Hello everyone and welcome to the center for culture, society and religion at Princeton University. I'm Jonathan Gold. It's really a delight to have this event, which is part of the Yin Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series in Buddhist studies. Launched in September 2021. The Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series is a collaborative multi-university partnership between Peking University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, INALCO, which is the Institut National des Langue et Civilisations Orientales, Princeton University, Harvard University, and the University of British Columbia. The lecture series is established in honor of Venerable Cheng Yen the founder of Tzu Chi and her mentor Yinshun with the goal of promoting topics in Buddhist studies. So in a moment, I will introduce our speaker and respondent. I just want to first thank our staff at the center and everyone who is putting in so much work for this remarkable event. And I also wanted to invite Dr. Ray Her, who is a representative from the Tzu Chi foundation, to say a few words if you would like. Thank you. Thank you Professor Gold. And on behalf of Tzu Chi foundation especially CEO Yen, and Dharma Master Cheng Yen I bestow my appreciation to the society and religion Center for Culture Princeton University. We so very appreciate that we can invite Professor Kate Crosby to deliver her speech in the Yin-Cheng lecture series. And thank you for all the staff in Princeton and the foundation to make this event great and successful. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Dr. Her. So our speaker this evening is Kate Crosby. Kate Crosby joined the University of Oxford as the Numata professor of Buddhist studies in 2022. She had previously been professor of Buddhist studies at King's College London, following posts at the universities of Edinburgh, Lancaster, Cardiff, and SOAS. She studied Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan, South Asian religions and Buddhism at Oxford for her MA and her PhD. She also studied at the University of Hamburg and Kelaniya, as well as with traditional teachers in Pune, Varanasi and Kathmandu. She works on Sanskrit, Pali Pali vernacular literature and on Theravada practice in the pre-modern and modern periods, including on pre-modern meditation. She has conducted field work in most countries with a substantial Theravada population. She was recently a member of the ICRC project on the interface between Buddhism and international humanitarian law, which is the law of war. Her publications include two wonderful translations. Shantideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra with her co-author Andrew  Skilton which is a very important historic translation and a translation from the Mahabharata of the books on the women and the dead of night. And she's also written Traditional Theravada and its modern era suppression from 2013; Theravada Buddhism: continuity, identity and diversity from 2014, and Esoteric Theravada, the story of the forgotten meditation tradition of Southeast Asia from 2020. And after her talk, we're going to have responses from Alicia Turner. I'll introduce Professor Turner after Dr. Crosby has finished. So please join me in welcoming Kate Crosby on the topic of Theravada Buddhist responses to colonialism and their modern implications. Good evening or good morning wherever you are. It's a great honor to be part of the Yin-Cheng series. And it's wonderful to be here in Princeton on this beautiful spring day. Thank you very much. Thank you for the lovely introduction, Jonathan. So I've chosen as my topic the Theravada Buddhist responses to colonialism and their implications for how we understand Theravada today. And I particularly want to look at how Theravada responses to colonialism are inspired by the texts, the traditional texts on which Theravada is based. So we're a bit of a mixed audience. So I thought I would give some background on a few things. So first of all, a just the geographic area I'm talking about. You can see here in the slide. So we're talking about mainland Southeast Asia and on the other side of the bay, Bay of Bengal, Sri Lanka going up into, into Southern China and Bangladesh, as well as down into Cambodia. So these are the areas with a substantial Theravada population affected by European colonialism, especially in the 19th century. And also I thought we'd have a little bit of a background about what was going on. You know, we're in a period of great upheaval Now. The 19th, early 20th century is also another period of huge upheaval affecting these areas. So the next couple of slides are just a bit of background to the changes that we're talking about. In order to understand the Theravada Buddhist responses to them. The biggest thing, of course, is the wars of colonial expansion. I've identified the British walls here, but there were other colonial wars. So the Opium Wars, trying to deal with the trade deficit on the part, on the part of the British. The trade deficit with China, the Anglo-Burmese wars throughout the 19th century and affecting Sri Lankans, the taking of Kotte. So the capital of the center of the island. There had been a European presence in Sri Lanka from the 16th century, but that had remained a Buddhist-- or a king who sponsored Buddhism until that time. Along with the expansion of European colonialism, we have the imposition of monocultures and plantation economies of extraction. And Princeton played its role in this, of course, because one of the reasons the British were so desperate for new areas of growing of wheat was the loss of the Battle of Princeton in the 18th century. Subsequent history that led to these monocultures near these land, this land belonged to people. So we have people losing their property. And we also have the mass migration of workers brought in to Theravada regions from mainland India in order to work the colonial system. And these mass migrations set off epidemics. We had death, disease, huge displacement, and also social unrest in response. The creation of poverty and the deliberate creation of addiction for economic gain. So opium and alcohol. Other changes, often in the name of progress such as the imposition of Western medicine and education and the suppression of local forms of education and medicine. This created a disruption to hierarchies, particularly affecting Buddhist monasteries. The career path that had centered on the monastery where the monastery was the source of education. And you could be a monk and then disrobe into a position at court that became disrupted. We also see the separation of religion and the state and really the creation of those as separate entities. The loss of Buddhist kings and where Buddhist kings remained, attempts to expansionism sometimes successful. So the kings of Thailand, we see new technologies come in. Military equipment. Thailand particularly was a conduit for that. And new forms of transport coming in. Printing, printing press. So although printing started in Buddhist contexts many centuries earlier in East Asia, it wasn't used in the Theravada region until this period. And then also the recovery of the Indian Buddhist landscape. So these are big events happening in this period that will go on to effect the changes we see in Buddhism this period. So those are some practical contextual changes, but there are also changes that go with that in terms of how people think. One of the biggest challenges for Theravada thinkers was the heliocentric model of the universe with things rotating around the sun rather than the traditional Buddhist cosmology of things rotating around, well, well things being located around the central mountain Meru and the circle of heavens and hells. We also have the idea of the body being challenged by the Cartesian model of the mind/body divide. And European enlightenment values. This separation of the physical realm and the spiritual realm also reflected in the separation of religion and science. Creation really is these are separate things. And while we're gonna be looking at the fears of Buddhists about the effect this has for Buddhism. There are also traditional Christians who are afraid by these developments and fearing the loss of souls, which, which pushes them to try and make conversions in Theravada regions. In response, we're going to begin to see claims to the superiority of the Asian mind in contrast to the military superiority of the colonial machine at that time. And this influences in part theosophy, So theosophy, which we don't tend to think of as a religion now, although it's still present around the world, was hugely important in the search for a true scientific religion underlying all religions. And it was influenced by current scientific thinking of the day, which in particular means Darwinian theories, including a Darwinian reinterpretation of rebirth, whereby you can't be reborn in the animal realm, in hell, we're all on a process of evolution. The Darwinian reinterpretation of rebirth. We also see around the world at this time the subjective term. So religion as something personal versus something public and societal. And I'm hoping my respondent Alicia Turner who has written so eloquently on this in relation to Burma. We'll talk about this in her response. We begin to see different responses to the treatment of texts. Buddhist texts regarded as the word of the Buddha and as the authority in making decisions. There are different responses we're going to see to this. On the one hand, certain types of textual fundamentalism. Looking