We are all physicists, at at least a naïve level, insofar as we must deal with the world of mass and motion, light and liquids, gravity and gyrations. Try asking some folk (in contrast to adept) physicist things like: What keeps the moon and airplanes up but us down? Why is the back of the refrigerator so warm? How can radio waves carry sounds and pictures? What makes water freeze? … and you may receive in return an astonishingly imaginative array of folk understandings that trail off into total misunderstandings, superstition and “old wives’ tales,” among some rather sound guesses. Music, philosophy, art and engineering are other fields in which expert or adept knowledge exists side by side with naïve or folk understandings. Buddhism, because of its sophistication comparable to any of these fields, is no exception, never has been since the earliest days, and never will be. Just as there is a Burmese or Chinese folk Buddhism, there is also modern folk Buddhism, generally unnoticed. In fact, many modern Buddhist teachers teach predominately folk Buddhism (see David McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism if you need convincing).
Folk Buddhism is a wilder, less domesticated and more popular understanding of Buddhism than adept Buddhism, an understanding, or rather range of understandings, that manifests in a particular social, cultural or regional context. It is the attempt to harmonize the radical message of adept Buddhism with the conventionality of the prevailing folk culture. Malleability is therefore a prominent property of folk Buddhism. Folk Buddhism includes many elements found also in adept Buddhism but also a hefty admixture of beliefs of non-Buddhist religious, ethical and philosophical traditions, many colorful elements from myth or popular entertainment, and many false understandings of Buddhist teachings.
It should be understood that, far from being a perverse anomaly, Folk Buddhism plays a necessary role in the history and continuity of Buddhism. First, it overlaps with adept Buddhism. Its defining characteristic is not spuriousness, but its relative popularity among the general Buddhist population. Witness the relative popularity of meditation practice in both Burmese and Western Buddhism. Second, folk Buddhists hold adept Buddhism in high regard and are drawn to approximate it with time. Folk Buddhists are generally aware in outline of the Path as something they might someday pursue. Third, folk Buddhism makes Buddhism comprehensible to some degree for most Buddhists and virtually all non-Buddhists. Particularly as Buddhism enters a new culture, it is Folk Buddhism that softens the clash of cultures and mediates the give and take that can bring these into harmony. It is the oil between piston and cylinder, the wheel between axle and road. It almost certainly provided some of the conditions necessary for Buddhism to become the first religion to go global.
A frequent Burmese visitor to the monastery at which I used to live in Texas, a laywoman who liked to come on weekends to prepare food for the monks, was up late one night and spotted a monk standing in the sky above one of the new buildings near where a new pagoda was about to begin construction. She called other people hither, who indeed verified the presence of this monk in the sky, but by this time the monk was sitting in meditation posture. It was generally agreed among the witnesses that this monk had teletransported from Burma. A couple of weeks later I heard a retelling of this story by a non-witness to this original event, in which the sky-monk in question was our own founder, who lives in Burma, undoubtedly checking out the new construction site.
The average Burmese Buddhist householder is devout, and knows maybe a little about meditation, but does not practice it regularly, while a uniquely large number are adept meditators. They know basic teachings of Buddhism largely from Jataka tales (primarily a Children’s literature), but are largely informed by a vibrant Folk Buddhism. The average Burmese Buddhist, at the same time, inhabits a world of tree spirits, miracles and magic, largely of pre-Buddhist origin but often blending in her mind seamlessly with Buddhist practices and doctrine. Tree spirits (nats) can be kind or malicious. Appeasing them has become a common duty of monks, toward which nats have a particular affinity On one occasion, I was cornered into appeasing tree spirits myself, after pointing out, ever skeptical, to a more senior Bumese monk that Texas tree spirits are unlikely to understand Burmese.
In Burma, many lay people have daily contact with monastics when they offer alms in the morning, rice and a little curry. People have a particular regard for those monks who are accomplished meditators, have impeccable discipline, are recognized scholars or excel in social welfare. Although monks rarely mingle in social gatherings, alms rounds or visits to the monastery on quarter moon days provide the laity an opportunity to learn some Dharma or ask questions. Although all monks are respected as representatives of the Sangha,f individual monks’ acquire reputations as teachers. Moreover, in this electronic age many people listen to recordings of Dharma talks and Paritta chanting at home, featuring their favorite famous sayadaws (teachers), as routinely as Americans listen to popular music.
In Burma, blessings are routinely sought from monks. As in other Theravada countries, the recitation of any of the Parittas, a standard set of eleven suttas or composites from the suttas, by monks on one’s behalf is widely believed to be efficacious in ensuring one’s welfare. If someone is ill or is about to take a university exam they often request such a recitation as a karmic boost beforehand. This practice has parallels in many religions and other Buddhist traditions, which sometimes, unlike the Burmese, use talismans or amulets to bestow blessings. A revealing study reports that in fact the vast majority of monks in Myanmar, virtually all of whom provide this priestly service routinely, believe such practices have no special power other than to produce self-confidence in the subject. I have often heard monks pointing this very thing out, but folk beliefs persist, as does the recitation of Parittas by the monks on behalf of devotees.
Part of the Burmese system of veneration of the Buddha and of arahants involves relics as the remains of cremation upon their demise, a practice that the Buddha himself endorsed at some level. In Burma the relics of such exalted beings generally take on the form of crystals which are capable of spontaneously reproducing like bunnies: Left overnight, the next morning a jar of them will have increased in number and mass. A museum has been built in a temple in Burma where a local arahant had lived and died. Pictures in the museum reveal he had very intense eyes, which, it is reported, did not burn during his cremation but were found among the relics. I am not aware that the eyes have multiplied with time.
Relics, and also consecrated statues of the Buddha, have special powers. Kyaik Tiyo, the golden rock, is a huge boulder, maybe 40 or 50 feet in diameter, perched on top of a sheer cliff, at the very top of a tall mountain in southern Burma, in such a way that it has been just about to roll off, for maybe the last several hundred thousand years or so. However, the folk story is that some of the Buddha’s hairs are contained inside of the rock and that the rock remains in place by the unexplained “power of the Buddha.” Once upon a time, some non-Buddhists tried to push the rock off the cliff in order to undermine people’s trust in the Triple Gem, but they were turned into monkeys. In an inspiring, hopefully not foolhardy, display of faith, there is now a nunnery directly below the rock, exactly at the point of first bounce.
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