Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand

Foreword

x i Foreword Some years ago, when the first paper of her first semester’s graduate work was due, Kamala Tiyavanich phoned me to ask for an extension. I thought she might be having trouble writing, and so when the paper appeared a week later, I was overwhelmed with a superb paper on provincial Thai Buddhism around the turn of the century that ran to more than one hundred pages. That incident should have prepared me for her final dissertation , but nothing could have done so. In thirty-plus years of teaching , no other work in Thai history has so completely caused me to think that everything I knew about a subject had to be thrown away and rethought. It is not the case that the book you now hold in your hands is filled with new information, though much of what it contains is new. It surprises and delights because it has taken a great deal of information, processed it through a very exacting and powerful intellectual grinding, and organized it with reference to a new context and new connections to other things we know. To greater or lesser extent, we all knew there were holy men, or “wandering meditation monks,” in the forests of Southeast Asia over the last century and more, but we did not accurately gauge their importance. Kamala persuades us that we have to consider them an integral part of the religious life of their community, and that to probably the majority of believers these monks were more xii F o r e w o r d real than their ecclesiastical chiefs. By implication she is telling us to think again about the ways in which we conceive civil society in previous times. We are grateful to Dr. Kamala for having breathed new life into an old topic and for stimulating rethinking of what we thought we knew of the past, not only in Thailand but through large parts of the world. David K. Wyatt Cornell University It may be unusual to find two individuals contributing to a single foreword. But Kamala Tiyavanich is an unusual scholar whose book makes multiple contributions. David Wyatt notes that Kamala has made substantial contributions to the historiography of Southeast Asian and Thai Studies. This includes not only the fresh information she has gathered but also the distinctive conceptual frame in which it is located. Subsequent scholars must rethink their terms of engagement in pursuing the trajectory of an earlier “Siam” becoming a contemporary “Thailand.” The comfortable notion that the historical diversity of Thai Buddhism can be contained in a contrast between two forms of Buddhism, a “reformed” Thammayut and a “traditional” Mahanikai, can no longer be sustained . Kamala’s book is a celebration of religious and social diversity, of local and regional traditions that transcended and ignored political boundaries, past and present. Kamala’s contribution is not only historical, it is no less anthropological . This is shown in the meticulous care she uses in reconstructing the regional and local monastic lineage of Ajan Man Phurithat. Thereby she “decenters” our understanding of Thai religiosity and sociality. Her pursuit of these “wandering” monks led Kamala out of the library and to the remote locales they frequented . There she interviewed elderly monks and laity who knew these monks and their tradition firsthand. Kamala’s perspective is also substantively anthropological. The religious commitment of these monks was embedded in the concrete and vivid details of their everyday life experiences. These are recorded in their own F o r e w o r d xiii terms in a variety of biographical materials. Thus, Kamala’s anthropological perspective is one that focuses on multifaceted “real life” experience, not a concern either for a generic “human nature” or an abstract “institutional” analysis. Kamala provides us with much food for thought. Bon appétit! A. Thomas Kirsch Cornell University ...