to the text, trying to live by the early texts and others, seeing them as composite materials that you have to choose from. So a collective relativism. We also get a move to see Buddhism as Pan Asian. So whether that the understanding that this pan-Asian religion had been lost, there was a heightened awareness of it at this time. Partly going along with the rediscovery of the Buddhist landscape in India. We also see an increase development in the essentializing of what it meant to belong to a particular tradition and the othering of those of different traditions. So the seeing of other religions as a threat of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, a kind of polemic in the writings and debates at the time. So that's our broad background then too big changes in government, big changes in economy and populations and challenges to traditional ways of thinking. Now, these big changes, some of which were catastrophic, they mapped onto something already in the Buddhist tradition. Which is the idea that each Buddha discovers the truth, discovers the Dharma, and establishes a teaching, a Sasana, or Shasana. But that teaching will decline and eventually disappear. And then a new Buddha has to discover the truth all over again and set up a new Sasana. In early Buddhist texts and the ones attributed to the Buddha and the commentaries on them. We have predictions of the decline of the Sasana and its disappearance in the canon and the Buddhist canon, this is 500 years. The Buddhism will disappear after 500 years and the commentaries. So the commentaries are written about 1,000 years after. Well finalized about 1,000 years after the Buddha, saying that the period is 5,000 years. These predictions give signs of decline. Signs that we can tell the Sasana is disappearing. One of them is warfare and other is disease. Another ill behaving monks, lack of moral conduct. People hating and hunting each other. And we have some very vivid descriptions by Darwin in his travels of British colonials actually hunting the locals. And the disappearance of the texts of the Dharma. With temples being burnt or manuscripts being confiscated. You can see how this begins to look like the decline of the Sasana. It's not the first time that Buddhists thought the Sasana was declining. We have periodic moments in history often that correlate to a particular mathematical moments where Buddhists see what's going on around them as evidence that the Sasana is in decline. This particular moment is coming up to two-and-a-half thousand years of the 5,000 years. So it's a midway, a crucial midway mathematical moment that that's in front of Theravada Buddhist interpreting what's going on around them. In those texts, we have external causes of Sasanar decline. So such things as persecution by or rule by, un-Buddhist kings, kings who don't take on the responsibility of protecting the Sasana. And people not listening to warnings by gods. Who say, you need to do this for society to the world to continue in a good way. So basically un- religious behavior, not specifically Buddhist. Then there are internal causes within Buddhism. So there are stories of most famous story about what causes the shortening of the lifespan of the Sasana is the ordination of nuns. So after the Buddha permits the ordination of nuns, He then after the event says, this is like a disease that's going to rot the crop of the dharma, or this is like a house full of women,  subject to robbery. So we will have half the lifespan that we would otherwise have had because of the ordination of nuns. But there are lots of other reasons as well. So people not learning, not protecting the Dharma, monks, not following the monastic rules, the Vinaya, and a failure to practice, the four foundations of mindfulness. So these are four stages of meditation practice found in the seminal texts or meditation. The Mahasatipatthana  Sutta. So I mentioned that this isn't the first moment where we have this idea that the Sasana is disappearing. We can see periods in Theravada itself, but also in East Asian Buddhism where there was a fear of the Sasana disappearing or that the dharma was no longer the true Dharma, become partial or corrupt. And one of the distinctive things in East, in East Asian Buddhism is the emphasis on pure land, on doing things to be reborn in the Pure Land to gain enlightenment there. Because the Dharma is no longer pure in this world. But in Theravada there's only one Buddha at a time is one of the crucial principles of Theravada defended in a third century before the Common Era debate. So there's no option for pure land. There's no idea that there are hidden teachings that can be rediscovered. So once Gautama Buddha, the historical Buddha's Sasana is gone. We have to wait for the future Buddha, Maitreya, or Maiteya to rediscover the Dharma and establish his Sasana. That idea that you can't go elsewhere, you can't find another Buddha until then shapes some of these responses. So colonialism then fulfills predictions of Sasana may decline. We see warfare, looting, confiscation of property, mass migration, disease, loss of the Buddhist king, and the policy of the non-interference on in religion that the British eventually impose. Ignoring of an earlier agreements to protect Buddhism means that we have non-Buddhist kings in Buddhist regions. And what this leads to in part then is yes, a response to this non-Buddhist king and attempts to bring in a Buddhist king. So while the king of Thailand remains in place because Thailand doesn't become colonized. The king of Thailand becomes the object of attempts to turn him into the King of Sri Lanka as well, that kind of thing. But there's also an inward-looking critique of Buddhism and Buddhist themselves what they are doing. We have responses at this time that seek to prevent the Sasana from disappearing so quickly and to protect the Buddhist teaching. And I'm going to go through some of these responses now, one of the problems that happens and causes the Sasana to disappear is the loss of texts. We see attempts in this time to preserve the Buddhist canon. So this is a famous inscription of the entire canon into, into slabs of stone. Each stone push into its own shrine. And you can see here that the whole site is the texts written into stone to keep them longer. Another example is the printing, the first printing of the Theravada Pali canon. So you've got here the three first printings we have. The first of these is in Thailand in the 19th century under the patronage of king Chulalongkorn. Now they're all political things going on as well. This centralized education system based on the Pali Canon. Is used to unify the Sangha and the administration of Thailand at this time. But it's also an attempt to keep the Dharma present. And in the opposite direction the colonial interests in understanding the textual authorities of the people being governed leads to the Pali Text Society editions which starts at around the same time. Then the Burmese, we've seen the inscription of the Burmese canon. But then the printing is a celebration of Independence and the two-and-a-half thousand year midway cycle in the Sasana. Now, in the 1950s, another attempt, another response, we see an inward-looking response is attempts to, an attempt to reinforce monastic behavior, reinforce the Vinaya, the monastic code. And in Burma, we see this through checking the Vinaya, trying to understand it through layers of commentarial reassessment that have gone on over the centuries and setting up an exam system. And in Thailand is a bit different because the king at the time, well, the future King Mongkut. He establishes a new branch of the Sangha, a new monastic lineage called the Thammayut, which is based on a kind of fundamentalist approach to the cannon. So he goes back to the Vinaya rules of the canon without the commentarial interpretations that he sees as later accretions. And does things such as introduces the wearing of robes as described in the canon. So it gets rid of traditional symbolic aspects of monastic robes. In Burma. The king also tries to stop things such as monks wearing footwear, wearing shoes. Whereas we get a more modernizing tendency in Siam and Thailand of allowing footwear. In Burma, we see repeated attempts to unify the sangha. In the 18th century, there was a big unification of the monastic orders in, in Burma. But under the British as Burma is split, it means monks who don't want to agree with what the central authority says can go to the British region and set up their own division. So he started getting a splitting of the sangha, which which Burmese monks try to prevent. In Thailand, in contrast, the Thammayut, so the lineage set up by the king becomes the mechanism of national control. So you have, you don't have a single unified Sangha, but you have one branch that has all authority in the administration of the Sangha nationally. And we have a centralization of exams. So gradually a centralization in both regions of, of how you show your learning and your status as a monk. In Burma after independence. There's the setting up of a disciplinary authority that judges Vinaya, according to commentarial texts by judges, judgments by very learned monks, which is backed by the state. So monks and laypeople in these cases can be assessed according to whether they followed the Vinaya and also dharma, Buddhist teachings. And the courts are backed by the secular authority, the temporal authorities as well. I'll come back to these later. But one thing it does is it extends in the canon. You can get rid of monks if they break