This paper stems from ethnographic research that I conducted in the village of Kukulewa in 1983. In 1978 Kukulewa had been selected for development under the recently elected UNP government's Gam Udava (Village Awakening) program, and as I investigated the impact of this project (Brow 1988; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; 1996) I was struck by the prominence it afforded to images of the ancient ‘village community’. I was also impressed with the ways in which this imagery, despite the nationalist and anti-colonial thrust of the rhetoric in which it was embedded, drew on representations of the village community that had informed colonial projects of rural development a hundred years earlier. Subsequently I began to explore the varied sources and complex transformations of these images (Brow 1999), and the present paper is part of that endeavor. It focuses on the discourse of improvement employed in Sir William Gregory's plans to restore the irrigation works of the north central Dry Zone, after he became Governor of Ceylon in 1872. My aim is to trace some of the connections between (1) the ideologies of colonial rule that framed Gregory's project, (2) the ways in which the region and its inhabitants were represented in official discourse, and (3) the means that Gregory selected to achieve his goals.

The principal sources for the study are official records —correspondence between the Governor and the Colonial Office in London, legal enactments and other official publications, and reports that circulated among government servants in Ceylon.

It has long been felt that in the formation of boundaries between the religious traditions of South Asia, the composers of the Mahābhārata would have played a considerable role in generating the dynamics of what was to become Hinduism. But since the Mahābhārata is quiet if not exactly silent on the non-Brahmanical traditions, and particularly about Buddhism, scholars have not found it easy to discern how it might have constructed such borders and, still more durably, how it might have generated a new textual praxis that could be used by later epic and purāṇic authors to patrol them —if indeed such borders existed. One strain of scholarship approached this question from the standpoint that the Mahābhārata would have grown from oral origins into a massive ‘encyclopedia’, one that could eventually claim, ‘whatever is here may be found elsewhere; what is not here does not exist anywhere’ (Mahābhārata, 1.56.33; 18.5.38). From this vantage point, a text of such self-sufficiency and self-importance could, at the most, have absorbed some minor references to the heterodoxies only haphazardly as a reflex of its snowball descent through the centuries (Hopkins 1969: 363-402; 475). This view concurs with an assimilationist model of Hinduism's relation to other traditions. Another approach has been to suspect that the Mahābhārata has more to say about Buddhism than it makes immediately obvious, and that what it has to say would have to have been said at some significant time in history.

Materialism, it has been said, is as old as philosophy. India too had her share of heretics, sceptics and proto-materialists right from the Vedic times. We read of them in the Upaniṣads and the epics. “Any number of these unbelievers is known, who deny everything there is to deny,” said Hopkins. “Materialists and other heretics without special designation appear to fill the whole land.” As the culmination to all these developments we have the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system of philosophy.

How and from when did materialism face a challenge? According to Frauwallner,

At the end of the first chapter of the SDS, S-M quotes a number of verses and ascribes them to Bṛhaspati. One of them runs as follows:

To many this has become the epitome of the Cārvāka philosophy, which is thus reduced to hedonism par excellence —a doctrine that urges man to seek happiness at any cost and, at the same time, makes happiness a matter of sensuous gratification alone.

Where did S-M get this verse? No authority is cited in his work though some other verses or parts thereof can be traced back to earlier Purāṇas, plays and poems. The authenticity of such passages is therefore doubtful. It is also probable that S-M as well as his predecessors borrowed them from a common source —perhaps purely oral. That is why T.W. Rhys Davids suggested that S-M's description of the Lokāyata “is chiefly based on certain infidel doggerel verses which cannot possibly have formed a part of the Lokāyata studied by the Brahmins of old.”

There are, however, reasons to believe that at least in case of the verse cited above, S-M reproduced a distorted version of the original.

