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  • The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand by Justin McDaniel
  • Martin Platt (bio)
The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand by Justin McDaniel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 327 pp.

This is a frustrating and even troubling book. I say this not because it is “magnifcent, beguiling, and thought-provoking” (Steve Collins, back cover), or “brilliant and innovative” (Anne Hansen, back cover), or “full of fresh observations and original thinking” (Craig Reynolds, back cover). When someone of the stature of Craig Reynolds asks, “Does anyone understand Thai religion in all its complexity better than McDaniel?” (ibid.), the reader tends to take notice (while at the same time surmising that perhaps there are some [millions of?] [End Page 355]

Thai people who might understand Thai religion better). However, in the case of this book, the author’s imprecision, sloppy thinking and poor understanding of Thai language continually bring the reader up short and call into question the soundness both of the book’s content and of the extremely high praise that it has received from some scholars.

McDaniel’s study is a supremely ambitious one. He frequently makes claims to providing new views and new understandings, and he even sees ft to “warn” readers (p. 7) and to suggest to them a “wise” course of action (p. 17), quoting along the way Wittgenstein, T.S. Eliot, and Samuel Johnson (from a secondary source). He declares that the book develops new approaches and makes new contributions to a very wide range of fields and their practitioners: “I hope that this style is useful to anthropologists, historians, philologists, art historians, political scientists, and magicians” (p. 19); “It should have some value for scholars of ritual studies, tantra, new philology, and the history of magic” (p. 20); “Here I hope to dismantle the discrepancies between anthropological and textual approaches to the study of ritual and performance in Southeast Asian Buddhism” (p. 21); “Here I speak not only to scholars of religious studies, Buddhist studies, history, and anthropology, but also to art historians” (p. 21). He calls himself a “historian of Buddhism, Pali and Sanskrit, and Southeast Asian literature” (p. 4), and compares himself to a fine artist (p. 18):

I present variations on a theme just as a composer designs different movements in an orchestral composition that are performed over an entire season, or a painter paints the same scene in different lights, at different times of day, in different seasons. I attempt to construct a Gesamtkunstwerk (here, a complete work incorporating all media) …

McDaniel spends a good deal of time critiquing the ways in which Thai religion has been studied in the past. He states that there has been a tendency to see Thai Buddhism as corrupt, full of foreign influence, and untrue to Theravada orthodoxy. He emphasizes that Thai religious practice must be seen in new ways, and that [End Page 356] practices (he prefers to use the obfuscatory term “technologies”, repeatedly) involving amulets, magic, shrines and so on need to be taken seriously as the actual praxis of Thai “religiosity” (another jarring term that seems misused in the book). All this is likely true. But is it new? Anyone who has spent time in Thailand will have noticed that, although there are temples nearly everywhere, many of them busy with monks and lay visitors, there are also plenty of other goings-on which seem to balance or even overshadow the ostensibly Buddhist activity. Indeed, students of mine, undergrads with no prior expertise in Buddhist or Thai studies, are within hours of arriving in Thailand asking questions about the spirit houses, shrines, amulets, trees festooned with offerings and more. Perhaps everyone has recognized the centrality of practices outside of orthodox Theravada Buddhism except the scholars of Buddhism themselves.

Using the revered and long-dead monk, Somdet To, and the spirit/legend of Mae Nak as organizing principles for an exploration of contemporary religious practice in Thailand allows this book to address many interesting and fruitful topics. McDaniel makes use of the variety of biographies and oral lore, as well as the practices centred on amulets, figures, murals, and so...

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