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Thailand Historical Background
Thai Buddhism was based on the religious movement founded in
the sixth century B.C. by Siddhartha Gautama Sakyamuni, later
known as the Buddha, who urged the world to relinquish the
extremes of sensuality and self-mortification and follow the
enlightened Middle Way. The focus was on man, not gods; the
assumption was that life was pain or suffering, which was a
consequence of craving, and that suffering could end only if
desire ceased. The end of suffering was the achievement of
nirvana (in Theravada Buddhist scriptures, nibbana), often
defined negatively as the absence of craving and therefore of
suffering, sometimes as enlightenment or bliss.
By the third century B.C., Buddhism had spread widely in
Asia, and divergent interpretations of the Buddha's teachings had
led to the establishment of several sects. The teachings that
reached Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) were given in a final
written form in Pali (an Indo-Aryan language closely related to
Sanskrit) to religious centers there in the first century A.D.
and provided the Tipitaka (the scriptures or "three baskets"; in
Sanskrit, Tripitaka) of Theravada Buddhism. This form of Buddhism
reached what is now Thailand around the sixth century A.D.
Theravada Buddhism was made the state religion only with the
establishment of the Thai kingdom of Sukhothai in the thirteenth
century A.D.
(see Early History
, ch. 1).
The details of the history of Buddhism in Thailand from the
thirteenth to the nineteenth century are obscure, in part because
few historical records or religious texts survived the Burmese
destruction of Ayutthaya, the capital city of the kingdom, in
1767. The anthropologist-historian S.J. Tambiah, however, has
suggested a general pattern for that era, at least with respect
to the relations between Buddhism and the sangha on the
one hand and the king on the other hand. In Thailand, as in other
Theravada Buddhist kingdoms, the king was in principle thought of
as patron and protector of the religion (sasana) and the
sangha, while sasana and the sangha were
considered in turn the treasures of the polity and the signs of
its legitimacy. Religion and polity, however, remained separate
domains, and in ordinary times the organizational links between
the sangha and the king were not close.
Among the chief characteristics of Thai kingdoms and
principalities in the centuries before 1800 were the tendency to
expand and contract, problems of succession, and the changing
scope of the king's authority. In effect, some Thai kings had
greater power over larger territories, others less, and almost
invariably a king who sought successfully to expand his power
also exercised greater control over the sangha. That
control was coupled with greater support and patronage of the
ecclesiastical hierarchy. When a king was weak, however,
protection and supervision of the sangha also weakened,
and the sangha declined. This fluctuating pattern appears
to have continued until the emergence of the Chakkri Dynasty in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
By the nineteenth century, and especially with the coming to
power in 1851 of King Mongkut, who had been a monk himself for
twenty-seven years, the sangha, like the kingdom, became
steadily more centralized and hierarchical in nature and its
links to the state more institutionalized. As a monk, Mongkut was
a distinguished scholar of Pali Buddhist scripture. Moreover, at
that time the immigration of numbers of Mon from Burma was
introducing the more rigorous discipline characteristic of the
Mon sangha. Influenced by the Mon and guided by his own
understanding of the Tipitaka, Mongkut began a reform movement
that later became the basis for the Dhammayuttika order of monks.
Under the reform, all practices having no authority other than
custom were to be abandoned, canonical regulations were to be
followed not mechanically but in spirit, and acts intended to
improve an individual's standing on the road to nirvana but
having no social value were rejected. This more rigorous
discipline was adopted in its entirety by only a small minority
of monasteries and monks. The Mahanikaya order, perhaps somewhat
influenced by Mongkut's reforms but with a less exacting
discipline than the Dhammayuttika order, comprised about 95
percent of all monks in 1970 and probably about the same
percentage in the late 1980s. In any case, Mongkut was in a
position to regularize and tighten the relations between monarchy
and sangha at a time when the monarchy was expanding its
control over the country in general and developing the kind of
bureaucracy necessary to such control. The administrative and
sangha reforms that Mongkut started were continued by his
successor. In 1902 King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, 1868-1910) made
the new sangha hierarchy formal and permanent through the
Sangha Law of 1902, which remained the foundation of
sangha administration in modern Thailand.
Data as of September 1987
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