New Mandala

20 responses so far ↓

• 1 Erik Davis // Jul 15, 2008 at 3:28 am

  Dear Nicholas – thanks for this link, I would indeed appreciate any conversation about the proverb and/or useful comparisons. For those disinclined to click on links, the full translation of the proverb goes like this:

  The treasures of man are women, wine, cars, and villas;
  The treasures of the gods include incense and candles, but
  The treasures of the Buddha are the grave and nirvana.

• 2 Grasshopper // Jul 15, 2008 at 2:00 pm

  There is a Taoist proverb that flows something along the lines of:

  When a superior student hears of the Tao, they practice it with diligence.

  When the average student hears of the Tao, they sometime keep it, they
  sometimes lose it.

  When the lowest student hears of the Tao, they ridicule it greatly.

  If they did not ridicule then the Tao would not be the Tao.

  I compare my quote with yours in so far as, the superiority of the state of Nirvana over the state of possessions. Personally I see there being no superior position because all statements include the word ‘treasure’. That there is a lexical judgment of ‘what is the superior treasure?’ in your quote highlights a value judgment more than the power of death in my opinion. Do you have any comment to make on the relationship between moral judgment from those who practice the will of the Buddha and the deaths of commoners practicing hedonism? The lexical ordering of the superior student judgments in the Taoist quote only enforces the notion of death for all — as all are students, whereas your quote implies one death is valued more over the other through different social classes. What I suppose I am getting at is the notion of relativism.

  Do the hedonistic ‘man and woman’, view the deaths of those who ‘treasure’ the grave and Nirvana comparatively superior to their own? What have you found regarding the acceptance of death being only brought about by the lure of Nirvana? Have you found that there many who accept the notion of relativism in relation to these differing values in Khmer society?

• 3 Grasshopper // Jul 16, 2008 at 1:25 pm

  Sorry, Erik, I wrote that while I was feeling fairly Grim Reaper at work. What a load of rubbish.

• 4 Erik Davis // Jul 17, 2008 at 2:19 am

  Hey Grasshopper, no apology necessary. I waited to respond partly to see if others wanted to jump in, partly because I honestly am not certain I understood the thrust of your original comment. Let me take a stab at it.

  My understanding of this proverb is that it identifies those items which are properly ‘valuable’ to different entities: Men value (stupidly, it is implied, from a Buddhist ascetic perspective) women, liquor, and material wealth; In Cambodia, it is often said that candles and incense are not for the Buddha, but for the gods (devata); but the Buddha’s treasures are the tough part. How do we ‘value’ death? How do we value the grave, and how do we even begin to think about nirvana?

  I don’t want to get into comparisons with Taoist proverbs, since I’m not sure what that would accomplish: as an anthropologist/historian of religion, I’m less interested in deciding which religion or school of thought is ‘right’ and more interested in understanding how this proverb ‘means’ in a particular setting.

  I hope that addresses some of your comments, and provides material for further discussion.

• 5 Grasshopper // Jul 17, 2008 at 11:45 am

  My reason for using the Taoist proverb was just to explore the idea of yours, rather than say which is right or not.

  That the Buddha treasures the grave and nirvana, and it comes last in the proverb implies that Gods can die too?

  When I was in Poipet, there was a man who told me that his boss used to beat him when the buses were not clean. In stop-start English, very broken French and Lonely Planet Khmer, I part interpreted, part assumed that he bore no ill feeling towards his boss because they would end up in the same place and that he did not have time to hate — because the buses had to be cleaned or he wouldn’t be paid.

  To be a little Hegelian, the immediate implication is that the man cleaning the bus is a man and the boss is a God, floating on a cloud of perfect incense above ultra hygenic buses, and both will end up in a grave — but because the man appreciates that his boss will die too, it gives me the impression that, in relation to your quote, despite him having the look of being a submissive crude hedonist, there is some Buddhist virtue resonating within.

  Therefore, the boss is only the man and his ’slave’, a superior being. That is what I was muddling about in the first post about there being a lexicon in regards to the importance of what comes first in your proverb. Does this have any resonance in Cambodia, or am I using Western concepts to make sense of Cambodian society?

  Thanks for your response.

• 6 Stephen // Jul 17, 2008 at 1:12 pm

  “How do we value the grave?”

