New Books in Buddhist Studies

Daniel Veidlinger, “Spreading the Dhamma: Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand” (University of Hawaii Press, 2006)

New media technology changes culture. And when it comes to religion, new technology changes the way people think and practice their traditions. And while we usually think of technology as some new gadget or machine, there was a time when the written word itself was a new technology, and this had a profound impact how Buddhism was practiced in South and South East Asia. This is the subject of Daniel Veidlinger‘s new book, Spreading the Dhamma: Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2006). In today’s interview, the inaugural show for the New Books in Buddhist Studies channel of the New Books Network, we talk with Prof. Veidlinger about his book and the way some other books changed Buddhism in Thailand. The “other books” we’ll be talking about, of course, are the books of the Buddhist canon, a collection of texts that when printed today runs some 15,000 pages. A millennia ago, however, these texts were carved into palm leaves and just as likely to be memorized as read or studied. Daniel Veidlinger is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. You can learn more about his work in this podcast from the Institute of Buddhist Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Duration:: 49m
Broadcast on:: 03 Jun 2011
Audio Format:: other

Daniel Veidlinger is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. You can learn more about his work in this podcast from the Institute of Buddhist Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Dear old work platform, it's not you. It's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards? They're customizable workflows? That is floating on a digital cloud 9. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. Hello, and welcome to the new books in Buddhist Studies channel of the new books network. I'm your host, Scott Mitchell. New media changes culture. And when it comes to religion, new technology changes the way people think and practice their traditions. And while we usually think of technology as some new gadget or some new machine, there was a time when the written word itself was a new technology, and this had a profound impact on how Buddhism was practiced in south and southeast Asia. This is the subject of Daniel Weidlinger's new book, "Spreading the Dhamma," writing, orality, and textual transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand. In today's show, we'll talk with Daniel about his book and some of the other books that changed Buddhism and Thailand. Of course, these books were the books of the Buddhist canon, a canon that, when printed in modern volumes, is some 15,000 pages long. But a millennia ago, these texts were carved into palm leaves and just as likely to be memorized as they were read and studied. How did this new technology change Buddhist's relationship with the teachings of the Buddha? And what might this bit of Buddhist history tell us about similar changes in media technology in our contemporary world? Hi Daniel, are you there? Yes I am. Thanks for talking to the new books network in new books in Buddhist Studies today. Today we're going to be talking about your book, "Sreading the Dhamma, Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand." I've had a chance to look at the book and I can highly recommend it. It's a very interesting work that sheds some light on how, in this case, a particular kind of technology can change the way that Buddhism is practiced. So to get the ball rolling, Daniel, I thought I would have you give our listeners a little background in how you became interested, not only in the study of Buddhism but in this particular topic. Well thank you. I got interested in the study of Buddhism in my undergraduate years when I was, in fact I started my college career in physics wanting to be like theoretical physicist or something like that. But then I changed to religious studies because I felt that the kinds of questions that I was interested in were approached in a more interesting manner through philosophy and religion than they were through physics which really interesting as it is. The study of physics in a formal manner really involves a lot of number crunching and I just found that some of the questions that I had were not that well addressed in that forum. So I moved into religious studies and within that I found Buddhism was the most interesting to me. It answered a lot of questions that I had. Its ideas spoke to me although I am not a Buddhist practitioner. I certainly am very interested more than just in an academic manner in the kinds of ideas that Buddhism talks about. And in fact I've noticed that a number of people who are interested in Buddhist studies also have an interest in scientific developments in physics and that sort of thing. You might know that there's been a number of books written in fact about connections between Buddhist metaphysics and the kind of strange world that quantum mechanics seems to show may exist. So that's kind of how I got interested in Buddhism and then I took it from there through graduate studies where I studied in the South Asian department at the University of Chicago. So I did not do a degree in religious studies per se but more in area studies. Because I was also interested as I developed in my career in not just Buddhism per se but also the politics and economics and other features of that whole region of