four basic rules. They have sex, they killed somebody. They steal something of a particular value, or they claim spiritual powers and falsely claim spiritual powers. And this process in Burma extends reasons being able to get rid of monks beyond those four rules. Whereas in Thailand, those four rules stay the main reasons for getting rid of monks. In Thailand. If a monk becomes too powerful or unpopular for some reason, the authorities think this person shouldn't be a monk. They will try to show that he has broken one of those four basic rules. Whereas in Burma there were lots of reasons you can have for getting a monk removed from the Sangha. We've had: protect the texts, protect the monastic rules. Then this is one of the big contrasts, I would say between Burma and other Theravada countries. And that is Abhidhamma. So in Burma. There's the understanding of Abhidamma. So this is the quite technical discussion of causality and metaphysics that forms the third collection of the three key categories of the Buddhist canon. In Burma, they say that this is the texts that disappears first when the texts start disappearing. So that means this is the one we need to protect the most. It's also the one most associated with liberating insight. So everyone needs to learn this and protect this. And it gets added to the monastic curriculum. And organizations develop and laypeople are also involved in the studying and protection of this text. Whereas in Thailand, we've already learned that Mongkut and in future subsequent kings, they regard Abhidhamma as a later development in line with Western scholarship. And it becomes sidelined. So Abhidhamma becomes less important in Thailand and then gets reintroduced in the 1950s from Burma. Another response we see is that we know the Dharma is going to be inaccessible and the Sasana's disappearing. We better work hard to gain as much spiritual development in this life before we lose that opportunity. And we get this move in Burma to make meditation, something practiced by everybody. And this is sometimes seen as a response to the loss of kingship. So there's no king to protect the teaching and monastic behavior. So laypeople need to be responsible for this as well. It's also sometimes seen as being about the subjective turn where we're all individually responsible for our religious practice. But it's also inspired by the commentary on that foundational text on meditation, the Mahasatipatthana Sutta. In that text, in the commentary to that text, it talks about this ideal land where everybody meditates. And I've put a little quotation there. It says when people are at the weavers or at the ford, they don't stand about gossiping. They ask one another about their meditation practice. If a woman answers that she doesn't practice, they criticize her for the lost opportunity of being born as a human in the time of the Buddha's teaching. And it goes on about how they get her to start meditating. In this text. Then in an ideal world, everybody meditates. And this text gets translated a lot. In the 19th century and early 20th century in Burma and also in the regions such as the Shan, Shan principalities. So meditation's the responsibility of all in the translations of this text, which in the original texts with the Buddhist speaking, he says O monks, you should meditate like this. These texts say, O laypeople, and it makes the phrase lay people delightful. They get ornamented. So this encouragement of laypeople as it's an area of creative composition by the translators. And we also get the development of what we now know as Vipassana meditation, which it means insight and insight into the truth of suffering, impermanence, and no self. So it's an outcome of meditation, but in this period, we use it to refer to a type of meditation that emphasizes these outcomes and tries to create this fast track just to that ignoring other aspects of meditation. Now that fast tracking, that simplifying of the meditation system to focus on that, The sidelining of the more complex training of the mind you get in other practices and making it something ordinary people can do in everyday life, it has global repercussions. So just as Chan or Zen Buddhism has changed over the centuries, partly for internal reasons to do with the understanding of the equation between samsara and Nirvana, partly for political reasons. And then it's kind of pre prepackaged but developed in such a way that it's easier to adopt into back into the West later. Also Vipassana, it's been shortened, made something people can do at a retreat center, do it, we can just go for classes. And so it's already made more transportable. So that will have some global repercussions. And within that there's a demotion of cosmological and magical benefits, their health benefits. But there's not the emphasis on physical transformation that we see in pre-modern meditation practices. And that's not to say those beliefs want there. So Ledi Sayadaw one of the most famous reformers and meditation and popular who popularized meditation at this period. He believed in the traditional cosmology, but it's just not emphasized in the practice. In Thailand at the same time, we get meditation being de-emphasized because hierarchy in the Sangha is now to do with your passing of central exams, your position in the administrative hierarchy. And monks who are renowned for meditation are sometimes seen as challenges to centralized power. And again, we have this criticism by Mongkut that the type of meditation he sees just like the type of monastic dress he saw is not in the canon, so it's not true Buddhism. Another response, perhaps less well-known, is longevity practices. So attempts not to die because you might miss the future Buddha Maitreya's arrival because the best state to be in so you can gain enlightenment from the human stage, the human realm. And so we see throughout, well, throughout Burmese culture this development of ways of doing practices which use alchemy and emphasize the mag-- what we'd call later than cosmological and magical aspects of meditation and emphasize physical transformation. Although this is less well-known, is that only really been studied in depth more recently, it is pervasive. These practices are pervasive, just not perhaps conveyed at the center. And another response, which I'll go into a bit more detail, is testing what is true. So testing the dharma, the Buddhist truth, and Vinaya. This creates these creates these court cases I want to talk about briefly. So the word Vinicchaya means an assessment or judgment. And it was there right from the beginning in Buddhism of assessing whether a, a monastic rule had been broken or not. So looking at all the criteria and is the person guilty or not. And in those early days, the false belief is a minor faults. So it's really about the really big rules like killing somebody, having sex, that kind of thing. And initially it's about self-regulation within the monastic order. But fairly early on in the mid third century Before Common Era. We have the story of the emperor Ashoka intervening because there were problems in the sangha. And we have the expulsion of monks based on dharma, on the understanding of the truth of the teaching. We have a switch then from looking at Vinaya rules to dharma as to assess whether you're a true monk or not. This inspires certain events in Burma, such the very famous unification of the Sangha in the late 18th century. And that unification, as I've mentioned, is disrupted by the British period. And as a result, there's a burgeoning of literature by Buddhists themselves. called Vinicchaya literature, which is trying to assess specific points of doctrine, specific points of monastic discipline to see whether they're true. So we get this huge increase in literature about both Vinaya and Dharma. In Thailand, we don't see the same response because we have this centralized royal authority that is already conducting reform of the religious repertoire and education. So there's less debates. These debates, sometimes they became international. So there's debate that involves lots of very senior monks from Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma over correct Sima. Sima is the ordination platform. And this has global repercussions because it trains monks in very detailed debate using textual authority. So when Christians challenge Buddhists to a debate, they're not really expecting much of a response, but actually the monks are very trained in debate. And one of the most significant of these debates is the Panadura debate, which I'll come back to a little bit, but it is translated into English and ends up being a copy being is given to the Theosophists in America who then visit Sri Lanka and we end up with that relationship between Theosophy and Buddhism. That really affects what we regard as Buddhism today. Okay? So this Vinicchaya culture lies behind the modern court cases, which are harking back to this idea of 18th century Unity before colonialism. They judge conduct and belief. These court cases were set up initially, immediately after independence. They then was stopped after the first military coup. And then not brought back in until the early 1980s. The penalties for not complying are severe. They include prison even if one declares that one is not a Buddhist. And this relates to this idea of religion as a public good rather than something for a personal conscience. Okay? And this is my last response that we see, which is restoring and rebuilding religious buildings. Now the reason for doing this is partly to maintain Gautama's