Mastering old age : Buddhist practice and techniques of the self among elderly laywomen in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

This thesis is an anthropological study of old age and Buddhism in Vietnam. It explores how Vietnamese women utilise Buddhist practice to navigate the late stage of life. Embedded in the context of a fast growing aging population and the present lack of studies that focus on aging in Vietnam, this research looks to contribute to the understanding of aging and the life course, and the role of religious practice in informing and reconstructing the everyday experience of being old in Vietnam. This research shows that Buddhism is a regime of practice that elderly women follow in their everyday life. As a daily practice, Buddhism shapes women’s experience of being old, by transforming the temporal and spatial structure of their everyday lives, and extending their social networks and engagements far beyond their families and feminine roles at home. Buddhist imaginaries and conceptualisations of life redefine the way women conduct themselves in their everyday lives and perceive and live out their roles at home and in wider society. In the process, elderly women also transform Buddhist practice to make it respond to their lived realities. Buddhism is lived out by elderly women not as a doctrine but as a practical way of life. The way of life that Buddhism carves out for its elderly adepts is embedded in the socioeconomic landscape of the contemporary socialist market economy in Vietnam and is imprinted with its practitioners’ gender- and age-specific habitus. This research finds out that Buddhism is also a set of techniques that work on the self, through which elderly women redefine their relational personhood in their interactions with their families and the wider society. Buddhism provides its elderly adepts with self-mastery resources which enable them face the dreadful thresholds of the final stage of life. As a technique of the self, Buddhism enables elderly practitioners to adjust their identities and personhood, which in turn give them a sense of purposefulness, agency and control over the various realities that emerge in the course of old age, such as physical decline, ambiguities in identity and loss of agency at the end stage of life. Old age is therefore mastered with Buddhist practice, and is transformed from a life stage of marginality and infirmity, to an experience of continuing personal development and empowerment.