Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged:
Subtitle: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)
Publisher: University of Michigan
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Copyright date: 1999
Subjects: Theravada Buddhism; Burma; Early Modern History; Arakan; Rakhaing; Aranyavasi monasticism; Gamavasi monasticism; Religious Communalism
Genres: Buddhism
First sentence: My interest in the religious identity of the Arakanese began in Athens, Ohio in 1992.
Description: The historian of Southeast Asian Buddhism faces many questions regarding Buddhist identity. Using the case study of Arakan (western Burma), two critical questions are pursued in this dissertation: why did Theravada Buddhism emerge as a religious identity for the majority of Arakanese and why did this religious identity develop into Burmese-Buddhist religious communalism? The prevailing literature regarding Arakanese history accepts uncritically a primordialist view of an ever-present Buddhist religious identity in Arakan from the pre-fifteenth century, that this religious identity was the chief means of collective action by Arakanese throughout the early modernperiod, and that it always involved social exclusion of Muslims. After examining Burmese-language palm-leaf manuscripts from collections in Burma and the British Library, royal orders and court treatises, and contemporaneous Portuguese and other foreign accounts, I concluded that these assumptions are incorrect. Burmese Buddhist communalism was clearly a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and generally did not define group action in preceding centuries. This dissertation makes two inter-related arguments. First, the Burmese Buddhist religious identity developed from a complex array of influences. Ecological, climatological, social, economic, and political factors all played important roles in determining the direction of and response to religious developments. Thus, Theravada Buddhism was not the ancient and monolithic religious identity that some have interpreted it to be. Rather, the Buddhist religious identity as it has emerged today developed gradually, and primarily from the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, during the periods of Burman and British rule. This was true also of the Arakanese Muslim identity. Second, Burmese-Buddhist communalism developed out of competition between Muslims and Buddhists for new agricultural lands and attempts to survive on shrinking land plots in the British colonial economy. British colonial authorities also reduced the vitality of patron-client relationships which meant the emergence of religious leaders as organizers of rural communities for collective action.
Table of contents: value: 1. Introduction; value: 2. In the Realm of Dangers and Strangers: The Roots of Arakanese Culture and Society; value: 3. Buddhist or Muslim Rulers? Models of Kingship in Arakan in the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries; value: 4. Monks, Texts, and Sects: The Emergence of Theravada Buddhism in the Royal Center at Mrauk-U; value: 4.3 The Troubled Sangha: Tensions between Gama-vasi and Aranya-vasi Sects; value: 4.4 Gama-vasi Monks; value: 4.5 Aranya-vasi Monks; value: 5. Religion Beyond the Royal City: The Emergence of Theravada Buddhism and Royal Patronage in the Rural Landscape (c. 1430-1630); value: 5.1 Expansion of Theravada Buddhist Influence; value: 6. From Captives to Lords and Laborers: Muslims in Arakan in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; value: 7. The Time of Troubles: the Decline of Central Kingship and Religious Patronage, 1630s-1690s; value: 8. When things Fall Apart: The Devolution of Politics and Religious Patronage in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; value: 9. The Burmanization of Arakan, 1780s-1820s; value: 10. One Land, Two Peoples: The Emergence of Religious Communalism in Nineteenth Century Arakan; value: 11. Conclusion; value: Bibliography