Tanabe, Shigeharu (1991) Religious traditions among Tai ethnic groups: a selected bibliography, Ayutthaya : Ayutthaya Historical Study Centre.

“Buddhist Proselytism, c. 1400-1560,” in Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830,” Cambridge University Press, 2003, has a good overview of the development of Buddhism in early Tai polities. It also cites all the important western papers on the subject.

“From Opposition to Syncretism: A Preliminary Analysis of the Tai Lue religion,” by Leshan Tan, in the proceedings of the 4th Thai Studies Conference in Kunming, referenced in the Tanabe bibliography above, has a very interesting discussion of the development of Tai Lue religion, with a lot of references to primary sources in Chinese. There are other papers in the proceedings, but they seem to suffer from methodological and terminological problems like referring to Tai Lue marriage customs as “free love” or religious practices as “primitive taboos.” Apparently, most of the work on Tai Lu religion is in Chinese without (yet) a thorough bibliographical study to guide the scholar like Foon Ming Liew and Grabowsky’s “An Introduction to Tai Lu sources of the History of Moeng Lu (Sipsong Panna),” published in Aseanie, decembre 2004.

Robert, I guess you can call them “supersititions” if you want to, but given that I live with the people who take them seriously. I have to show proper respect, even to those Jatukam amulets.

I actually have some of those amulets though I’m not sure if they are that specific type. I should have put “superstitious” in quotes since I was really talking about whatever King Mongkut had declared a discouraged practice (and I’m not sure exactly what that list is. I should do some reading.)

The thing is that some of these practices, even if they seem irrational to some, can still be helpful to people. For example, people with sleep paralysis often think they’re being harassed by a ghost at night. In reality this is a mental condition brought on by anxiety and can be treated with anti-anxiety drugs, but often some sort of protective charm will help prevent the disorder because it reduces the anxiety that causes the condition. (People feel safer knowing the ghost will be scared off by the charm, reducing their anxiety.)

So all of these practices have to be looked at in terms of whether they’re harmful, harmless, or actually helpful somehow rather than whether they’re based on empirical science or something.

Michael Charney’s new book Powerful Learning (2006) discusses the Burmese analogue of what King Mongkut did with the Thammayut, documented by Craig Reynolds in his 1972 PhD dissertation.

In Burma they had a 100 year ongoing dispute in the Sangha on the way that the robes of monks should ne wrapped over their shoulders when they enter into villages for alms.

I think the bottom line is that as states got bigger, and they had to in the face of European colonialism, Kings had to assert control over people, economics, religion, culture, you name it. Basically, use it (and put a boundary down), or lose it. (This is supposedly the origin of the Prah Vihear dispute).

If local customs or rituals defy the laws of physics or other science, I just look at them as a form of poetry. Hopefully, it’s not poetry that makes people violent and nationalistic.

Jon: That’s interesting. In my experience the water was just poured on trees or used to water plants, after the chanting. I have seen water scattered on people with a sort of bamboo whisk/brush thing as a blessing but only very rarely. My experiences are mostly at a Thammayut monastery and I think they kind of frown on too much “superstitious” ritual. (I was just reading about how King Mongkut, founder of the Thammayut, rejected the traditional Buddhist/Hindu/Indian cosmology in favor of modern science along with rejecting a lot of superstitious practices.)

What does Akhas refer to?

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Excerpt:

“Master Gotama, you know that we brahmans give gifts, make offerings, [saying,] ‘May this gift accrue to our dead relatives. May our dead relatives partake of this gift.’ Now, Master Gotama, does that gift accrue to our dead relatives? Do our dead relatives partake of that gift?”

“In possible places, brahman, it accrues to them, but not in impossible places.”

“And which, Master Gotama, are the possible places? Which are the impossible places?”

[Realms of Hells, Devas, Humans, gods, etc, listed as impossible.]

“Then there is the case where a certain person takes life, takes what is not given, engages in sensual misconduct, engages in false speech, engages in divisive speech, engages in abusive speech, engages in idle chatter, is covetous, bears ill will, and has wrong views. With the break-up of the body, after death, he reappears in the realms of the hungry shades. He lives there, he remains there, by means of whatever is the food of hungry shades. He lives there, he remains that, by means of whatever his friends or relatives give in dedication to him. This is the possible place for that gift to accrue to one staying there.