Sasana. But it's also something advised in texts about the future Buddha Maitreya. If you want to be reborn. In the presence of Maitreya, build a religious building. And we see this at certain periods and Theravada history where people think we're coming to the end of the Gotama's Sasana, they start building. And one of the one component of this is the search to find and protect the Buddhist sites related to the Buddha's life that had been ongoing attempts to maintain Bodh Gaya, so the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. By Burmese kings. They still sent abbots there up to the 15th century when the practice seems to have stopped. The last Abbott went to [???] and abandoned Bodh Gaya. But just before the British re-discovery of Bodh Gaya, there was a mission sent by the Burmese court to check out what was happening with Bodh Gaya and how they had maps that were detailed enough, directions, detailed enough for the mission to refind Bodh Gaya. That happened shortly after the failed embassy by the British to the Burmese courts. So the Burmese, we're keeping the British out at this point. And that leads on to the Mahabodhi society in Calcutta being founded by the revivalist in Sri Lanka Anagarika Dharmapala, who aims for the custodianship of Bodh Gaya. And the sponsorship for this comes mainly from Indian Theosophists. Okay, so we've looked at the type of response we get. So I just want to pick out some contrasts. in between mainly between Thailand and Burma, but we can see these also in other parts of the Theravada world. So Thailand, we associate more with modernization to protect kingdoms and to negotiate independence So Thailand protects its military and commercial interests through modernization, through centralization. And it's also to protect the Dharma and the Sasana. And we see in Thailand from the center of the acceptance of modern practices. So I've already mentioned Chulalongkorn authorizing the use of footwear. Traditional and regional forms of Buddhism get suppressed. What this leads to in part as the loss of types of meditation and  Abhidhamma expertise. I've put the three kings, images of the Three Kings most associated with this process. Mongkut Chulalongkorn and Vajiravudh. And I've put them in that. They've got their three different outfits as it were, because they all use Chinese dress, British dress, and Thai dress according to the occasion. So in a way symbolic of the type of negotiation that they were engaged in. What about the minority voices? The ones that aren't to the center that we don't hear about it. I want to give a couple of examples of that. So what about traditionalist in Thailand? An example I want to look at is the understanding of Buddhism and meditation. Meditation in this period we've seen is no longer associated so much with physical power. And I've already mentioned this demotion of body power technologies. What we see because of the suppression of somatic meditation practices is the understanding of these things as magic. But if we look at these sort of protective and meditative technologies in more detail, what we find is that the technology that underlies the tattoo, you can see on Angelina Jolie's back is actually the same technology that's used in traditional meditation practices. That here is a nice Sri Lankan manuscript. So the Sri Lankan manuscript is showing bringing in meditation experiences into the body to make the body immortal, to strengthen the body. And in the mid 18th century, that was what people were doing in Sri Lanka. To try and defend the Sasana surrounded by the Dutch, and the Portuguese. So there was a revival based on that type of meditation. But in the 19th, 20th century, this type of meditation becomes lost. That connection between the technology of spiritual self-transformation and physical transformation becomes broken. And this affects how Buddhism is understood. So quite often in studies of Theravada Buddhism, those kinds of practices, the yantras, the tattoos have been treated as something that's either not Buddhist or, um, yes, influenced by something outside or type of magic. And these contrasts between Nibannic and apotropaic practice. But before that body-minds split and before the suppression of things that aren't seen in the canon, those were part of the same family of technologies. Burma has conservatism as a response. So Burma generally, we see as being more conservative for the same motives, protecting the kingdoms in line with other places at the time that try to keep the British out. So places like Nepal, Tibet, certain Indian states, again seeking to protect military and commercial interests, protect the Sasana, and to resist British attempts. Once colonialism was present to turn monks and citizens into cogs in the colonial machine, we see some modernization. So e.g. I've mentioned Ledi Sayadaw or adapting meditation practice. But he did so on the basis of a strong grounding in Abhidamma, we see some modernizing forms of Buddhism suppressed. But it depends really on the point in history that you pick. So I'll come back to some modernizing forms, Buddhism in a minute. In Burma. It looks at certain points in history as if Thailand's modernizing was maybe more successful because it managed to negotiate keeping independence. But I think it's good to look at some examples of how this traditionalism can be successful. And this is something Alicia Turner has written about very eloquently. In Burma, there's a popular story of King Bimbisara So this is one of the kings around at the time of the Buddha. And he's meant to have cuts on his feet from having worn footwear into Buddhist shrines. And so that's the story about why you should not wear. To illustrate why you should not wear shoes when you're on the pagoda. And the British argument for wearing footwear was that each person should show respect according to their own religion. So the visitor to the pagoda. So in theory, Christian should take their hats off. There's a bunch of English people on the Xudong pagoda clearly with their hats on. This, then in the early 1900s, becomes challenged. And there's a very successful challenge where U Thein  Maung challenges. He's a lawyer. He removes the sign of European exemption from removing their footwear. And it alters the root of the viceroy on his state visit. And this leads to this challenge becoming universal. And so it's a very successful challenge of British authority using religion. And it relates again to decide this issue of whether religion is a matter for private conscience or a public matter. So this is the next point I want to make is a very well known for the history of Burma that British non-interference in religion means that religion becomes an arena for contesting colonialism. Okay, What about modernists in Burma? And here's a very famous example. So the monk Ukkattha, he rejected the Burmese monastic avoidance of Western subjects and he went to India, studied, studied in India for seven years. He had a mentor called Adityavamsa, who got banned from-- I didn't know how to translate this word-- excommunicated for writing and book in favor of the ordination of nuns. Now remember ordaining nuns as one of the reasons that Buddhism is going to die out sooner and so Shin Ukkattha, then he's part of the modernizing wing. And after his return from India to Burma, he sets up a mission school which Teaches secular subjects as well as Buddhism. It's a base for anti-colonial organization including later communist groups. He advocates the wearing of shoes in temple. He says Bimbisara's Sore feet are not in the canon and therefore it's not canonical, it's not a true teaching. And he very famously wins a Christian-Buddhist debate in the 1930s by rejecting miracles. And so you basically, when his opponents, his Christian opponents pick out certain miracles that seem ridiculous, he says, you've misunderstood the canon. That bit isn't true canon. You need to know which bits are From the time of the Buddha in which are later accretions. So he wins his debate, but he insults the entire Sangha hierarchy in Burma by walking out of the sixth Council, which is what is behind that publication of the entire canon in the 1950s. So it has all the learned monks and because they keep the entire canon and don't get rid of things that mentioned gods and heavens and things you can't directly see. He says they're stupid and insults them. So he gets arrested after independence with the first of these Vinicchaya cases and he gets released by the coup. And so he writes in his success a book called Die human Born human. Which partly on, based on the basis of Buddhist teachings, but partly on the basis of Darwinian theory of evolution says, if you die human, you're gonna be reborn human. You can't go into hells and this kind of thing. And it's that book that then is the core of his later conviction after he's died, but his pupils are standing in his place. Once these court cases set up again in the 1980s. So he's convicted of not teaching the true teaching of Buddhism. So he's an example then of the suppression of a modernizing voice. Successful in the 1930s. His debate is reported in the national newspapers. But in the 1980s when these courts are set up and they have state backing, He's one of the first to be convicted of adhamma. I won't go through all of these slides because of time, but I just want to pick out the last bullet point there. One of the things I find really interesting about these debates between Christians and Buddhists is that the Christian God becomes totemic of British colonial power. So that the