the world. Then in terms of oh if you want me to then expand to the specific topic of the book I could say a couple things. I actually am from Toronto, Canada that's where I grew up and in Toronto there is a strong sort of feeling in the air of media studies as your listeners might know the father of media studies is Marshall McLuhan a Canadian scholar and he set up a whole institute for the study of media and culture at the University of Toronto and his shadow does fall heavily on the Toronto area. You just hear his ideas being talked about in many different forums growing up there. Honestly the CBC radio was a big presence in Canada and was in my life growing up we used to listen to it a lot and they would talk about his ideas every now and then and just the whole idea of radio going out to the vast areas of Canada and kind of bringing this huge country together is something that you really can't avoid growing up in Canada you know you know that the country exists because of media you know it's such a big and empty country that there just wouldn't be any cohesion without it. So that's kind of a way that I got interested in media studies so this book allowed me to join my two interests into one. Great yeah that's I love the opening of your book where you actually talk about McLuhan I think it's you make a lot right yeah I know it's interesting that he was ridiculed in his day because people felt that his ideas were quite ridiculous and of course many of them turned in fact one of the things he said believe it or not was that he said somewhere that he believes that it's something in the future people will watch um will watch programs about the weather on television without you know going outside to see what the weather's like and indeed you know weather TV is a big deal nowadays people watch lots and weather.com is a very important website as well right and it's not just the the weather the weather channel but you know there's weather shows about the weather on other other networks right yeah it's exactly tornadoes saying it's like the biggest pastime nowadays so yeah um so so you do open the book with this uh the the sort of the thing we take for granted nowadays that human culture and uh I think you say something like human culture and technology arise in tandem um right and and it's interesting to read that and think oh you're talking about uh writing itself as a technology which I think we you know so far removed from the you know invention if you will of writing take writing for granted um and forget that it would have been a new technology at some point in history um so I think that's it that's exactly right yeah so yeah that we think of the word technology as referring to very advanced things like cell phones or the internet or whatever but technology is simply some sort of physical item that helps achieve some uh human aim so you know a pen is a technology as well so it's a piece of paper right and and it's interesting to sort of keep in mind in the very beginning of Buddhist history there there really was no writing or that writing was absolutely new thing shorter or if you could expand on that well sort of set the story yeah this is a very yeah this is a very tricky question because uh since there wasn't much writing in ancient India there's not that many records to tell us about this the position of writing but basically it seems that there was definitely not writing in India during the time of the Buddha now uh in India before the Buddha there does seem to have been writing in fact the earliest civilization in India is known as the Indus Valley Civilization and it flourished about 2000 BC so contemporary with the Mesopotamian Empire for example and in Mesopotamia there was writing at that period as there was in Egypt and there was writing in the Indus Valley as well but that civilization collapsed maybe about uh 1817 1800 BC and then a new civilization emerged in India known as the Aryan civilization and the Buddha was part of that civilization and they did not have writing so before Buddhism emerged the the the Vedas were very important texts in ancient India and they're the foundational texts of the religion that today is known as Hinduism and they were for sure memorized orally they were not written down and the Buddha who lived uh you know it's impossible to say exactly but about 500 BC um definitely lived during a period in which writing still had not uh come back to India so the first evidence of any writing at all in India is from the inscriptions of the great Buddhist emperor called King Ashoka and those inscriptions are from the middle of the third century so about 250 BC something like that um so that's a full 200 let's say about 200 years after the death of the Buddha right so it does seem and there's no evidence whatsoever for writing before that in India so although some people have thought that the Buddha must have had writing simply because of the complexity of the ideas represented in the Buddhist texts serious uh scholarly investigation into the question has shown that there is no evidence of writing uh in India before the period of Ashoka so that is to say two centuries after the Buddha so that means that if there was no writing I know it's hard to believe but the only answer is that all the teachings of the Buddha which totals something like 15 000 pages in you know a modern printed edition were memorized orally so for people listening who have a test coming up whether they have to memorize you know um the declaration of