Really Need a Temple? The Lue as Flexible Buddhists

Really Need a Temple? The Lue as Flexible Buddhists

Both scholars and tourists may imagine that people can find temples everywhere in the Buddhist Tai world. Yet, in the process of practicing beliefs, do we assume that if there is no temple then there are no Buddhists? In this work, I take the Tai-Lue people who live in Sipsong Panna (PR China), the homeland, Lao-Lue who are traditional residents in northern Laos, some of whom had settled in Seattle, Washington State, USA since the end of Indo-China war, and the female immigrants in Taiwan as subjects to study the relationships between Lue Buddhists and the temple. No one might doubt that they were still Buddhists since in the long run their life with temples had been disappeared in public sphere. But what and how did people do to be Buddhists without temples around in daily life for so many years for those different Lues? People instead collected carefully monks’ photos and other relevant things at home. As the Paiyi or Burmese/Myanmar Lue do in Taiwan, the Lao-Lue in Seattle and some in homeland adopted any possible strategies to find photos of holy men, then hold tightly in their hands. Those pictures to me are critical emblems of Lue ethnicity and religious identity for the members who are mostly out of the homeland of Laos. The deep belief of existence of a holy man or phuu mii bun seems to be the most critical element for a Lue to be true Buddhist. Temple-based Buddhism is what I call “unstable institutional ownership of Buddhism” and holy-man-based Buddhism, I suggest, is a “stable close-fitting ownership of Buddhism”. Theoretically a temple building should be stable and an easily broken photo is unstable. However, in Lue’s situation the religion-scape is totally upside down. Flexible reality of Lue Buddhism indeed fully tells the people’s past and present.