Daniel M. Veidlinger. Spreading the Dhamma. Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand. University of Hawai'i Press 2006/Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 2007.
Some books make me feel that the author had a great time and went into a great adventure to write his work. This is the impression I got from Veidlinger's book. I enjoyed it a lot and learned a lot. It would be useless to try to situate this book in a kind of genre or discipline, because in many ways it is a pathfinder, it's a new way of looking at things. It focuses on the Buddhist textual culture of Lān Nā, that is to say the country of which Chiang Mai was the capital (is the capital?), aka Northern Thailand. I was particularly interested in this book since I had the realisation that grammatical texts have to be understood against the backdrop of oral culture. What Veidlinger does it to follow the texts especially relying on local chronicles, or chronicles of the region, including the Burmese Sāsanavaṃsa or the Sinhalese Mahāvaṃsa. He mines the colophons of the many manuscripts he has done research on. The book is the result of his doctoral research.
One can see how Veidlinger has gone through so many unexplored sources. At the moment his book was published only Macdaniel had done some work in this field and obviously in the field of Pāli von Hinuber, and the Frech Bizot, Lagirarde, etc. Hans Penth, Harald Hundius, etc. as well. Lammerts is nowadays leading the research on Burmese manuscripts (by the way, he wrote an academic review of Spreading the Dhamma). But the important thing about Spreading the Dhamma is its thesis, which is kind of provocative and at the same time kind of self evident if you think of it: the Dhamma, that is the Pāli canonical texts, spread in Northern Thailand mainly orally. The manuscript record seems to show a very weak and exceptional written tradition. The promoters of written culture in Northern Thailand would have been the usual suspects: communities of forest dwellers araññavāsins of the Mahāvihāra Sinhalese lineage. The book tells us the complete story/history of Lān Nā from the 13th century until the 19th, with printing press and the changes this involved. In fact, Veidlinger's approach is inspired by McLuhan's theories, which I always found very interesting. This tallies with my "new" reflections on the role of vyākaraṇa in the region. If the medium is the message, as Veilinger seems to suggest, the oral Dhamma is a different message than the written Dhamma. Very interesting, simply to highlight one of the many thought provoking meditations in the book, is the role that written Vinaya would have played in strengthening the monastic code and making it more rigid.
In so many ways, as Veidlinger defends, it is impossible to completely separate oral culture from written culture, as they both live together and influence one another. And whereas I do not think that the entire canon was transmitted orally, or that sometimes the texts simply travelled in the minds of the monks, who would recite them and other people would write them down, whereas I do not think this was the rule, it is nevertheless possible, and many times Veidlinger's re-examination of the vocabulary that is used in the tradition, in the chronicles, deserves attention. It is clearly that many times the monks are learning by heart, they are orally dictating the texts, etc. My impression is, however, that written texts were always there, from the beginning. And on the other hand I would not believe everything the chronicles say. Obviously Veidlinger is very careful with the historiography, but as he himself acknowledges it is very difficult to know about oral culture in the past, because by its nature it has not left traces. Nevertheless I think there are some lines of force in the book that are, to me, very important. One is the correspondence: oral/esoteric/Mon vs. written/exoteric/Laṅkā. When I say Mon I do not mean simply the Mon people but related peoples as well, for instance the Khmer. I am more and more interested in the so-called Tantric Theravāda. This book has helped me understand the development of written culture in Lān Nā. It also has given me some perspective about great authors such as Sirimaṅgala and Ñāṇakitti. As my friend Yamanaka told me, Sirimaṅgala was probably a forest dweller, living apart from the society, secluded, writing stuff. We do not know for certain, but it seems to be the case. In this context it seems to me that the grammar was learnt clearly as part of the general Buddhist education and this was so because texts were expected to be efficient when they were recited. That is why the term for texts is mantra (same as in the Milinda) and there are so many rituals that involve recitation ceremonies. It is clear that even the learned, written Pāli tradition has received so much influence from oral culture, and therefore even when it developed, it was constrained by so many conventions that only make sense in oral culture. I do not know if statements such as Tambiah's:
One can see how Veidlinger has gone through so many unexplored sources. At the moment his book was published only Macdaniel had done some work in this field and obviously in the field of Pāli von Hinuber, and the Frech Bizot, Lagirarde, etc. Hans Penth, Harald Hundius, etc. as well. Lammerts is nowadays leading the research on Burmese manuscripts (by the way, he wrote an academic review of Spreading the Dhamma). But the important thing about Spreading the Dhamma is its thesis, which is kind of provocative and at the same time kind of self evident if you think of it: the Dhamma, that is the Pāli canonical texts, spread in Northern Thailand mainly orally. The manuscript record seems to show a very weak and exceptional written tradition. The promoters of written culture in Northern Thailand would have been the usual suspects: communities of forest dwellers araññavāsins of the Mahāvihāra Sinhalese lineage. The book tells us the complete story/history of Lān Nā from the 13th century until the 19th, with printing press and the changes this involved. In fact, Veidlinger's approach is inspired by McLuhan's theories, which I always found very interesting. This tallies with my "new" reflections on the role of vyākaraṇa in the region. If the medium is the message, as Veilinger seems to suggest, the oral Dhamma is a different message than the written Dhamma. Very interesting, simply to highlight one of the many thought provoking meditations in the book, is the role that written Vinaya would have played in strengthening the monastic code and making it more rigid.
