Organizer: Geoff Wade, , Australia A key research project of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre in Singapore is the ‘Comparative Study of Religious Networks in Asia’. This seeks to place the remarkable role of Buddhism as a pan-Asian but highly plural system of meanings and interactions, in the context of other religious expansions and networks in Asia. Both the highly contested issue of “Indianisation” of Southeast Asia, and the colonially-weighted discourse about the spread of Islam and Christianity into Asia will be viewed from a broader context of the possibilities of cross-cultural religious networks and meanings. We hope this panel will help both to define the parameters of the project, and to build an international network of scholars interested in it.
Archaeological finds in sites pertaining to most newly Indianised polities of Southeast Asia, between the 4th and the 7th century EC, clearly indicate that the dominant divinity was Vishnu. Representations of the god himself or of associated divinities are far more numerous and the epigraphic record confirms that Vaishnavism – in a sectarian, devotional form – was then a central concern for local rulers. In this presentation, we will show how these cultural developments follow contemporary evolutions in India, and how they must be considered, in parallel with Buddhism, as primary factors in the Indianisation process Southeast Asia, in the religious, economic and political spheres.
There is little doubt that the spread of Islam to Southern India, Southeast Asia and Southern China was intimately tied with maritime trade, and the routes along which this trade passed. When and how the religion took root in the respective areas, however, and the ways in which the Islamic communities which were established interacted remain issues of continuing research. What were the relations between trade and jihad in the spread of Islam to Southeast Asia? Were there khutba networks as described by Elizabeth Lambourn for Western Indian Ocean Islamic communities? What other factors were involved in both the establishment of and linkages between Islamic communities of these three regions? This presentation will explore this huge topic from the limited range of historical materials available to us over the period c. 800-1500.
The critical anomaly of the Christian spread in Asia was the interruption in this contact between the rise of Islam in the 7th century and the establishment of a secure maritime route around Africa in the 16th. The more ‘natural’ and piecemeal expansion eastwards was almost halted under Islamic rule, and the churches that had been established in Malabar, Ethiopia and elsewhere had little further contact with reforms in the rest of Christendom. The resumption of contact in the 16th Century was with a form of Christianity that was clerical, monastic, and politically attuned to the aims of Portuguese and Spanish crowns.
This disciplined clericalism meant that Christianity could not provide to Asian kings the charisma that Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam had brought them. Sacred knowledge and power was too tightly controlled by a celibate clergy, and moreover one that was culturally remote from Asia in its first stage. Hence the major Christian gains were among stateless peoples and the lower orders of monarchies (with the remarkable exception of several Kyushu daimyos in Japan).
Nevertheless Asian Christian networks were eventually established, of essentially two kinds. The Iberians and others who cooperated with the Spanish and Portuguese padroado built their networks out of Manila and Goa, extending effectively into Japan, China, Vietnam and eastern Indonesia. The French Société des Missions Etrangères after 1660 had to operate wholly without state protection. Ayutthaya (Siam) was their first base in Asia, from where they began to train priests from a great range of Asian societies. This state-free network will be one of the foci of the paper.
Scholars have long had difficulty trying to categorize Buddhism.
There have been two kinds of problems to this. First, while there
have clearly been phenomena that we now call Buddhism for over two
millennia, and some Buddhists were in conversation with other
Buddhists, there is nonetheless compelling evidence that the religion
of “Buddhism” arose in conversations between scholars, colonizers and
Asian practitioners in the middle of the nineteenth century. Second,
while scholars know that there are problems with the tripartite
division of Buddhism into Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana, because
scholars tend to specialize in the Buddhism of one region, and because
most national Sanghas map onto one of these communities, there is a
tendency to reinscribe these categories in our scholarship. I want to
suggest however that it is necessary to see the imagination of
Buddhism in much more flexible ways. By examining Theravada Buddhist
networks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is possible to
see that Buddhists imagine their religion in local, national and
universal ways.
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