Early Buddhist History (VIII): Buddhism in Thailand

[Music] in this presentation i want to talk about buddhism in thailand it's a big topic but it's quite interesting one thing we need to clarify at the beginning is the distinction between thailand as a country and the thai people this is because often when you see anything written or hear anything about early buddhism in thailand it's not actually referring to the thai people because the thai people did not come into thailand before they migrated in the 12th to 13th century from the north before the thais were in that country that we now call thailand it was divided roughly into two areas in the north it was under the khmer empire out of cambodia and it had that influence so there's a lot of archaeological finds in northern thailand they find hindu and mahayana sculptures and images because that was coming out of the influence of the khmers in the south was a country called the tararati which was a mon civilization and they were more theravada although curiously based on the art styles they seem to have been followers of the amaravati branch of sri lankan buddhism in the lecture on sri lankan buddhism we saw that there were two rival schools the mahavahara and amaravati although they were both theravada the amaravati school was very unorthodox and over time they drifted into mahayana ways of thinking so none of thailand before the thais came in was what we would call mainline theravada the thai people came from southern china probably guangxi province and were driven south by the han expansion as the hand chinese expanded into the territory of what's now china that there was many ethnic groups were driven out and put on the road it's now thought that the thais originally came from the island of taiwan and that there have a strong component in their ethnicity of austronesians like the polynesian sort of people but they were certainly inter-bred and culturally influenced by china quite a bit before they came into thailand there's a legend a mythical origin of the thai people that i've seen different versions of they have a mythical culture hero called kun barom who was the founder of the race and he was either a uh in some versions he's a deity sent down from heaven and other versions he's just a great hero in one version he had a magical water buffalo that plowed the first rice fields and when it died they cut it open and the thai people came out of it and the ties spreading out from guangxi province spread also into other places very closely related people are the lao and also the the shan people they all came from that initial migration and they all speak similar languages so the ties moving into thailand gradually uh settled the whole area the first major thai state was the sukatai kingdom founded in 1238. they had an early king ram kamahang 1279-98 is still considered to be a great hero in thai history a great founder of the thai culture and civilization he's the one who made theravada the official state religion and encouraged the propagation of theravada buddhism part of his reasoning may have been purely political in order to establish a clear distinction and separation from his more powerful neighbors the khmers the alphabet used in thailand is credited as having been designed by king ram kamahing based on indian models and it follows the um the same sort of alphabetic sequence as indian alphabets but it's unique to thailand there is a legend of the birth of king ram kamehameha that he was although he was officially the son of the previous king the legend had it that his mother was actually a yakini a female yaka who had mated with a fisherman and that he was some kind of foundling that was raised to be the king so this is for whatever else it's worth an indication that he is so powerful and important a figure in thai history both in religion and in culture and politics that the thais felt the need to give him a supernatural origin one of the things that he did during his reign was to send some monks to sri lanka and we saw this previously with the burmese history that there was a constant exchange of monks back and forth between southeast asia and sri lanka and the monks that came back instituted what was called the lanco wang lineage lanka referring to sri lanka so this was uh again a seeding of the mahavahara tradition into thailand it occurred at this time now quite early in the actual history of thailand in the late 13th century and he also instituted the uh the position of sangha raja that still exists to this day sanga raja meaning like king of the sangha he's the head monk works closely with the king and oversees the um the religion in the country and this is something that we see as a theme in thai history close relationship between the buddhist sangha and the state particularly the monarchy and it's probably more so than in other buddhist countries the next important king for buddhist history was king maha tamaracha who reigned from 1346 to 1368 and he wrote the book the three worlds according to king roon this is uh a cosmological treatise describing the different realms of existence and it was really the first major uh literary buddhist work done in the thai language in thailand another smaller thai kingdom that was quite important that existed contemporary with sukhothai was the laan na kingdom with this capital at chiang mai and they were ethnically thai and linguistically thai but had their own tradition and their own civilization for a long time an independent state and it was there that the emerald buddha was housed