The Vakkali Sutta, a canonical text within the Pali Buddhist canon, tells the story of the Buddha Shakyamuni’s visit to infirm elderly monk, Vakkali, to inquire after his health. Vakkali reports to the Buddha that his physical state is deteriorating, intimating that he is near his life’s end. When asked if he has any regrets looking back on his life, Vakkali replies that in truth he has only one: that he had been unable to make the trip himself to venerate the Buddha in person. The Buddha rebuffs his senior disciple with a refrain now famous among Theravada Buddhists:
“Enough, Vakkali! What is there to see in this vile body? One who sees the Dhamma, Vakkali, sees me; one who sees me sees the Dhamma.”
This reply articulates a foundational principle for later followers of the Buddhist path: the Buddha himself was a mere mortal, a flesh-and-blood human being—he does not intend for others to treat his person as an object of veneration. As the Buddha says elsewhere, he “is not a close-fisted teacher”—all that one needs to know regarding the path to liberation is contained within his teaching, his Dhamma, his gift to the world. And so, he insists, “one who sees the Dhamma, sees me.”
Such a conception of the Buddha as having departed from his disciples upon death contrasts fundamentally with Christian insistence on the abiding presence of God in the world—the Buddha is the “Tathāgatha” (“He Who is Thus Gone”), whereas Christ remains ever-present among believers by means of the Holy Spirit. This theological discrepancy is one among others explored by Neena Mahadev in Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, an ethnographic study of Buddhist-Christian relations in Sri Lanka based on fieldwork undertaken over the course of nearly two decades. Mahadev follows the complex dynamics between factions of these two communities in the context of 21st century Sri Lanka, investigating aspects of interreligious tension and cooperation resulting from a devastating 2004 tsunami, a protracted civil war (1983-2009) and its difficult political legacy, rapidly evolving media technology facilitating the dissemination of religious messaging at an unprecedented speed and scale, and the acceleration of novel religious movements in the context of globalization, including forms of charismatic evangelical Christianity. As Mahadev explains, antagonistic relations between Buddhists (who make up approximately 70 percent of the population) and Christians (who altogether today make up approximately 7.5 percent of the island’s population) stand at the cross-section of a number of religious and ethnic fault lines defining social and political life in contemporary Sri Lanka. Investigating the strategies through which Christians negotiate their place as religious minorities, Mahadev characterizes the overall relationship between Buddhists and Christians in Sri Lanka as one of “agonistic pluralism,” in which contestation for physical, political and discursive space at times gives way to inventive theological and interpersonal compromises.
The narrative of Karma and Grace departs from an account of the background to a bill proposed in Sri Lankan parliament to ban “unethical conversions” of citizens to Christianity, explaining the contentious legacy of Christian missionizing on the island from the colonial era through to the present-day characterization of Christianity as a “foreign presence” on the part of some Sinhala Buddhist nationalists. Alongside this background on socio-political factors contributing to the introduction of this unique attempted legal intervention, Mahadev outlines fundamental discrepancies between Buddhist and Christian worldviews constituting in some cases what appear to be absolute dialogical impasses. With respect to the issue of religious conversion, a central theme of the book, for example, Mahadev illustrates the fundamental tension between the Buddhist insistence that any incentivization of religious conversion (most importantly, in this context, material incentives which one might receive as a convert to Christianity characterized as “charity” by a church) represents an “impingement” on the free will of the target of conversion. This attitude owes to the Buddhist characterization of monetary or material promises as worldly “fetters,” desire for which is a central obstacle to the ultimate goal of enlightenment from the point of view of Buddhist soteriology. In radical contrast, Mahadev explains, an evangelical view insists that human agency may have little to do with an instance of conversion to Christianity. From this perspective, the operation of God’s grace is at work in guiding both a convert in their decision process as well as any member of a Christian church shepherding a potential convert into this new community. Whether or not any “incentives” are in play is irrelevant from this point of view—it is not a matter of “unethically” compromising the agency of a convert through the promise of charity, but rather one of recognizing the ubiquitous agency of God through providential intervention at every turn in our daily lives. In short, an evangelical Christian may see conversion as one category among God’s miracles (p.114).