“But, Master Gotama, if that dead relative does not reappear in that possible place, who partakes of that gift?”

“Other dead relatives, brahman, who have reappeared in that possible place.”

So that is the canonical basis for the dedication of merit to peta. It is worth noting that the food isn’t simply burned or something; in my experience it is given to monks, then the monks chant while the laypeople pour water into bowls. Thus the good kamma of giving food to monks is dedicated. The food itself isn’t literally “given” somehow such as by burning.

Nat worship is different though. There are various protective chants but there’s no imperative to build spirit houses or anything, as far as I know, in the canon. I don’t think there’s anything against it though. I think the idea is that being concerned for the welfare of all beings is good, so if you think there’s a being somewhere it makes sense to be concerned for it.

It isn’t evident to me just how effective Buddhism’s supposed “clear internal measure of legitimate practice” is given the amazing plurality of practices and beliefs existing within the tradition. Unlike Catholicism, Buddhism is famous, like Islam, for lacking any clear, definitive authoritative hierarchy. Thus the incredible profusion of sectarian traditions of vinaya practice and theological discourse in India. And when one rolls geographical and ethnic diversity into the mix, the proliferations of Buddhisms becomes so profuse as to leave a number of modern scholars, ala what Jon has said, to wonder if there is any singular “Buddhism” underneath and behind all that diversity. I think in fact you can extend that suspicion of singularity to the supposedly coherent and bounded traditions of Mahayana, Theravada, Vajrayana as well, which also dissolve as singular, coherent, well-bounded entities upon close analysis.

Buddhists throughout history have seriously disagreed with each other over what is virtuous and what is conducive to liberation. While appeal to those categories, in the sense of the style and rhetoric of disagreement, may unite them, substantively and logically they have all too often reached very different substantive conclusions about what counts as virtuous and conducive to enlightenment.

While modernist reformers look to the (Pali) textual canon as the final arbiter, this is only so successful in practice regarding the lived tradition as I have indicated previously. Moreover, what is frequently overlooked is how each reforming project creates a new invented tradition of great antiquity, again as Jon has pointed to. In addition though, I think modern scholars of Thai Buddhism, for instance, fail to recognize how much this new universal vision of Thai Buddhism advanced by the reformers is deeply partial and biased in its royalist and Central Siamese presumptions. While Kamala has highlighted the latter dimension, few have commented on how the Chakri dynasty sought to make their royalist Buddhist literatures, sensibilities and moral compass THE standard by which the Buddhism of a new nation state was understood as a uniquely timeless and universal Buddhism.

I find it difficult to see how grand statements like “Buddhism has X” or “Buddhism believes X” are even possible. All that I’ve ever seen is plural hybrid Buddhism*s*, Buddhism mixed with something else, a local culture. Based on discussions, many westerners seem to believe that they practice a universal culturally sanitized version.

Perhaps the influence and example set by monks for lay people is important for “wholesomeness” and “cessation of attachment to the self” among lay people. The book by Kamala Tiyavanich above describes monks mixing a with lay people before rigid standards were imposed by the “reformed” urban center (which also enforced exclusion of women from the Sangha). This mixing with lay people is certainly something completely missing from modern urban Bangkok, where after work all one finds are a completely unwholesome mixture of massage parlours, luxury department stores, and bars. I find it hard to see how a highly cloistered Sangha that does not actively mix with lay people is conducive to mindfulness among lay people. They leave a large gap for Christian missionaries.

Peter Skilling despite being such a mild-mannered guy, presents some rather radical theses (albeit discretely and politely) about localised but connected intellectual lineages in Buddhism:

Peter Skilling, “Geographies of Intertextuality: Buddhist Literature in Pre-modern Siam ” Aseanie 19 (2007).

Peter Skilling, King, Sangha, and Brahmans: Ideology, Ritual, and Power in Pre-modern Siam, In Buddhism, Power and Political Order / ed. by Ian Harris. – London: Routledge, 2007 – (Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism)

Things I’ve learned from Skilling’s papers and talks he gave at the Siam Society: Many of the murals in temples at Pagan, Burma were influenced by strains of thought from Nalanda University and the Pala dynasty as was Tibetan Buddhism. In fact, the oldest Thai commentary was originally written in Sanskrit but now only exists in the Tibetan language. Local lineages were certainly connected and communicating, enforcing some universal Budddhist standards.