Food And Freedom

Author(s): Paul Dundas
Publisher: Paul Dundas

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186
Paul Dundas
therefore outwith samsāric affairs. Despite this, many Buddhists perform rituals which seem to suggest that he is more than this. In Gombrich's opinion, there are two levels of belief at work here. For the villagers whom he studied, the Buddha was 'cognitively' dead and unable to exert influence, in other words, this is what the villagers firmly stated to be the case. On the ‘affective' level, however, the Buddha is alive and capable of granting boons; the villagers manifested this attitude by their behaviour in worship.173 This analysis has been criticised by Southwold on the grounds that behaviour is never a sufficient basis for deducing belief.174 His fieldwork shows that Sinhalese Buddhists consistently hold that the Buddha is defunct and as a consequence, totally unable to influence human affairs. When some wordly favour is required, then worship is directed towards the intermediate figures of the Sinhalese pantheon (similar deities exist in Jainism);175 true religion, which has more serious goals, is in the mind.
The whole notion of belief is, of course, notoriously difficult. If we do not take seriously what an informant specifically tells us to be the case, then our ability to make valid statements about anything is likely to be seriously hindered, but, at the same time, we should beware of overemphasising the validity of statements such as Upadhye's and giving total credence to them, for all utterances about belief function in a wider network of other unexpressed utterances and beliefs. 176 Upadhye's statement about Jaina belief is in these terms not worthless but must inevitably be subject to qualification: the context in which statements about worship are uttered is not the same context in which worship is performed.
In a recent book177 Southwold has subjected the idea that belief has primacy in religion to a rigorous critique and demonstrates that it is a legacy of the Christian world-view (perhaps ultimately going back to the Greeks) to maintain that matters of religious truth can only be expressed in beliefavowals. 178 Similarly, it is a legacy of the fact that westerners have been reared and conditioned in a theistic culture (or at least one which generally speaks about religion in theistic terms) which leads them to judge the Buddha and, by extension, the Jaina tīrthařkara, in theistic terms,179 I do not wish to take issue with Southwold's subtle and, above all, humane study which provides a highly attractive model for the study of religions, but it is not mere theistic bias which finally leads me to question Jainism's credentials as a totally atheistic religion. The early texts may indeed advise the Jaina that there is no being worthy of worship, but it does seem highly likely that the centuries of influence which an increasingly predominant Hinduism exerted upon Jainism reshaped many of the characteristics of Jaina religious behaviour. In the words of P.S. Jaini, 'The wave of the bhakti movement that had swept over the whole range of Indian life finally overtook the atheist Jainas and forced them to deify, as it were, their human tīrthařkaras or face the peril of extinction. Probably this move brought