Introduction

The collapse of communism is most usually symbolically equated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (about twenty years ago), although in some countries it is reckoned a bit later. But the term “post-communist Europe” is not an adequate one for variety of reasons. Two of these reasons are worth mentioning in connection with the content of this chapter. First, the term simply acknowledges that some countries have a communist past, but does not say anything about the main features their new social orders have developed during years of post-communist transformation. Second, there are numerous post-communist countries, countries which range from the center of the continent through the southeast to Eastern Europe, or from the Czech Republic and Slovenia through Macedonia and Albania to Ukraine and Moldova. These are countries with different histories, social and cultural specificities and social development possibilities with, in a word, profound social differences despite 45 (or, in the case of the majority of ex-Soviet Union states, 70) years of common past. Therefore, the term “post-communist Europe” used in this chapter is simply a technical one. In addition, the chapter covers only part of post-communist Europe: countries that joined the European Union in 2004 (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) or in 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania) and one country which is set to become the twenty eight member state of the European Union in July 2013 (Croatia).

The first part of this chapter presents a description of the methodology that was adopted in the various stages of our research. It is—inevitably—a somewhat schematic account, which makes the whole process sound at the same time tidier and smoother than it actually was. But I expect that the lack of pathos in the following lines will be more than compensated for by the gain in clarity.

This is followed by a discussion of the variant readings that have been accepted into the received text, where our reasons for choosing a particular reading are explained.

Methodology

In the autumn of 2004, while the collection of mss was still ongoing, a template file of the psū section was prepared on the basis of one of the existing standard editions and was distributed to the different teams of collators in Pune, Pondicherry and Paris along with paragraph divisions and with a list of conventions that every collator had to adopt when recording variant readings and other features of the witness (lacunae, omissions, corrections, marginal notes, etc.) in order to ensure uniformity of notation. Thus, every time a new ms was collated, its peculiarities were recorded by modifying a copy of the template file (named after the ms siglum) accordingly, providing thereby a kind of diplomatic edition of every individual manuscript. By the time the collation process was completed, the recurrence of certain variant readings, as well as the omission of words or phrases or even whole passages, had made us aware of the problematic places in our text and alerted us to the similarities between some of our witnesses.

The human body has become in recent years the subject of renewed interest across a spectrum of disciplines, from sociology to literary theory. Approaches to its study vary, of course, with each discipline. Since the groundbreaking study “Techniques of the Body” by Marcel Mauss (1935), however, an underlying assumption in the human sciences has been that the human body is not merely a physical and biological reality confronting human consciousness as an external and independent entity, but primarily a cultural construct carrying social and cultural meanings and messages. Attention has also been drawn by many sociologists and social-anthropologists to a central dimension of the cultural construction of the body: the human body stands as the primary symbol of the social body, or the body politic (Turner 1984). Mary Douglas posits the interrelationship between the two types of bodies in clear terms:

Berger and Luckman (1967), furthermore, have drawn our attention to a central dimension of culture: all cultural creations, including the human body, have a dialectic nature.

Introduction

Ronquillo and Dizon, in the National Museum of the Philippines Archaeological Resource Management Manual (1992, 61) write that “In the past decades the rapid rate of commercial development and recent advances in technology has greatly affected the environment, including potential archaeological sites at various levels: regional, national and international.” Indeed, several such incidents of “rapid” development have brought about the need to refl ect on the criteria used to present a recommendation to stop construction work from impacting on an archaeological site. The claim that archaeological sites should not be demolished was repeatedly made during several recently contested infrastructural projects. Why? Because these sites are “heritage” sites and there is no doubt that heritage sites deserve to be conserved, preserved, protected and properly managed. This is, in fact, stipulated in the Philippines National Cultural Property Law, Presidential Decree 374. But, how significant must an archaeological site be to merit a recommendation barring any earth-moving activity or other site disturbance on or around it? How do we decide if it is worthy of preservation, protection and management? Indeed, if we followed the criteria for deciding which sites should be preserved in the legal framework of cultural property laws in the Philippines, a great portion of the country would become unavailable for development.

This chapter will use the Huluga archaeological site in Cagayan de Oro, Northern Mindanao as a case study to evaluate proposed standards for answering these questions.

