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Sam
Foreign.
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Podcast Host
You're listening to the first episode of a four part series, and for this series we're bringing you something a little bit different, as all these interviews were recorded on site at the recent annual conference of the association for Asian Studies aas held in Vancouver, Canada. This is one of the largest and most important gatherings in the world for scholars, researchers and practitioners working on Asia. Every year, thousands of participants come together across hundreds of panels, workshops and informal meetings to share research, debate ideas and take stock of where the field is heading. While AAS spans the entire Asian region and has a wide range of disciplines from history to anthropology, from politics to religion, Burma has long held a meaningful place within these conversations, and this year was no exception. Against the backdrop of ongoing crisis inside the country, discussions repeatedly returned to questions of conflict, displacement, resistance, and the role of scholarship in times of upheaval. For many attendees, this was not just an academic exercise, but it was a way of staying connected to realities on the ground and to each other. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited by the conference organizers to be on site throughout the event with the aim of helping bring some of these conversations beyond the walls of the conference itself into our global audience of listeners tuning in virtually. As with similar gatherings we've covered in the past, we set up a small recording space and we spoke to a wide range of participants, scholars, activists and others working on issues related to Burma. These are not our usual long form interviews, but shorter, more immediate conversations that capture something of the energy and diversity of perspectives present at the conference. So for that reason you may notice that the audio feels a bit different from what you're used to hearing on the podcast. Recording in the middle of a busy conference in downtown Vancouver comes with its challenges, background noises, tight schedules, and less than ideal acoustics. Our team has done everything it can to clean this up, but some of that atmosphere still remains, and so we hope, if anything, it helps convey a sense of being there, of moving between rooms, catching fragments of conversation, and encountering different voices as they emerge in real time. This series is part of our ongoing effort to document and share the many ways that people continue to engage with Burma, even from afar, and to create a bridge between spaces like AAS and listeners around the world. We're very grateful to the organizers for the invitation, and we're already looking ahead to future opportunities to do more work like this at similar gatherings. And with that, let's turn to the conversations themselves.
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Geeta
Sam. Hi, I'm Geeta. I'm a historian based in India and I presented a paper at this conference on the tensions between a colonial idea of Buddhist Asia and the emerging idea of a Hindu India. And in particular, I follow a couple of characters in this story and the one that I'm. My starting point in some sense is a Sri Lankan activist named Anagarika Dharmapala, who comes from Sri Lanka, or colonial Salon as it was then known around the 1880s to India. He comes with the Theosophical Society. There's two mentors there. And the goal is to revive Buddhism in India, but the goal also is to secure the sort of Buddhist sacred sites as they are actually being unearthed in India at this time. And in particular he's interested in the Mahabodhi Temple. The Mahabodhi Temple is actually in the hands of a. It's managed by a Hindu Shaivite sect. There are Hindu rituals there, there are Buddhist worshippers there. It's part of the Shraddh circuit of Gaya. And Dharmapala is really interested in returning the management of this temple to Buddhist hands. By return, of course, we're not sure it was ever completely in Buddhist hands. That's a different matter. But this is what his goal is. And by using the Mahabodhi Temple and its kind of return to Buddhism as a kind of emotive issue, he's also trying to bring together a Buddhist Asia, a Buddhist Asia which is very diverse, which has all kinds of Buddhist practices, you know, among the Buddhist larger Buddhist community. He's trying to bring them together around the rescue, quote unquote, of the Mahabodhi temple. So in 1895, he enters the temple and he this place is a Japanese Buddhist statue given to him by one of his companions, Kozengunaratna, who later becomes Shaku Kozen, known as Shaku Kozen in Japan. And the head priest of the Mahabodhi Temple is not actually around. But his men then tell Dharmapala to leave, they escort him out and also escort the statue out. And after this, there are two court cases in which go all the way up to the Calcutta High Court. There are some early wins for Dharmapala, but eventually he loses both of the court cases. And he also loses a fair bit of support that he was looking for in Calcutta, given that most of Calcutta's kind of educated elite were upper caste Hindus or would self identify that way. He ends up losing a lot of their support. But actually what does happen is that there is some support for this cause in the rest of. In certain parts of the rest of Asia and Burma is one of them. So in Burma, there was probably some support for this cause for about two decades, that's the 1890s and the 19 and sort of the early 1900s. There's a fair bit of support, of course, in colonial Ceylon, which is Dharmapala's own sort of, you know, stomping ground, as it were. But in India, where he is really interested in that larger project of reviving Buddhism and sort of capturing the Mahabodhi Temple, in this way, he's lost support. He did establish the Mahabodhi society in order to sort of keep this, keep this issue alive and also to try and revive pilgrimage and kind of bring together that Buddhist Asia that I was talking about. So there's this idea of Buddhist Asia around, kind of shared, a very pared down shared idea of Buddhism. And there is some traction for this. But of course, national boundaries, other political problems often get in the way of a serious kind of political outcome for Pan Buddhism that Dharmapala is leading at this point. Now, around the 1920s, we begin to see in India at least a kind of movement towards a stronger Hindu identity. And in particular, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar writes his kind of most important text, maybe it's called the Essentials of Hindutva. He releases it in 1923, which is quite a potent time. It's immediately post the first mass anti colonial movement called Non Cooperation Khilafat, later led by M.K. gandhi. And in it he argues that Hindu is a designation for anybody who is from India who regards India not only as their fatherland, note that it's not motherland, but fatherland as well as Holy Land. So here he's on sort of tricky ground. It's fine if people identify themselves as Hindus, and so they're fine. They recognize India as both the Holy Land and the fatherland. However, what do you do with Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, who are all