things that are challenged are the cruelty, the character of God is compared with the character of the Buddha. God in the Old Testament kills people. The Buddha is never cruel, and challenges omnipotence and whether-- and science as well. Whether the Christianity, whether the Christian God is omniscient. And you see this being used in this claim to Buddhism is more scientific in the Panadura debate, the influential Panadura debate in Sri Lanka. by Ledi Sayadaw, or in his writings  on God by Anagarika Dharmapala. He's the Sri Lankan reformer and nationalist and he partly sets up the first Buddhist temple in Britain to try and make the British less cruel. He thinks Buddhism, will help them become less cruel. And Shin Ukkattha uses it as well. Okay. So these court cases then that he's convicted with there being 18 since 1981. And the most famous is probably the two of the Vinaya. Once the Vinaya and drama of the 2005 arrest of venerable Saccavadi, who had been ordained in Sri Lanka, gone back to look after her father in Burma, where being an nun is illegal and was arrested and tried and found guilty of impersonating a monk. The others, the Dharma ones. One of the things that's interesting about them is the types of things that people are convicted for are widespread in global Buddhism. So things like adapting meditation, rejecting cosmology. Very simple things. The last one, the most recent in 2022, one of the teachings that U Candima taught was that you're reborn according to your good or bad acts. And one of the things he had to adjust with those good and bad acts don't immediately lead to such and such a rebirth. So you have to think of the Abhidhamma causality that connects those actions and the repercussions. Okay, So I've spoken about why buddhists interpreted what was going on in colonialism in  particular ways and how they then responded in adjusting Buddhism. So a couple of slides of conclusions. So firstly, colonialism is seen as the cause and effect of a decline of the Sasana predicted in the Pali canon, commentaries and post-colonial literature. And this creates a kind of inward criticism. Are we being good Buddhists? We have responses to protect Buddhism and the opportunity for enlightenment now or to gain rebirth. In the next Buddhist presence in Metteyya's presence. We're going to do this by firstly stemming predicted losses, protecting texts and Abhidhamma and emphasizing monastic conduct. Or we're going to follow the merit making instructions in the texts about the future Buddha by building temples. Or thirdly, we're going to adopt the practices of an ideal society by all meditating. As in the Mahasatippatthana commentary. The third thing, the effect of British non-interference means the Buddhism becomes this arena for anti-colonial activism, which broadens the impact of religion and its association with nationalism. The fourth point there, what is false Dharma gets interpreted very differently in different regions by different people. So Burma tends to use the commentaries that have been contested for centuries. And Thailand has a rupture with that and emphasizes the canon and removing later accretions. And we can see in that the Thai connections with missionaries and later British and French education systems, as well as political expediency seeking to have control over the entire Sangha of the region. The fifth point there, the affirmation of the reactionary and anti secular approach in Myanmar. These to something quite distinctive, which is the continued strength of Buddhist textual scholarship that including in Abhidhamma. What happens with minority voices? 0.6. Shin Ukkattha's modernizing approach in Burma and traditional meditation traditions in Thailand. They're all there, they're present. They all share and anxiety in the decline of the Sasana. They're reaching opposite positions from the same concerns. Whether we turn Buddhism in something that we might see as relativist or reactionary. The same source concern is that seven, the techniques that made Buddhism when out in historic debates with Christians, with those that while benefiting from these centuries of debates with, among Buddhist was selective in their use of texts. So in those debates, Buddhist claimed the higher moral and scientific ground. What science meant change. So in the early with the Panadura debate, astrology was evidence for Buddhism being scientific. Later that disappears. And they target the Christian God as totemic of colonial cruelty and claims to science and power. So those debates that are successful with Christians, they become part of public knowledge to global knowledge, Buddhism. So that's the form of Buddhism that becomes known about more in the West. But then Shin Ukkattha's success before independence. That's his downfall in the court case. And many adhamma cases in Myanmar are about things that are standard teachings in global Buddhism. This contrast is not just about relativist Buddhism, law, reactionary Buddhism, conservative Buddhism. It's about whether religion is a public or private matter. One of the things I find interesting is my next 0.10, which is the changes to meditation, which were to fast-track nibbana made it export ready. Contributing to global mindfulness. Meditation practices, adapting, adapted for fast tracking enlightenment now for uprooting the fetters that keep us trapped in Samsara, then preadapted, ready for their opposite. So secularized Mindfulness is to tackle this life hindrances which overlap with the hindrances. That are the first hurdles in traditional Buddhist meditation. My 11th point there. The undermining of traditional meditation in Thailand creates a vacuum. Which when meditation comes to be seen as part of being Buddhist, that vacuum gets filled by imported Burmese methods, adapted forest methods from Thailand itself. And then more recently, mindfulness being reimported into Thailand, which is something only seen in Myanmar much more recently. So mainstream Burmese and Thai developments for different reasons. de-emphasize physical transformation. So somatic physical, body-based an apotropaic practices are then marginalized in scholarship as well and treated as magical non-Buddhist, rather than being part of the same family of technologies of transformation. Then finally, the differences in the Thai and Burmese dominant responses reflect their colonial experience. How they negotiated, when they were resistant, when they had autonomy and really timing. Despite these differences though, we see some very strong shared values, e.g. at the center, in the center they converge in their rejection of the idea of ordaining nuns. So ordination of nuns, just as it was in the early 20th century, remained something at the periphery done by those more engaged with the outside world rather than those at the center. I'll stop there. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Professor Crosby, that was really wonderful. So now we're going to have our response from Professor Alicia Turner, Associate Professor of Humanities and religious studies at York University. Dr. Turner's research examines the intersections of religion, colonialism, secularism, and nationalism in Southeast Asia with a particular focus on Buddhism in Burma or Myanmar. Over the past 150 years. Her first book, Saving Buddhism, the impermanence of religion in colonial Burma. From 2014, explores the fluid nature of the concepts of Sasana Sasana, identity and religion through a study of Buddhist lay associations in colonial Burma. She recently published the Irish Buddhist in 2020 with Lawrence Cox and Brian Bocking, a biography of an Irish sailor and agitator turned Buddhist monk. Her current project is a book on the genealogy of religious difference and violence in Burma, Myanmar. Please welcome, Professor Turner. Yeah, I really want to thank Kate for this really fascinating talk. To thank the Princeton Center for culture, religion and culture, society and religion for inviting me here and the Yin-Cheng organization and for hosting this event. It's a really wonderful opportunity to actually have conversations across Buddhist studies and to think through larger questions in a Buddhist studies context. That's not our specific areas that we work in, but we can think across these ways. So one of the things I really appreciate about your work, Kate, is the depth of analysis that you bring to the study of Theravada as a whole. I don't really know anyone who has the range that you have to be able to discuss and compare issues across Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Srilanka, and not just in say a colonial period, but really she has the ability to work from early textual traditions straight through to contemporary events. And so I'm really love to hear when you give these talks because not only do I learn something, but it also helps me build these connections to start to think about what's going on. Comparisons to Thailand here I think are really useful for me. One of the things I want to comment on and suggest more thought or just part of our conversation is the ways in which you talk about responses to preserving the Sasana Sasana, you start to characterize them in two separate groups as modernizing or more apotropaic, but also perhaps magic. Maybe we put it in this other category of those things that were more focused on the body. And I had to laugh with your image that you use, have Ledi Sayadaw on there. So a couple of weeks ago, I was lecturing to my undergraduates about practices. I was lecturing about practices like using in diagrams and astrology and other