Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka.

• Author: Perry, Edmund

For reasons i will try to make apparent further along in this review one should read these two books as a unit. They both treat the phenomenon of change in the Theravada Buddhism preserved and practiced by the Sinhala people of Sri Lanka. Their account and their interesting explanations of changes in the Theravada from its origin in ancient India up to the "transforming" innovations recently introduced by Sinhala urbanites in and around Colombo are rendered in a lucid prose and an engaging narrative construction that make their authors' scholarship accessible to Sri Lanka specialists, Buddhists and buffs alike. This literary excellence will make pleasurable the repeated close readings that are necessary for an ample grasp of the data and its interpretation presented here by Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere.

Gombrich, an Indologist at the University of Oxford, and Obeyesekere, a native of Sri Lanka who holds a professorship in anthropology at Princeton University, have already established their names as well as a canon of research literature in the study of the religious life of Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka. One recalls at once such notable book-length examples as Gombrich's Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) and Obeyesekere's Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

In Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, Gombrich develops social explanations for "three major points of change" that have occurred in Theravada's history. He selects the Buddha's founding of this Sasana (religion) in India some 2500 years ago; its migration from India to Sri Lanka, where a redefinition of Buddhist identity happened; and within the last 150 years, a configuration of responses and reactions to the Protestant Christian missionary accouterment to Great Britain's colonization of Sri Lanka, a development widely designated nowadays as "Protestant Buddhism." It would be difficult to argue sensibly against the choice of these three instances of "major change" in Theravada, particularly since Gombrich gives a persuasive defense of his selection without claiming that these are the only instances of definitive change.

There is similarly no compelling reason to challenge the basic assumptions of his concept of social history. He holds that the social historian's primary responsibility is to explain change while understanding that the historian, like every other human being, cannot explain everything. He holds further that changes in a religion arise in response to problem situations within a society and are, hence, appropriate phenomena for empirical study and for causal explanation in social terms that may conflict with the metaphysical explanations proffered by the religion itself. He considers the agents and subjects of innovation in social history to be, typically, human individuals whose intended objectives evoke group patronage, although disasters in nature exemplify notable exceptions and some intended actions result in unintended consequences.

Gombrich acknowledges here (p. 25) the limited usefulness of a general definition of religion, as he did earlier in...