increasingly asserting their separateness from this larger Hindu kind of identity. His argument was that they're all good minorities. Christians and Parsis could even be patriotic minorities. Muslims could never be any of those things. But he still preferred that those who regarded their homeland and fatherland as India, they be recognized as Hindu and they be recognized as the rightful kind of citizens or rightful, yeah, citizens of the country of India. Now, the problem was there. Well, the problem, or rather the conundrum that he's facing is that there are millions of Buddhists in the rest of Asia. Now, how do we think about that? Now here comes a kind of another attractive proposition for him, which is that India has had a certain kind of cultural imperialist effect on the rest of, of Southeast and East Asia. And that's really in the form primarily of Buddhism and the spread of Buddhis. Even if those communities don't really regard India as anything more than a kind of distant holy land. Other than that intimacy, there's no other real attraction to India. He still is trying to figure out what to do with those communities and how to think about the relationship between Buddhist Asia and this new idea of Hindu India that he is presenting. It's not exactly a new idea, but the particular form in which he presents it is quite new. He's also doing this often through retellings of a lot of different kinds of history. And so he's suggesting that on the one hand the Buddha and Buddhism is to be respected because it's got this enormous international renown. And he doesn't have anything against the Buddha. He does think that he was an interesting character, but he thinks of him as a holy man within the larger Hindu fraternity. Obviously this then raises some tensions with those in Buddhist Asia who are arguing that Buddhism is quite separate. So Buddhism becomes something that's a little bit tricky for them at another level. They are really interested in finding a kind of aggressive or establishing a sort of aggressive, violent, imperialist identity for Hindu India. Historically they aren't really able to find this and instead what usually gets told to them is that it's Buddhism that's your major contribution to human, to the history of humanity. But for them Buddhism is this non violent religion. Yes, it spread everywhere, but this kind of non violence was not something that attracted them. In fact, it weakened India's defenses and so on. So this is the tension that I'm trying to explore. The tension between a Buddhist Asia and a Hindu India.
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Sam
Wow, there is so much there. It is. So that is such a fascinating topic and it goes into so many different directions in looking at the mapping of where colonial Burma and the British colonial empire came and then went and the legacy that it left with those maps. It's also reminding me of, I mean, one figure in this later movement that we talked about, Uchantun, who's the. We spoke to his daughter who Uchantun of course, among many other things was the individual who introduced SN Goenka to Seju Bakin and launched the kind of Goenka Vipassana movement. But then, you know, so many other involvements that he had that was as, as big as that moment in his life was. It's small compared to how much else he accomplished. But you know, within U chiantun's life, thinking about the World Buddhist Fellowship, I think it was called, that really had, in the 1950s, really had this idea of what a pan Buddhist movement could be, which has, you know, since not come about. And so you're talking a bit about the origins of what could have been there, some imaginations. And then, you know, and then, of course, looking at what Bodh Gaya represents as a very. As a pilgrimage site, a mass pilgrimage site that comes and just remembering that it wasn't always that. That it wasn't always Buddhists, that we're aware of it, that we're maintaining it, that we're going and paying respects to it, that it kind of had to be unearthed and accessed through the Mahabodhi society. So so many of those elements that are there both in terms of what came before it and then what would go and come after it in the ensuing decades and centuries, and those figures that were involved and in ways that I think the Ripp of the picture you're painting, it affects so many of us, so many listeners, I would say, that would be tuning in, I mean, from meditators in the west who came to get this practice and have some conceptualization of what it means to, you know, Burmaphiles and those interested in Burmese history and where the British Empire came in and how the story turned out, as well as this. These. These contrasting identities and. And. And movements of, you know, what it means to be Buddhist or what it means to be Hindu and imperial ambitions. And so I almost don't know which thread to pick out there, other than just to lay out, you know, how much is there. Where do you want to take this of all these. These things?
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Geeta
Well, you know, we could start a little bit at the colonial beginning, I would say. So Burma actually has quite a role to play in modern Indian Buddhism and the rise of it.
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Podcast Host
So.
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Geeta
And I'm going to distinguish modern Indian Buddhism, obviously, from the ancient practice. So sometime in the early 1800s, Francis Buchanan Hamilton, the famous colonial surveyor, ends up at Bodh Gaya, and he is documenting the Mahabodhi Temple. He's probably the first one to suggest in the modern era that there is a lot of. There are a lot of Buddhist. There's a lot of Buddhist iconography in the temple, on the temple walls and so on. And the first one to suggest that is a Buddhist site in a certain kind of way, of course, it was with that Hindu Shaivite sect. And he interviewed the high priest, and the high priest, quite. In a quite relaxed and accommodating fashion, even amiable fashion, said to him that actually a group had come from the Burmese court, so the court of Eva, and they had come and they had collected waters and they had done Buddhist worship just a few years prior to Buchanan Hamilton's arrival at the site, which was around 1811, if I recall correctly, and thereafter in the 1870s, we again have evidence that King Mindon Min sent his own kind of group of people to the Mahabodhi temple in order to renovate it or to add to it, because this was merit giving for a king to help and further a kind of Buddhist site, especially ones that are so central to the Buddhist imagination anywhere,
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Sam
just to set some context here, because again, I don't want to impose kind of modern sensibilities on what it took then, not just to. To go to India for this mission, but even to conceptualize where this existed. And, and, and that it wasn't some. Some religious mythology, but it was actually a physical place you can go to and do things at this time. These two dates you're talking about in the 19th century, was there other activity from Buddhist communities in other Buddhist places in that region that were aware of the physical locality. Locality of Bodh Gaya and going there the same way that the Burmese kings were doing?
