This is an ambitious book, and a successful one—one that deserves a wide readership, certainly among those interested in Theravada Buddhism, but also among all who are interested in humanistic studies of mainland Southeast Asia.
McDaniel states as his first aim the desire “to establish ‘curriculum’ as an interpretive category for the history of religions and for Southeast Asian Studies” (p. 7). Unlike previous studies of Buddhism in Thailand and Laos, this book is a “[s]tudy not of texts but of interpretative communities” (p. 6). McDaniel is looking for a new way to understand the region by examining the use of the classical texts and teachings of Buddhism, with a focus not on the translocal but on the local. He does so by studying what can be known of how Pali texts were used in educational settings, and how they were interpreted and passed on from teacher to pupil.
His study, then, is a study of change, focusing on the agency of local practitioners in creating change in classical literature, art, and ritual. He looks at the processes of transmission of religious and ethical beliefs, as evidenced in the teaching texts that have been left behind by generations of teachers and that are held in the libraries of temples throughout northern Thailand and Laos. His study turns from evidence to what used to be considered the mundane, texts that developed as teaching notes. These notes may once have seemed to be of little consequence, but over time, they became, as McDaniel demonstrates, a mode of knowing of that students of the region should be aware of.
The second aim of the study is “to contest the scholarship that sees a sharp difference between pre-modern and modern religious education in Northern Thailand and Laos based on the advent of the modern state.” In fact, he states, “one sees a fundamental continuity from the sixteenth century to the present—trajectories of Buddhist pedagogical history that do not begin or end with the advent of modernity” (pp. 18–19). Both of these aims promise an interesting discussion, and throughout his study, the author does an admirable job of achieving them.
The study opens with a treatment of the institutional history of monastic education in Laos and northern Thailand. The author rejects the characterization of the region as one in which the local populations were passive recipients of classical traditions. In discussing Laos, he demonstrates convincingly that neither colonialism nor communism succeeded in altering greatly the manner or the content of Buddhist instruction. Turning to Thailand, he demonstrates that, for all the attention the Sangha Act of 1902 has been given in earlier studies, and for all the centralization and change that the act mandated, the methods and the content of Buddhist instruction have maintained a continuity lasting for centuries. He takes great pains to demonstrate, quite convincingly, the error of mistaking “the rhetoric of elite reform for actual changes on the ground” (p. 115).
Having set the historical scene, McDaniel turns to the study of curricula as a yet unused tool for understanding not what the elite were trying to achieve, but what was actually happening. “The study of kings and buildings, the stuff of institutional histories, is not enough if one wants to understand how Lao and Northern Thai monks learned and taught Buddhism” (p. 119). The truth of this statement is well verified.
In looking for details of the curriculum, McDaniel examines nissaya, vohara, and namasadda texts (p. 119), which he describes as “idiosyncratic lecture and sermon notes structured around the selected translation of words and phrases from individually chosen canonical and non-canonical texts” (p. 122). These texts were not the property of a single individual, but were used repeatedly by different teachers, with each one adding his own thoughts and preferences. From text to text found from temple to temple, the many great differences make it clear that, “Instead of transmitting an integral and received tradition, [the authors] took bits and pieces of the received tradition in service of their own local rituals, ethics, and social concerns” (p. 121).
The texts that were chosen to be glossed and commented on were not the same from area to area or even from temple to temple. It becomes clear that the individual monk chose texts according to his own desires and needs. And what also becomes clear is that the approach to using source texts was the same throughout the region, and that as time passed, this way of creating a text also became a way of knowing a text. That is, it became a mode of knowing. And it is here that the significance of the title of the study becomes clear. From palm leaf manuscripts at his disposal, each monk who was preparing to give a sermon or teach another monk took a story, and from that story, he selected, or “lifted” words that he would explain in detail, drawing from these explanations points that he desired to stress and adding his own notes to those that previously had been placed in the text. The many nissaya, vohara, and namasadda texts were developed over time by successive users, each one free to add his own notes and references. They were intended as presentation notes, with important points identified as guides from which to present a sermon or a lesson. In using these texts, a given monk made himself part of a living progression of thought and interpretation, handed down from one generation to the next without individual ownership.
In a section entitled “The Culture of Translation,” the author takes up the question of where the nissaya, vohara, and namasadda went, for they are not in evidence as they once were. It turns out that such texts may no longer be at hand, but they are still very much in mind. That is, the same approaches are used in more modern text styles. What had been a style of creating a text has become a mode of thinking. For even in more modern textual treatments of the classical texts, one still finds the same approach, that of focusing on a small detail—an individual word, perhaps, or a phrase of a given text, and expanding on it not only as a way of teaching the details of that text, but also as a way of thinking about the entire story. McDaniel identifies the significance of the frequent references to the Pali texts, with explanations and expansions in the local vernacular, instilling in the local text the ritual power of the source, and likewise instilling in the teacher the aura of power and authority of the original teller of the story, the Buddha himself.
There is much more that could be said about this book, but I will leave that to the individual reader to explore. For my own part, I most value a book that not only can teach me new things about a subject, but can also give me new ways of looking at subjects I am most familiar with. This, indeed, is one such text.
While reading the book I found myself thinking again about the question of who “owns” a text in Southeast Asia. We all know of the fluid idea of ownership that holds in copyright and in patents in modern commerce. In classical Thai literature, it seems clear that a text, whether written or oral, belonged to the community, and anyone was free to use it, alter it, or add to it. In looking at Buddhist texts, we see amply demonstrated in McDaniel's analysis that they are studied through glosses explained by one's teacher, and learned by listening to repeated, and varied, recitations from one's teacher. We see also that the source text resides in the vernacular and the community that uses that vernacular, and so does the power of that text. Power and legitimacy reside in local versions of the text. And that suggests interpretations of how individuals approached both religious and literary texts.
The question comes to mind of who owns these Buddhist texts, if they are constantly subject to change in both the telling and the interpretation. Literary texts, at least those appreciated primarily in performance, are similar. Only in the modern era does individual authorship become a mode of thought, and even today, this is not fully integrated. Understanding the view of Buddhist texts can suggest ways of viewing the literary texts as well.
When McDaniel discusses the more modern Buddhist text known as a “handbook,” which has replaced the nissaya text, I was brought back to the time when I was first learning to read Thai, and I looked for books on familiar topics to practice my reading. What I found were “handbooks” created for disciplines such as the teaching of English as a second language, which was the focus of my workday. These handbooks were good practice for me as an adult novice reader, but I recall being surprised to find that they were primarily compendia of vocabulary taken from English-language texts, with each word transliterated and elaborately explained. Theoretical arguments were not addressed, and the steps involved in various activities were given little attention. Vocabulary was the key issue, it seemed, to the authors of those handbooks. It was certainly not a structure that I would have used had I been writing a text, and I could never discover where that approach came from. The similarity with the nissaya approach to teaching is striking to me, and I now have a new way of viewing those texts, and many others like them. I have to wonder whether the approach that the author identifies in the nissaya is not a more thoroughgoing phenomenon, the reflections of which can be found in many fields.
I could go, on but I will not belabor the point. There is much here that I am sure will be revealing for those who are concerned with Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and for that contribution alone, this is a very valuable study. But those who are not directly interested in Buddhism will learn much from reading it as well. Students of language, literature, history, and education, to name only a few disciplines, will find this an interesting and valuable addition to their libraries. McDaniel has given us a remarkable and enlightening study, one that will be widely influential for a long time to come.
