hindu influence is notable in Laos, it is not nearly so emphatic, especially at the level of common lay religious culture. Instead, in Laos indigenous cults of phi (spirits) and khwan (vital essence) have predominated, while Hindu influence has been limited, though not exclusively, to royal elite circles. In any case the comparative comments interspersed throughout this book are aimed at determining what may be distinctive about Lao religious culture and its articulation of Buddhism, not to overly emphasize its historical dependence upon Sri Lanka, though Sri Lanka, while not very familiar to contemporary Lao people, has been sometimes lionized in Laos as the mother load of Theravada’s origins and purity. Over these past thirty years most of my travel itineraries to Sri Lanka, for extended or brief stays, were simply a combination of marathon flights between New England, where I make my home and teach, and South Asia, where I do my research and writing, without any stopovers in between. About ten years ago Sree Padma (my wife) and I decided that we no longer wanted to endure the travails of “airplane asceticism.” We began to break our journeys in either Europe or ix Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asian stopovers were very rewarding, especially in yielding perspectives on how Buddhism relates to various other religious cultures with which it has been long wedded. In December, 2004, we spent ten days in Luang Phrabang, Laos, where neither of us had ever traveled before. Our timing was fortuitous, for we avoided the catastrophic tsunami that ravaged the southeast coast of Sri Lanka (the very location where we had originally planned to stay with friends over that unforgettable Christmas holiday). In anticipation of that first visit to Laos, I located relevant scholarly sources that could inform our impending visit. I easily discovered several helpful political histories and anthropological studies of Laotian society.1 I already knew of detailed French scholarly studies of Lao culture published over many decades,2 but I was surprised to discover, given the importance of Laos to the history of Theravada, that only a few specialized academic studies of recent origin focused on its religious culture per se. While Marcel Zago’s masterful descriptive compendium of Lao religious ritual, written in French before the revolution of 1975, remains the standard reference work for Lao religious culture,it is,regrettably,not well distributed and now, inevitably, getting somewhat dated. Thus there is no single volume of an accessible sort that can introduce interested students of religion directly to Buddhist tradition within the social and historical contexts of Lao religious culture .That is one of the primary purposes of this book, although I am by no means an expert on the subject, and my work cannot begin to approximate the precision, intimacy, and scope of Zago’s earlier work. Though I am on “temporary loan” from studies specific to Sri Lanka, my hope is that this book will be a gateway or introduction for some, a useful collation of knowledge for others, an interpretation that provokes further reflection for a few more, and a stimulus for future studies of Laos and its religious culture as the country becomes more accessible to outsiders and as its own intellectual resources develop further. I am under no illusions that this is a definitive work, but I do hope it will help...