I want to congratulate Neena Mahadev on such an important and insightful book. It has stimulated my reflections on my own research and or understanding inter-religion in Burma in many directions.
What I love about Karma and Grace is its consistent approach to take religion seriously in terms of theology/soteriology, but also sovereignty, politics and lived religion. Few books are able to carry off one or two of these aspects well, but Karma and Grace is unique in doing all of these with equal success. It is a testament to not just her multicameral method but her insight, sensitivity and skill as a scholar.
In this reflection, I want to offer inquires and comparisons on three aspects of the book as it relates to what I know in colonial and contemporary Burma. The first are about attention to time scales, immediacy of miracles vs the long durée of karma and nibbana, to ask what Vipassana does in this space. The second are some reflections around the connections between religious projects of sovereignty, religious competition, and distrust of foreign donors. Finally, I want to talk about whether, and how, to study what she terms inter-religion.
Immediacy of Miracles and the Immediacy of Vipassana
I appreciate how Karma and Grace lays out the very different scales of intervention between the karmic transformation toward nibbana and the immediacy of Pentacostal miracles and transformative grace. The contrast between slow change and immediacy made me think about these as competing emphases internal to each tradition in relation to their competition between traditions.
In the larger Christian framework, there seems to be a tension between Pentecostals and other born-again groups’ emphasis on the immediate transformation of the individual and the proximity of global transformations, either in the coming salvation of the nation or the return of Christ verses mainline Protestant and Catholic authorities who emphasize slow moral transformation of the individual and downplay discussions of global transformations or eschatological change. This makes sense of the alignment of the conservative Catholic authorities with Buddhist nationalist/modernist agenda in Sri Lanka– both see their power grounded in the long history of their tradition and its preservation.
But it is spaces of immediacy of transformation in Buddhist practices that I found more curious in their absence in the books description of post-war Sri Lanka. It is not that Mahadev’s Buddhist interlocutors don’t have means of making quick and necessary changes in their status — the book offers a robust depiction of various Buddhist means of interacting with gods, ghosts and demons, ones that at times are understood as comparable to Christian miracles. Such interventions may be increasingly dismissed by modernist/nationalist Buddhist elites, but this does not seem to matter to their practitioners who are looking for practical, immediate intervention. However, looking from Burma your discussion of the Buddhist landscape of Sri Lanka seems to be missing a key option for Buddhist immediacy and transformation. Early in the book you describe an urban intersection in Colombo housing the edifices of Buddhist modernism, including a Vipassana meditation center, but meditation doesn’t show up elsewhere in your multicameral lens. This is clearly about local Buddhist emphases at the time—but the absence itself might tell us something.
In Burma throughout the 20th century, Vipassana meditation held out an option for a shortcut past the lifetimes of karmic moral transformation to instead reach nibbana “in this very lifetime.” This new meditation method, popularized in the early 20th century, combined with the study of Abhidhamma produced not only many monks who the Burmese Buddhist population knew to achieve the highest levels or to be enlightened, but also held this out as a real possibility for lay people as well. Vipassana centers of the late 20th century kept records and sign boards of the number of lay meditators who had achieved each of the stages nearing nibbana. While people recognized that this was a difficult and virtuosic achievement, multiple levels of immediate individual transformation were possible in this system. So, what does vipassana’s offer of enlightenment say to the Pentecostal immediacy of salvation through grace? Why isn’t vipassana an option for potential Christian converts? I wonder if it has something to do with models of theological anthropology and agency. To think about this, I want to look at a different moment of religious competition.
Christianity was never considered as great a threat by Buddhists in Burma as it was in Ceylon. The famous 19th century debates between Buddhist monks and Christian clerics in Ceylon are only ever reproduced as mild amusements in colonial Burma. Christianity was not felt as a threat in part because Christian conversion was deeply tied to ethnicity for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, we have a much smaller archive in the past or the present of Buddhist authorities critiquing Christian practice or theology. However, one example I know well is that of Ledi Sayadaw, the attributed founder of the Vipassana meditation movement, and his sermons for moral reform. The movements for temperance in early 20th century were multi-religious, with Christian, Buddhist and Muslim advocates working in parallel, at times in explicit co-operation, but more often in unspoken competition toward the same ends. Preaching to an audience against drinking alcohol, using intoxicants and eating meat, he exhorted his Buddhist audience to consider the extraordinary power they held for transformation through moral actions. In this sermon, he combines the lifetime’s long karmic fruit of good actions with a range of immediate outcomes, both scientific and spiritual that could come from study and moral reform. But he also takes the opportunity to contrast Buddhist’s spiritual agency with that of Christians.
Ledi Sayadaw’s calls for moral reform defined the community in opposition to Christians in order to emphasize the potential of good behavior for Buddhists. In Christian ethics, he argued, individual humans could do nothing to change the situation; even Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, and Moses could do nothing more than make offerings and wait for God’s intervention. Buddhists, on the other hand, knew well the power of good actions; karma offered the possibility of counteracting the effects of past misdeeds. In this telling, Christians themselves are powerless, whereas Buddhists are depicted as individual (liberal?) agents, able to act upon, and transform, themselves and their world. I don’t know if this difference in agency offers any insights into the difference in time scales between contemporary Pentacostal and Buddhist agency, but it is something to think about.
Particularities of Buddhist Politics of Religious Sovereignty
I was really struck by the material depictions of religious practices of sovereignty in Karma and Grace (for example, sand run over by preachers used to fertilize miracles at home, the geography of Buddhist protector gods) and religious competition understood in economic terms as fraud. There is something important in Buddhist allegations against other religions buying converts as well as the broader distrust of foreign NGOs and donors.