independence is like that you should know that's nothing compared yeah so do yourself back right it's sort of it's sort of hard to wrap your mind around it considering how you know we take for granted books or writing in general to imagine the for 200 300 years uh all of this information was contained in people's memories that's right now it seems to me that the book the the your book though uh sort of goes into the future a bit right because you're talking about uh uh Thailand and a particular kingdom in Thailand um maybe a thousand years later 2000 years later uh quite a while after the the possible invention of of writing in India correct that's right now there's a number of reasons that I look at that uh that I look at that's kingdom uh the the kingdom is called Lanah which um was a kingdom that flourished in northern Thailand from let's say the 13th century until the 20th century and basically the Thai people from what we know did not really have writing amongst themselves until quite late maybe about the 13th century in fact so even though writing in India was developed about as we said 250 BC in Thailand which adopted a lot of Indian culture and writing was not well sorry amongst the Thai speakers in Thailand writing was not really known until about the 13th century so that's only 700 years ago right yeah much much more recently and the thing that makes it so interesting is that because of the recent arrival of writing amongst the Thai speaking people uh it is much more easy to get documentation of that early period when writing was just being transformed sorry when the oral tradition was being transformed into a written tradition so that's the reason that I chose this um this Buddhist kingdom to look at so for example there are early manuscripts there that are not that far uh from the period in which the the oral tradition became a written tradition right so so uh what was Lanah right like as a as a kingdom or a culture prior to uh the introduction of of written culture was Buddhism a big presence there how you know what was the society like well um let's be clear so in the region that we today call Thailand right there are many different ethnic and cultural groups living there as well not so much today although there certainly are still present today but in the in the past there were a number of very strong cultural groups there um of which the Thai were just one and over hundreds of years the Thai came to achieve hegemony over that whole area but in the let's say a thousand years ago uh the Maun people were very very prominent in that region and they did have writing um amongst the Maun people and the Maun were um were people they still exist there are still Maun speakers although far fewer than there used to be but they had a period in which uh let's say from the sixth century to about the ninth century there was a great Maun Buddhist empire that is often known as Dvaratha T that's the name of it and it occupied a lot of Thailand a lot of what is today called Thailand and Burma as well and they seem to have a form of um a form of terra vada Buddhism that they practiced and they did have writing how do we know because there are still inscriptions existing from that period that we can read and on those inscriptions one finds things like some of the basic Buddhist ideas or the Four Noble Truths or the the Buddhist catechism and these kinds of things so yeah we know that there was a Maun empire before the Thais ever got to that region that had writing so the Thais got there around the 13th century and different Thai principalities were established so there was one in northern Thailand that we called Lanan and they were Thai people and then there was also one south of Lanan called Sukotai also populated by Thai speaking peoples but they spoke a slightly different dialect of Thai and had a different identity the main difference between the central Thai kingdoms and the northern Thai ones has to do with the influence of Cambodia because uh I'm sure many of the listeners have heard of one of the largest religious monuments on the face of the earth called Angor Wat and it's a magnificent structure and it's a relic of the great Cambodian empire known as the Khmer Empire and they at that period ruled much of Southeast Asia as well but not so much northern Thailand but so central Thailand was very influenced by Cambodian language and culture whereas northern Thailand was less influenced by it so that's not too long an answer to your best bet no no it's it's totally fascinating this you know I feel like this is a part of the world that many people have knowledge of but not in this sort of depth and complexity um absolutely yeah I could just see you know this whole other culture and thinking about what was going on in other parts of the world and thinking oh this is a part of the world that is completely unknown to me and I'm sure many people so um it's a fascinating uh sort of picture of this this little corner of the world that we kind of don't know that much right we know about the Vietnam War and that's a lot of the knowledge of Southeast Asia and America comes from you know the Vietnam War um which is certainly an important feature of the development of Southeast Asia but just one of many right right and it's a fascinating part of the world and understudied it's for sure understudied for example in Thailand there are I'm not sure exactly the latest demographics but maybe 70 or 80 million people of whom 95% at least are terrified of Buddhists right