practices of protection. And I was explaining, I was telling the story of being at the [???] pagoda once early in my career. And it was the day before I was about to fly home and I met a very sweet man. We were chatting a little bit and I said, Yes, I'm sad, I have to go home. And he said, Oh, are you getting on an airplane tomorrow? I said yes. And he told me that airplanes are very dangerous and that I should be very worried and had I any protection. And I said no. And so he pulled out, he went into his his wallet and pulled out this. A small picture of Ledi Sayadaw, width on the back of it. All of the inscriptions that were the protective symbols, exactly the symbols that you showed or very similar to the kinds of symbols that you showed on the tattoos that would protect you from harm. And he gave this to me for the very bodily protection of a scary thing like an airplane. So I also, having lectured about this a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my students and realized I was getting on an airplane quite soon after that, I had to dig it back out and put it in my wallet. So that is why it was here today as you started to do this. But I think actually that we have Ledi Sayadaw or the great modernizing monk, the sort of the mythical origin of Vipassana meditation and mindfulness and all of these sort of individualized, focused versions of Buddhism you're talking about or you're modernizing on one side. And you have here on exactly the backside, those bodily magic engaged kind of things. It means that they are both two sides of the same coin, but also that maybe what we think of as modernizing and it will be think of as its opposite, are maybe more closely integrated and lots of, lots of ways. And in some of the things that you're talking about. The other thing I really love about these conversations about the ways in which the focus on the decline of the Sasana is actually very productive. I like the ways in which you focus this talk around thinking about diagnosing the colonial condition as being about the decline of the Sasana. But looking at the many ways that there are responses to that, I think the multiple kinds of movements that are motivated by a concern about the decline of Sasana in Burma and across, across the Theravada world actually show us some really different facets of the same thing. This framework at this Buddhist framework in which even the teachings are impermanent. And we have this anxiety around preserving the teachings as motivated things from royal reform of the Sangha from early pre-modern periods all the way through to uprisings that you would see in the streets in the past ten years. But what I find interesting in all of this is that the concern from the decline of this Sasana itself is actually quite creative. And the more I start to look at different moments and different movements, you start to ask in this moment, response to the concern of decline. What's actually perceived as evidence of decline, the evidence of loss, what's perceived as the appropriate response, and who's responsible for that? I think in doing so, it almost comes to appear that there are different Sasanas or there's different emphasis in what the Sasana and it is for different movements in different people at different times. And I think that comes to the creativity of how, what is extensively, or at least it claims to be a conservative tradition. It's claiming to preserve the Buddhist teachings in their pristine and pure form. But actually the work of that preservation creates new Buddhist movements. It creates new ways of organizing society. And as I think you quite rightly pointed out, and what I really appreciate within this is that it creates new concepts of who is responsible for Buddhism in terms of the society, in terms of the individual. I actually think part of what I might want to talk about in there is that it might not be that religion is either mostly about-- or Buddhism is mostly about society or mostly about the individual. But actually at these movements are producing society as a thing. Some of them are producing society in terms of the nation, particularly under the colonial moment. Or they're producing a community of people, but they're also producing individual subjects. That those aren't necessarily fixed things that Buddhism in this movement might be about an either one, but they're actually produced out of these movements themselves. With that focus of asking at each moment of concern about Sasana and a decline. What's the evidence of the threat? What are people saying is why we know Sasana is in danger at this moment? And what is the source of that threat? I kinda wanted to, for an audience that probably doesn't know Burmese history as much. I wanted to sort of lay that out in some movements you might know about are some things that you have seen. The work I do mainly original work was really from the 1700s to the 1910s. And looking at the rise of lay Buddhist movements within Burma, in that moment, it was the colonial condition that was clearly the evidence of a decline in Buddhism. This Sasana, it was clear to everyone, these are a moment of massive transition is as you lay out, the evidence was all there. But then the question was to these lay people, what was, what was the origin of that threat? If the Sasana is in decline, what are we doing wrong? And you might think the straightforward answer is the British. The British have arrived. We need to reject colonialism. But in that moment. Actually, their argument is that what is happened is that we as individuals, are not practicing the teachings correctly. And so what we get in the turn of the 20th century is we get a moral reform movement. We get lay people becoming themselves responsible for the Sasana. But really turn the gaze inside to say, right, Am I doing the right things? And we get sort of typical moral reform of that period. So anti-alcohol movement, anti movements against eating meat. The complaints are things like school boys these days. They're not respectful to their elders. We need to be very concerned. But if that's a moment of both creating a community of people and now lay people who are responsible for Sasana, It's a different kind of threat. If the threat is internal to the people. Then I want to think about a different moment. You mentioned the responses to the [???] path and those people who are trying to produce immortality. So the option is if the Sasana is in decline, either we need to save it, it needs to be around, or we need to know how that we can be around until Metteya gets here, right until the next Buddha's here. But we also have an offshoot from that group in the mid 20th century that actually creates what my colleague refers to a Salvation Armies. We get organized groups of devotees to the [???] Path who create royal imagery of battle like an army, like engagement. And they do spiritual warfare against the threats to the Sasana. And they engage in spiritual warfare for what they understand to be spiritual things that are threatening the Sasana. And here again, we have lay people transformed. We have people doing the work, but the work they're doing is not on the self, but it's in kinds of what we might put in a category of magical apotropaic operations, spiritual warfare. The threat is external now, the threat doesn't come from inside the house. The threat is somehow external in this community. The two postcolonial movements that I think you can see the work of this defensive Sasana and its production of community. But it's also differentiation within this that are probably better known to an audience who doesn't know Burma so much is the Saffron Revolution of 2007 and the movement of MaBaTha, that is the movement for the defense of amu ba thatana [???] that happened over the past ten to 12 years. So to start with the Saffron Revolution, Saffron resolution was a major movement of monks in Burma that were responding against repression from the Burmese military regime. And this is in 2007. The military regime had engaged in some economic reforms that had skyrocketed prices and what were already quite poor People were starving. And some very brave people went out to protest against that. The military is notoriously repressive, notoriously like particularly repressive of popular protest. And it was very brave to go out. Amongst them, a very few monks. But two of the monks that went out to these protests were actually arrested, tied up and beaten by the military. They were physically harmed. And in 2007, the response to that was the Sangha in massive numbers across the country, came together and decided that the military was a threat to the Buddhist Sasana. Suddenly the Sasana was in decline. The Sasana was under threat. But the threat was not our moral reform. It was not some spiritual powers. It was the military government that was in charge. And it was quite literally, if you look at the symbolism in the streets and the Saffron Revolution, you have large, huge streets are filled with saffron monks in the center. And then all the way along the outside edges you have lay people holding arms. They're literally physically protecting the monks from being beaten because the monks, understood to represent the Buddhist Sasana are there in the center. They are the Sasana. And if the military is willing to hit and harm monks than the military is a threat to the teachings. So the threat is external, but it's the state itself. At this point, we've moved from a moment in which the king in a pre-modern period might have been the agent of reform to the Sasana end up