and this is now in bangkok this is a very beautiful buddha image and it has a legendary origin that there was according to the legend there was a stupa that was hit by lightning and when it crumbled from the lightning strike they found this plaster image of a buddha quite crude plaster image of a buddha and the king had it moved into the palace and one day he noticed some of the plaster was chipping off so we had his workman strip the plaster off and there was this beautiful emerald buddha underneath this uh emerald buddha has been moved a couple of times it's it's been a prize in the wars between the different uh local kings which is something we see in uh southeast asian history we saw it also in burma that when one country defeats another in war and conquers it they'll take the sacred objects back to their home country also at this time in la na towards the end of this period there was a new sect established out of sri lanka and they were at odds with the older lineage because the older lineage had fallen off from following strict vinaya they were handling money and owning rice lands this is something we see in religious history quite often it also occurs in christian history you'll see a lineage of monks that starts out as a reform movement and is very pure and straight but then over time they become corrupted by their own success they gain wealth and power and they kind of slide and then you get newer forms coming up starting the cycle again so the sukitai period ended in 1351 when they were conquered by the ayutthaya kingdom to the south which was another thai kingdom and it was the most uh important thai state from 1351 to 1767 and ayutia by the early 1700s was such a big city that historians think it may have been the largest city in the world at the time with up to a million population so this shows that thai civilization by this time had become very sophisticated and complex if they can support a city of a million people one of their early kings utong who reigned from 1351 to 1316 he again followed the sukhothai model and established theravada as the official religion and he also instituted the illegal code that was called the dharmasastra that was based on indian models like the laws of manu and this legal code was in effect until well into the 20th century and still has a basis in thai law legal practice and again in the mid 1400s we have another infusion from sri lanka of reform another new lineage was started called waranatana wagaset so this once again repeats the theme that comes up again and again in these histories one of the kings of the 15th century king boromata trilochanat he promoted this sect and he personally spent eight months as a monk and this isn't also a repeated theme in in thailand there's a couple of things here that are uniquely thai one is that you have the institution of temporary ordination this is not seen at all in sri lanka that men will ordain as bikus for a limited period of time without the intention of staying for life and and it became a custom that the young men would ordain for one rainy season and their early manhood and it was kind of like a rite of passage that you weren't considered to be fully adult and ready for responsibility and for marriage and so on until you had gone through a rainy season as ubiku and the other point here is that a king took ordination and this has been done by many thai monarchs subsequently that they will take temporary ordination so this is again the very close tie between the monarchy and the sangha in thailand also during his reign another great literary production of thai buddhism was produced this was an epic poem on the vasantura jataka which is still a very beloved theme in thailand the vasantori jataka recounts the story of the bodhisattva's last human birth before becoming the buddha when he was a prince who perfected the bharami of dhana of giving or generosity by making a resolute vow to um never refuse anyone a gift when asked and this immediately got him in trouble because some beggar asked him for the royal elephant and he gave it away so his people were so upset they threw him out and he had to live in the forest with his wife and two sons and one of the details of the story that upsets a lot of westerners is that he gave away his wife and two sons as well but it's a very uh a moving story in in that there has been a tradition in thailand which i think is pretty i think it's pretty much extinct now but it was a tradition that some monks would memorize the uh this long it's actually a very long jataka they memorize this epic uh either the thai you know the thai version of the epic and and recite it with very moving inflections and bring people weeping to tears in the 17th century also now we're still in the utea period uh there was established the an examination system for monks where monks would have to take a oral test of translating poly passages into thai so there was a a [Music] attempt from this period on to regulate the quality of the sangha and there's still an examination system in thailand although it's evolved quite a bit we'll talk about that a bit later in the bangkok period in the early 1700s after the sri lankan sangha had declined a great deal and was in crisis and there was actually no legitimate monks left in sri lanka by the early 1700s it was the thai monks who went to sri lanka and re-established the ordination there and this became the sama nakaya in sri lanka which is still one of the lineages that exists there today but while theravada buddhism was thriving and established