whereas in Tibet there are probably five or six million people but there's certainly as many scholars of Tibetan Buddhism as there are of Thai Buddhism probably more right even though there's more than 10 times as many at Thai so it's a very interesting part of the world uh and again in especially in ancient times there were so many different uh groups conquering different areas that it became very what today would be called multicultural I like to think of it as kind of a harbinger of the modern world with people with hybrid identities speaking many different languages um having different religious ideas coming and going it's a very interesting part of the world and I recommend that your listeners learn more about Southeast Asia well on that note uh in in the book you talk about some of the ways that different kinds of Buddhism came to uh to La Nana on this part of Thailand um specifically certain ordination lineages and uh certain monks from Sri Lanka are coming um if you could just you know give us some ideas about some of these figures that you're talking about and some of the events that you you mentioned uh in your book right well yes it's interesting that amongst the Theravada Buddhist world and just to be clear uh Buddhism is divided into various schools uh just like many religions have different major groups and one of them is Mahayana Buddhism which developed later about 2000 years ago the earliest form of Buddhism is known as Theravada although um it is obviously different from the actual teachings of the Buddha we do seem to think that the texts of Theravada Buddhism are closer to the actual teachings of uh the this prince from India that is known as the Buddha uh than Mahayana Buddhism and so Theravada Buddhism is practiced mostly in Southeast Asia and the monks of Theravada Buddhism are very concerned about the purity of the ordination lineage so that means when you become a monk there's various ceremonies that take place in order to make you into a monk and certain things have to be said certain actions uh ritual actions have to be done and of course like um all religions the rituals have to be done properly in Buddhism and therefore there has always been anxiety amongst different orders of monks that perhaps at some point in the past the ordination was not done properly and that means that from that point on you know all the monks are not really full monks right there's this danger if the rituals are not done properly so every now and then um there are uh there are um expeditions to take place where monks will go to different areas where they believe the ordination is more pure than their own so this took place uh several times in the history of Southeast Asia and there was a lot of traveling between countries so you might have the monks of Thailand feeling that their ordination should be renewed so they'll go to Sri Lanka be reordained there and then come back and do the rituals um to reordained people in Thailand and then the bermis might go to Sri Lanka and then Sri Lanka might feel that their ordination has become somewhat impure and they'll go back to Thailand and bring it back so in fact you have the situation which the main order in Sri Lanka is called the Syamese order the main order of monks and the main order in Thailand is called the Sri Lankan order the Sinhavese order so uh you know it shows the um you know the the ninja course that went on between the various monastic groups over time but but what that means it's very interesting again this is why it's so modern in a way that the idea that they would travel around from different countries and they kind of in doing so established um as strong relationships between the different countries and um it's not exactly like the United Nations you know where they would have represented but honestly some of the aspects of it are similar to the idea of this an international body with people speaking different languages all trying to communicate and share ideas like that right so so some of these monks again getting back to the the texts involved i remember from the book that many of these monks would come to uh Lana with the canon sort of in their heads and present the canon that way um am i am i getting that right well probably yes you probably are writing yes that's right so one of the things that i investigate in the book is when the monks went to different regions to be reordained um did they bring back copies of the Buddhist canon with them or were they just trained in the canon orally so that's one of the things i tried to investigate in my book and it's very difficult to know exactly um basically there are accounts so every time that the monks went to a different country to be reordained there would be a a chronicle that would be written by a wise monk monastery who would say exactly what happens and keep that that information for future posterity and by reading these things i tried to to figure out if they brought back texts with them and new ways of writing or if they just learned the various texts off by heart and i tried to discern it based upon the kind of words that were used in the chronicles to describe the mission now obviously in some chronicles they specifically say they brought back copies of the canon with them so okay that's that's evidence that they did but other times they might not say that specifically but it might be suggested so the short answer to your question is yes sometimes it seems they brought back copies and other times they probably didn't depending