The central role played by ascetic ideals and life styles in the religious traditions of India is so taken as axiomatic by scholars and practitioners alike that the point bears little repetition. There is, however, another equally important strand of Indian religious history that is older than asceticism and without reference to which asceticism cannot be properly understood. I am referring to the society-centered religion of the Vedas and of the later dharma tradition. This paper examines the conflict between asceticism and the established societal religion and the symbolic universe of classical Hinduism that emerged from their interaction.

Louis Dumont (1960) in his seminal work “World Renunciation in Indian Religions” drew our attention to the structural conflict existing within the bosom of Hinduism between the ideology of the renouncer and that of the man-in-the-world. One of his major contributions, as Veena Das (1982, 7) rightly observes, was to point out that concepts and institutions such as renunciation can be adequately studied not on the basis of their intrinsic properties but on the basis of their relationship to other concepts and institutions within the Hindu world. Thanks to structuralism there has been a general shift across many disciplines from internal definitions in terms of intrinsic properties to external definitions in terms of extrinsic relations. The study of world renunciation in India makes this approach imperative, for even the native discourse views it as an antithetical category defined more by its negation of social structures than by any internal structure or property of its own.

Constructing a stemma, that is a tree-like graph showing the historical relationships between the extant witnesses of a work, may be regarded as a desirable or even indispensable aspect of textual criticism. Nevertheless, its construction is often a daunting task, especially in the case of textual traditions that span across several centuries and over a vast area. When a work has been handed down in dozens or even hundreds of exemplars, the factors which normally obscure the history of the transmission of any text are likely to be amplified by the sheer bulk of available data and the difficulties in their organisation and analysis. These factors essentially amount, as is well-known, to either horizontal contamination —i.e. the propagation of innovative features such as interpolations, reformulations, etc., across lines of transmission, as may happen for example when a copyist has two or more mss of varied ancestry before him— or parallelism, namely, the fact that the same new characters may independently appear in different branches of the tradition.

In the chapter on “Methods and results”, it was pointed out that instances of both contamination and parallelism abound in the available mss of the initial section of the KV (and presumably, also in later sections), thus suggesting that the text has had an intricate history, which might turn out to be simply impossible to reconstruct in detail. In other words, building a stemma of the extant mss appears to be a formidable, if not impossible, challenge.

The year was 1988. The South Korean government banned the slaughtering of dogs and the serving of dog meat in restaurants. The Olympics were coming to town and the South Korean government did not want to project to the world the image of an uncivilized dogeating nation. A few years ago in England demonstrators prostrated themselves in front of trucks carrying British horses to France for slaughter. Then there are the cows in India: even Macdonald's had to change its menu when they went to India —lamb patties instead of the traditional beef. In insults too food looms large: the British call the French “froggies”, the Indians call despised groups “dog-cookers” (Leach 1964; Wijewardene 1968).

Humans do take their food seriously, not just in a nutritional or medical sense but also in a cultural sense. Poor Koreans, a people with a long and distinguished culture, are forced to prove that they are “civilized” to the rest of the world by changing their food habits. Anthropologists have long noted that among the wide variety of edible vegetables and especially animals available to a given social group, only a small fraction is actually consumed. Prohibited foods, whether by injunction or by custom, far outnumber permitted ones in most societies.

Lokāyata (substantive) along with its derivative lo(lau) kāyatika (adjective) is often encountered both in Pali and Sanskrit, and as logāyata, logayaya or loyāyata in Prakrit. The word does not seem to be Vedic. In Sanskrit it first occurs (indirectly) in the Pāṇinīya Gaṇapāṭha 23; in Pali in the Tipiṭaka itself. The word, both in Prakrit and Sanskrit, has generally been taken to mean the materialist system of philosophy, later known as the Cārvāka and that is how it is generally rendered in English.

T.W. Rhys Davids, however, noticed that on many occasions in the Pali Sutta-s, the rendering, viz. “materialism”, does not suit the context. Accordingly the PTS Pali English Dictionary decided to omit this meaning altogether. It glossed lokāyata as

The Dictionary also refers to Rudolf Otto Franke's German translation of the DN in which lokāyataṃ is rendered as “logically proven explanation of nature” (logisch beweisende Naturerklärung).

