Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia

“Rationality” in the Biography of a Buddhist King: Mongkut, King of Siam (r.1851–1868)

232 “Rationality” in the Biography of a Buddhist King: Mongkut, King of Siam (r.1851–1868) Paul Christopher Johnson A close examination of the biographical representation of King Mongkut of Siam over the last century provides one way of beginning to fill in the gap between indigenous and Western ideas of sacred biography. Mongkut provides a unique figure in this regard because he himself balanced precariously between Siamese expectations of kingship and Western ideals of the scientific, diplomatic, and commercial leader. Mongkut was extraordinary in that he was able to fuse at least two notions of the political “ideal man”: the Western ideal of “progress” with the Theravâda Buddhist values of lineage and merit. As a result, both Western biographers and Siamese subjects remember Mongkut as a king of the dhamma (dhammaraja), one who lived in adherence to compassionate truth. The question raised here concerns the cultural foundations of Mongkut’s “rationality.” This essay argues, against a long Western biographical tradition, that the “rationality” (in the sense of a worldview or strategy) of Mongkut’s kingship cannot be understood simply according to Western notions of “rationality” (in the sense of a strategy or worldview whose primary values are logic, science, consistency, and coherence). This biographical tradition portrays Mongkut as the sure man of letters guiding the way from dark, Old Siam to New Siam by the light of the torch of knowledge. Typical of this genre, for example, are the words of Malcolm Smith, a physician of Mongkut’s court: “But Mongkut was the real maker of modern Siam, the pioneer who blazed the trail, the one who broke away from the old traditions and set up new standards of living in their place.”1 Against the simplicity of this kind of portrait, I argue that the “rationality” of Mongkut was a unique and complex negotiation among many competing ideologies, of which the West’s was only one. If the particular “rationality” of Mongkut is the primary interest of this essay, it also questions the means by which an individual’s life is transformed into a biographical image of religious and cultural significance. Usually this sort of project has been undertaken as a part of a Western historical -critical reconstruction of other cultures’ sacred biographies. The task here is both alike and different from such efforts. It is alike in that it endeavors to uncover mechanisms of transformation of an individual life into a cultural symbol. But it is different in that its subject is not sacred biographies but rather Western, modern biographies published between Mongkut’s death and the present. The biographical transformation at work here is in the service of what is taken as “objective” history, rather than in the service of a sacred tradition characterized by myth-history. This “objective ” form of biographical representation, however, veers frequently into its own sort of myth-history, a positivist hagiography of progress, science, and “rationality.” That the Western idealization of “rationality” as the culmination of the development of religions needs to be suspected is by now, of course, old news. Beginning with the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl2 and Bronislaw Malinowski,3 scholars of religion have slowly but surely dismantled evolutionary schemes of the relations between magic, religion, and science. Some scholars, such as S. J. Tambiah,4 have questioned the very idea that “rationality ” can be understood as free-standing and distinct from religion and magic. But these theoretical shifts have been played out on the stage of “primitive cultures” and in general terms of societies or movements. Individual figures, such as Mongkut (Rama IV), king of Siam (r.1851–1868), have been left in their nineteenth-century positivist costumes. Mongkut’s “costume” is in the fashion of a hero of reason. As said, most of the Western literature on Mongkut portrays him as leading the revolution in Siam from “empty ritual” to “pure religion” and a scientific worldview. Core to this representation of Mongkut is an assumption that his “rationality” reflects a general evolution from a “superstitious” to a modern, scientific worldview. But “rationality,” the means of making comprehensible and meaningfully whole one’s experience of reality, is not as simple as that. The conventional usage of “rationality,” as scientific explanation, must be treated with suspicion. In this regard I follow the cue of Tambiah, who, for example, accounted for the coexistence of such “Rationality” in the  233 Biography of a Buddhist King divergent...