WESTERN MODERNITY AND THE OLCOTT BUDDHISTS
In order to understand the concept of an Olcott Buddhist a short account of western Christian modernity would be useful. An Olcott Buddhist as has been mentioned in these columns is a person who is Buddhist by religion but Christian by culture, especially with respect to the profession. It is unfortunate that some are under the impression that an Olcott Buddhist is one who has been educated in an English medium school established by Colonel Olcott and the Buddhist Theosophical Society. The Olcott Buddhists have separated the religion from the culture and the profession and we find many of them practicing their Christian professions while being Buddhists by religion. As a result of separating religious aspects from other cultural aspects Buddhism is being confined today to pansukula (funeral rites), alms giving, "malwatti" (trays of flowers) and "upparawatti" (gimmicks).
Only a few decades ago the Sinhala Christians (including the Catholics) were referred to as "agame", "agam karayo" etc. by the rest of the Sinhala people. The usage of this term meant that the Christians were considered to posses a religion while the (Sinhala) Buddhists did not consider themselves to belong to a religion. If a western sociologist (could be an Olcott Buddhist with a training and very often a postgraduate degree in western Christian Sociology) claims that the term Sinhala Buddhist itself was created in the colonial period there is no need to get exited about it as the Sinhalas did not consider themselves to belong to a religion as such before the western Christian modernity was enforced on them. The religion was part and parcel of the culture and the Sinhala culture was "entangled" with "Buddha Sasana". Buddhism was a way of life and was not a pure religion. This was true in respect of Hinduism as well and many Indian and Sri Lankan Hindus refer to Hinduism as way of life. Even Catholicism before the advent of the reformist religions considered "phenomena" as a whole as implied by the word Catholicism itself, which signifies a holistic attitude towards understanding the world.
There are so called historians and other "intellectuals" who do not consider Mahavansa as a book in history. Mahavansa was never written as a history book as in the old days history as a subject was not separated from the religion as such. There was no separation into history, arts, religion etc., those days and Mahavansa was not a pure history book or a pure book of religion. The Bible itself cannot be categorised into a pure history book or a book of the religion. The separation into various disciplines came after the western modernity that began in the fifteenth century and prior to that not only that there was no science as such but there was no art as well. Art as a separate discipline was recognised only after the fifteenth century.
After the fifteenth century "theories and concepts" were created to deal with separate art, separate science etc. The present day world has been "convinced" that the state was gradually separated from "religion" and the western sciences have an objective outlook that is independent of the religion. Even culture is separated from religion and the people are being conditioned to live as "atoms" individually and to separate knowledge into various disciplines. However what is not understood or what is not told is that this very separation is the phenomenon that binds everything into a whole and that the western modernity is bound with the new Christian culture that was given a name by Martin Luther, Calvin and others. Their Christianity is essentially a Christian culture that broke away from the Catholic culture and this new culture came into the world with what is now known as the renaissance. Since then a new Christian culture has been created based on what we call the Greek Judaic Christian (GJC) Chinthanaya. This culture was given the names Protestant, Reformist etc,. after Calvin, Luther and others.
Western Christian modernity gave rise not only to separate arts and separate sciences but also to western science and technology as such, capitalism, nation states, private property, individuality, western human rights, and also to a new Christianity. (Marxism in our opinion was a product of Catholic Chinthanaya however contradictory it may sound.) The westerners may claim that the state is separated from the religion and impose it as a condition on the states of the non western countries. However, what they do not tell the others is that the western state and western science together with other products of western modernity are bound with the new western Christianity that has evolved through nearly five centuries. What Weber identified as Protestant Ethic is associated with the Greek Judaic Christian Chinthanaya, and describes mainly the attitudes of the GJC Chinthanaya. The logic, the epistemology and other philosophical aspects of the GJC Chinthanaya have not been discussed by him for the simple reason that he did not have the concept of a Chinthanaya.
What we have been saying on Needham's question as to why western science was evolved in the west and not in China, and on the birth and evolution of western science for more than seventeen years is now been discussed by western Philosophers of Science. In a paper published last year, Luc Faucher and others have argued, following Nisbett, that the birth of Mathematical Science was aided by Greek or Western cultural norms that encouraged analytic, abstract and rational theorizing. This is much more than the idea of western Sociologists of knowledge, that knowledge is a cultural construct, though it falls short of the formulation of the Jathika Chinthanaya school that knowledge is constructed due to "avidya" of "anicca, dukka, anatta" and is relative to one's sense organs, mind and culture which in turn depends on Chinthanaya. In this formulation there is no absolute knowledge as such and relativeness is not that of something that exists independent of the observer. It has to be emphasised that this does not mean that anything goes as in western postmodernism and some kind of consistency, of course relative to the particular logic that one uses, is invoked when deciding between theories. We will come back to this point later in this series.