being something that lives in the monks and the people. And the threat is the military. The response of how you are to preserve the Sasana is quite literally you to go to the streets and you're to hang your hands around and make sure that they can't get to the monks. The Saffron Revolution is repressed quickly, but there becomes some responses that come out of that. In particular, we got a lot of parahita. So social service, Buddhist kind of work that comes out of it. Movements that really extended till today that were new at that moment. In part because the responsibility that the state might have had is now falling to the people who are literally defending the Sasana on it and amongst themselves. Then this third movement that you might, you might have known of is Burma had become quite famous in its newly democratized are somewhat democratic transition in the 2010s for a rise of an organization called MaBaTha. And MaBaTha is a Burmese abbreviation for Amu--the Ma-- Bata and Thatana. Amu means nation, it means people. It really means our kind. Bata. For the Sanskritists around. You can pick lots of good guesses. In, in Burmese context, it means both language and a sort of 21st century understanding of religion. And Thatana is the Sasana. But the reason this movement mostly of monks is particularly well-known is because it was rabidly anti-Muslim. And it created this massive anti-Muslim discourse that created the possibilities for the genocide against the Rohingya. Here the rhetoric of MaBaTha which was a pretty broad social movement. It had educational arms and training and culture and newspapers that had relief funds and donations. But its anti-Muslim rhetoric was very clear. The Sasana is under threat. Once again, we find ourselves in times of great transition and in trouble. The Sasana is under threat, but the threat is outside and we can label who it is. And this movement is deeply engaged in global as well as Islamophobic and anti-Muslim discourse. But it pulls up a specific outside threat. And yet Then the question is, okay, how do we defend the Sasana? And to my mind, their methods are particularly not creative here. They give a very homogenizing, their sermons are actually quite boring to listen to because they have a very, very homogenizing discourse about Buddhism. It's very pat and very simplistic. And they, but they turn to the state. So the major project they want to defend the Sasana is to create these four laws for the protection of race and religion. And now we have a newly democratic, somewhat democratic parliament that enacts these laws against conversion, against or protecting Buddhist women who might marry Muslim men and so on. And so it's particularly attacking, but using the state as the agent to protect the Sasana and not here. And using law and semi democratic law to do that. I think, I think this is interesting and useful perhaps as a way to think about the ways in which these movements that you lay out quite clearly as responses to Sasana Sasana, involve multiple ways. I mean, I think they involve multiple threats and multiple responses at the same time. Um, I wanna, I want to also give you a pushback of the modernizing versus the magic in response to your heterodox monk. Shin Ukkattha is particularly famous in Burma for what is to Burmese ears quite a shocking statement. And this [???] this one life: born human, die human. But we have another monk that a PhD student of mine has been working on [???????] who writes Pali commentary of the Milinda Panha, And writing a Pali commentary in the contemporary period is itself pretty unusual. Um, but he's the head of the meditation lineage. And the meditation lineage that he creates is much more the embodied and much more focused on reaching the jhanas, reaching the levels of meditation than your standard Vipassana is. In fact, he's very much in his discussions and meditation. He is really more about the body. In addition, he has a lot of focus in his commentarial tradition. Whether or not he might have reached the opinions, the higher powers that one would get as one gets higher and higher into the stages of meditation towards enlightenment. He writes this very controversial commentary. And parts of the commentary are controversial because he wants to change one ceremony. The other part of the commentary that's quite controversial is he proposes the ordination of nuns. And he says that women should be allowed to be ordained. In this. He's to mid 20th century. He's meditation, he's writing commentary. He fits nicely in your modernist box. And he wants to ordain nuns. He fits nicely in a modernist box. Except for when you finally figure out why he wants to ordain nuns. It's because his justification for why he knows enough that it's legal or it's right to ordain nuns is because he's claiming he's reached levels, close levels to enlightenment, that he has knowledge of past and future. He has sufficient knowledge to interpret the Milinda Panha by himself. But also that he has knowledge to know that it's really okay if we fully ordain nuns. But his reason for ordaining nuns is not the one you want it to be, which is perhaps gender is an illusion and a problem here. No, his answer is that in his meditation lineage, women, lay women who practice this can get higher and higher and can get to the closest stages to enlightenment. The problem is canonically, if you are at that highest stage and you don't immediately ordain, you can't live as a lay person. His answer for why he wants to ordained nuns has nothing to do with gender or gender equality. It's a pragmatic problem. He sees himself as creating through his much more magic apotropaic ideas of meditation and enlightenment. A physical problem that these women he's brought into his fold will not be able to live if they don't actually have a full ordination possible to him. So I think in Shin Ukkattha we get this modernizing feel. Both are heterodox, both are rejected by the Burmese mainstream. But I think in general, and we also get this sort of flip side of the modernizing and the Magic, or the modernizing and the spiritual powers come together in different ways. And so I think maybe that would be an interesting place to see where those overlaps and those connections happen. So if you had thoughts or reflections on those, I would love to hear and as always, I love to have the conversation continue and to hear from others as well. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was great. So maybe if we put a few questions on the table, you can sort of field them as you go. I believe we have something online. Another question. Okay, So unless you raise some issues about sort of magical thing. So what I want you to say about this idea of magic is that this idea that these things are magical and in some ways separate from other things, is a modern external imposition. And that, so in terms of modernizing, so [????] who did a PhD at SOAS a decade or so ago, he looks at Mongkut, the ultimate modernizer. You had all these kind of discussions with missionaries and at the same time was performing the animal sacrifices at the palace and this kind of thing. So it partly depends on who people are talking to, what gets emphasized. And I think that Personal Transformation, magical powers that one might call magical powers These are all things that in the practice setting, I think people talk about quite a lot. Even if they're in a Vipassana tradition. Maybe not once that moves outside, although that's beginning to change as well. So global Vipassana might now look at these things a bit more. So I really wanted to say that because that becomes, I mean, it's pervasive, but it's new partner no longer part of the dominant voice about these things. One of the things I wanted to just to raise, I'm not quite sure why you made me think of it in terms of what one can do in response to the decline of the Sasana. Now, one of the things I noticed in the 18th century manuscripts is an interest in the mathematics. And so trying to calculate how many people should become enlightened under Gotama Buddha's Sasana. Now, how many people have already been enlightened and therefore whether it's still possible. Another place for mathematics is the threat of Islam. So this sort of majority Buddhist country in both Thailand and in Burma, the perception of the threat of Islam seems extraordinary. Yeah. But we get these extrapolated calculations of Islam overtaking and this kind of thing. So I think an interesting but perhaps unseen thing is these calculations that go on in people's responses. I have a question if you don't mind. So you mentioned something about two things about Thailand that I just want to know more about if you could talk about. One was you talked about Thai expansionism early on. So if you could just say what that is and what the effect of that is historically. And the other was why? You were talking about how Thailand has less of an emphasis on meditation in their maternity. And so what are the changes that are taking place that, that substitute for what would be the meditation traditions in Burma or another place. So Thailand is so people often think of Thai the modern Thai state being modeled on European states. So Thailand becomes like a modern state. I also wonder about the influence and inspiration of Chinese, um, organization as well. So decentralized organization of the state. And in the 19th and 20th century, Buddhism becomes and it's still a mechanism for that. So when Mongkut is s a monk, he's, he's become a monk to avoid the often deadly competitions for the throne. His