In so many ways, as Veidlinger defends, it is impossible to completely separate oral culture from written culture, as they both live together and influence one another. And whereas I do not think that the entire canon was transmitted orally, or that sometimes the texts simply travelled in the minds of the monks, who would recite them and other people would write them down, whereas I do not think this was the rule, it is nevertheless possible, and many times Veidlinger's re-examination of the vocabulary that is used in the tradition, in the chronicles, deserves attention. It is clearly that many times the monks are learning by heart, they are orally dictating the texts, etc. My impression is, however, that written texts were always there, from the beginning. And on the other hand I would not believe everything the chronicles say. Obviously Veidlinger is very careful with the historiography, but as he himself acknowledges it is very difficult to know about oral culture in the past, because by its nature it has not left traces. Nevertheless I think there are some lines of force in the book that are, to me, very important. One is the correspondence: oral/esoteric/Mon vs. written/exoteric/Laṅkā. When I say Mon I do not mean simply the Mon people but related peoples as well, for instance the Khmer. I am more and more interested in the so-called Tantric Theravāda. This book has helped me understand the development of written culture in Lān Nā. It also has given me some perspective about great authors such as Sirimaṅgala and Ñāṇakitti. As my friend Yamanaka told me, Sirimaṅgala was probably a forest dweller, living apart from the society, secluded, writing stuff. We do not know for certain, but it seems to be the case. In this context it seems to me that the grammar was learnt clearly as part of the general Buddhist education and this was so because texts were expected to be efficient when they were recited. That is why the term for texts is mantra (same as in the Milinda) and there are so many rituals that involve recitation ceremonies. It is clear that even the learned, written Pāli tradition has received so much influence from oral culture, and therefore even when it developed, it was constrained by so many conventions that only make sense in oral culture. I do not know if statements such as Tambiah's:
The fact that Buddhism is aesthetically a musical religion, and that the memorizing of words is closely linked to musical rhythms, gives us a clue to the technique and the way in which novices and monks are in fact capable of memorizing an impressive amount of words in their correct order. (quoted in p.162)
I don't know what to do of this statement. Well, is Buddhism a musical religion? I cannot think of any religion that is not musical, basically because music itself has always been religious, and one can simply look at musical tendencies today to see how quickly music scenes religiousize themselves. There must be some connection. The fact that among all arts, music is the only one that has taken the name of all muses, must mean something. In any case, even in the canon, in the oldest layers of the canon, we have tons of poetry that only make sense orally. I think Spreading the Dhamma is full of interesting reminders. As a Catalan poet said: "Truth needs to be regularly stated because it is regularly forgotten". I very much appreciate, also, in Veidlinger's book, his translations of colophons, or simply interesting references where we see that people who wrote the Pāli manuscripts that we use were sometimes farmers that had to copy the text at night. Consider this one, that I find one of the best, found in Hundius's article on the Journal of the PTS, 1990:
My writing does not look beautiful at all. Senior people are worried that it will be very difficult to read; oh yes, there is no doubt about that. CS 1231 -- Year of the Snake; I was not keen on writing at all!
Brilliant. Many Pāli manuscripts have survived thanks to people like this fellow, who were somehow forced to write without understanding a single syllable. Among other benefits of Spreading the Dhamma, one is having more appreciation for Thai manuscripts plagued with mistakes and written in a crazy way.
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