on whether there were enough copies to go around don't forget you know a written manuscript takes a lot of effort sure and these are not written in ink the way the manuscripts are written are basically on palm leaves and a knife is used to carve the letters into the leaf so it takes a lot of effort and therefore in many cases there might not have been extra manuscripts to give to the monks to bring back their homeland even if they wanted to right so that raises uh that that sparks an idea in my mind and that is just that uh if you could uh describe you know i think of as you're saying there wasn't ink involved and i think we often think of the the buddha's canon as these series of books you know here at the the at my school we have we have a whole copy of the canon ourselves and it's this lovely bound volume um that you can go right and refer to uh but these early texts were not books in that sense um what were they like what was the what was you know you said palm leaves and ink so if you could just uh talk a bit more about what these early texts were their physicality was like sure yes so in the in the in dick world right that is to say the world influenced by india which includes india and south east asia and um largely Tibet the main way that manuscript were written um as far as we know from the earliest period were on palm leaves they did not use paper at that point of course paper was developed in china later and did spread but much later uh to these countries so for many at least a thousand years palm leaves were the main thing that are used and if you can picture a palm leaf palm leaves is a very long thin leaf right often maybe a meter long and a few inches wide so they would be written in five four five or six lines and each line is really really long and that's how you read it so it's a very different way of reading and handling if then you would be used to in a western book now also the leaves are not bound together like a book but rather as they're usually written on both sides and then in a hole or two holes are drilled through the middle of the leaves and then maybe 20 or 30 leaves would be tied together onto a string so the leaves would hang on a string and to read them you would um kind of lift up a leaf and move it onto um the part of the string that's empty and just kind of shift them around like that so it's not that easy to read it and often people would in fact not have a string but they would just the there might be a rod that goes through the leaves and you would actually remove remove the rod and just read the leaves open and try to keep them in order and then you know when you're done you'd you'd kind of stack the leaves up again like maybe like a deck of cards a picture deck of cards right all stacked up for the hole in the middle that like a little rod would go through or a string to hold them all together but I did often see um manuscripts of the leaves have been put back in the wrong order that's that's fairly common which which raises the question were these were these books uh uh how to use the word book incorrectly but were these books um uh read in the way that we would read them or were they use in a different sort of way yeah I would say both uh definitely there were some uh scholarly monks who would read the books in order to gain the knowledge from them right so they would say well I want to see what the buddha said about um about uh the the dependent origination right which is a central concept in buddhism so they would go to a copy of the um the connection of leaves from the samyutani kaya and they would look up the section on the paticha samupada and read what it says so yes that certainly happens sometimes but I think the um the majority of the manuscripts were probably used for recitation in other words the monks would be reciting something and they would just go from the beginning of that portion until the end and just sort of recite it using the manuscript as a basis in case they forgot the words but even in those cases uh largely when monks are reciting something they've probably memorized it already but they might have the manuscript there's an assistant in case they forget a word they might look down you know to see what it says but the other main use of manuscripts for sure is as a cultic item right as an item that represents some sort of uh ritual usage um so texts would often be made in order to get good karma right which is often called merit uh so one of the other reasons in fact that I picked specifically northern Thailand to do my investigations was that the in northern Thailand there was a scribal tradition of writing colophons that is to say a little um addendum at the end of the text that says a little bit about who the scribe was and why they made the text so as you can imagine this is a gold mine for somebody who's investigating the history of texts and the scribes would often say that they are the reason they are writing it is because they want to make good karma so they want to build up their good karma which will enable them to be reborn in some sort of better world um so so that's that's uh the sort of idea of of writing as a ritual act rather than writing for you know uh to as you say there are there are definitely scholar monks who are doing some sort of what we might consider sort of modern scholarship maybe that's right but there are most of them probably didn't right and now you also at a couple points in the book mention the some of the other ritual aspects of not only these texts