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Geeta
So we have evidence that there is a steady stream of pilgrims, very small, but they're there. We have mentions of people coming to Bodhkaya for pilgrimage, but it's also true that there is some confusion as to exactly where that is. But there is a replica of the Mahabodhi temple in Bagan from centuries earlier. So there is a sense that there is a Mahabodhi temple, and especially at the level of the court. So it's a court that sends visitors from time to time.
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Sam
The Burmese court. The Burmese court, not other Buddhist kingdoms?
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Geeta
Well, no, I mean, I'm sure there are others as well. The one that I can speak to most confidently is the Burmese court. But the kind of steady flow of Buddhist pilgrims from Burma, which is very. Which this steady flow is very consequential actually, for modern Indian Buddhism. And I'll tell you why in a second. That actually starts later. That starts in the early 20th century. So at this point, Mindon Minh has sent his people and the British government gets a little bit worried. They've given them permission to do a bit of renovation around the temple, but they get worried that they are making a mess of it, quote, unquote. And so they send their own archaeologist, an Indian archaeologist named Rajendra Lal Mitra, to go and check out what they've done. And he declares that it's a mess. And the British then actually renovate the temple themselves. And apparently in the image of what they think about this temple or they thought a Buddhist temple should look like, we know that within 10 years Burma has actually been conquered by the British. It's now turned into a colony. The court of, in fact, the last king of Burma is exiled to India to Rathagiri. And this, I think. So at this point is when Dharmapala sort of enters India. And by the 1895 he started doing his sort of Mahabodhi temple campaign. Now one of the outcomes of that is everywhere he goes in Asia, he asks these head priests that he meets, including the Tatana Bayan, who's the head of the Sasana in Burma, to send volunteers to India to these pilgrimage sites, to settle there and to begin a kind of international Buddhist worship at that site. And in fact, some Burmese pilgrims do come, some monks do come. And the one who I can think of as particularly important is a person named Uchandra Muni who was mentioned at the talk yesterday, actually. And Uch Chandra Muni comes as a, you know, comes at as a very young man. Initially. He comes in the 1890s. Initially he's a little put off by the conditions because the conditions in Bodh Gaya, Kushinagar, all these other places is not great. These are not great places to live, they're not comfortable places to live. He goes back to Burma and then he's a little bit guilty about it, so he comes back again and then he meets Mahavir Swami who is a self styled abbot. Another interesting story, a rebel of 1857, a wrestler who ends up in Sri Lanka and then ends up ordained there and then comes back to Kushinagar, which is the place where the Buddha is said to have died or attained Mahaparenaban. So he becomes his student and his disciple and he lives the rest of his very long life till about 1970 in Kushinagar. He's also the monk who presides over the conversion of Dr. B.R. ambedkar to Buddhism, maybe the largest conversion in modern history, on 14th October 1956, where apparently 500,000 people converted alongside Dr. Ambedkar. And he presides over that conversion ceremony. So this is somebody of some consequence. He does all kinds of things in Kushinagarh to ensure that there is a visible Buddhist worship and practice there. There are other monks who are coming and going, there are pilgrims who are coming and going. The one who was mentioned yesterday was U othama who is an early Burmese nationalist and Dr. Sanayer MIT is working on him. And he also comes to India to study, actually. So a lot of the Burmese who are coming into India are coming not only for Buddhist purposes, but they're also coming for good old fashioned educational purposes. Later they also come for political purposes and of course trade and commerce. So the links with Burma are very, they long predate borders and so on, but in the 20th century they're also quite a visible presence in all of these areas. So he comes to study in the early 1900s and then he's here when he's in India when the Swadeshi movement happens. And he's very taken by some of the rhetoric around that made in India, for instance, we must throw off the yoke of colonialism in order to kind of regain our own sort of strength commercially, economically, et cetera. So he's very interested in that and he's taken by that. And so, but. And he keeps coming back. So he's another person who is coming in and out till his death in 1939 in Burma. And he's also networking with the Indian National Congress. He becomes Indian National Congress's kind of delegate to Sun Yat Sen's funeral. So he's pretty close to some of these higher, higher ups in the, in the Indian National Congress. But interestingly, when he's looking for political allies, it's finally the Hindu Mahasabha that ends up being his closest political ally. And he ends up the President of the Mahasabha in 1935, which was interesting. And this is the time when the Hindu Mahasabha, which is a very right wing Hindu political group strongly associated with Savarkar, is again trying to kind of intervene in the Mahabodhi temple dispute, which by now has been lost legally. But there's an attempt to find a political solution to it. And so representations have been made to the Indian National Congress. Committee reports have come out. And the committee report headed by the committee was headed by Rajendra Prasad, the future President of India. And he suggests that the Temple Board, a new temple board, be constituted for its management and it'd be half Buddhist and half Hindu. But then he's also talking about Buddhism as an offshoot of Hinduism. So Hindus and Buddhists should worship equally in a friendly manner at the temple. And then this becomes a kind of another issue, not particularly what Rajendra Prasad has said, but what the Hindu Mahasabha and some of the other Hindutva ideologues of this time are saying, which is that Buddhism is basically an offshoot of Hinduism. And this becomes another kind of tension with some of the. The Buddhist. The Buddhists who are coming from these other countries to India, you know, how to sort of situate them and their accommodations made at various points. But that remains one of the abiding tensions.