  Erik, fascinating proverb. I’m admittedly quite unknowledgeable about this stuff. But the proverb got me thinking about of Ajahn Chah’s reiteration of the Buddha’s “die before you die” teaching, as for example:

  The Buddha taught to ‘die before you die’, to be finished with things before they are finished. Then you can be at ease. Let things break before they are broken, let them finish before they are finished. This is the Buddha’s intention in teaching the Dhamma.

  Given the Buddha’s extortions against craving for death, as a desire for cessation (vibhavata.nhaa). Could the way to “value the grave” be to value dispassion in life as the fruit of realising the inevitability of death ?

• 7 Erik Davis // Jul 17, 2008 at 2:05 pm

  I think I see the point more clearly now, but my sense is that it is a bit to the side of the meaning of the proverb for most Khmer (any Khmers reading this? Sound off, please!).

  While death is clearly the ultimate leveler (we all end in the grave or as ash, ideally), and the proverb points to this, I would hazard that the proverb says less about the possiblility of some sort of hegelian aufbehung in death, in which the social contradictions of a hugely hierarchical cultural imaginary (that’s where I do agree with you on the hegelian bit – the bus cleaner was definitely a lower human in the social realm there, and the owner a higher human – to be clear, not my interpretation), than a way of pointing to the ultimate irrelevance of the treasures of this world, or the honors rendered the gods (who definitely die, by the way – that’s a well-established part of Buddhist cosmology).

  I would also point out that it is not the case that the Buddha ‘treasures’ death (well, maybe he does, I don’t know, but the proverb doesn’t say anything about it), but that the treasures of the Buddha – which I read as that which is valuable about Buddhism and its teachings – are death.

  Thanks for engaging on this.

• 8 Erik Davis // Jul 17, 2008 at 2:06 pm

  oops – aufhebung – German was never mein stronge suit.

• 9 Erik Davis // Jul 18, 2008 at 1:23 am

  @Stephen: This is a very plausible extrapolation of the proverb, from a very doctrine-oriented point of view. In fact, I think that insofar as it has doctrinal relevance to everyday life, your interpretation is likely to be one of the only options.

  My reservation about your interpretation is not that it is in any way incorrect, but that it might be too limited, especially since this proverb is almost never, in my experience, spoken by (or even in the presence of) Buddhist monks – there’s a real sense that it is somehow transgressive.

  I suppose my main question about it is my attempt to integrate (if that’s even a worthwhile or plausible thing) the observations in the first and second paragraphs above – that the proverb points to doctrinal truths about death and grasping, and that these doctrinal truths, couched in this way, are felt to be transgressive, even somehow irreligious.

  Thanks for your thoughts here….

• 10 Erick // Jul 18, 2008 at 2:35 am

  Isn’t the structural parallel here this: the second set of ‘objects’ in each series is an offering to the actor/agent prior to them in the sentence? These items constitute objects desired by those agents, and thus these are the best gifts to give them in order to curry favor with and/or please them. Thus, the Buddha appreciates, desires, is postively responsive to those who offer him “grave and nirvana”.

  The interpretive complexity lies therefore, it seems to me, not only in the question of how is the Buddha appreciative and desirous of both the grave and nirvana such that they are ‘his treasures’ (literally, metaphorically, or both) but also who offers these to him and why? Also, what exactly does the “grave” mean in this context? Is it simply a metaphor for “deathlessness”, which is similarly a metaphor for “nirvana”?

  Some broader anthropological questions no doubt are this: under what conditions and in what contexts do Cambodians use this proverb, either orally or textually? What types of Cambodians are prone to employing this proverb? What are the reactions of those who hear others using it? The actual social uses of this trope would seem to be key to actually determining somethng of its social, cultural and religious meaning.

• 11 Erik Davis // Jul 18, 2008 at 5:14 am

  @ Erick

  Some broader anthropological questions no doubt are this: under what conditions and in what contexts do Cambodians use this proverb, either orally or textually? What types of Cambodians are prone to employing this proverb? What are the reactions of those who hear others using it? The actual social uses of this trope would seem to be key to actually determining somethng of its social, cultural and religious meaning.