and respected part of society there was also a kind of underground buddhism that was called the yoga witchara sometimes called esoteric buddhism that incorporated magical elements and maybe had some some tantric influence and may have been influenced originally by the khmer civilization i know that even at the present day in thailand there are individuals who have certain magical rights that they perform particularly healing like snake doctors and bone doctors and who do you know magical healings of people and the mantras that they recite as part of their ritual are in old khmer which is regarded in thailand as a kind of magical language so this yoga yoga wachara tradition never really quite died out even though a later period in chula longhorns time which we'll get to there was an attempt to suppress it so the ayutia civilization was plagued throughout the latter part of its uh existence with constant wars with burma on and off they were constantly battling with the burmese and in the final war of this period the burmese were victorious and they sacked and looted ayutia and the kingdom fell one of the traditions that came out of these wars was the reason why thai monks shave their eyebrows because at at one point the uh the king of thailand uh was told that the burmese had infiltrated the country with spies who were dressed as bikus and were wandering up and down the roads to make maps and study military positions and so on and so he came up with a plan how they're going to catch all these burmese spies and and because it's worked because of the close relationship between the monarchy and the sangha he had words sent down through the the hierarchy in the sangha to tell all the monks on the next-door poster today when they shaved their heads also shaved their eyebrows so then any monks walking around with eyebrows they would know were burmese spies and they were fake monks they were just spies for burma and they were caught and put to death and it was successful but the because it worked i guess the king forgot about it he never rescinded the order so that the thais you know loving tradition and loving the monarchy they you know they never told to stop so they just keep doing it to the present day then after ayuthiya fell the thai people managed to regroup and reform and the first leader was a man called taxon who reigned from 1767 to 1782. he had been a general under the last ayutthaya king and he he was crowned as a king and established his capital in thornbury and he was quite a dynamic character quite successful in restoring the fortunes of the thai state and driving out the burmese but unfortunately in the last period of his reign he went kind of mad he went sort of crazy and part of this was a sort of religious hysteria where he inconsistently claimed to be both a sotapanna and a bodhisattva and if you understand theravada soteriology there's no possible way an individual can be both a bodhisattva and the sotapanna and he ordered that the monks have to bow down to him and many of them refused and he had some of them punished and he became very dictatorial and lost his popularity and esteem and he was overthrown by one of his own generals and put to death although there's also a story that he wasn't never actually put to death he was it was a fake and the uh they spirited them away and just kept him and let him retire in hiding but nobody really knows and the uh the general who took over established the chakri dynasty which is still the reigning dynasty in thailand today and has been very successful and continues down to the present so they they began their reign in 1782 and all their kings are generally known to history by a short form they're just called rama 1 rama 2 rama 3. although some of the more important ones we hear about also get known by their more personal name rama the first established re-established the the position of sangha raja and he had the pali canon translated into thai for the first time the end of the 18th century is the first time that poly canon was translated from pali into thai he also reinstituted and modernized the examination system for monks many of his reforms were like this and tightening up the state regulation of the sangha another of his institutions that still exist to the present was that every monk has to be issued a id card a passport a monk's passport kind of thing too and here's an example this is my thai passport my uh is called a by suti it's my thai monks passport and it certifies that i'm a bonafide uh bhikkhu ordained in thailand every monk had to be associated with a monastery there was not allowed to be free-range monks that weren't uh weren't part of the hierarchical monastic system and he assumed as part of these reforms he assumed that the right of the state or the monarchy to forcibly disrobe uh disreputable monks and 128 monks which is not a huge number for a country with that many bikus 128 monks were disrobed during his reign by the order of the state for not living according to vineyard the next king rama ii 1809-1824 refined the examination system and his basic system is with some modifications still in use today there are nine grades and monks get different titles for passing different grades it's considered to be something that a diligent beku will try to get some standing in this examination system though i think very few monks make it to the ninth grade he was also concerned that the british ruling in sri lanka would undermine buddhism and he again sent yet another mission of bhikkhus to sri lanka to help them to preserve the