Thus the chief meaning in Pali and Sanskrit seems to have diverged into two altogether different ways, having no apparent relation to each other. It is not that such a case is unprecedented. What is interesting to note is that the gloss provided in the PTS Dictionary never found favour with any Pali scholar excepting Rhys Davids himself.

The theme of ‘tradition’ in the South Asian context, with the variety of its expressions, is the subject of this collection of essays. It is a fundamental topic on which many have reflected and much has been written. However, because of its very centrality, I believe that it can never receive enough attention. In fact, the function performed by the device of ‘tradition’ has been and is still indispensable for the great majority of the South Asian forms and systems of knowledge and meaning, since it is their main foundation of guarantee and validation. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the details and the dynamics of this function in order to effectively grasp the logic of those forms and systems of knowledge.

These are, in short, the principal motives that have led me to return once again to the theme of ‘tradition’.

Now, in order to counterbalance the terseness of the above statements, it would be appropriate to explain the intentions, goals and reasons that have guided the construction of this volume on ‘tradition’. However, a mere list of programmatic declarations would not do justice to the complexity of the theme and to the wide range of contexts that have been examined and discussed; it would actually generate various kinds of misunderstandings.

This does not mean that the organisation and arrangement of the following collection of essays did not follow any ‘guideline’ —namely, a precise programmatic intent. Quite the contrary.

The publication of the TS along with its commentary, Pañjikā (TSP) in 1926 was an epoch-making event in the history of Indian philosophical studies. It is a voluminous work consisting of 3645 verses divided into twenty six chapter. 2 Śāntarakṣita, the author of the work, was the rector (upādhyāya) of the University of Nalanda (the remains of which are still to be seen in Bihar) in the second half of the eighth century CE. He then left for Tibet where he founded bSam-yas, modelled on the Buddhist monastery of Odantapurī. Tibetan scholars in this institute were trained to translate Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan. After staying in Tibet for twenty five years or so, Śāntarakṣita died in the first decade of the ninth century.

The commentary on his work was written by his disciple, Kamalaśīla, who had accompanied his master to the land of snow. He is said to have been killed by some rivals whom he defeated in a public debate.

Both Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla belonged to the Yogācāra school of Buddhist philosophy. The TS was written with a view to refuting all other philosophical systems and establishing the Yogācāra view. The book has been called “a veritable encyclopaedia for us of Indian philosophy current in his (sc. Śāntarakṣita's) time.”

One of the many philosophical systems that Śāntarakṣita examines in the TS is the Lokāyata (Chapter 22). As usual he first presents the exponent's view (pūrvapakṣa) and then proceeds to refute it.

Introduction

“Religion” and “state” are contested concepts. A particularly heated debate has been raging about these concepts for a decade or more among practitioners of religious studies. On the one hand, the majority view is that the terms “religion” and “state” are difficult to define but that they are in principle good enough for analytical purposes. On the other hand is the view of a group of self-styled critical theorists that both terms are illegitimate abstractions that mask ideological positions (Fitzgerald, 2000, 2007; McCutcheon, 2003).

I find this debate intriguing, although it has very few implications for this chapter. This is because I choose to take a social constructionist approach to the sociological understanding of religion (Beckford, 2003). This means that, instead of using generic notions of religion and the state that purport to be valid for all times and places, I prefer to focus on the social processes whereby the meanings of these terms are generated, attributed, deployed and contested in particular social and cultural contexts. This allows me to work with rough and ready definitions that merely identify the outer limits of common usage. For my purposes, then, religion has to do with beliefs, values, motivations, feelings, activities, normative codes, institutions and organizations that relate to claims about the ultimate significance or perceived wholeness of life. Loosely following Max Weber's example, I understand states as formal political collectivities that successfully claim legitimacy over the exclusive exercise of authority, backed by force if necessary, in relation to all human activity in their territories.