but ritual in in general and I know that there are um the the idea of relics in Buddhism um is pretty important particularly relics of the Buddha himself or you know relics of of disciples and whatnot and it's assumed that these relics have some sort of uh ritually the magical powers but you mentioned that early on these texts did not have the same sort of it wasn't assumed that the texts had the same uh sort of spiritual weight as relics or other ritual objects but that that may have changed over time and my that's exactly right yeah that's what I believe that is the case so um as the listeners probably know in western religions in particular Judaism and Islam come to mind the actual physical object of the holy book right be it the Torah or the Quran is a very sacred object and um for example the Torah the Jewish holy book is kept um in an ark and it's usually a beautifully made structure and there's the velvet curtain in front of it and the Torah itself is usually tied up with velvet strings and usually in fact where there's a silver crown right so obviously that is a book that is uh given great reference right and it's paraded through the congregation during the service and people kiss it so that is a great example of you know a book that is greatly honored the physical book is greatly on it right in the Buddhist world is the terra vada Buddhist world especially in the earlier period in Thailand it does not seem like the physical object was given that much sacred power until a little bit later on now relics in the Buddhist world from early on have been given great prestige as you say they are very important in most of the great stupas you know the great Buddhist monuments there are legends that inside them is some part of the Buddha or one of his followers and that gives the stupid great power this is of course a theoretical problem in Buddhism in general because the question is if the Buddha is in Nirvana right so he's died and he doesn't really exist anymore in any meaningful sense of the term how does worshiping his relics actually give you some sort of blessing right because the Buddha isn't there to do the blessing for you right right so that's as you know was a big problem in Buddhism in general but nevertheless that tradition developed and it doesn't really seem that writing was felt to have that kind of power until a little bit later on but yes eventually the idea that a written statement of the Buddha so you know writing down some passages from the canon and burying them inside a stupa instead of a relic of the Buddha later on that idea did enter Buddhism and so the writing gained power but certainly in the early period it wasn't regarded as very powerful and in many parts of the Buddhist world it has more writing has more or less power accorded to it certainly it's rarely viewed with the respect that it is in the Jewish or the Islamic tradition but sometimes it is and why why is that do you think that the the physical books or the writing itself wouldn't be as important in that earlier period what's the sort of resistance to writing if you will right well I think that a big part of it simply came out of the Indian milieu in which Buddhism arose in India the Hindu tradition the the memorized word is regarded as the most sacred thing and the Vedas are as I said transmitted orally but it's not just that they happen to be transmitted orally the fact that they are transmitted orally is a central part of how the whole religion operates knows the word vach which means you know the spoken word is a very important concept in Hinduism and the way that sound vibrates when it is spoken has mystical overtones and this kind of thing so there's even some passages that say if a Brahman writes something down then they have to britually bathe to purify themselves again you know so that writing is just something that you don't do is viewed as a low-cast thing to do so because Buddhism arose in that world obviously it wants to partake of the kinds of ideas that the main that the general population has because Buddhism was a younger religion and trying to establish itself so if it's immediately said that writing was this great thing then people might say oh well you know the Buddhists they like writing so that must mean that their religion is somehow not as pure as ours so maybe although its ideas sound interesting we're gonna stick with Hinduism you know now in the Mahayana form of Buddhism which emerged much later after King Ashoka right so Emperor Ashoka he adopted Buddhism and slowly thereafter became more and more popular so by the time that Mahayana Buddhism emerged probably the Buddhists did not feel that worried about what society and general would think of their practices and therefore Mahayana Buddhism did adopt writing more seriously than Theravada Buddhism and one of the most prominent Buddhist scholars Richard Gombridge actually believes that Mahayana Buddhism was only made possible because of writing namely that Mahayana had quite different ideas from what early Buddhism said and therefore monks would probably not have been willing to spend all the time required to memorize the Mahayana texts because they thought you know they would have thought that these ideas are kind of strange but since writing was a very incredible right the people the few people who did sort of initiate the idea of Mahayana were able to use writing to record their ideas and therefore even though they were fewer numbers you know writing is very powerful and preserving