The body of Karma and Grace is devoted to case studies illustrating the broad spectrum of discursive strategies through which religious difference is negotiated in 21st century Sri Lanka. Alongside antagonistic narratives of Buddhist majoritarian nationalism and Christian “dominionist” theology (an originally American, mid-century evangelical movement voicing a mandate for the necessary conversion of the Global South), Mahadev documents examples of interreligious cooperation and cohabitation as well. While some of these examples, such as that of the public alliance between conservative Roman Catholic leadership and Sinhala Buddhist nationalists, may be accounted for on the basis of political expediency, Mahadev works to reveal more subtle “quotidian moral negotiations” through which individuals (as opposed to religious collectives) narrativize religious conversion, liminality, and uncertainty. There is in Sri Lanka historically and today the phenomenon of Christian-Buddhist interreligious marriage, in cases of which it is not uncommon for both partners to retain their religious identity and ties to devotional communities for the duration of their lives. Expressing a viewpoint which would no doubt be welcome among western liberal theologically pluralist circles, one of Mahadev’s interlocuters, a Buddhist convert from Christianity, reflected fondly on her religious upbringing, maintaining that Christianity helps “to cultivate good habits in our heart” (p.245). Mahadev gives the example of a Buddhist women who believed that she had been exorcised of a spirit possession through the joint efforts of a Buddhist professional healer and Christian pastor, suggesting that this individual “sought a way to experiment with Sinhala Buddhist and Pentecostal-charismatic Christian deliverance forms, at one and the same time, to doubly assure her cure” (p.258).
Mahadev is able to study interreligious negotiation at the granular social level through her “multicameral” ethnographic approach, which demands that the researcher embed within multiple different religious communities in order to locate and explore the lived experiences of individuals located at the interstices of these communities, a methodology necessary “for examining the conflictual and conciliatory quotidian realities and intimacies” of the religious factions under consideration (p.33). The theoretical dimension to Karma and Grace is underwritten by attention to political theory (placing in conversation Carl Schmitt, Theodor Adorno, Chantal Mouffe and William Connolly) while also bringing to bear extensive reading from the history of religions and comparative theology. Mahadev is careful to avoid facile characterizations of novel religious phenomena concerning which some may be tempted to handily classify on the basis of well-worn paradigms. For example, in explaining a novel cult of Maitrī Bōsat (the future Buddha Maitreya) now promoted by a self-styled monk and mystic, Pitaduwe Siridhamma Thero, Mahadev cautions against categorizing messianic aspects of 21st century Maitrī Bōsat worship as a form of “religious syncretism,” involving the crude superimposition of Christian themes into a Buddhist context. Rather, Mahadev suggests that Sri Lankan Buddhists like Siridhamma Thero have creatively redeployed long-standing repertoires of Theravada Buddhist imagery and narrative, offering “a competitive and dialogical response to expansionary forms of Christianity by building upon Buddhist conceptions of the future” (p.203).
It is worth pointing out that in recent years there have been some significant convergences between dimensions of global evangelical Christianity as it has found expression in Sri Lankan Buddhist new religious movements. The “prosperity gospel,” or suggestion that personal wealth is not a vice but rather a reward or gift from God in the form of providential favor, for example, has been recently articulated in Buddhist terms by representatives of the Mahamevnawa movement, as well as by Siridhamma Thero (in his new incarnation as “Samanthabhadra Thero”), who explain that affluence, rather than being a “fetter” to be discarded, is the result of the karmic fruition of good deeds in past lifetimes, and therefore an index of personal virtue. This example falls somewhat outside the scope of Mahadev’s project, and I invoke it not as a criticism of her work but rather as a possible theme for future investigation by anthropologists of Sri Lanka. In all, Karma and Grace stands out as an ethnographic study of the highest caliber, with a clearly articulated methodological approach and set of intended theoretical interventions. It builds on decades of widely read ethnographic studies of Sri Lanka to provide a welcome update on the dynamic 21st century state of affairs involving the negotiation of religious difference in an era of globalization, fissiparous regional politics, and digital media saturation.
