ANTHROPOLOGY; CHINESE BUDDHISM; THERAVADA; VILLAGE; ECONOMY
摘要
Theravada Buddhism prevails not only in the Southeast Asian countries of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, but also along the border areas of the Chinese province of Yunnan. The largest group of Theravada Buddhist adherents in China is the Tai Lue found in Sipsong Panna, southern Yunnan, who had adopted the religion by no later than the thirteenth century.
In Southeast Asia, Theravada Buddhism is the established religion, enjoying advocacy and patronage from monarch or government. By contrast, Theravada Buddhism in China has been undermined by atheistic propaganda and suppressed by the government during radical political campaigns since 1950. Political suppression, cultural intrusion of the Han Chinese, and stimulus of market economy, all have contributed to produce a unique variant of Theravada Buddhism in Tai Lue society of Sipsong Panna. In comparison with Southeast Asian Buddhism, the Tai Lue version can be characterized to a great extent by its secularization. For example, nirvana, which in normative Buddhist soteriology is the ultimate goal--the release from the cycle of rebirth through the annihilation of the self and all passions--is conceived by Tai Lue Buddhists as the top level of heaven, called meng niban, and deemed as the best place to live. Religious merit is sought by the Tai Lue more for glory and prestige in this world than for happiness in other world. Buddhist ritual is performed more for pursuing mundane gratification than for religious goals. Merit-making is utilized more as a scaffold to build one's interpersonal network, social status, and economic reciprocity than as a means of enhancing one's status in next life. Novices and monks are less restricted by monastic disciplines and regulations; their renunciation of secular life is more in name than in reality.
Along with these variations, the relationship between Buddhism and village economy in Sipsong Panna also shows its peculiarities. For instance, Buddhist beliefs and Buddhist values have very limited influence on economic behavior and economic development; lavish spending of wealth in religious rituals, though draining capital from economic investments, is motivated more by this-worldly desires than other-worldly ones.
