Buddhism is a missionary salvation religion, first taught by the Buddha (‘the Enlightened One’) in the north Indian Gangetic plain in the sixth and early fifth centuries BC. The Buddha came from the edge of the Brahmanic society of his day, and he reacted both against the ritualist exclusivism of Brahman religion and the extreme asceticism practised by renouncers who followed Jainism (Gombrich 1988).
Buddhism began as a form of humanistic, religious *individualism: each person’s salvation lay within their own grasp, regardless of background or sex. Salvation in Buddhism means the attainment of nirvana through overcoming desire. Achieving this required long training and meditation and before that the accumulation of spiritual merit (won by moral actions and supporting Buddhist clerics); this accumulation was presumed to take many lives. Buddhism shares with *Hinduism the doctrine of reincarnation according to one’s actions, understood in Buddhism to mean in accordance with the moral qualities of one’s actions. At any one time there are some practitioners who are more advanced than others, and this is institutionalized in the distinction, found in all traditional forms of Buddhism, between the Sangha (monastic community) and the laity.
Thus traditional Buddhism was egalitarian only in the sense of believing in spiritual equality of opportunity. The closest Buddhism came to propagating the notion of a community of equal believers was the early idea that all monks were equal strivers on the path to salvation; but even this was modified as Buddhist rulers established hierarchies of abbots and other monastic offices. The role of the laity was always the spiritually inferior one of providing material support for the Sangha.
In modern times a new form of Buddhism has arisen which does assert the equality of all believers. Its followers attend meditation centres rather than monasteries, and reject the spiritual leadership of monks. They understand Buddhism to encompass social reform, social work and (sometimes) socialism. Influenced by nineteenth-century European thought, they see Buddhism as a rational ‘philosophy’. This kind of modernist Buddhism has been called Protestant Buddhism by Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988), not just because it was profoundly influenced by Protestantism, but also because, at least in the Sri Lankan case, it arose as part of a Sinhalese protest against Christian missionary activity and British dominance.
Buddhism today can be divided into the Theravada, found in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Sri Lanka, and the Mahayana, found in Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Both have missionary offshoots in many other parts of the world. Theravada is the older and more conservative form. Mahayana Buddhism first arose around the turn of the common era in north India and added many new scriptures and numerous saint-like bodhisattva figures for the laity to worship. Tantric Buddhism is an esoteric current within the Mahayana, based on still later scriptures. It has played a crucial part in the development and legitimation of priestly roles and instrumental rituals within Mahayana Buddhism.
Until the 1980s there was little substantial anthropological work on Mahayana Buddhism, though more has now begun to be published (Gellner 1992, Mumford 1989, Samuel 1993). For various reasons (Gellner 1990) it was Theravada Buddhism which first attracted a very large amount of extremely high quality scholarship (Gombrich 1971, Keyes 1977, Nash 1966, Spiro 1971, Tambiah 1970).
Initial anthropological enquiries on Buddhism attempted to answer a number of interconnected questions, all ultimately focused on the problem of understanding Buddhism as a religious system: What is the relationship between the worship of the Buddha and the cult of spirits or gods whom Theravada Buddhists worship for worldly ends? Do lay Buddhists really accept total responsibility for their actions and future lives? How do they justify performing rituals for the benefit of dead relatives? What do Buddhists believe they are doing when they worship the Buddha? Do they really accept that he is a dead man who cannot help them? Do lay Buddhists want to attain nirvana? Do lay people really understand the simple rituals of Theravada Buddhism as nothing but aids to the generation of good intentions, as the official explanation would have it, or do they also see them as magically effective? What differences are there in the monks’ view of Buddhism and the laity’s? What motivates people to become monks or nuns? What do the laity receive for their support of the Sangha?
In anthropological terms, these questions boil down to the following issues: (i) How can an individualistic religion provide for collective ends? (ii) How does the austere virtuoso creed of the texts relate to the practice of ordinary lay Buddhists? (iii) What is the relationship of Buddhism to the non-Buddhist practices and traditions with which Buddhism always coexists? Are they complementary opposites within a single system (Tambiah 1970)? Are they dynamically and historically mutually-defining but competing systems (Mumford 1989)? Is Buddhism in a transformation of wider shamanic practices (Samuel 1993)? Buddhism poses in particularly stark form the problem of *great and little traditions. It also raises the question of the universalizability of the concept of *syncretism (Gombrich 1971).
There has also been debate on the extent to which Buddhism can be said to have provided a theory of the *state. Textual scholars assert that the scriptural story of King Mahasammata was originally meant as a skit on Hindu theories of *kingship, not as a serious Buddhist alternative (Gombrich 1988). How far this satirical intent was misunderstood or ignored subsequently, and how sociologically significant the story was in Theravada countries (Tambiah 1976), remain controversial questions. In the 1980s anthropologists increasingly turned their attention to the role of Buddhist institutions, doctrines and personnel in the development of *nationalism and *political violence. In some cases this meant laying aside questions of authenticity; in others a critique of the role of Buddhism in modern politics seemed to be premised on the older concern with identifying what Buddhism is truly about.