Twenty-first century Burma has seen a Buddhist nationalist project against out-conversion — focused mainly on the image of the Buddhist woman fraudulently lured to convert to Islam. But what Karma and Grace helped me see is that the concerns over out-conversion are tied to a very deep suspicion of foreign donors–religiously driven or not–in both Buddhist places. In Burma there are two moments in the 21st century in which there has been a suspicion against the motives of foreign donors: the moments proceeding and after Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and in the wake of rising anti-Muslim violence from 2014 though to the Rohingya genocide of 2017. These moments of rejecting foreign aid, described by the military and NLD governments as a threat to national sovereignty, seem very different viewed through simply a political lens. One was that of an autocratic military regime happy to deny citizens life-saving aid it could not, or would not, provide. The other was the Democratic icon Aung San Suu Kyi and a Buddhist nationalist movement casting aspersions on foreign NGOs for labeling the nation as Islamophobic and genocidal. The religious motives of the NGO work were not ever the explicit content of Buddhist complaint, but their non-Buddhist nature made them particularly suspect in this moment.
Reading Karma and Grace made me bring these two events together in relation to a particular Buddhist rhetoric of religious competition. As you rightly point out, Sri Lanka and Burma are often lauded as highly generous nations with populations who donate significant portions of their own income. But the politics of who should be the object of generosity are apparent among Buddhists in both places. From the 19th century to the present, there have been modernist Buddhist reformers who have pushed to limit lavish donations to monks, temples and rituals and instead focus that largess on helping the poor and needy of the laity. But notwithstanding traditional modes of distribution, movements for large scale Buddhist social welfare never really take off–or when they do seem to be overshadowed by Christian or international “development” generosity on the one side or large-scale donations to monks or temples on the other.
I wonder if this is partly due to the politics of religious sovereignty that Mahadev points out–that a righteous Buddhist king’s merit is supposed to enable him to karmically and materially provide for his subjects and Buddhist nation states have taken on this role. Pointing out the failings of the Buddhist polity to provide — by the need for outside donations — brings attention to the karmic failings of the king/nation state and its karmic illegitimacy. Outside donors are both competitors in this karmic economy of merit — stealing the karmic credit that should justly go to the nation in order to lure people away from the fold, but they are also a threat because such donations hold up a mirror to reflect the moral and karmic inadequacies of those in authority.
This makes me think about Buddhist suspicions of corruption and malfeasance against both state leaders (military or democratic) as well as against monastic leaders. The political overtones of Buddhists organized against corruption are clear in contemporary Sri Lanka, but they also have threads in Burma. It was Buddhist social service organizations in the wake of cyclone Nargis that fostered the civil society organizing which brought about the decade of democratic transition in Burma. Foreign, Christian and Muslims were depicted as a threat to the nation, but it was Buddhist-led social services that most clearly revealed the karmic untenability of the last military regime.
Indifference and Agonistic form of Inter-Religion
Finally, the part of Karma and Grace I draw the most inspiration from is the chapter on what Mahadev terms “agonistic forms of inter-religion,” that is, those spaces of lived interaction between religions where people engage multiple ontologies and epistemologies pragmatically without conflict or contradiction. The cases you depict in this chapter are particularly compelling for how normal and relatable they are.
In my work on religious difference in colonial Burma, at one point I had set out to study what I was calling “religious indifference.” That is people in the highly religiously plural milieu of late 19th century colonial lower Burma, who lived lives that engaged multiple traditions without any conflict or concern. Their interactions in terms of intimate relationships, families, ritual participation and affective ties consistently ignored or defied the strict boundaries of religious identity and religious difference that the colonial state, and some of their Burmese neighbours, took to be foundational.
Other scholars have pointed out my term “religious indifference” potentially depicts these people as particularly cold or combative toward religion, and Mahadev’s term “agonistic” could be read this way as well. However, what I really mean are people who were particularly unmoved and unmotivated by religious identity as a mode of organizing human difference. Despite the overtones of disquiet in indifference or agonism, we are each trying to describe a way of being distinct from forms that emphasize difference as conflict: religious competition for you, religious difference for me. I was disappointed to see that Mahadev declined to theorize these modes of being. Disappointed because I’m stuck and I hoped she’d do the work for me. But on another level, I wonder if an instinct not to theorize such lifeways is more appropriate.
I stopped working on “religious indifference” in part because I researched colonial discourses about religious tolerance in Burma. Such discourses observed and heralded the types of lives Mahadev and I are trying to describe. They lauded them for their liberal and modern values of tolerance, which in the colonial depiction almost out did the Europeans at their own liberal modern tolerance game. However, in such praise the discourse ironically redoubled the work of religious difference. Only those who were labeled as Buddhist were seen to be so tolerant — and tolerance as a virtue was used denigrate and racialize religious others to devastating effect both in colonial anti-Muslim violence and in the Rohingya genocide. And so, I became wary of describing any people as religiously tolerant, of valorizing any set of practices that defy or ignore boundaries of religious identity having witnessed its murderous capacity.
But it also made me wonder if we are better off not looking too closely at such lives and practices of religious indifference/agonism. Like a spirit that disappears if you look directly at it, or a quantum particle that changes if you observe it, perhaps these very everyday approaches to religions should not be the object of our descriptions or theorizing, because our theoretical frames have the power to transform them into something else. What if instead we normalize them by requiring explanations for their absence rather than their presence? That is precisely what I see Mahadev doing in Karma and Grace, approaching religious competition and the production and maintenance of religious difference as a problem that must be explained, the aberration rather than the norm. She does so with such skill, such nuance and attention to “taking religion seriously,” that she has set the standard for the field.