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Sam
This is just incredible. I mean, the story is so rich. And you're now painting this picture of this. Of in this colonial landscape and mapping the. Where the Burmese pilgrims and the royal court start to make contact. And, you know, I think their motivations, it must be so multifaceted. I mean, from really just strictly religious devotion and wanting to make merit to, you know, political angles to looking at the future and the independence of their religion and their people, as well as their legitimacy as kings and rulers. And, you know, this also, this growing identity, I think, as Buddhists as Pan Buddhism starts to spread. And, and just an understanding of what Buddhism is. I mean, I'm thinking of. When you mentioned Buchanan, I'm thinking of years ago. I feel embarrassed saying this to a scholar such as yourself, who must know far beyond this. But I remember reading In Search of the Buddha, which really blew me away when I read many years ago, because it was just. Again, it was painting this picture of this history that one thinks, well, okay, we've always known what we've known now. And the book is constructed in such a way to show. Show how when those British colonialists were in India, in those sacred sites, they didn't know what they were finding, what they were finding in the ground. They didn't understand what religion it belonged to or where it was from or what the teachings were. And so Charles Allen, the author of that kind of paints this picture of these administrators that were piecing together all of these clues they were finding through interviews and through documents and through.
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Geeta
And native informants.
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Sam
Exactly, exactly. And trying to show. Trying to understand themselves, well, what, exactly who, exactly what this figure and what was he teaching? And then seeing the connections that would come in the region with the growing, you know, the Buddhist identity in Burma as it would come to it. And I'm also thinking that perhaps this is. I wonder how this is related. But we did an interview with Lawrence Cox, who was a co author of the Irish Buddhist, and looking at Dhammaloka and this Irish laborer who became a Buddhist monk and was one of the early supporters of this idea of Pan Buddhism or even like we did another interview about Lokananta. I'm not sure if you. You're familiar with him, the Italian Monk in the 1950s similarly, who was also going to Burma and Sri Lanka and Thailand and India and connecting with the Mahabodhi society and where these kind of pan Buddhist ideas come together and this greater overall Buddhist identity. So. So, yet again, I'm not leaving you with a clear question. It's just. It's so rich. What you're saying is so rich. And you're such a good storyteller. I'm just. I'm so fascinated where this goes. So take it away from there with those themes.
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Geeta
No, thank you. So Charles Allen's book, while I, you know, admire the scholarship and the depth of his research, tends to, in my opinion, portray this story in too British a manner, you know, as though it's entirely driven by British excavations. And. And in a sense, it neglects. For whatever reasons, it's also not the story he wants to tell, so I should be generous in that way. It neglects the fact that modern Indian Buddhism is very much a product of this Buddhist cosmopolis that's emerging across the Bay of Bengal. It was always there. So if you look at Anne Blackburn's work or many other really serious scholars of Buddhism and politics around this region, we will see that there was. There was always a lot of exchange around the Bay of Bengal, you know, with Southeast Asia and South Asia. But even in this period, I would say that there is a tremendous amount of activity, Buddhist activity, Buddhist exchange. So somewhere I call this the Buddhist Bay of Bengal, because that just to highlight one of the really important forms of exchange that's happening. You know, just the knowledge of Buddhism. And there are monks traveling, there are nuns traveling, there are kings sending messages, there are colonial governments sending pilgrimage concessions and sending artifacts back and forth. So there's a lot of exchange happening just among, and not always facilitated by colonialism, although colonialism becomes a really important context for the mobility of people around this region. We also have enormous labor movements from India to Southeast Asia to work on the plantations and so on. And so they're bringing back. And they often come back to India, so they're bringing back ideas of Buddhism as well. So there's so much going on in this period. I think this is where actually, while. I think the British are very important starting point because they're unearthing these sites, so they're doing the archaeological work. They're often doing the Indological work of tracing the texts. So that kind of secular knowledge of the way Buddhism spread is very, very important. Of course, they're doing all this with a lot of native informants who often. They don't give the credit that they ought to be. So there's all of that going on, for sure, but then there is also this other layer of activity which I think is important to kind of focus on. And I think we're trying to do. A lot of people are trying to do that. One of the things that you had said earlier was on meditation. So one of the interesting things is that meditation isn't a big part of Buddhist practice at this point. It's something that comes. That really happens with. With Goenka and others in the 1950s. But I believe that meditation takes off as a kind of Buddhist practice. It's so strongly associated now with Buddhism, but it's not something you're seeing as central to the practice in the colonial period, probably only about the 1930s, that meditation starts becoming important. You start seeing bits and pieces of it. Even within a huge conversion movement like Ambedkar's, meditation isn't necessarily central to it, as you know, there are other things that have been put down as kind of central to the practice of this Buddhism, but not necessarily meditation. So that's an interesting. You know, that's an interesting. I don't know where one could go with that, except to say that that's also something that's been added on to Buddhism as central to its practice, but a little bit later added on or
- [28:59]
Sam
rediscovered, depending on who you talk to about where it came in.