What is important to us is that the identification of a "pure" religion became possible only after the western Christianity of modernity. When this modernity was enforced on the Sinhalas, Buddhism became a "pure" religion separated from the culture. This is not to say that there was no "religiousness" among the Sinhala people before the western modernity was introduced by western cultural colonialism, but there was no separation into a pure Buddhism or Buddhagama as such. There was the "Sasana" but there was no "agama" as such. The Sinhalas had a way of life that could be called a Buddhist way and their "professions", "arts" and "crafts" were all united within the framework of their way of life. They were not similar to the teachers who impart Christian concepts and theories to their students between "pansil" in the morning and "naraseeha gathas" in the afternoon. The "gathas" and the Christian concepts do not make a combined whole. Gradually Buddhism was reduced to a mere subject in schools both BTS and Government. As a result even the Christian and the Catholic schools found no danger in teaching Buddhism as a subject for the "benefit" of the Buddhist students. Buddhism was and is being taught as a subject without any relevance to the lives of the students while other subjects such as Mathematics, Science. Literature etc., are taught with a Christian perspective very often by the so called Buddhist teachers, with more relevance to the Christian culture in which the students are brought up.
It has to be emphasised over and over again that western Christian (non Roman Catholic) culture separates knowledge into different compartments called Mathematics, Science, Literary Criticism only nominally and superficially. They are mutually connected by the GJC Chinthanaya and even Mathematics (western) is based on the western GJC chinthanaya. This interconnectedness exists not only among the subjects but even between state, economy, education in general, arts etc. The GJC Chinthanaya that encourages separation and specialisation superficially combine everything into a single whole at a deeper level. The western intellectuals for the last five hundred years have been trained to observe only the superficial separation and not the connectedness that operates deeply. Thus western political scientists, philosophers and others would come up with theories that claim that the western state is separated from the religion (secular), western science is objective, the education is not religious etc, when in fact all those components arising out of the Greek Judaic Christian Chinthanaya associated with a new Christianity that was initiated in the fifteenth century, that was recognised and given a name by Luther Calvin and others in the sixteenth century, and that is still evolving, are mutually connected. The western state is out and out Christian at a deeper level. If Eric Fromm claims that some kind of consumerism associated with technology has replaced Christianity in the west he is not quite correct. The religion in the west has changed from Catholicism to Protestantism and it is the latter that has been evolving through the last five centuries. The consumerism is a result of the evolution of Protestantism and Fromm should not have lamented about the evolution if he did not have any problems with the latter. What Weber calls the Protestant Ethic could be still found in the western society, and the GJC Chinthanaya is only going from strength to strength.
When the westerners and their imitators in the other parts of the world claim that religion is personal they are only expressing the atomisation of the people associated with the GJC Chinthanaya. One does not have to go to the church to pray as part of a common community experience and one could pray at home or in the bus. If the God is omnipresent there is no necessity to go to the church, argued the Protestants. Einstein who was the supreme product of the GJC Chinthanaya, it was not only for his contributions to western Physics that made him the popular figure that he was in the western society and made the Time magazine declare that he was the man of the century and the British (English) to prefer him over their own Newton, talked of a personal God. (Incidentally the year 2005 has been declared the year of Physics in memory of the three famous papers published by Einstein in 1905.) This personal God of Einstein symbolised the atomisation of the God himself/herself that commenced ironically in the Catholic church itself with the paintings of Michelangelo and others, five hundred years ago. Einstein by declaring that his God was a personal God separated his religion from the religion of others, taking another step in the evolution of Protestantism. However, it should be remembered that Einstein's God does not play dice and that he (Einstein and not God) refused to believe that observations are observer dependant, opposing the views of Bohr in the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Physics.
One may ask what is the relevance of all these to Olcott Buddhists. The Olcott Buddhists separated a "Buddhism" from their lives as professionals and others, a "Buddhism" that was not found in the pre colonial Sinhala society. As many people have noticed the "educated" Buddhists recite "pansil" (the five precepts) in silence while the uneducated upasakas and the upasikas have no inhibition to recite them loudly after the Bhikku. The educated Buddhist, very often an Olcott Buddhist, has personlised his religion following the western Protestantism where as for the uneducated upasaka or upasika there is no "pure" religion as such whether personal or not. For the Olcott Buddhist reciting "Pansil" is a personal experience that need not be heard by the others.
(To be continued).
Professor Nalin de Silva
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