Siam

Mongkut spent twenty seven years in the monastic order before he came to the throne of Siam, and he used them. Dissatisfied with the standard of discipline and of textual knowledge he found, he took ordination in a Mon lineage he judged more correct, studied Pali intensively, and gathered a reform minded group that became the Thammayut order. Its programme was textual and disciplinary: monastic rules kept strictly and by the letter, the Pali canon treated as the standard against which local custom was measured, and a scepticism about the cosmological claims of popular Buddhist literature where they conflicted with what could be observed. When he became king in 1851 he was in a position to make that reform a state matter, and his successors continued it, eventually organising the whole Thai monastic order under a national administration. The result is that Thai Buddhism carries two ordination lineages, the reformed Thammayut and the older and much larger Maha Nikaya, and a national ecclesiastical structure with a supreme patriarch. Richard Gombrich's social history of Theravada sets that alongside comparable reform movements elsewhere in the Theravada world, which arose in the same century and under similar pressures.

The Siamese monarchy defined itself through Buddhism, and the mechanism was merit. A king built and endowed monasteries, sponsored ordinations, supported the copying of texts and led public acts of giving, and in doing so demonstrated the accumulated merit that explained his position and generated more of it. That is a religious theory of legitimacy quite different from the Chinese mandate or the European divine right, and it made royal patronage of the monastic order a structural necessity rather than a personal choice. What the nineteenth century reform did not do was displace the rest of Thai religious practice.

Justin McDaniel's work on Buddhism in modern Thailand describes a landscape in which amulets, protective tattoos, spirit shrines, monks with reputations for power and stories of saints and ghosts operate alongside and inside the canonical tradition, and are not experienced by practitioners as a separate religion. Reform movements have periodically tried to prune this and have not succeeded, which McDaniel treats as evidence that the categories used to describe Thai Buddhism from outside fit it badly. The country was renamed Thailand in 1939, and the atlas holds Siam as the historical polity under which the settlement described here was made.