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Geeta
That's also possible. But in the sources that I've looked at, I haven't seen meditation as necessarily central. So it's interesting that that takes off in such a big way in the 50s and is so strongly associated now with Buddhism such as that. We can't think of a time when it wasn't as strongly associated. But yeah, I think that just to take off a little bit more on that point about the Bay of Begal, so there are all these pilgrims who are coming to India from the 1910s onwards, and they don't stop coming. I mean, that the pilgrimage trail only gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And so there are Buddhists who are extremely visible now in a way in which they hadn't been visible. So this too becomes another kind of way in which ideas are being exchanged. And earlier you were talking about Uchantu and he was somebody who, again, was very. Is an interesting figure, along with, of course, what Unu is doing with the convening of the Sixth World Buddhist Council and so on. And then UNO's relationship with Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India in the 1950s, is often also on there's always, there's often a Buddhist pretext for their discussions because Nehru is also very interested in Buddhism. But where Uchantun comes into my research a little bit is actually at the point at which he meets Dr. Ambedkar. So Dr. Ambedkar goes to Burma and Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka, at least twice each in the 1950s at a time when he's quite unwell. He's just finished this huge task of drafting the Indian constitution and presenting it to the nation. He was also the, you know, a law minister in Nehru's first cabinet and so on. He's resigned from that now. And now he's thinking what next? And clearly what's on his mind is to make good on the promise he made in 1935, which is that he would not die a Hindu. This now introduces another layer of complication. If in fact those earlier people that I was talking about, the Hindutva quarter, the right wing quarter, were trying to create this Hindu India, if in fact he is now suggesting that Buddhism is in fact completely different from a caste ridden Hinduism and that his Buddhism would not be, should not be identified, this creates another level of issue for them because their kind of main goal is that of Hindu unity. And clearly Ambedkar's kind of, kind of challenging that. But anyway, Ambedkar goes to Burma and at one point he meets Uchantun and he asked for his support for a future conversion. The conversion hadn't happened yet. In a way he's doing this traveling to lay a kind of groundwork for that. And so this brings me to that point about travel. I think that while colonialism isn't as central to the story in a very direct way as has often been made out kind of that British discovery of Buddhism kind of story, I'd like to suggest that there is also a kind of Indian counterpart to that or South Asian more broadly put. But travel is a very important part of this. So there are railways and there is unprecedented movement of people and therefore ideas and so on. So Ambedkar is going to all these places in order to garner that kind of support. And immediately after his conversion too, he does something that Buddhist had only just begun to do, which is to go to all the pilgrimage sites and to do pilgrimage. And his last major speech is actually in Nepal at another Buddhist conference. So he's also traveling, you know, even though it's very difficult for him in health terms almost to the, almost till his final days, trying to spread that message. But he did meet the Sasana Council and he did try to get them to come on board in terms of support and so on. Of course, that was. It had a mixed legacy after his death, which was shortly after his conversion, in fact, just three months.
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Sam
And you mentioned U Chan Thun was a supremely important figure for what he was doing specifically and particularly in India. Can you expand on where Uchantun's involvement became so critical to the development in the story?
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Geeta
Well, so I'm not sure that he was doing very much directly in India, but as the head of the Sasana Council, as I understand it, he was in touch with Ambedkar. And Ambedkar wanted the Sasana Council to send people to help, you know, to send people knowledgeable in Buddhism to come and help with the Buddhist movement he hoped to begin in India or to develop in India. He wanted them to come and sort of be a visible presence during his conversion ceremony. And after he did look for that kind of international support and more than Sri Lanka, it was really in Burma way, he got some support from Uchantu.
- [33:42]
Sam
And if you're mentioning that before the 1950s or 60s, let's say that meditation is not really much part of the Buddhist identity. And yet we're talking about the revival of these Buddhist sites and Buddhist pilgrimages and making merit and otherwise. And maybe I just answered the question about to ask about, you know, in regards to making merit. But if we're taking meditation out of the equation, which is so hard for some listeners to do today, where it's so associated with this path of purification, of liberation, just simply of feeling clean and feeling like you're able to, you know, balance the mind and be a bit more clear headed. If we're removing that equation from the Buddhist experience, identity, conversion, pilgrimage, et cetera, then as we're looking at this Buddhist revival and identity that's taking shape without the meditation aspect, how would you describe or characterize what's driving it? Or how it's how one is being identified or where the incentives and the motivations are coming with the meditation part being removed.
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Geeta
So, you know, I think the meditation side appeals to people for a certain reason and for their own reasons. And obviously that's fine. But I think at this point it was a lot about community building. It was a lot about just seeing just the emotive and affective experience of being on pilgrimage and seeing where the Buddha attained enlightenment, maybe where he was born, where he attained the ultimate release that is his, the place that he died, the place that he preached his first sermon. I think just the fact of going to these places was just the possibility
- [35:20]
Sam
had opened up for the first time through colonialism, largely. Yeah.
