Theravada Buddhism: The View of the Elders

Chapter 8 Theravada in Wider Perspective

ChapTEr 8 Theravada in Wider Perspective Theravada Buddhism today is no longer confined to its traditional habitats. For the past one hundred years, it has been reaching out to the world beyond South and Southeast Asian borders. This is not unusual for Theravada in particular or Buddhism in general. In its history of more than twenty-five centuries Buddhism has mixed with and been assimilated into different cultures, undergoing changes in itself and causing changes in the host cultures in the process. The difference today is that, for understandable reasons, this process is taking place much more rapidly and extensively. What is happening to Theravada in the globalized world is only a portion of what is happening to Buddhism generally in this broader context. So the story presented here must be viewed essentially as part of a larger whole. The outreaching character of Buddhism from its very beginnings has been noted. An essential feature of the compassionate Buddha was his wish that the message of “deathlessness” reach as many people as possible. The way in which he asked the first sixty arahants to go in sixty directions “beating the drum of the Dhamma” is well known. He himself spent his life traveling and teaching until his parinirvana. With the Emperor Asoka’s efforts in the third century BCE, Buddhism moved outside India to become the first pan-Asian religion. Asoka was clearly a ruler who thought in global terms. To conform to his ideology, he had chosen Buddhism, which had a global appeal, to share with the world. It was through his efforts that Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, among other places, received Buddhism. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, Christianity came to Theravada in Wider Perspective 139 countries like Sri Lanka as a result of globalizing efforts from the West. First, it was the Portuguese with Roman Catholicism, followed by the Dutch and the British with varieties of Protestantism. Rhys Davids, who studied Pali and Buddhism in Sri Lanka and subsequently founded the Pali Text Society (PTS) in England in 1881, was a member of the British civil administration. Although this was not the first encounter of the West with Buddhism, the establishment of the PTS marked the first organized effort to introduce Buddhist Pali texts to the West. It is interesting to note how the same globalizing trends that brought the European religions to Asia took Buddhism back to the West. In addition to the PTS in England, another early example of Theravada being presented to the world was Anagarika Dharmapala’s presence in the Parliament of World Religions held in Chicago in 1893. Over thirty years later, in 1926, Dharmapala was instrumental in establishing the Buddhist Vihara in London, the first Theravada center in Europe. Theravada reached the United States later. Its beginning was marked by the Washington Buddhist Vihara, established by the Sri Lankan monk Madihe Pannasiha Mahanayaka Thera in 1965. For the last half-century Theravada Buddhism, as a living religious practice, has been spreading fast in the West. As it did in the past, this translocation has changed both the religion itself and the cultures in which it has found new homes. This concluding chapter will study some of these new developments. Diaspora Theravada In recent years, for sociopolitical reasons, people from developing countries have been moving to developed countries in large numbers . These have included Buddhists from South and Southeast Asia. The mass migration of Vietnamese people during and after the Vietnam War brought many Mahayana Buddhists to the United States and Europe. For the last five decades Tibetan Buddhists have been resettling in India, North America, and Europe in great numbers. During the destructive Pol Pot regime (1975–1979) whoever was able fled Cambodia. Many of these refugees were relocated in the United States and Europe, thus bringing a large number of ethnic Khmer Theravada Buddhists to the West. A relatively small number from 140 thERAvADA BuDDhI SM military-governed Myanmar have settled in the United States and European countries; and in addition, a sizable number from Thailand , Sri Lanka, and Laos have also settled in these areas, not to escape any particular political situations, but motivated by the possibility of improving their socioeconomic prospects. It is natural that these people would bring their religion with them. Buddhism transported in this manner is described as “baggage Buddhism” by some commentators, for these immigrants carried their religion along with them...