The idea of filial debts calls attention to enduring tensions in studies of Buddhist social institutions, their ritual maintenance, and their literary representations. Across Buddhist traditions, the doctrinal articulation, narrative representation, and ritual expression of filial debts, filial piety, and filial gratitude have occupied the core of religious motivation and practice for centuries. Ranging from medieval China to premodern and contemporary Southeast Asia, this panel identifies key terms and resources for the study of filial debts, and traces their shifting significance and development over time and across various textual and ethnographic contexts. A decade on from the publication of such landmark works as Shayne Clarke's Family Matters and Liz Wilson's Family in Buddhism, this panel returns to the status of the family in Buddhism, taking filial debts as a core frame and focus for the study of Buddhist personhood, affect, ritual, literature, and belonging.
This paper addresses the issue of filial piety in Thai, Lao and Khmer Buddhism through two notions that are the core of the regional religious practice, udissa and guṇ, both borrowed from Pali and Sanskrit lexicons. The first term, udissa (uthit in Thai-Lao, utoeh in Khmer) appears both in ancient local sources and contemporary religious practice at the centre of expressions designating the offering of merit with others, especially deceased relatives. As for the term guṇ, it has the sense of ‘virtue’, ‘benefit’ or ‘merit’. This term has locally been given an additional meaning, as it also refers to the ‘body components’ that progenitors pass on to their offspring during gestation. Here the term guṇ takes, by extrapolation, the meaning of ‘legacy’, or ‘debt’ held by parents towards their child, which he must ‘recollect’ and ‘repay’ in order to be a good Buddhist.
Since at least the sixteenth century, the doctrinal articulation and ritual expression of filial debts and filial gratitude in Theravada contexts have occupied the core of religious motivation and practice for many Buddhists in mainland Southeast Asia and beyond. Recent studies have demonstrated the deeply intertwined approach to expressing and repaying filial debts within Khmer, Lao, and Thai Buddhist cultures, with specific attention given to exegetical Pali commentaries, vernacular manuals drawn from the esoteric meditation tradition in Laos and northern Thailand, and vernacular poems from Cambodia. This paper extends these analyses to the range of chanted poems on gratitude to parents that grew in popularity throughout the twentieth century in Central and Northeast Thailand, situating them as twentieth-century irruptions of older currents across the region, in which the affective dimensions of love, grief, debt, and gratitude between parents and children shape the performance and reception of Buddhist verse.
While some debts in Theravada contexts, such as those to parents, are considered congenital, acts of merit-making can also create new debts of gratitude that in turn produce, reinforce, or rework bonds of kinship. Applying insights from Grégory Kourilsky and Trent Walker into the central place of filial debts and filial gratitude in Buddhist thinking and practice to a 1982 volume of linked biographies of Buddhist nuns in Burma (thilashin), this paper explores how communities form and feel in the exchange of debts of gratitude called in Burmese "kyezu" (kyeḥ jūḥ), an intrinsically relational term that signifies a deed offered in service to others that requires return. Tracing intertextual references and social maps drawn in the biographies, this paper illustrates how acts of kyezu deployed by thilashin are textually prefigured, strategically performed, and affectively textured in service to local formations of religious authority and the communities oriented to it.
This paper examines representations of children’s karmic culpability in medieval Chinese Buddhist miraculous tales from the fourth to tenth centuries CE. By analyzing miraculous tales through an age-critical lens, and with a sensitivity to cultural definitions of children and childhood, this paper argues that children occupied an ethical position distinct from adults in medieval Chinese Buddhism. Miraculous tales evince an age-dependent notion of karmic culpability, according to which children younger than six or seven (seven or eight _sui_ 歲) could not accrue negative karma. Age-dependent karma emerged as medieval Chinese Buddhist adherents reconciled Buddhist ethical principles with Chinese sociocultural ideas of a late-developing moral consciousness. The paper further traces narratological patterns to identify when, why, and how children were held karmically liable for their own actions. I show that an analysis of children forces scholars of Buddhism to reconsider the workings and logic of fundamental Buddhist doctrines like karma.