- [35:24]
Geeta
Strangely enough, through the context. Yeah, the context that opens up and the transport revolution that really comes with the colonialism. And then, you know, again, you know, there are so many other things that end up happening. For instance, we have for the first time Japanese Buddhists coming to India in a number that is unprecedented, really. And that's because a couple of shipping lines had opened up. And Richard Jaffe has a really fantastic book on this to talk about the ways in which the kind of South Asian Buddhist world actually has an influence on Japanese Buddhists who are traveling to India and spending time in India, including that Japanese companion of talked about earlier. And they are often doing their. Their studying in Sri Lanka and in Burma. They're doing their traveling in India. And again, they're doing so many different things beyond just Buddhist stuff, but they're often going back to. To Japan with certain ideas, again, carrying certain ideas of Buddhism. That's again, a kind of situation that opens up because of a more connected world, better transport and. And all of that. But. But just to answer your question, many of the pilgrims who come, for instance, after Dharmapala's call are coming with a sense of rescue. They're coming with a sense of building a community. They are coming because they. Somewhere in their minds there is a sense of Buddhist Asia. They're coming because they can for the first time. So they're also coming for their own personal Buddhist reasons, and they also come with different practices. So, for instance, Tibetans would are coming in larger numbers also to India, and they are doing certain practices. They're sometimes taking small bits of soil or even bits of gravel and wall of these sides, they're putting gold leaf on it. So all kinds of things that they're doing. And all these practices are also being discussed in different ways in these, you know, what is the proper Buddhist, what's the appropriate Buddhist practice at these sites? Again, these sites are not just Buddhist sites. They also eventually become major heritage sites. And there's that. There's also a feeling that there are relics here. There are relics of the Buddha in these stupas that are being found, for instance, in Sarnath and certainly elsewhere. And again, a kind of that affect of that sort of closeness with the Buddha and his body or the body of the desire, all of that would also come into play. So I think people are coming for their own reasons. People also coming for very political reasons. And let's take the example of Tai Shi and Tan Sen has written really a brilliant piece on him. He's a Kuomintang leader. He's also a Buddhist monk in China. And he comes to India in 39, late 1939, early 1940 in order to do Buddhist pilgrimage. But he's also coming to meet Indian National Congress leaders and he's going to Burma, he's going to Sri Lanka, he's coming to India. He's coming with a sense that these are all potential allies in a sense or places where he can network. And why does he. So what's the kind of. The pretext is certainly Buddhism and certainly there's a Buddhist aspect to it. He is a monk, but he's also coming in order to try and generate a broader anti Japanese imperialist front. You know, Japan is. China is suffering as a result of Japanese imperialism during World War II. So, and a little bit before that. And so they. He's interested in looking for allies to that cause too. So there are multiple reasons people are coming. Some reasons are more political than others, but you know, everybody has reasons for coming. It's so meditation I think certainly becomes and I think that I am not an expert on this but I do think that somebody needs to study why it emerges as so central to Buddhist practice at a particular time in particular places and why perhaps that wasn't the case always.
- [39:05]
Sam
It seems a key figure here. And I'm not sure how much you've researched this figure and if you have where you put them in this context, but as the story goes on the next figure I would place there to start to analyze where, where he came in would be Munindra and, and what Munindra represented and you know, where he came with the cultural and communal and religious, but then also meditative aspects and open minded aspects and connecting Burma and all these other countries and where, you know, Munindra and we've done so many interviews on this topic. Munindra then becomes one of the, the first and primary mentors of a lot of these young hippies who then today are, you know, the elder teachers of the mindfulness movement in the West.
- [39:46]
Geeta
Right.
- [39:47]
Sam
And so the kind of connective tissue that he would be between the past and the future, I think.
- [39:53]
Geeta
So he said this modern in a way.
- [39:55]
Sam
Yeah, I think there's a lot of scholarship left to be done on him as well. And what piece that fits in and you know, where the meditation comes in but comes in with the tradition, with the community, with the religion, but also very much the meditative aspect.
- [40:09]
Geeta
Well, so you know, I would Say my study, I must be honest, stops in 1956. But I mean, there were also people chanting, for instance. So it's, I'm not saying that meditation was not an important part, but I don't think it was as central, true, at least to what's happening in South Asia at this point. It may have been important in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, I can't really say. But even today I think that, you know, if you look at the Nichiren movement, for instance, there's a lot of chanting and there's, there's a lot of community building. I'm sure there's some meditation as well. But I suppose if you, if you count chanting too as meditation, then that's certainly present at this point as well. But I can't speak to any of these other things that you're sure.
- [40:55]
Sam
And I think it's important to actually unpack and open up what we mean by meditation. Because in the west there could be a sense of sense that this just means, you know, sitting down and cross legged and in silence observing the belly or the breath or something. But you know, what about the alms round? What about meta practice? What about chanting? What about giving? Donna, these are. If you look at meditation as Bhavana, as a cultivation of mind, then you know, the actual seated practice.
- [41:21]
Geeta
Sorry, there are many ways to do that.
- [41:23]
Sam
Exactly, exactly. And then we see it. Yep, right. Exactly. So we do open up the possibility of what cultivation of mind means. Another aspect in here and thread, in what you talk about which hasn't been discussed is which I think has reverberations from what you mentioned back in these early conceptions in the 19th century to what we see today in China and India is where Buddhist relics or replicas can be used as diplomatic or influential things in the region where we've seen over time, India, New Delhi or Beijing has, has, has sent on tour like a replica or a relic and use that as, as kind of a, a religious and cultural tool to be able to, for, you know, for connection or influence with the people.
