defined by Melford Spiro. Merit, often expressed as
concrete, material benefits rather than in purely spir-
itual terms, could be conceived of as a form of pro-
tection from illness, evil spirits, and natural calamities
often caused by supernatural entities. On the other
hand, invoking protection from local divinities could
result in benefits that were not much different in prac-
tice from those resulting from the performance of
purely “orthodox” Buddhist devotions.
Buddhism dealt with local spirits in numerous ways,
ranging from discursive structuring (definition of their
status and attribution of a specific place within the
Buddhist cosmology and soteriology), to ritual inter-
action, to mere noninterference. Discursive structuring
seems to operate in general only on the main princi-
ples, but it does not work in detail. For example, in the
case of Thai “village cosmology” the relationship is un-
clear between thewada(from the Sanskrit devata), gods
that are considered to be situated outside the cycle of
rebirth (in itself a heterodox idea), and local spirits
known as phl. Ritual interactiontakes many forms,
from the reading of Buddhist scriptures that took place
in front of the Japanese kamiuntil the anti-Buddhist
persecutions of 1868, to the celebrations of festivals for
the protectors of Thai monasteries (Chao Phau). In the
case of noninterference,Buddhists leave certain issues
concerning local spirits to traditional figures such as
shamans, storytellers, diviners, and so forth. In fact, in
most Buddhist cultures a number of such traditional
specialists deal with local deities, spirits, and ghosts. In
some cases, they form distinct and independent pro-
fessional and social groups, such as kamipriests in
premodern Japan, Bon priests in Tibet, and certain
shamanlike specialists in China and Southeast Asia.
Most of the time, however, traditional specialists of
local sacred affairs are not religious professionals, but
perform their services as a side business in addition to
their ordinary, secular professions.
Buddhist cosmology and popular religious
practices concerning the afterlife
An area of religious life in which the interaction of
Buddhism with local divinities is particularly intense
is the one that deals with DEATHand the afterlife (fu-
neral ceremonies, ancestor cults, and neutralization of
evil ghosts). In particular, the Buddhist cosmology of
HEAVENSand HELLS, together with its multiple PURE
LANDS(Sukhavat, Potalaka, etc.) always involves the-
ses kinds of issues. To most Buddhists, nirvana is not
an immediate goal; what matters most is REBIRTHinto
a higher state of being, from which the dead can be-
stow blessings onto the living who honor and worship
them. This is the starting point of ancestor cults, which
are associated with the idea that lack of proper ritual
action toward the deceased will cause misfortune and
disaster. In this way, memorialization brings together
merit-making in the form of ritual exchanges with AN-
CESTORSand apotropaic beliefs and practices promis-
ing protection against evil ghosts. Memorialization
also fuses Buddhist classic cosmology and local divini-
ties (in the form of ancestors, tutelary deities, and spir-
its of various kinds). It is not by chance, then, that in
most of Asia, Buddhist monks are directly involved in
funerals, memorialization of the dead (who are turned
into ancestors), and control of ghosts, often associated
with evil deities of classical cosmology such as yaksa
and asura, the natsin Myanmar, and the phlin Thai-
land and Laos. Particularly interesting in this respect
are East Asian Buddhist funerary practices and their
underlying cosmology of hells. Chinese Buddhists ap-
plied the bureaucratic structure of their state to the
afterlife, developing the cult of the Ten Kings of hell—
judges who decide the destiny of the defunct in the
afterlife. This cult combines Buddhist conceptions of
hell, popular Indian ideas of rebirth, Indian gods such
as Yama, Daoist deities, and Chinese popular beliefs
and practices (including Confucian bureaucracy). An-
other cult (known as shi eguei gongyangin China and
se gaki kuyoin Japan) that developed in China dealt
with the so-called hungry ghosts, an East Asian version
of the Indian preta, which shows concerns and fear
about the spirits of those who died a “bad” death or
who were not properly memorialized by their families.
These funerary cults spread all over the Sinicized world
in East Asia and still constitute one of the most im-
portant and enduring contributions of Buddhism to
East Asian cultures.The problem of syncretism
The term syncretismhas had a long history of nega-
tive connotations as indicating a random mixture of
various religious elements dictated by ignorance, su-
perstition, or even diabolic influences. The term pre-
supposes the existence of a “pure” form of a given
religious tradition, uncorrupted by blending with
other religions. For these reasons, it is difficult to use
syncretismas a neutral, descriptive term. The word was
redefined, however, in The Encyclopedia of Religion
(1987) as referring to “connections of a special kind
between languages, cultures, or religions” (vol. 14, p.
218). In this form, however, it is too vague to be use-
ful for analysis of specific cases of religious interac-LOCALDIVINITIES ANDBUDDHISM