The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (review)

The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. By H. L. Seneviratne (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999) 358 pp. $49.00 cloth $22.00 paper

This new study of the character and social impact of the Sri Lankan Buddhist clergy, from the early twentieth century to the present, is extremely important for at least three reasons. It represents an innovative and appealing approach to anthropology; it offers a challenging, even if partly inconsistent, response to Weber's interpretation of the socioeconomic significance of Buddhism; and, most important of all, it provides a fresh and powerful thesis concerning the origins and nature of the "modern Buddhist monkhood" in Sri Lanka, and exposes with consummate skill and compelling evidence the reasons for the largely distressing social and political consequences that the Buddhist clergy have wrought in Sri Lanka during much of the twentieth century.¹ Each of these contributions calls for elaboration.

Though Seneviratne is not alone in adopting an approach that he calls "liberation anthropology," he appears to be the first to use the term, or to reflect on it in such an incisive way. Turning his back on the relativist assumptions of much conventional and postmodern anthropology, Seneviratne insists that students of culture can no longer look with complete detachment on the rise of intolerance, ethnic cleansing, gender violence, political corruption, and the like, wherever they appear. For the anthropologist to move, as he says, "from participant observer to observing participant" means that universal normative considerations, such as human rights, must now be brought to bear on the scientific study of culture, and that anthropologists themselves have a stake in what different cultures make of these considerations--especially "native anthropologists" like himself, a member of the majority Sinhala community of Sri Lanka. It is such people who have a special obligation to address subjects that affect "the happiness and well-being of the members of their soci-eties."

Seneviratne's summons is controversial and will, as it should, provoke further cogitation, even though it possesses considerable intuitive force. In settings as ethnically divided and hostile as Sri Lanka, the work of anthropologists and other social scientists, native or not, is rarely received as objective or detached, whatever the intention. That fact would appear to add weight to Seneviratne's courageous call to reconsider the value neutrality of social science.

The study is explicitly set against the background of Weber's work on religion and capitalism, and, in particular, reflects some familiar criticisms of Weber as they pertain to Sri Lanka. Seneviratne taxes Weber for not properly grasping the connection between Buddhism and socioeconomic life, largely because of the idealized and "essentialized" description of "ancient Buddhism" that he inherited from the Indologists of his day. By distinguishing too neatly between an intellectualized, "other-worldly" religion of the elite, and a "lived," socially-engaged folk religion of the people, Weber is said to have misjudged the political and economic potential of Buddhism, which manifested itself in important ways in Sri Lanka. There, as elsewhere, Buddhism had significant political consequences, just as "contrary to Weber's understanding," it provided the resources for a "[capitalist] ethic that has remarkable resemblances to the Puritanism that Weber derived from . . . Calvinism" (346).

Seneviratne's revisionary comments are in many ways compelling, and underscore the need to handle Weber's thoughts on Buddhism with care. However, in regard to the Buddhist sources for a capitalist ethic, there are some points at which Seneviratne's account is inconsistent. One of them is the mention of dana (almsgiving) as the basis for economic rationality and an ethic of wealth creation and hard work (345). Seneviratne himself hints that the objective of dana is not economic activity and the creation of wealth as ends in themselves, but is, rather, religious merit to be acquired by making donations to the monks (320--323). For Weber, a crucial premise of the Protestant ethic...