Nirvana for Sale?: Buddhism, Wealth, and the Dhammakaya Temple in Contemporary Thailand

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Nirvana for Sale?: Buddhism, Wealth, and the Dhammakaya Temple in Contemporary Thailand. By Rachelle M. Scott. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009, xiii + 242 pages, ISBN 978-1-4384-2784-3 (paperback), $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4384-2783-6 (hardcover). In the popular Western imagination, as well as in the minds of many people residing in Buddhist Asia, one of the truly quintessential aspects of Buddhism is that it is a tradition that fundamentally rejects materialism and the accumulation of ample wealth. Rachelle M. Scott’s impressive recent book, Nirvana for Sale?: Buddhism, Wealth, and the Dhammakaya Temple in Contemporary Thailand, seeks to complicate a simplistic and often wrong-headed view that “authentic” Theravada Buddhism writ large is inherently antithetical to the accrual of wealth, and that the Thai Dhammakaya tradition is therefore an example of a “capitalistic” or “materialistic” Buddhism that is, in some important ways, at odds with the true essence of Buddhism. One of the principle reasons that this sort of viewpoint is problematic, Scott persuasively argues throughout the book, is that it tends to rest on positing an ahistorical, decontextualized definition of the parameters of “authentic” Buddhism, and then judging complex real world phenomena against this standard. Thus, while a considerable portion of the book is concerned with laying out a history of the Dhammakaya movement in Thailand and the controversies that afflicted it in the late 1990s, the aim of the book actually concerns the considerably more ambitious project of investigating the nature of the complex relationship between wealth and piety in the Buddhist tradition. Featuring clear, accessible prose and an admirable attention to detail throughout, this is an excellent book. One of the work’s most commendable aspects is the emphasis that Scott places, again and again, on the need to understand various phenomena in context. She persuasively argues, for instance, that there is little to be gained from seeking to uncover a single, authoritative Theravada Buddhist stance on the meaning and significance of the renunciation of the “ordinary” life of the layperson by Buddhist monastics or a universally agreed-upon attitude toward the soteriological implications of wealth accumulation, because no such solitary stance exists. What one finds instead is a plethora of varying approaches that–if they are to be understood at all–must be made sense of within their own specific socio-historical contexts. This is not to say that normative or dominant discourses do not exist with respect to Buddhist approaches to dealing with issues like material wealth, but Scott is careful to point out many of the most common rhetorical positions that Buddhists have taken on the subject of wealth accumulation are, in fact, polemical arguments backed by various agendas, and thus must be understood within that context. This is a very good, well-articulated, and important point that other scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies would be wise to bear in mind. The “Introduction” to the book serves as an impressively concise, yet nevertheless substantively thorough, description of how Orientalist discourses have assisted in the creation of an account of Buddhism that devalues local forms of Buddhist practice in the service of problematically valorizing textually-based, ostensibly “pristine” forms of Buddhism that allegedly more accurately reflect the actual teachings of the historical Buddha. While several excellent book-length studies of this subject already exist, Scott’s brief summary of some of the more salient points from this field of scholarship would serve as a useful introduction for anyone seeking to gain a quick familiarity with some of the more important themes of the discourse. Typical of her approach of seeking to offer a balanced, nuanced account of each topic she addresses, in the early portions of the book Scott spends considerable space challenging the notion that Buddhism should most accurately be conceived of as the otherworldly-oriented system of rational renunciation that it was portrayed as being by prominent early Western scholars (most notably Max Weber and the many others that he influenced).