dhamma there and the next king rama iii 1824-1851 was mostly known for building temples there was a great deal of building activity of religious buildings in his reign then we come to rama iv who is also known as king mankut a very important figure in thai history and particularly in relation to buddhism he reigned from 1851 to 1868 before he became king he was a bhikkhu himself for 27 years and he never expected to become the king it was supposed to go to his elder brother who died and unexpectedly and they asked mongkut to take the throne and he he agreed even before he became king well with his connections to the royal family he of course was had some influence in power he founded the dhamma utica sect whose head monastery is what baranowa in bangkok the dhamma utica sect was and still exists it's a reform movement because it was felt by mankut and his circle that the sangha had grown corrupt and particularly during the chaotic period at the end of the 18th century with the final war with burma and the disruption of the whole state they were afraid that the ordination lineages had been broken and corrupted for a biko to be properly ordained according to vinnie he must be ordained by five bikus outside the middle country and all those bikus must be themselves properly ordained if any one of them is an improper illegal bhikkhu then the ordination is invalid so it was felt by some at the time that the ordination tradition had been broken during the period of chaos of the burmese wars and that you could not trust that any of the bakus were legitimately ordained in the transmission so king mongkut and some of the purists around him uh investigated and decided that there was a group of monbikus that had maintained a pure lineage and they started a movement to reordain monks under these this new tradition or this old rediscovered tradition and these became the dhammayut sect or the damayu nikaya they currently make up about 10 of the monks in thailand and they are one of the two recognized nikayas the other being mahanakai which means the big group and it's basically just everybody else so all the monks in thailand today are classified as either mahanakai or damayut i heard a story about that the founding of the demute sect that they were so particular about ordination procedure that they or at least some of them held that if even one syllable was chanted wrongly in the ordination chanting then the ordination was invalid it seems actually a kind of unrealistic standard but this was they were striving for this absolute purity and one of their early people reordained nine times because every time after his ordination he found there was some niggling picky little thing either in the chanting or the the sema or some other aspect of the ceremony that that wasn't quite right so that the dama utica sec are important in that they are they have a tradition of holding vineyard properly and they're usually associated and supported by the upper crust in thailand like the monarchy and nobility king monkhood by the way is the uh the monarch who has been lampooned in uh the west with the play and the the movie the king and i that's supposed to be king mongkud and it's complete uh completely wrong portrait of king mongkut and that movie is actually banned in thailand because it's so insulting to monkhood mankut was not definitely not illiterate ignorant buffoon as shown in the movie he had besides his deep study of buddhism he also took a great interest in western science and he was fluent in several languages both oriental languages and western languages so king mongkot is still very much a beloved figure in thailand the next king was a king rama the fifth chula longhorn he was also very important for buddhism he reigned from 1868 to 1910 the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th and it was during his reign that the the sangha act was passed which regulated the affairs of the sangha and although the act has been amended many times and fiddled with it's still the basis for the state organization of the sangha hierarchy in thailand he promoted education of monks both in buddhist studies in pali studies and the canon and commentaries but also in things like science and psychology and so on he wanted to have well educated monks and he established the university at chulalongkorn university for that purpose one of his uh relations i think it was his brother no i'm not sure his exact relationship but uh was a prince what huachuhiron wararat who was a great scholar monk he ordained and was a very influential person in the sangha he wrote the book entrance divinia that's still used as a basic textbook on vineya in thailand today however the type of buddhism that was promoted in chulalongkorn's reign was very scripturally based and they held for example that it was no longer possible in this degenerate age for anyone to attain to stream winner or to any of the higher states this type of view was held i would say up until the end of the 19th century and was common in many buddhist countries at least in tiravada countries also in chulalongkorn's reign there was an attempt to regularize buddhism in the countryside the villages and so on that that the um magical tradition the yogic tradition was there was an attempt to to root it out one of the things that chula longhorn did was he ordered a monastic libraries to be sent to bangkok for inspection and any books that were heretical were destroyed and then they they were sent back only the orthodox ones so as a great deal of literature was lost in this kind