Photo courtesy of Xinhua
The arrest of 22 Buddhist monks with narcotics in their possession at the Katunayake Airport recently hit the headlines. Many referred to them as cheevara dharin, meaning people impersonating Buddhist monks or lay people in Buddhist robes. But they have not been charged with impersonating Buddhist monks; they were found to be monks from several temples in the country. The repeated use of what may be called an euphemism, cheevara dharin, wouldn’t change facts nor would it help receive the attention it deserved as a serious social problem. Calling them impersonators of Buddhist monks may temporarily soothe the collective religious psyche of Buddhist priests and laypersons but it would not fool discerning persons.
To understand the hypocrisy in this we can think of those aristocratic families who disown their children who marry someone below their status. Often such parents say, “He/she is no longer a member of our family”. However, people know that it is just an angry response. They will still identify such children with their families.
This incident, however embarrassing it may be to many priests and Buddhists, is not an isolated incident. There are Buddhist priests who have misbehaved in public at times even worse than thugs. On such instances, some call them cheevara dhariya but they remain as monks and reside in their temples as usual. It is obvious that this euphemistic naming is a convenient language game that hides the important questions surrounding such incidents.
One of the unavoidable questions linked with such incidents is whether the way we relate to Buddhism is correct or fruitful. Has the present form Buddhism, which is the result of centuries of social change, contributed enough to make us better human beings? No religion can remain untouched by social change and all religions including Buddhism have undergone much adjustment, as they are essentially people related. Religions don’t exist in a social vacuum. They are inert if they are confined to holy texts; they come to life only when people act according to their edicts in forms of worship, rituals, visits to holy places and spiritual experiences.
According to Prof. Ninian Smart, there are seven dimensions of religion – experiential dimension, mythic dimension, doctrinal dimension, ethical dimension, ritual dimension, social dimension and material dimension. They suggest the facets of religion that have contributed to our religious experience. None of these dimensions can mean anything without human intervention and they are continually being influenced by social dynamics such as economics, politics, education, culture, science, technology, superstitions, violence, war and conflict. We cannot consider religion as an isolated entity. It is an inseparable string of this tapestry where each string influences all the others and is influenced by them.
Hence the religious experience of Buddhists today is manifestly different from that of our ancestors who lived in different periods in the past in different economic, cultural and political contexts. As historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari says, over the centuries science has taken over much of the ground occupied by religion. For example, in ancient times, our ancestors went to their shamans at the first sign of sickness or misfortune in any form – lightning, thunder, drought or famine. Today we rarely go to priests or places of worship when we have a health issue; our first impulse is to see a doctor. When there is lightning and thunder we stay indoors and switch off vulnerable electrical devices instead of praying to gods or deities to stop them. When there is a power failure, we call the relevant electricity supplier. If we still seek the intervention of religious formalities when death occurs, it is because we still believe in the version of afterlife delineated by our religion.
This unending interaction among all our entrenched and overlapping social institutions – political, economic and cultural – has not spared our religions and they have ceaselessly been modified by the torrents of societal changes. Therefore, it is not derogatory of any religion to say that the current forms of religions are distanced from their original forms. No religion is practiced in its primeval form in which existed in the past. Now the question is to what extent our religions in their present day forms has contributed enough to make us sensitive to current social issues, whether they have made us more broadminded, progressive, affable or less coarse.
There is no doubt that of the facets of religion, our religiosity is most manifest in our persistence in performing rituals, worship, belief in narratives, festivals and celebrations that have become routine without them contributing to deepen our human relationship. Year after year, we celebrate our religious events and make our weekly visits to places of worship which, after a transient high, leave us with the same biases, obsessions and tedium. What receive our least attention are the doctrinal dimension and ethical dimension. Generally, we have no time for studying the doctrine, the books of which category is crowded out by self-help categories that include guidebooks on career development, becoming fabulously rich, being top class executives, honing leadership and diplomatic skills and generally climbing up the social ladder. When it comes to ethical dimension, we use ethics to suit our plans either to show how cruel others can be and wink at morals when they impede our success. Usually, ethics and doctrine begin to figure dominantly when we have already put behind us the worldly successes and get ready to look for greener pasture on the other side of death. As far as we are energetic and ambitious, our role models are those topnotch bureaucrats and other elites in society but never our religious leaders – they resurface only when getting ahead and success are no longer attractive or attainable.
Far from blaming religions for not coming to grips with our social ills, we may think of how their present forms and how we relate to them have failed to make us sufficiently progressive. There is no point in placing religion above all human achievements and lifting it to the stratosphere of ethics if we let it remain there propping it up with all types of outward manifestations of religiosity. If we keep hiding behind facades of decorum and familiar language games without honestly taking stock of our fragile relations with our religions, we can continue to deceive ourselves that our religions need no sober evaluation.