- [42:12]
Geeta
Right. So relics become very important to this story of, you know, the return of Buddhism to India, but, but also connection to the larger cosmopolis I was talking about in the Bay of Bengal, but also to Nehru's diplomatic purposes. As you were saying, diplomacy is something that relics come in handy for. So the British begin to unearth those sites, sites at the end of the 19th century. And they are often looking actually for artifacts. So there's a flourishing antique trade. Museums want artifacts, Buddhist artifacts. At this point are considered beautiful. And there's a draw there. So the British are doing this collection. What they're not very interested in is actually the bone relics of the Buddha or his disciples, which is what is in these stupas. And so in the 1850s, for instance, Alexander Cunningham, the famous archaeologist, drills a hole through the sanshi stupas, or the bilsa topes, as they're known then, and he takes out the reliquaries and then the relics as well. And he's really interested in the reliquaries themselves because they're artistically very important. And, of course, there are all these very interesting artifacts inside the relic chamber. The relics themselves are not that important to them. So just to give you one story of what happens, these relics end up in the British Museum. I'm sorry. And then, of course, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is opened a little while later. And the relics themselves, the bone and the ash, stay inside the vaults. The reliquaries, however, are displayed. Sometime in the 1930s, the Mahabodhi Society in London begins to agitate, or at least request, strongly request, that these relics be returned to the subcontinent. Now, before that, relics had been found in the late 19th century. And at this point, the British were a little bit more careful with what they did with them, a little bit more organized. So they often distributed relics that they found. They kept the reliquaries, but they distributed the actual ash and bone to Burma. They distributed them to Siam, which was really quite critical. Siam, in turn, the king gave some portion of the relics to Japan. And cementing. Trying to cement a certain kind of relationship as the two uncolonized Buddhist places in Asia. Similarly, Britain is sending the. You know, the viceroy of India is sending the relics also to Sri Lanka and so on. So certain soft diplomatic uses of the relics are already being had. Eventually, by 1910, the Mahabodhi Society starts saying, but maybe these relics should stay in India. And so there are then debates about where the relics should go, what's the rightful place for them. And the head priest in Burma, the head of the Sasana or the Sangha there, that is Sumangala, also weighs in on this. So there's a lot going on. The discussions begin, really, in 1910 in India. And then there are two major vihara openings. I'll get to Sanchi in a second. But there are two major vihara openings in India where relics are given by the viceroy or sort of gifted to these viharas by the viceroy. One is the vihara in Calcutta, which is the Sri Dharma Rajaka Vihara, which Dharmapala is very much part of. And so part of the relics are given to the Mahabodhi society, another part is given to the Bengal Buddhist Association. And there's a very spectacular ceremony for the opening of this Vihara. It still stands in Calcutta today in Kit Square. And the ceremony is very international. There's a parade through the streets of Calcutta. The Viceroy himself is sort of involved. The second major opening is about 10 years later. So this was in 1920. The next opening is in 1931, very shortly before Dharmapala dies. And that's in Sani. Now this is an even bigger opening, I'm sorry, not in Sanji, in Sarnath. This is an even bigger opening. It's called, it's called Mulaganda Kutti Vihara. And there are the full sort of galaxy of Indian political leaders, are there, There are international Buddhists, there are, you know, Buddhist kings and queens and top diplomats and officials of their countries and colonies are coming to see this over the next couple of years to see the relics. Those relics are from Peshawar, if I recall, and also Nagarjuna Konda. So there's a lot going on there. But it's a new building to which they're installed. Now in 1948, when the relics finally do come, the VNA agrees to send back the relics, but not the reliquaries. It's a different political situation. The subcontinent. India has got independence. Sri Lanka has got independence, Burma has got independence. So these are three new nations looking to kind of build a relationship with each other, but also to build their own post colonial identity, as it were. And Buddhism becomes quite central in Burma and Sri Lanka. Of course, there are obvious reasons why it's interesting why that happens in India. Right. So India is at the moment of its partition. There's a civil war in the creation of Pakistan and India as two separate nations, very much on ostensibly on religious grounds that Hindus and Muslims can't live together. So two separate nations have been created. This leads to terrible violence and so on. So religion in a way has a bad name. And you know, but what's interesting is there is an understanding, or at least there's some thinking that India is a religious place. We have to speak some kind of language of faith and spirituality. But what is that language in a time when religion has devolved into so much violence? So Nehru chooses Buddhism and he particularly chooses Ashoka. This king who's, you know, in the third century BCE is said to have given up violence in order to preach the non violent creed of Buddhism and spread that creed all over Asia. So he upholds Ashoka and Ashokan symbols are in fact adopted as the new symbols of the nation. The Ashokan lions are the official symbol of the government of India. The Ashoka Dharma chakra is in the center of the flag and whatnot. So, of course there are dissenters to this. So while Nehru stays away from religion in general, in fact he has something of a disagreement with the first president over the president's attending certain temple openings and so on. He is present at all these major Buddhist occasions. He's also kind of directly in touch with the Dalai Lama in Tibet and the Panchin Lama in Tibet, who are very young at this point. Dalai Lama is barely 19 years old at this point. So he's involved in Buddhist affairs. And it's an interesting thing to think about why. But the relics become a really, the return of the Sanchi relics become a really good occasion for him to kind of, you know, flex his sort of Buddhist diplomatic metal, as it were. So he sends the relics or allows the relics to be sent all over Buddhist Southeast Asia. So it goes to Burma and Sri Lanka, of course, but also to Cambodia, it goes up to Nepal with the South Asia, and then it goes all over the Himalayan regions, which are very difficult areas at this point to be sending relics. So at one point Nehru was writing in a letter to the president of the Mabodi Society that the relic should go to Ladakh, but Ladakh is. It has to go on the back of a donkey because there are no roads to Ladakh. And, you know, so it's really fascinating how interested and keen he is in getting these relics everywhere because there, there's an internal project, right, trying to make the, the Buddhist Himalay feel that they are part of India and so kind of a nation building project there for him. So why not send the most holy of things, which is the, you know, in Buddhism, which are the relics to all these areas as a, as a goodwill gesture, as it were. But he does manage to succeed, with the help of the Mahabodhi society and others, to send these relics to a vast number of areas because internationally it has that other, other kind of use for him in the sense of again, a certain soft diplomacy, again emphasizing that Buddhism is something that all these countries have in common. And that becomes at least something of a pretext for him then to pitch non aligned, the non aligned movement that he's very keen on and opening other kinds of diplomatic ties and so on. So Buddhism again, as a really important pretext and as a kind of conversation opener, as it were. And while people tend to, or scholars have suggested that Nehru's interest in Buddhism was quite superficial, I don't think so. I think this was somebody who was quite interested, has read quite a bit in Buddhism, may not have thought of himself as a Buddhist certainly, but he's philosophically very interested in Buddhism. And so it's not that, just that he's making instrumental use of all of this. He is quite interested in being in these places and he's quite interested in Buddhist connections. And so both he and Unu attend the installation of the reinstallation of the relics in the Chaita Giri Vihara in Sanchi. It doesn't go back into the stupa, but it goes into this vihara. And they also have arguments with the British about sending the reliquaries back, that how can you have sent the relics back without the reliquaries? And they do in fact manage to get the reliquaries back as well. So there's all this back and forth. A lot of energy being expended on this at a time when the energy is also being expended on a lot of other more direct nation building projects like elections and stuff.
