The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia: Second Edition

The Cosmological Schemeof the Three Worlds

102 part ii Lithai was most influenced by the model of the cakkavattin who attains his position through the virtues of his past meritorious lives and who rules justly and compassionately in accordance with the dhamma. Like the mighty cakkavattin who conquers the four continents with his armies, Lithai conquered Sukhothai and sought to establish his authority over a widespread territory. Over half of the fourteen years of his reign was spent out of the city. Hebuiltdistinctivelotusbudceityatowersinoutlyingcentersastangiblesigns of the spiritual links binding together capital, province, and vassal states.67 A giant wheel (cakka) and the Phra Buddha Singha, a palladium image, accompanied the king on his travels.68 These practices parallel the installation of the Jaya Buddha Mahanatha image by Jayavarman VII in outlying centers of his empire and Aniruddha’s custom of enshrining votive tablets and jataka plaques throughout the territories over which he exercised suzerainty, thereby serving the purpose of creating a loosely structured ritual hegemony. Stupas and relics legitimated Lithai’s territorial rights; the wheel and the Buddha image that accompanied him further reinforced his claims over the network of states beyond the royal capital. Lithai also sought to unite his newly forged kingdom by distributing Buddha images, relics, and Buddha footprints incised with the 108 cosmologically potent supernatural signs. In effect, he created a ritual unity joined together by a cult of sacred relics, images, footprints, and monks in which “the monks who accompanied a sacred relic [and image] in its passage through the country helped strengthen the nexus between outlying centers and the capital.”69 The historical legacy of King Ramkhamhaeng and his grandson, Lithai, has been influential in the processes of national integration and political legitimation in the modern period. It has even been argued that King Ramkhamhaeng’s famous stele inscription depicting a strong, benevolent, dhammaraja king holding audiences with his subjects and presiding over a prosperous realm was, in fact, fabricated during the reign of King Mongkut on the eve of Siam’s political and economic modernization.70 It has even been proposed that King Lithai’s Traibh¢mikath¡ was not authored by him as a Buddhist political charter before he overthrew the usurper of the Sukhothai throne and restored the kingdom’s fortunes, but rather, that this cosmologi- buddhism and the state 103 cal treatise on the ethics of kingship was written instead during the reign of Rama I (r. 1782–1809) to bolster a Siamese monarchy devastated by the Burmese sack of Ayutthaya.71 Even though these particular historical reconstructions are not supported by most scholars, it is certainly the case that at those two turning points in modern Thai history—the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries— Buddhism provided a critical basis for maintaining a sense of national identity in the face of severe challenges. In recent times, theTraibh¢mikath¡ has been invoked by conservative, neotraditional groups to support the continuance of power by the ruling Thai elites and liberal voices calling for greater and more rapid democratization. These later voices reconstruct the political institutions and cultural products of Sukhothai as providing for a “true Buddhist model of participatory, liberal form of government.”72 In conclusion, a brief postscript about the disjunction between the period of the cosmologically grounded Southeast Asian states and the present age may be useful. In his lectures on Angkor at the Musèe Louis Finot in Hanoi before World War II, George Coedès observed, “I hope I have made it clear . . . that the arrangement of a Khmer city and its architecture and decoration were governed by a whole series of magic and religious beliefs, and not determined by utilitarian or aesthetic aims. To understand these monuments one has to be acquainted with the mythological images on which they were modelled.”73 Does the fragmentation that characterizes our postmodern worldview undermine our ability to truly understand the supernaturally charged, symbolically integrated cosmos of Jayavarman VII, Kyanzittha, or King Lithai? Possibly. The broad and deep comprehension of the religiously grounded worlds of Angkor, Pagan, and Sukhothai requires both knowing history and having a sense of empathy and imagination. To enter into their cosmological milieu demands not that we suspend critical rationality, but rather, that we integrate such analysis into an empathetic understanding of these classic cultural, political, and religious centers and what they represented in the lives of those who lived, worshipped, and ruled there. These splendid ...