Inaugurating a monastery
This last Saturday, 19th Sept. 2018, I was lucky to be part of the inauguration of a new Buddhist vihāra here in Chittagong. I was invited by Dr. Ananda Vikas Chakma, a historian at Chittagong University. The site for the new monastery is small and has been contested for something like 30 years. It has its origins in a promise by the Chittagong City Corporation to give a plot of land to the Indigenous communities living in Chittagong for a Buddhist monastery of their own. The Chakma and Marma that I spoke with there drew a distinction between ‘Bengali Buddhists’—meaning the Barua and allied lineages—and ‘Indigenous Buddhists’, by which they mean themselves. This plot of land was granted to the Indigenous Buddhists three decades ago, but apparently it was occupied by other nearby landowners almost immediately, and there has been a lawsuit ongoing for decades to try to actually get control of the space.
The event itself was organised in such a way as so capture and use this uncertainty. We are due elections here in Bangladesh within the next three months, though neither the date nor the process has yet been agreed. The public events I have attended since arriving have thus all been marked by politicians giving speeches in anticipation of the election. The Indigenous Buddhist community clearly recognised that this was a good moment to bargain with the local politicians: the mayor of the city corporation and several local politicians had a chance to address the Indigenous Buddhist community, while they in turn got valuable legitimation of their claim to the site and were able to render concrete the fact of the new, long-hoped-for, monastery.
The buildings erected on the monastery site had proper foundations, but they themselves were not quite so solid yet—the roof for the Buddha images was still corrugated metal. The tall buildings of the wealthy local property owners who had contested the establishment of the monastery looked down from all four directions. Up on the stairwells and in the windows, people peered down to see what was happening.
The key ritual event was the unveiling of a plaque embedded in a very solid concrete monument declaring that the monastery had, indeed, been inaugurated by AJM Nazir Uddin, Mayor of the Chittagong City Corporation. It was quite a procession—the participants and organisers had baskets of marigold petals to strew as the mayor’s delegation came in: the mayor, his entourage, several other politicians with their own entourages. It got crowded very quickly.
They were all preceded by a magnificently turned out police bodyguard with an imposing automatic weapon. He stopped for a moment, and looked down at me. ‘I am also Buddhist!’ he said to me, with a sudden huge smile. In the space of the monastery itself, there were plastic chairs lined up, and people crowded into the newly built shrine room to venerate the Buddha images. Food was offered to all the various key guests, which rapidly piled up. The head monk of the new monastery sat down for a photo session with the mayor.
When the plaque had finally been unveiled, we then walked in a long line to the main auditorium of the nearby Chittagong Polytechnic. This campus, by the way, is a wonderful patch of relatively calm green space just on the other side of the railway line from Khulshi. The tropical vegetation and waterlogged ground threaten to overwhelm the plain buildings, but they have so far resisted and look across parkland to a wall of trees and vines at the edge of the campus. Another politican’s entourage, encased in black cars with tinted windows, squelched past us going the other way—they were late, would look at the new monastery, and then come back to take part in the programme.
The auditorium was full on both sides. The audience was much larger than the group that had managed to squeeze into the space of the monastery; and on the stage, we had a full turnout of local politicians, senior monastics, and other members of the Sangha. I had to use the ‘panorama’ feature of the phone to get a decent sense of the stage.
The politicians talked first: the mayor, then a key national member of the Awami League who has held senior posts in the Chittagong Hill Tracts previously, then the ward councillors. As each politician finished they were fêted with flowers and then left together with their entourage. By 4:00 it was only the Sangha left on stage, and the senior members of the Sangha carefully deferred to each other in accepting invitations to chant, offer Dharma talks, and talk about the future of this new small monastery. My Bangla is nowhere near good enough yet to have captured even half of what was being said, so I won’t pretend to offer any analysis.
When the programme finished, I walked with a group of organisers along the road towards the market on Polytechnic Road. It turns out there’s a Chakma vegetable stand there, with a completely different inventory of produce from anything I’ve seen here. Folks bought food and then dispersed homewards.