ideas and they could preserve them and therefore the religion that new form of the religion was able to spread more widely than that otherwise would have because it would have gotten resistance from the mainstream monks who would not have bothered to spend time memorizing so this would have been once it got stabbed right once it started it can't stop right so this reminds me of something else in your book where you mentioned that when writing first comes into northern Thailand there are some monks who are feeling threatened by this new technology can you say more about that why would they feel this is it is is some of these what you're saying here sort of related to that idea feeling sort of threatened by these new ideas or a new way of practicing right well certainly let's be clear i know it's difficult to sign up here that the argument of the book in you know one hour so i'm trying and it is a somewhat complicated argument so i try but i try to make it as simple as possible for the listeners so basically let's be clear once writing emerged and was used that doesn't mean that suddenly the whole tradition became written right so yes for the first few hundred years it was completely oral that's for sure then writing became used but very very as scantily for recording of religious texts the tradition in fact holds that you remember at the beginning of our interview i said that the first evidence for writing is about 250 BC however it's still another 200 years after that that it's likely that the Buddhist texts themselves were written down so remember we said that King Ashoka introduced writing to India but that doesn't mean that at that point they started to write all the Buddhist texts down they only did that another 200 years later and even then that was probably done very infrequently you know just as that let's say like a investment plan you know in case for some reason there was like an epidemic and all the monks who memorized the text died then we would have to go to the vault and pick out this written one and kind of re-establish it but i don't think that writing was used commonly to transmit Buddhist texts from hundreds and hundreds of years after that period so that means that you know there was a written version of the tradition and an oral version of the tradition and therefore the monks who memorized the oral tradition right they would have felt that a lot of their prestige in society came from how many texts they memorized and they would even get titles you know based upon how many texts they memorized so you would get a lot of prestige if you knew you know all three sections of the Buddhist canon and you'd have a little less prestige if you only knew one section of the Buddhist canon that kind of thing so once writing comes then these guys who are memorizing it they could obviously feel that their position their prestige the honor given to them is threatened by writing because you know they are not as necessary anymore so it's it's reasonable to believe that they would not have been that enthusiastic about the idea of writing down the texts also they might have felt that you know once you write them down that means that there's no person there necessarily to make sure that you're reading it correctly and you could then put your own ideas into it or misunderstand it right there's something dangerous about the idea of writing because an individual you know if a book falls into the wrong hands it could be read and then somebody will think the wrong things about what they're reading because there's not a learned person present in the room with them to explain no no I know it says this but it actually means that right right so you could see why traditional monks would be threatened by this idea I mean if you look at the West you know what was one of the first books that that was banned in the West once the printing press got started the bible right because the church didn't want the bible falling into the hands of common people who had interpreted in ways that were not regarded as proper by the church so the same sort of thing the hindsight was probably valid concern yeah they were right exactly they were right to be worried about these things so so this brings me to my my other question and that is that it seems that we are now currently in another sort of technological change in terms of media and communication obviously in the in the 20th and 21st century we have a whole different kind of technological change happening with you know first radio and tv and now the internet and social media do you see any way that some of the things that you're learning from 700 years ago in in Thailand has some relevance to the way that technology is changing Buddhism in the contemporary world yes i've heard about the internet it sounds very interesting i'll have to look into it I know this is taking you outside of your book so that's right well it's interesting that you say that because my next project the book that i'm working on currently is precisely about more modern communication technologies and how they are used by Buddhists and how they might affect the nature of Buddhism so first of all let me just back up for one second because since you mentioned this idea of how it changes the nature of Buddhism i do want to point out that as writing got more and more used in some of the Thai monastic orders it does seem that those monastic orders became stricter about the interpretation of some of the rules and you see this kind of thing in Protestantism as well