  Absolutely. I neglected to put those details up in any real form, except to note that the proverb elicits a nervous giggle. There are exceptions: usually among assertive, older aacaarya (អាចារ្យ, Thai: ajhaan) – by definition men, will occasionally hear the proverb from my lips and respond forcefully “That’s right!” and then begin a slight exegesis. However – and here’s the thing that’s interesting for me: they have universally focused on the first two lines, and I can never get them to talk in detail about what it means to ‘value the grave.’

  I think the structural parallel you point out is somewhat overstated, if I may. In the second line (the gods), it is very clear that these are offerings the faithful give to the gods. But the first line (men), the treasures stated are things men want, or take, or possess – not things that are given, for the most part. And it is very difficult to understand how one might give a grave, or nirvana, to the Buddha. The Buddha has no need of the latter, already having entered his parinirvana. And if we are the metaphorize both objects as ‘death,’ we end up with a very strange, seemingly christian-oriented focus on the ‘gift of death,’ which I don’t think is what’s going on here.

  I’m grateful for these thoughts!

• 12 Erick // Jul 18, 2008 at 9:30 am

  I don’t think the parallels of the first two lines are overstated, in fact. In ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ mainland Southeast Asia, is it really so odd to claim that women, alcohol, high value technology and property are all things offered to men of prowess and stature in the pursuit of seeking their benevolence, assistance, good will? They don’t just seize those objects; sometimes they are offered up, either voluntarily or to avoid a more rapacious seizure. Similarly, you seek to influence / bribe / show your respect of men of prowess through those offerings just like you seek to show your reverence for devas and powerful spirits through offerings of candles and incense (with an ambiguous line existing between reverence and bribery, in practice).

  The parallelism of the first two lines is so strong to me, and the logic in such contrast to the normative ideals with regards to the third line, that I’m not surprised folks giggle, seem unconformtable and unwilling or unable to explain the final line. Nor am I surprised that monks who do offer an interpretation of the third offer conventional exegesis that simply avoids the logical, moral and cognitive tensions produced by the parallelisms. I would expect them to do exactly what you have indicated.

  From a historical perspective, it isn’t surprising that the grave is a treasure of the Buddha. As Schopen has argued persuasively, the Buddhist occupation of graveyards and sites of the dead was one of their pre-eminent claims to religious and social power in ancient India (and the logic extends almost universally, as well). Not that i would expect most Buddhist monks to put it in those terms. And from what you say, they don’t.

  But isn’t it very odd that you can never get them to talk about the final line. I mean, except for the reference to ‘grave’, there is obviously nothing controversial about calling nirvana a treasure of the Buddha (and his awakening, his teachings, etc). And there is nothing controversial about death and graveyards in Buddhism; they fully thrive on that imaginary. It is the association of nirvana with grave that is clearly transgressive here and produces silence, inexpressibility. So why the silence? And why the conjunction of the two in the proverb – what provoked it; how is it mythically productive?

• 13 Erick // Jul 18, 2008 at 10:14 am

  I should add that I remain curious about the social uses of the proverb. Your last post clarified a bit about Khmer responses to it, presumably when you have prompted them specifically about it. But I am interested in knowing who uses the proverb or comments on the proverb without prompting by you or another researcher, either orally or textually, and in what contexts, and to what ends (as much as these can be reconstructed from the larger discursive and performative interactions). I don’t know how one can determine the meaning and significance of the proverb outside of those naturalistic settings and uses.

• 14 Erik Davis // Jul 19, 2008 at 2:41 am

  @Erick
  I take it back – your reasoning persuades me. Yes indeed, the treasures of men are women, wine, cars, and villas, and those things are not only valued by them, they are often offered to them. The same parallel exists, as you convincingly argue, with the second line. The disjunct of the third line does appear to be the ‘kicker’ in a way, because one simply cannot offer either of these things to the Buddha. This disjunct then seems to highlight a different notion of value.

  Your notes on Schopen et al. are quite on the mark – most of chapter one of my dissertation is precisely on such issues, though I am compelled to concentrate on Southeast Asian examples. I do feel that the claim to special power over the dead – not merely what I think of as the ‘pastoral care’ of the dead, but also and especially the power to suppress the malign dead – has been the dominant way in which Buddhism has spread through its history, at least thus far.

