Forging Buddhist Credentials as a Tool of Legitimacy and Ethnic Identity: A Study of Arakan’s Subjection in Nineteenth-Century Burma

Forging Buddhist Credentials as a Tool of Legitimacy and Ethnic Identity: A Study of Arakan’s Subjection in Nineteenth-Century Burma

Jacques P. Leider*

(Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51 (2008) 409-459)

Abstract 

The kingdom of Arakan was conquered by the Burmese in 1785 and annexed by the British after the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824-6). Resistance to the occupation was followed by campaigns of pacification that entailed social disruption. Starting with an analysis of the religious motives for King Bodawphaya’s quest to conquer Arakan, this article focuses onthe use of local religious traditions to bolster ethnic self-identification and resist the processof integration. Based on little explored indigenous and Western primary sources, this essay attempts to make a contribution to the social history of Buddhism in Arakan.

.........................

* Jacques P. Leider, membre de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, jacques.leider@education.lu.

 

Le royaume d’Arakan fut conquis en 1785 par les Birmans. Après la première guerre anglo-birmane (1824-6), il fut annexé par les Anglais. La résistance arakanaise aux occupantsprovoqua des campagnes d’oppression qui eurent un impact considérable sur la société.L’article que voici propose une analyse des motifs religieux qui sous-tendent la conquête parle roi Bodawphaya (1781-1819). L’attention se porte ensuite sur le recours aux traditionslocales qui étayaient l’identité communautaire et permettaient de résister au processus d’in-tégration. Cette enquête fondée sur des sources primaires indigènes et occidentales offreainsi une contribution à l’histoire sociale du bouddhisme en Arakan.

Keywords

Arakan (Burma), Sri Lanka, Teravada Buddhism, colonial history, ethnic identity

“Tere are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal;

nor between what is true and what is false.

A thing is not necessary either true or false; it can be both true and false."

Harold Pinter

For kings in Southeast Asia, Buddhism provided the cosmological propsof a regal ideology which was sustained by a brahmanical discourse onkingship and ritual. However, the conventional approach which claimsthat Buddhist credentials and brahmanical concepts were used as tools of political legitimacy restricts their analysis to an elite context. But the history of late colonial and post-colonial times indicates that Buddhismalso functioned as a source of inspiration for anti-colonialists and socialrevolutionaries who opposed those who were reputedly in control of theimperial religion.

So if the political predilections of both left-leaning revolutionaries and nationalistic authoritarian monks or laymen can belinked to the fundamentals of the Buddhist tradition in recent times, why should historians not hypothesize that Buddhist concepts fed into theexpression of contentious cultural and social dynamics at earlier periodsas well?

Covering the pre- to early colonial times, this essay offers a case study which focuses on the Buddhist kingdom of Arakan from its conquest by the king of Burma in 1785 until the fall of the Burmese kingdom itself ahundred years later. Te main subject I would like to explore here concernsthe rhetorical embodiment in religious terms of both confrontation andsubjection which were the result of the resistance of the Arakanese in theaftermath of the Burmese conquest. I will first look at the conqueror’suse of Buddhist credentials to legitimate his conquest and his intrusioninto local religious affairs. Ten I will turn to the subjected Arakanese who contested this conquest and resorted to an ethnic-cum-religious self-representation which was rooted in the myth of Buddhism’s origins in Arakan and its dynastic traditions. As far as Western and local sourcesallow, I will give a brief description of the diminished state of the Buddhistinstitutions in nineteenth-century Arakan. Tis will lead us to a mid-nineteenth-century Arakanese text which builds on the malleable notionsof doctrinal continuity and gives a very particular representation of Araka-nese Buddhism in the context of the intra-monastic discussions on thetransmission of Teravada orthodoxy.

The themes broached in this paper lie at the intersection of studies con-cerning the inculturation (or localization) of Buddhism in Southeast Asiaand a critical discussion of Burma’s political-center-focused historiography. In the “ritual states” of Southeast Asia, kings together with leading monkscontributed to the localization of Buddhism by building temples andmonasteries, acquiring and honoring relics, and implementing monasticreforms. In doing so they not only expressed their power but also author-ized their political actions. However, the ever lively peripheries were notpolitical vacuums and the dramatis personae involved tapped into similarsources for Buddhist credentials. Arakan is a particularly interesting case asit looks back to a largely autonomous history in Burma’s periphery. The last part of the paper is based on a typically local Buddhist text and its interpretation as a politically significant source can be contextualized against the background of my ongoing Arakanese textual studies.