- [51:16]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, right. It's such a fascinating history. And as you've explored and fleshed it out for us up to the this point, I'm curious what you think are the legacies that it leaves us with today, and particularly those legacies when we talk about exploring these historical periods. One of the things we often find are where things become flattened, where erasure and assumptions have taken place, where different political conveniences have, have, have skipped over and explained things in a certain way that when we then unpack, we realized that it was a lot more complex and sometimes a bit more awkward and confusing as we bring it out. So with all of that in mind, all of that consideration, this historical work you've done, in what ways do you feel it's significant and perhaps even urgent for where we're sitting today and looking back at where things came from?
- [52:08]
Geeta
I mean, I suppose in one way the legacy of this time was in fact the legacy of that conversion of Ambedkar, maybe the most potent one just in terms of the number of Buddhists that are now in India, you know, who call themselves Buddhists, who have a Buddhist practice. So there's that and there is a. Quite recently there was a movement too for again around the Mahabodhi Temple and trying to make it a fully Buddhist place. You know, the management board especially to
- [52:40]
Sam
so it's still not.
- [52:42]
Geeta
It's half Hindu and Harpuddist. Exactly.
- [52:44]
Sam
I see.
- [52:45]
Geeta
Well, it wasn't in the colonial era. It becomes that way in 1949. It's one of the things that Nehru insists on doing. And the first Chief Minister of Bihar makes this happen. In 1949, there's an act which is passed by the. By the Parliament, by the. Rather the State assembly, to make Bodh Gaya, to put it under new management, the Bodhgaya Temple. That is just the Mahabodhi Temple. And so there was a board, there is a board currently that's technically supposed to be half Buddhist and half Hindu.
- [53:12]
Sam
Hindu.
- [53:13]
Geeta
But now the argument on the part of these Buddhists is that they're, The Hindus that are on the board are Brahmanical. And so, you know, we need to have this board entirely Buddhist. So it's an interesting kind of position. And now it puts the government in a slightly tricky situation again, because this is a government that is dominated by Hindutva ideas. And so the idea of what to do with all sort of the conundrum of what to do with Buddhist and how to think about them vis a vis Hindus remains very alive. And so there's that issue. But I do think that some of Nehru's Buddhist diplomacy is also another kind of important legacy. I think sort of the middle decades of Indian independence, there wasn't that much interest in the relics, but that's come back into the spotlight. So the government is sending these relics out. The government has reinvigorated international Buddhist conferences and so on. So there is again, an interesting. In Looking east, in fact, it's called the look east policy, and trying to kind of create networks and to reinvigorate this relationship with Buddhist Southeast Asia and Buddhist East Asia to what ends? I mean, Buddhism can't be the only end. There must be other ends. I think that's still being. That's still working itself out. I mean, I think that there is. I don't think Buddhism's gone anywhere in South Asia. In fact, it has an unprecedented visibility, even though. Even though it's not the most interesting sheer numbers, it's not the most followed religion. But I think that there is something to be said for the discussions around what authentic religion actually is, what ethical religion is. And I think that in a way, because Buddhism didn't have the followers in India that maybe it had in Burma and Sri Lanka, there was a lot of, really, this is almost a progressive imagination of what Buddhism could do on the subcontinent. And in some ways, that's what I'm really interested in. And if we look at the kind of record of Burma, Sri Lanka and India post independence, that's not the happiest of records in terms of kind of Buddhist majoritarianism or Hindu majoritarianism. And it's worth asking then where those ideas of Buddhism sort of went. And you know, is there space for actually restoring them in the public discourse, not just Buddhism as identity, but Buddhism as faith and religion and as something that can bring people together rather than rather than be the kind of political identity that enacts or results in in violence against minorities and so on. So is there space for that? I mean, this is a question I asked, so I'm really leaving you with a question rather than a comment.
- [56:07]
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- [57:13]
Sam
Sam Yarananda da Yananga Nayaranaya da Yarana.