half-brother ends up on the throne. And the highest monk in the land, the king of the Sangha practices these traditional meditation. The somatic practices that I work on. One of Mongkut's-- So you can look at it two ways. You could look at Mongkut saying this is later accretion is not in the canon and therefore it's not true. But you can also look at it from a perspective of power by dismissing what his teacher, what the head of the Sangha is doing and claiming authority himself as a reformist. He can sideline that power base and create his own power base is the head of this new branch of the Sangha. So that's what happens. He sets up the Tamayyut and then once he becomes king, he has a branch of the Sangha that's loyal to him. Initially, the Tammayut will for quite a long time, they become the monks that are given the high status position, especially administrative positions, and having high status over the rest of the Sangha. And so they end up representing the state, representing the king throughout Thailand. I'm one of the neat things about this as Thailand is a collection of many different ethnic groups speaking different languages or dialects. And by using the sangha, which is present throughout, not everywhere. Then he can gain control over the entire country. And you have a process of At one point it becomes outlawed. You cannot feed monks, you can't give her arms to monks unless they speak Bangkok Thai which is the modern becomes Thai It gets negotiated differently. So people negotiate with the local governor to be able to feed monks who can't speak Bangkok Thai, but you get this use of Buddhism to create a national identity. Other centralizing can use as well. So when modern medicine becomes a source of research in Thailand, becomes that you can't get your school certificate unless you have a vaccination certificate as well. So there's other ways of centralizing Thai, identity and authority in Bangkok. So not just through Buddhism, but Buddhism becomes a tool. Sorry. We do have additional questions. If you'd like. I'll read the first 1 s. I'm sorry. Remind me what the second question was. About. So long. I ask about the other ones there instead of meditation. Alright, so the emphasis was on administration and also sidelining the type of meditation done traditionally very widespread and promoting monks who practice meditation that they revised on the basis of the canonical texts and giving those preference and donating monasteries to those monks. It's not universal, so that type of meditation continues but gets sidelined and starts to disappear. And all is preserved in a modernized form. So there's one branch of that that still continues to this day where they think those body practices, body-based practices where you internalize in your physical body, the spiritual attainments. They use that just for the somatic thing. But traditionally, in the 18th century manuscripts from Sri Lanka, that's been used at every level of spiritual attainment. So the personal as well. We do have a question that came in through the Zoom from Eric White, who says you present Burmese conservatism and tie modernization as alternative successful responses to the various challenges of modernity. Is it useful to consider failed responses in Burma, Siam, or elsewhere in the Theravada world. And what they illuminate about the historical dynamics of Theravada Buddhism in this era. Yeah, I mean, I think she catches a really interesting one as somebody. So at least you referred to him as heterodox, but he would never have thought of himself as heterodox, but as ultra-Orthodox. And there's been some interesting work recently by Olivia Porter looking at the [???] who, are extremely Orthodox but have this reputation as being heterodox. Generally, there are tiny, tiny, tiny group. So I think if we look closely, we can see lots of attempts that say fell off the forest tradition in Sri Lanka that rises and disappears. And yeah, so I think there were lots of interesting ones and I think what creates success is a lot of different factors. So what looks like success? Thailand, really, we call it a success because of what happens in the First World War with Thailand, aligning with the victors of the First World War. And in return for the greed final confirmation of no more encouragement from the British and the French. Yeah. So that's, that's the moment at which we can judge it, judge what's happening. But at anytime it could have gone another way. And I think it's really interesting in Burma that she knew Carter was a national hero or one point. But now is this the antihero? And also he was a supporter of communism, which at one point it looked like the way Burma could go. But that moment also passed. There were these moments that if you took a snapshot, something looks successful, IT policies or something looks like a failure and it comes to succeed. And that also will change in the future. Doubtless, what will happen now in BEM, We don't know what happened in Thailand, we see different factions because lots of emphasis on Magical, what we call magical. Magical is very different, difficult, isn't it? Because it really gets used to refer to a technology that people didn't recognize or no longer is used. But we get reformist movements. But we've also got no secular models as well. So what will happen in these countries? That will certainly be a crisis for all of them. I think in terms of how many people own the Sangha, how many people will become monks? Okay? If there's one in the room, I'm happy to. One is a theoretical question and one is empirical theorem. The first question I have is, you mentioned that dichotomy between textual fundamentalism and eclectic relativism. I sort of differing responses. I was wondering. What is your assessment about the accuracy of both of them because they think you mentioned something about later, like scholars seeing the Avi Del Mar tech that's sort of like a later version. And then so textural fundamentalism can sort of insist on tax debt or may not be reliable. And then also you mentioned the dismissal of things that don't fit in with the secular worldview. And that sort of being like a way of what is your first question about like your accuracy of each of the different responses may be in terms of, you know, early sources or something like that. And my second question is about your field work in like Cambodia, Sri Lanka, in Theravada countries. And if you notice sort of like a discernible difference between how people in each of these countries talk about Buddhism. Okay, interesting question. So the first one about fundamentalism. Chenault cutter is convicted on multiple camps. So the court document is thousands, I mean, over 1,000 pages long. And it includes the fact that he dismisses the abdomen as the later tradition because his argument is that the story is that the stator and the Vinaya are recorded immediately after the Buddha's death at the first council, not the abdomen. The Abhidharma rather is authorized by the Buddha's visiting the deity. His, his birth mother has become in heaven and teaching me Obama to her coming back for lunch, repeating it to the cerebrum. And so the fact that the heaven is in there and he's influenced by one of the big, so big influences on him know, that I haven't mentioned is actually Indian debating methods using the Pomona of a criteria of direct perception and this kind of thing. For him, direct perception is extremely important. And the fact that you can't directly perceive heaven is his reason for dismissing it. So he's for the people judging him, the five judges of Minnesota Court, he is rejecting part of the canon. So they are making a fundamentalist judgment. But he's also performing a form of textual fundamentalism in that he saying that there are certain parts of the texts which are true. But the other in this case is Hindus who represent colonialism as well. But the Hindus have corrupted the texts with these stories about gods in this kind of thing that we can't see and therefore don't exist. So both doing the similar form of federalism but ended up with different results. I think that the, yes, so for most Buddhist studies, scholars who don't have an important statement of faith as part of this scholarship. The canon is cumulative and brings together lots of sources, and it brings together contrasting sources as well. And the Abhidharma while brings in new things. And also, when we get into the commentaries is clear that things like ideas of the human body or changing medicine changes and develops. And so we see changes going along that whether they're new or just the restatement of things. I mean, for instance, if we think about what we're doing now on Zoom and we're using our phones and this kind of thing. That's something new that obviously isn't there in the canon. But is that how would a fundamentalist approach that we don't get Buddhist fundamentalism rejecting phones and Zoom and this kind of thing. But we could, it's not in the canon. The things that get targeted as non-canonical, also interesting and also I think relate to other politics going on. I won't go on. But you can see examples of this in, for instance, monks who were accused of being communist in Thailand in the 1950s and watch, yeah. So then non Buddhism is through a political, a particular political lens. I'm sorry. Thank you very much for this wonderful talk. I just want to thank Professor Crosby and Professor Turner for their excellent presentations and this great exchange. Thank you so much for joining us and thanks everyone for being here. Thank you.