Th e Conquest of a Kingdom

 
After a short, well-planned military campaign, troops led by the Burmese crown prince completed the conquest of Arakan in early January 1785. Th ree years after ascending the throne, King Badon aka Bodawphaya—the longest reigning monarch of the Konbaung dynasty (1782-1819)— revealed his high-flying ambition of becoming a truly great Buddhist king by embarking on this glorious military quest. Th e weak and divided kingdom of Arakan was an easy prey and offered an excellent opportunity for territorial expansion. Economic interests may additionally have functioned as an incentive as the possession of Arakan provided a closer access to Bengal’s maritime trade. But the royal order to invade the country did not dwell on such reasons and instead emphasized purportedly highermotives: the king intended to put an end to the country’s anarchy and to re-establish the purity of the sāsana, the Buddhist religion. However, in the rhetoric of Burmese warfare, such a motivation is rather commonplace.It signals a fundamental belief in a rightful political order and shows concern for the welfare of the Buddha’s teaching; it thus matches an understanding of the king as a just ruler who cares for the continuity of the sāsana and the prosperity of the monkhood. On the other hand, dismissing such a religious motivation as either cynical or merely symbolical would fail to give due credit to the king’s own sense of predestined vocation that sprang from his Buddhist Weltanschauung. In the case of Arakan, the military triumph legitimized, ipso facto, the rightful war of a just king, but also functioned, a posteriori, as a handy justification for his acclaimed religious goals. 

Religious and spiritual motives comprised a complex set of factors that played an important role in Bodawphaya’s policies in general and in Arakan’s invasion in particular. Th ey formed an integral part of the king’s livelong vision of himself as a just ruler which was inspired by the model characters of Buddhist jātaka and the Ashoka of the Buddhist tradition; this thus meant striving toward the ideal of Buddhist kingship and
acting as a reformer of the ceremonial traditions of Hindu-Buddhist court culture. Arakan was home to the famous Mahamuni statue, said to be a true copy of the living Buddha which was made with the help of
God Indra at the moment of Gautama Buddha’s visit to the kingdom of Dhanyavati. Considering the magical power ascribed to this statue, the act of coming into its possession figured as another undeclared, but certainly
desirable objective of the conquest. Put into courtly style: Bodawphaya sent his son to Arakan to “invite” the precious statue to Amarapura and the Mahamuni obliged by graciously following the invaders on their return
to the motherland.

Arakan bordered on India which was, even in official Burmese records of the nineteenth century, referred to as “Majjhimadesa,” a geographical term found in the Pali scriptures. Consisting of sixteen countries which
were located in relation to the Buddha’s place of enlightenment, Majjihimadesa was linked in the Buddhist imaginaire to the hagiographic accounts of the Buddha’s travels and the area in which his missionaries lived. Building on the traditions that neighboring lands, such as Burma, which had similarly been graced by numerous (though not canonized) visits of the Enlightened One, Burmese kings saw themselves as the natural protectors
of the holy places of Buddhism in India as well. Bodawphaya once planned to visit India, but was probably dissuaded in fine from doing so by his advisors. In those days in which the British hegemony was steadily expanding, the political overtones of any kind of pilgrimage would have functioned as an obvious impediment. Although it would be difficult to extract this notion in an unambiguous sense from our sources, in the king’s mind “Majjhimadesa” may have represented the summum bonum in terms of his ambition to rule the Buddhist world. 

After taking control of the country, the Burmese uprooted the political, military, and religious elite of Arakan. Th e tax and revenue system that the Burmese introduced followed the standards of the contemporary Burmese district administration. Burmese people were appointed as chief officers but they also had to rely on local men to pass on their orders at the village level. Just as in other districts of Burma, census and revenue inquests were made. Th e Arakanese king and his inner court were sent into exile to Amarapura, the Burmese capital. Th e country also lost its ritualists and masters of ceremonies because the Arakanese court Brahmins, the so-called puṇṇa who were men of Bengali origin, had to follow in their footsteps. Together with their families they numbered in the several hundreds. King Bodawphaya was keen to use their expertise, especially in the field of astrology and of king-making ablution ceremonies. As I have shown elsewhere, the Arakanese puṇṇa played a dominant role at the court of King Bodawphaya and they remained at the top of the strictly hierarchized puṇṇa group until the end of the Burmese monarchy (1885).

