10 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Did Emperor Ashoka really exist?
It’s a general problem because we today have a very Middle Eastern Monotheism view of religion where you *are* something, or worse you *believe*/*have faith in* something rather than you *do* something. It’s exclusivist and generally anachronistic. One anthropologist summed up the colonial encounter for a lot of group as they are taught that not only they have this thing called “religion” (which is not just “culture” or “knowledge), but also more importantly they have the wrong one. To put it in fancy anthropological terms, for most of the world religion was an etic (external) category rather than emic (internal) one.
Buddhism is particularly interesting in this regard because it did have an idea of specific religion/philosophy/teaching (dharma/dhamma) that could be exclusive... but it didn’t have to be. During the Nikaya period, some have argued to me, the only real “Buddhists” were the renunciates, the monks and the nuns. They were exclusively Buddhist whereas the lay people (like Asoka) might believe in Buddhist principles or sympathize with the renunciates and believe them to be trusted holy people, but wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as “Buddhist” or “not Buddhist”.
Certainly, by a certain point we are talking about Buddhist societies (often with an acculturated substrate of what’s sometimes called “folk religion, famously Bon in Tibet), but we still find the mixing at official levels in many places. The relationship between Shinto and the Japanese Buddhist schools is complex, and sometimes they’re separate and sometimes they’re pretty explicitly mixed, but often they’re kept separate but for example before the Meiji Restoration, a Buddhist monastery might run a Shinto temple or vice versa. Like even when separation of worship, there’s not necessarily a separation of authority.
Philip Almond wrote this book called *the British Discovery of Buddhism* which argues pretty convincingly that, subsequent to the fall of India as Buddhist center, only British colonialism “discovered” (his term) that there is this global thing called Buddhism that’s practiced differently in Sri Lanka and Burma on one hand, and China and Japan on another, and Tibet and Mongolia on a third hand, but it’s all really One Thing. Oh and the British also decided that actually Buddhism was sort of Asian Protestantism (a logical reform on the decadent and therefore Catholic-like Hinduism), and you see things like the book length epic poem called *The Light of Asia*. But that’s getting far off topic.
Our idea of religion is not a culturally specific that travels pretty well between Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Baha’i, etc, but the further we get away from those, the worse it works. Realizing that puts into question a lot of old assumptions about what Buddhism was in Asoka’s time, so I was wondering what the current state of this was. This reunderstanding of religion globally started in the 80’s, but really picked up in the 90’s and 2000’s.
Comment by lcnielsen at 08/04/2020 at 11:53 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Our idea of religion is not a culturally specific that travels pretty well between Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Baha’i, etc, but the further we get away from those, the worse it works. Realizing that puts into question a lot of old assumptions about what Buddhism was in Asoka’s time, so I was wondering what the current state of this was. This reunderstanding of religion globally started in the 80’s, but really picked up in the 90’s and 2000’s.
Recent work on Zoroastrianism has focused a lot more on syncretism, actuallly, taking a step away from Mary Boyce's notion of "orthodoxy" and "heresy" (which lead to reactions where people implicitly accepted this framework leading to a situation where suddenly nobody was a Zoroastrian anymore because they weren't "orthodox" enough...) and focusing more on notions of orthopraxy (which Boyce also developed a lot). While *Masdayasni daena* is often translated as "the Mazda-worshipping religion", the actual meaning is "the Mazda-worshipping *way of life*".
So in this more modern view there is a basic framework of orthopraxy combined with a pretty large space of Zoroastiran orthodoxy that allows for syncretism and diversity in e.g. cosmogony to a certain extent, as long as it stays within certain bounds. Much of this is thanks to increased focus on e.g. Sogdian records, which show clear aspects of what we would think of as "orthodoxy" (like the classic snippets of doctrine in the form of conversations between Zoroaster and Ahura Mazda) but also worship of various other deities, presumably identified with *yazata*.