Anne Blackburn explores the emergence of a predominant Buddhist
monastic culture in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka, while asking
larger questions about the place of monasticism and education in
the creation of religious and national traditions. Her historical
analysis of the Siyam Nikaya, a monastic order responsible for
innovations in Buddhist learning, challenges the conventional view
that a stable and monolithic Buddhism existed in South and
Southeast Asia prior to the advent of British colonialism in the
nineteenth century. The rise of the Siyam Nikaya and the social
reorganization that accompanied it offer important evidence of
dynamic local traditions. Blackburn supports this view with fresh
readings of Buddhist texts and their links to social life beyond
the monastery.
Comparing eighteenth-century Sri Lankan Buddhist monastic
education to medieval Christian and other contexts, the author
examines such issues as bilingual commentarial practice, the
relationship between clerical and "popular" religious cultures, the
place of preaching in the constitution of "textual communities,"
and the importance of public displays of learning to social
prestige. Blackburn draws upon indigenous historical narratives,
which she reads as rhetorical texts important to monastic politics
and to the naturalization of particular attitudes toward kingship
and monasticism. Moreover, she questions both conventional views on
"traditional" Theravadin Buddhism and the "Buddhist modernism" /
"Protestant Buddhism" said to characterize nineteenth-century Sri
Lanka. This book provides not only a pioneering critique of
post-Orientalist scholarship on South Asia, but also a resolution
to the historiographic impasse created by post-Orientalist readings
of South Asian history.
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