Obviously it was India that was the source par excellence of Sanskrit manuscripts and knowledgeable Brahmin astrologers. But such manuscripts and astrologers were at first more readily available in Arakan.
Because Bodawphaya wanted to reform kingship in Burma by turning to its Indian Sanskrit roots, he was keen to study the cultural heritage of Arakan as well. In Sandoway (or Th andwe, southern Arakan), Ashin Kawissarabhi, a Burmese missionary monk, compiled the Dhanyavati Ayedawpon which soon became one of the best known sources in central Burma on ancient Arakanese kings and their counsellors. One of the most ardently pursued reform projects of Bodawphaya was the calendar reform and the king also wanted to learn about the calculations of time in Arakan. Th e king further instructed monks and royal officers to collect medical treatises.

and texts with prophecies of the Buddha.15 At the same time he decided to deport the abbots of the major monasteries of Mrauk-U (Arakan’s former capital) together with the vinayadhara (overseer of monastic discipline) of the Arakanese saṅghā. By establishing leading Arakanese monks and learned puṇṇā: in Amarapura, the king thus succeeded at gathering the exegetical expertise for the texts that he collected.
By deporting the contemporary and former royal offspring,16 the king rid the country of potential leaders who could challenge the Burmese rule in Arakan. Th e expatriation of Brahmins and prominent monks further
achieved the result that challengers were denied access to traditional knowledge on ritual ceremonies, and had thus lost the means of gaining a degree of legitimacy in case they revolted—as some did unsuccessfully.

Th e Transmutation of the Mahamuni

Barely a week after they had occupied the Arakanese capital, the Burmese made preparations to transport the giant Mahamuni bronze statue from the site of Dhanyavati, a former Arakanese capital north of Mrauk U, to
Amarapura.17 According to a wide-spread belief, the Mahamuni was made at the time of the visit of Lord Buddha to Arakan and was thought to be a physically identical copy of the Awakened One. Th e Buddha “inspired” the statue to life, called him his “younger brother,” and endowed him with the mission to protect the sacred teaching in Arakan until the time when Metteya (Maitreya), the last Buddha of the cycle, would appear. Arakanese kings prayed at this sanctuary at the beginning of their reign and did not undertake any major campaign without invoking the support of the Mahamuni; in fact, in times of disaster, prayers to the Mahamuni often functioned as a final recourse.18 Th e chronicle further mentions earthquakes and wondrous manifestations at the sanctuary as signs of acute political crises. Th e cult of the Mahamuni was, however, not merely a royal cult; it was popular throughout Arakan and spread in various forms and beliefs to south-east Bengal and Tripura.19 Th e simultaneous eradication of kingship and the departure of the statue symbolizing the collective political and religious identity of the Arakanese thus meant both a loss of power and protection. Kingship had authenticated the cosmological unity of the social and political system in accord with the presence of the Mahamuni whose magical protection was to last five thousand years. A political and social order that had lasted for hundreds of years was thus shattered20 when the ritual connection between the Mahamuni and the king, which was a crucial factor for ensuring the prosperity of the country, was broken.

From a Burmese perspective, the political-cum-religious significance of the transfer of the Mahamuni statue from Arakan to Amarapura can barely be underestimated. For Bodawphaya, the possession of the sacred statue functioned as an eminent confirmation of his own glorious destiny. His pride was immense when his son brought home a statue that “former Burmese kings had never even dreamed to be able to worship,” as a bell inscription of 1798 notes.21 In 1810, at the time that the king had declared himself to be a bodhisatta (or future Buddha), he stressed that, though the Arakanese “history” of the statue stated that the Mahamuni had been established by Lord Buddha to defend the sāsana in Arakan for five thousand years, the statue had now actually come to him!22 Th e king’s interpretation delegitimized Arakan as a Buddhist heritage site and proportionally enhanced the patrimonial importance of Burma. As the Mahamuni had become the most revered Buddha statue in Burma in the last two centuries and its temple in Mandalay the most eagerly visited place by both local and foreign visitors and pilgrims, its appropriation by the Burmese entailed a transmutation of the status of the statue. It thus became the object of a national cult of all those who adhered to the Burmese Buddhist culture. “Nowhere, even at the Shwedagon or Shwesettaw, is the devotional atmosphere more intense,” wrote G. E. Harvey eighty years ago. Th e Mahamuni temple was a national sanctum and, whatever its loss may have meant for the Arakanese in hindsight, the Mahamuni’s new “life” in Upper
Burma greatly symbolized Arakan’s integration into a larger Burmese environment.

Th e statue did not leave Arakan without its written biography. Texts of the Mahamuni Phaya-thamaing were among the first Arakanese texts brought to Burma. Th e way in which the Mahamuni’s biography was
streamlined to fit the Burmese context (its cultural integration!) has received little scholarly attention although the adaptation of the text by Burmese monks should be considered as an object worthy of further study.

Read More>>>

To read the whole Article, Download HERE.