of quest for purity i spoke once with a man i met in bangkok who was working for the un going to country monasteries in laos and photocopying their old manuscripts and documents at the time of king chulalongkorn laos was a french protectorate so it was not under the power of the thai sangha and a lot of the yogacaro wild and woolly stuff astrology and magic ceremonies and so on a lot of this literature still survives in laos today at this time in the early 20th century there began a very important tradition the kamatana tradition the forest tradition monks who put an emphasis on meditation rather than study and generally lived in the in the forest or in remote places it's uh often uh said to have started with ajin sao who lived from 1868 to 1941 who disputed the official position that it was not possible to attain states of enlightenment in this present age he popularized the meditation on the syllables budo that's still very common meditation in thailand a form of anapanasati where you run this two-syllable mantra budo in the mind and he was the teacher of ajin man who lived from 1870 to 1949 and had more effect in the long run than ajin sao you know he was really the root of all the different lineages that came out of the thai forest tradition ajin li imagine mahabu ajin mahabu particularly was his personal disciple ajan cha 1918-1992 was not a direct disciple of ajin man although he did spend a brief time about two weeks with ajinman and he always said later that ajinman gave him the critical instructions for his meditation probably the reason ajin shah did not spend more time with ajinman was the problem of the lineages and ajahn shah's mohankai so that would make sense this is not explicitly stated because it's probably was just politeness not to bring it up but probably the reason that his visit was only two weeks or less than two weeks was to get out of the monastery before the parimoka ceremony which would have been a problem in vineyard if having different lineages together and as ajin cha who of all the the time monks has had the most global influence agent monasteries are now all over the world so thai buddhism has spread through that that branch and the kamitano or forest tradition is now very respected but at when it first started it was considered dangerous and heretical and they didn't get along with the authorities very well and it took them a long time to become an accepted and respected venerated part of thai buddhism so that's pretty much the main lines of of thai buddhism down to the present there have been in in thailand from time to time various other unorthodox infusions or eruptions from time to time i already mentioned the yoga which are tradition and one incident that may have been associated with those people it was a very disruptive incident in the early 1900s called the holy man's rebellion that caused um a great deal of unrest in both uh northeast thailand and ubon and also in laos which basically speaks they speak the same dialect they're very culturally close some kind of uh ascetics or holy men originating in laos began spreading an apocalyptic idea the world was coming to an end and people had to rise up and throw off the evil authorities and take over and this actually caused a great deal of damage it took a long time to put these rebellions down and some of their ideas were quite mad at one point they told people that all the water buffaloes were going to turn into yakkas and eat people so the people started killing the water buffaloes and this really disrupted the economy for a long time because for a rice farmer a water buffalo is his major capital investment another tradition in more recent times is the damakaya movement not to be confused with dama utica we talked about earlier that's entirely unrelated damakaya was founded by a monk called chandissari in the early 20th century and there's a very many dhammakaya centers now and they've there's some overseas not just in thailand they have some very odd teachings that are quite unorthodox beginning with their meditation system recently or not so recently you know within i think last 20 years there was a an article published by someone who is basically a whistleblower who claimed to be an insider in the dhammakaya and left the movement and said that once you get into the inner circles they teach a doctrine of another apocalyptic doctrine that there's going to be a final battle at the end of the world between the forces of good and evil and their founder chandisaro is up in one of the high heaven worlds waiting to be reincarnated at the time of the final battle and he'll come down with all his uh his disciples and they'll conquer the forces of mara and establish a kingdom of righteousness so this uh this is very un un buddhist certainly unterravada is a very um odd odd kind of way of thinking in a buddhist buddhist context but this is again something we have seen again and again looking at buddhist history that there are always movements bringing up going off the main line and bringing in heterodox ideas but in general thailand has been since the beginning in sukhothai times down to the present and very consistently and orthodox theravada country and the sangha has been well ordered and organized and closely tied to the monarchy and the state so this is a brief survey of thai buddhism and i i hope you have enjoyed it thank you

Channel: Ajahn Punnadhammo

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Id: eRy2ZV-rxrQ

Length: 40min 50sec (2450 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022