  As for the social uses of the proverb: it is rare, and I never did study it systematically. It was brought up to me on a number of different occasions, and since I did more research with Buddhist laypeople (especially donchee / maechi, and funerary workers) than with monks, the setting was always ripe for a certain amount of ‘transgressive humor.’ When others brought it up to me it was always, uniformly, when there was no ‘Buddhist official’ (monk, aacaarya, &c.) present, and always with a giggle that marked both nervousness and humor. That is to say, while it indicated some rather deep meaning, it was also very much a joke.

  When I brought it up on the other hand, to check my understanding, or to see how widespread recognition of the proverb was, the giggle was also present, but the responses varied depending on audience. When there were no Buddhist officials around, there was more relaxed laughter, and occasionally “O! He knows that one!” and ice was progressively broken. When around a Buddhist official, the official would either ignore it and the conversation would move to other topics, or he would give traditional exegesis as discussed earlier.

  Cheers,

• 15 Erick // Jul 19, 2008 at 6:36 am

  Thanks for explaining the context of the proverb’s use. Fascinating stuff. It would seem that the parable is a potent discursive barb in the ironic, critical yet ‘underground’ world of informed, competitive ‘professionals’ within the arena of popular Buddhism. And that it is used unevenly, rather like a weapon of the status and ideological weak, so to speak. A way for criticisms of monks – as normative ideal, as practical reality, or both – to be uttered while simultaneously being able to distance onceself from the criticism, since after all it is a traditional bit of parable wisdom cooked up by someone else! Yet cautiously used nonetheless. I love it.

• 16 Erick // Jul 19, 2008 at 6:45 am

  I must say, the idea of the proverb has continued to kick around in my head. And I find it productively tantalizing. IF my argument is right in arguing for an anthropological notion that the treasures are treasures because of their transactional value between an unstated actor and the agent listed at the beginning of each line, then the last line is confounding and transgressive both doctrinally and ritually. Who, after all, is in a relationship of exchange with the Buddha so as to produce the value of the grave and nirvana, and what is the character of that exchange? And yet, despite being confounding and transgressive, your Khmer informants recognize the logic as accurate and meaningful in some sense. Otherwise they wouldn’t see the parable as saying something informative and meaningful. So how exactly is it accurate enough so as to be seen as reasonable? What kind of exchange is possibly imagined as going on?

• 17 Erik Davis // Jul 20, 2008 at 4:40 am

  @Erick:
  Thanks for these – this last is especially provocative. Since my dissertation is essentially about the transformations of ‘value’ via death in Khmer society, the issue of exchange is a key one. (The relationship is precisely the one that practically founded anthropology – the existence of symbols of fertility and wealth in death rituals). Though I’m comfortable with the existence of a transactional analysis here, I don’t think we must necessarily limit our understanding of this proverb to an analysis that provides that level of precision. More basically, my take on it is that each line lists a number of things that are valued, or valuable, to/for/with reference to the person or entity named. In that general reading, which doesn’t obviate the more precise transactional possibility, the proverb points to the existence of different notions of value within a single cosmology, where value is dependent on the person’s status and ontological position. Thanks,

• 18 Erick // Jul 21, 2008 at 12:31 am

  So Erik,

  While I agree transactional exchange models are not the only way to analytically and theoretically think about value in a productive fashion, I am predisposed to a general anthropological take on value. And since the mid-80s to 90s and the practice turn, that has more and more tended towards models that attempt to account for the production, reproduction and transformation of value, in either their specific or general sense – Munn, Turner, Graeber, etc.

  While I agree substantively with your approach at a descriptive level – i.e. distinct domains of value within a single world (although I’m not sure I would argue that this necessarily implies a single cosmology – that perspective seems to be very much what the dominant discourse of canonical Buddhism would like us all to believe) – I worry that this risks a vision of value as naturally given epistemologically, ontologically and ethically / metaphysically within a particular socio-cultural world. And that this risks, in turn, a more anemic interpretive and analytical examination. One result being that the processual and praxis dimensions of ongoing social life are downplayed, even displaced, by reified representations of dominant ideologies of value that posit it as simply, unequivocaly there in the world, rather than a contingent product of collective social life and actions.

