Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand

3 Kings and Universities

3 Kings and Universities The Siamese began to colonize the region to their immediate north in the late nineteenth century. With this colonization came the reform of monastic education . Before looking at these reforms, I summarize the basic political history of this colonization. Historically this region was more culturally and economically connected to Laos to the east and the Shan and Khoen regions to the north and west than it was to the Siamese in the south.1 It had been a collection of independent and tributary city-states self-designated as the kingdom of “Lan Na” and populated by various groups of Thai-speaking peoples. In the early twentieth century, Siam, which had been slowly gaining administrative and economic control over the North under the “monthon ” (a type of “sphere of influence”) system, formally established seven provinces (changwat) in the region (phak) of Northern Thailand. This removed institutional and economic power (and, more slowly, symbolic and ritual power) from local royal families. Since the early twentieth century local Northern Thai (Chao Lan Na / Khon Muang) leaders have pledged their allegiance to the Thai government centered in Bangkok. However, regional teachers and students have resisted or ignored what Victor Mair calls the “culture of the capital” and have been able to maintain their diverse local pedagogical interpretative traditions.2 How the North Became Thai Prince Damrong of Siam composed the first Thai “official” history of the conflict between Laos and Thailand in 1926 (Chotmaihet rang rop khabot Vien92 n tiane). Beginning with Damrong’s history came other histories that separated the Lao people living in (present-day) Northern Thailand and Northeastern Thailand and those in present-day Laos. Charles Keyes writes that “despite the fact that well over half the population of Siam, the boundaries of which were fixed during the colonial period, had previously been called ‘Lao’ by the Siamese, Prince Damrong literally wrote the Lao out of Thai history.”3 Prince Damrong himself wrote that “people in Bangkok have long called [the peoples of Northern Siam] Lao. Today, however, we know they are Thai, not Lao.”4 The Lao on the left side of the Mekong became Thai, and according to Thai history texts they always had been “naturally” Thai. Keyes asserts that these official histories create “national narratives that are a ‘product of modern nationalisms.’”5 The present political borders are mapped onto the past and ethnicities and languages are subsumed under these nations, erasing their shared histories. Lao and Thai become natural, eternal, and, therefore , real divisions, even though there is little evidence that they existed in precisely this way historically. Before this coercive and/or defensive ethnicization, reference to the people who occupy modern-day Northern Thailand and Laos simply as “Lao” had a long history. The Siamese colonization of Lan Na was a slow process, and for most of the nineteenth century the North was considered culturally Lao and of little importance to the Siamese. Ayutthayan chronicles refer to the area of Northern Thailand as the “country of the Lao.” The oft-quoted Daniel McGilvary, when referring to Siamese relations with Chiang Mai, wrote in the late nineteenth century that “the Siamese [Central Thai] had never interfered with or assumed control of the internal affairs of the North Lao states.”6 His book A Half Century among the Siamese and the Lao groups the Northern Thai with the Lao in Northern Thailand. In referring to the people (in what is today Northern Thailand), he writes that “the substantial character of the Lao as a race will I have no doubt enable more to be accomplished thro’ native assistance than in many other lands.”7 Lillian Johnson Curtis, a missionary in Chiang Mai, Lampang, Phrae, and Nan between 1895 and 1899, wrote The Lao of North Siam. She continually observes in her book the customs of the people of the cities and villages of Northern Thailand as distinctly Lao and not Siamese. For these missionaries, Northern Siam or Northern Thailand was Lao. Even as late as 1919, the Chris93 kings and universities tian missionary Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell referred to the language of Nan and Phrae as “Lao,” even though she referred to the region and the people as “Northern Siamese.”8 Furthermore, she referred to two of her local contacts as Ai Sen and Pi Teing, evidence of the mixing of Thai and Lao languages , which persists until this day. Ai is “older...