when you know people went back to the bible and started reading exactly what it says then you see the emergence of this new phenomena that they call fundamentalism right where because the the written word is staring at you from the page and it says this people tend to interpret it in a stricter way than if it's delivered in an oral way and it's kind of floating the words are kind of floating around you don't see them in front of you so maybe i know this is a little bit counterintuitive actually to many people in other words the idea that an older more traditional way of doing things you know having the elders recite something orally to younger people and then they memorize and recite it you would think that that would lead to a more conservative interpretation of some of the ideas but in fact act sometimes the written version of these two more conservative interpretations simply because a word is a physical object and you see it in front of you and it says what it says you know and you might feel that well it says to do this it says that the world is going to end on such and such a day or whatever and therefore you just feel that you know there's some truth to that right where somebody says it's you know the second they stop saying that the words disappear right so the words don't have as much as much weight anyway so yes i think that writing did influence some of the monastic groups towards a more conservative interpretation of the rules for example now that there's a list of rules and this is what it says so we're going to follow them now in the modern world i have found that Buddhism is quite a popular topic uh to be for discussion in internet forums and social media and this kind of thing so Buddhism lends itself well to these modern technologies i think that there's some connection maybe people learn a little bit about Buddhism and the idea of the idea of the interdependence of all things it is a core idea in Buddhism and sure enough with the internet you know it's can link up people who like you and i right now for example who are not in the same place and that that might make people think that some of these crazy Buddhist ideas that things that are different that appear separate are actually in some way connected through the chain of causation you know the internet suggests that things that are far away and otherwise disconnected can be connected through electricity so maybe that gets people interested in Buddhist ideas by just using the internet a lot that's one of the ideas that i'm researching now certainly for for some time there has been available on the internet the whole corpus of poly Buddhist texts and that of course radically changes the way that you can access them because you can search them in ways that you never could before uh for any word and county occurrences of words this kind of thing so it definitely changes uh the way that the texts are used by scholars and by practitioners as far as i can tell so you said this is this is the your next project that is working on on the contemporary technology that's right absolutely uh so you i've talked a little bit about the internet i do want to mention that one thing i noticed that when i was in Thailand is when you go to um like uh um this was before uh let's see this is before dv uh sorry before mp3s became very popular so they still have these things called record stores right i know those are going the way the way of the dodo nowadays but yeah so now it's in Thailand and i went into record stores and you'd have records and tapes being sold there and a remarkably large amount of the tapes were recordings of monks giving uh lectures about the dharma uh so i did notice that that is a very common way that people in modern Thailand come into contact with some of the teachings of Buddhism so we call this a secondary or morality right in other words you have the oral world then you have writing and then you through technology you actually go beyond writing back into orality where people sit and listen uh to a tape or listen to the radio this common radio broadcast of monks giving various talks about the teachings of the buddha so it's a very common way that people come into contact with them and it seems like uh you know with the internet that even happens again as you're saying this sort of global uh inter-connected way i know there are plenty of other you know we here we are on a podcast but there are other podcasts that do uh just Dharma talks or whatnot absolutely yep and i was just meditating on second life my character on second life was just meditating a few days ago and then after the meditation there was a talk by a monk who was physically in Thailand but you could see his avatar and it's interesting that they use that sounds good word avatar you could see his avatar dressed in robes and you know who's speaking it really was quite an amazing experience well i think we're coming up on the end of our time here together um thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us daniel thank you i really enjoyed it and i hope the semester and grading wraps up for you and uh we're looking forward to seeing your your future work thank you i appreciate it okay so thanks so much bye-bye you've been listening to an interview with daniel vidlinger author of spreading the dharma writing or reality and textual transmission in buddhist northern Thailand for the new books and buddhist studies channel of the new books network i'm your host scott michel thanks for listening you you [BLANK_AUDIO]