Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand

Notes

3 0 1 Notes INTRODUCTION 1. The name of the country was changed to Thailand in 1941 during the Phibun regime. I will use the terms “Siam” and “Siamese” to refer to the country and to the ethnic Thai in pre-1941 contexts, and “Thailand” and “Thai” in post-1941 contexts. As a result of the nationalist policy of the Phibun government, the term “Thai” came to encompass all ethnic groups in Thailand and not just the Siamese, who were concentrated in the Central Plains. (Here I am following Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994], 18.) 2. In this study the terms wandering monk, thudong monk, and kammathan monk will be used interchangeably, following the monks’ own usage. The Thai thudong comes from the Pali dhûtanga, which denotes ascetic or austere practices. The literal meaning, according to Nyanatiloka , is a “means of shaking off” mental defilements. The thirteen practices are wearing patched-up robes, possessing only three robes, going out for alms, not omitting any houses on the almsround, having only one meal a day, eating out of the alms bowl, not accepting food presented afterward, dwelling in forest areas, dwelling under a tree, staying in the open or in caves or abandoned houses, visiting or staying in a cemetery, being content with whatever shelter is provided, and sleeping in the sitting position. See Nyanatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary (Kandy: 3 02 N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 – 5 Buddhist Publication Society, 1980), 59; also Boowa [Bua] Nyanasampanno , “An Account on the DhûtaΩga Kammaπ π hâna Bhikkhus,” in Buddhism in Thailand (Bangkok: World Fellowship of Buddhists, 1980), 71–72. Kammathan (from the Pali kammaπ π hâna) refers to meditation subjects. 3. The vinaya comprises the disciplinary rules for all monks. People today tend to associate Buddhism in Thailand with Theravada monks who recite the vinaya’s 227 rules. 4. As Craig Reynolds puts it, “Each abbot was to a large extent master of his own realm. . . . The quality of monastic leadership in combination with the attention the monastery received from the community determined its prosperity and influence.” Craig J. Reynolds, “The Buddhist Monkhood in Nineteenth Century Thailand” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1972), 26. 5. Scholars screen out diversity when they construct, for the purpose of comparison, a monolithic “Thai” Buddhism. See, for example, Geoffrey Samuel’s comparison of Tibetan and Theravada societies in Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 24–36, 308. 6. See Thongchai, Siam Mapped. 7. David Wyatt writes the following about the meuang as it existed in the pre-modern state. Meuang “is a term that defies translation, for it denotes as much personal as spatial relationships. When it is used in ancient chronicles to refer to a principality, it can mean both the town located at the hub of a network of interrelated villages and also the totality of town and villages which was ruled by a single chao ‘lord’.” David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 7. 8. Thongchai, Siam Mapped, 99–100. 9. Before Tai-speaking people gained dominance in the ninth and tenth centuries, Khmer-speaking people and Khmer civilization dominated much of what is now Thailand. In the eighteenth century, significant numbers of new Khmer migrated into the area. William A. Smalley, Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 137. The following discussion of languages draws on Smalley’s work. 10. Mon people were most numerous in Pathum Thani, Nonthaburi, and Ratchaburi. They settled there as a result of wars between the Siamese of Ayuthaya and the Burmese kingdoms, wars that lasted into the early years of the nineteenth century. King Taksin (1767–1782) of Thonburi and Rama I (1782–1809) of Bangkok conferred noble titles on N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 – 7 303 the leaders of Mon settlers and drew them into the ranks of Siamese officials and the aristocracy. Reynolds, “Buddhist Monkhood,” 226. 11. Lan Na is the name of an ancient northern kingdom. The term “Lanna Thai” is now gaining usage to refer to the people of the northern region of Thailand. The language they speak among themselves is called Kham Meuang. It has several...