  I think in general, Buddhist Studies has suffered from presuming a whole range of values and regimes of value as ‘given’ in mature Buddhist social worlds, and also from presuming these as being more or less coextensive with the canonical, orthodox, textual visions of the Buddhist imaginary. It has neither sought to explain how that regime of value – or better, hierarchical articulation of regimes of value – is a product of collective social action in general, or how the canonical, orthodox, textual Buddhist imaginary achieves – in actual social praxis and history – its dominance as a stable regime of socio-cultural value. Scholars of Buddhist Studies seem to simply presume that this is a natural result of survival of the ideological fittest. That the Buddhist imaginary – displaying greater complexity, comprehensiveness, and ideological subtlety – naturally wins out over other regimes of value. Until “modernization” arrives on the scene, when it is suddenly for some reason thrown into distress.

  But again, all these thoughts betray my disciplinary biases and presumptions.

  Cheers.

• 19 Erik Davis // Jul 21, 2008 at 2:03 am

  @Erick,

  No, no, we’re in total agreement here – hilariously, to me, your last comment sounds like a briefer (and in some ways, better) version of a paper I wrote a few years back, right down to the name dropping of the three thinkers on value I consider most foundational (well, after the earliest sociological ones, like Marx et al.) – Munn, Graeber, and Turner.

  I find Turner’s stuff inspiring but extraordinarily difficult to get through, and his focus on media largely irrelevant to my own work, but Graeber’s big book on value remains one of the best current approaches to value thinking in anthropology.

  Munn’s work is even better in her focus on the transformations of value, though I find her definition of symbol (paraphrase: a symbol is something that means something) difficult to take too seriously – that doesn’t damage the importance of her work, just betrays my own preference for a certain version of symbolic anthropology.

  Value appears to me as something constantly in conflict and contest, always fluctuating. There are, however, institutions (’regimes,’ as you put it) which attempt (not always successfully) to stabilize and control these meanings. Buddhism has been a profoundly successful strategy of value stabilization, for reasons I think revolve around their emphasis on death and the particular manner in which they integrate with sovereign regimes.

  “Modernity” needs to be better defined or else tossed out, but I’m disinclined (and don’t take you to be pushing this idea) to agree that the Buddhist regime of values is tossed into distress by modernity. Cheers,

• 20 Erick // Jul 22, 2008 at 3:07 am

  Erik,

  Yes, Turner’s work is often, even usually, a painful read at the level of rhetoric, clarity, etc. Munn’s is most impressive in the sense of a fully developed model deployed in a thick ethnographic description and analysis. And Graeber’s is the most suggestive, in part because he widens out his historical, comparative and theoretical focus. At the same time, Graeber doesn’t provide an ethnographically rich exemplification of his analytic and theoretical musings like Munn and Turner. Which is a particular trajedy for those thinking about the production and reproduction of value under ‘Buddhist regimes’ since Munn and Turner’s ethnographic work is focused on social worlds that are relatively small in scale, simple in complexity and bounded in sociality compared to the usual horizon of Buddhist studies scholars. No one has, to my knowledge, worked up an ethnographically and historically informed account of value on the scale of pre-modern polity, a modern nation-state or a civilizational imaginary / regime.

  As you might have guessed, I tend to find the presumptions behind symbolic anthropology a bit too constraining given many current theoretical and analytical questions. Practice theory and other related approaches to semiotic forms and collective action I find more amenable, especially when thinking about value. It seems to me actually hard to find anthropologists now self-consciously expanding upon the tradition of symbolic anthropology as a coherent, integrated body of work.

  Actually, I do think that ‘modernity’ seriously challenges Buddhism and its regimes of values (both importantly plural, in my opinion). Although the concept of modernity is too diffuse to help analytically. Rather, both a capitalist mode of production and a nation-state mode of sociality / governance create quite distinct yet robustly competitive orders of value and value production that do, in my opinion, challenge the established institutional and discursive modes of value / value production under ‘classical’ (Theravada) Buddhism, as that has been canonically understood. The former challenge tends to be highlighted much more currently, but both have been crucial to the reworking of Buddhism in the 20th century as I see it.

  By the way, if you haven’t had a chance, you should check out the March 2008 issue of Anthropological Theory. The issue is devoted to value in anthropological theory. In addition to a Turner article on Marxian value theory, there are other articles by Robert Foster, Webb Keane and other anthropologists working on the anthropology of value.

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