Buddhism and Postmodern Imaginings in Thailand

The Religiosity of Urban Space

James Taylor

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351954433
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Buddhism

This book presents a rethink on the significance of Thai Buddhism in an increasingly complex and changing post-modern urban context, especially following the financial crisis of 1997. Defining the cultural nature of Thai 'urbanity'; the implications for local/global flows, interactions and emergent social formations, James Taylor opens up new possibilities in understanding the specificities of everyday urban life as this relates to perceptions, conceptions and lived experiences of religiosity. Changes in the centre are also reverberating in the remaining forests and the monastic tradition of forest-dwelling which has sourced most of the nation's modern saints. The text is based on ethnography taking into account the rich variety of everyday practices in a mélange of the religious. In Thailand, Buddhism is so intimately interconnected with national identity and social, economic and ethno-political concerns as to be inseparable. Taylor argues here that in recent years there has been a marked reformulation of important conventional cosmologies through new and challenging Buddhist ideas and practices. These influences and changes are as much located outside as inside the Buddhist temples/monasteries.

Chapter 1
Thai Buddhism in Postmodernity

To change life … we must first change space

H. Lefebvre¹

In 1998–2000 I spent two years in metropolitan Bangkok teaching and researching in a voluntary exile from the Australian academy. This idea of a book on new Thai religiosity, or what I refer to as the religiosity of urban space, started one day after a near miss in a driving accident. Returning home one day I drove into a small lane where I was living to encounter an oncoming Mercedes driving directly towards me. A quick-footed response on my part averted a head-on collision. The middle-aged female driver had both her hands briefly off the steering wheel, paying respects in a two-handed gesture as she passed the housing estate’s newly refurbished locality shrine to the Hindu deity Lord Brahma (Phra Phrom).

Not to read too much into such an innocuous everyday encounter (and the many other similar incidents I encountered while living in the Thai metropolis) it nevertheless made me reflect on the significance of a postmodern urban religious context with its cultural pastiche and floating signifiers. This reflection was especially poignant when we are told of the increasing secularization and disenchantment corresponding to modernity and new western global influences. Buddhism, following the west, is seen as increasingly marginalized or privatized.² But new politico-religious movements for instance show that this structural differentiation of social space is not a sound argument as religions were always involved in the world of power. The recent debate in Thailand as to whether Buddhism should be the national religion in the 2007 Constitution where some 10 per cent of the population are not Buddhist is a case in point. Perhaps, as in the case of Thailand, it may be more useful to look at how religions become public and, in terms of social space, how they actually work with or against the project of modernity.³ As anthropologist Talal Assad says (though in a different social context), religious space in wider society has to be constantly redefined due to internal and external secular influences which continually ‘affect the clarity of that space’.⁴ Essentially, I argue in this book that, secularization aside, there has of late been a definite resurgence of interest in sacred space. This accords well with the vision of postmodernity, explains philosopher Edith Wyschogrod, which permits contradiction and paradox to sit side by side. Further, a postmodern viewpoint allows religiosity contextualized by cultural re-enchantment, de-secularization, and post-traditionalism, to become more culturally visible and even more relevant, rather than remain in a more marginal position in modernity. Importantly, we can see that postmodernity embraces alternatives, marginality and new religious articulations.⁵

Presently, Thai Buddhism, expressing wider social and cultural sentiments, is caught in the contradictions of history and tradition that is propelled not so much by a consciousness of the past or the storm of progress as its own retrospective gaze.⁶ Thai Buddhism is in a continued state of reflection with its own shadow, its own imagining. Interestingly, from an anthropological perspective, it also provides a variegated frame of analysis into broader lived experiences; that ‘what holds us intimately, from the inside’.⁷ Similar to earlier comments by sociologist Roland Robertson⁸ who was considering Japanese religion, new articulations of Thai Buddhism are significantly implicated in local–global historical and socio-cultural contexts. These necessitate an entirely new way of thinking social practices in Thailand. In this book I attempt this task in a twofold manner: firstly, in an interpretation of the variety of religious (Theravada Buddhist) experiences and the particular sites of social encounter that are defined by connected relations among the various elements.⁹ These may include monasteries, shrines, religious cyberspaces, individual/body and national politico-religious body, ethnicity/identity, marginality, imagination and power; sites that are contested in the dynamics of social, economic and political change.

The second concern of this book as it attempts a new way of thinking religiosity in Buddhist Thailand is intended as a process of recoding lived worlds, to situate the vernacular, particularized religious narratives in relation to wider global forces and sentiments. My main concern is to generate new openings for consideration; to explore the práctico-social as everyday performances that constitute new subjectivities and in particular the variety of contemporary religious practices.¹⁰ These practices are intertwined in a spatial complexity of everyday life worlds and merged with global forces, both seen and unseen.¹¹ New identities, as with new religious practices, are then both local and global; they are glocal, intersections that are neither wholly one nor the other.¹² I would suggest that, in the case of new urban religiosity, we should consider a montage of foreground and background, global/local, as the inside is on the outside, while the outside is now firmly on the inside.

The most important change in relation to material discussed in this book pertains to the period after the 1997 Asian financial crisis.¹³ This marked the fissure of Thailand’s modernity and its heady economic growth, especially during the 1980s.¹⁴ As the scholar monk Phra Dhammapitaka (Bhikkhu P.A. Payutto) noted reflecting a widespread sentiment at the time:

When we study the reasons which made us fail (during the crisis in 1997) … did it arise from misguidedly developing the country in a way which relied too much on the outside? We did not try to stand on our own. We were rich because we borrowed money … This is the lesson … We should not lose our way again. Don’t get lost playing around in the world on a stage set by others … the principle is that big money sucks up small money.¹⁵

It seemed as though the whole Thai psyche and national confidence was so severely shaken and uprooted after the crisis that its impacts were felt widely in the intensity and varieties of popular religiosity. An example is the salvation cult surrounding the sixteenth-century Princess Suphankalaya,¹⁶ the elder sister of King Naresuan of Ayutthaya (r.1590–1605) to which I now briefly turn.

A Nation in Crisis and Salvation Histories

Phra-Suphankalaya was supposedly the grand-daughter of the famous Thai Queen Suriyothai (discussed later) who died in battle against the Burmese in 1548. It was from this cult that the representation of what I referred to in an article in 2001 as a ‘modern salvation history’¹⁷ emerged, shaped in the re-imagining of a quasimythic national female hero. This salvation history emanates from the conditions of modernity and, in particular, a crisis-ridden centre. The story of this Thai princess is intriguing and while mention is made of her, albeit briefly, in at least three Burmese chronicles, it is not discussed in the Thai chronicles.¹⁸ However, while many Thais had some notion of her existence from standard history, it was through the wanderings in Burma during the 1940s of an eremitic Thai monk named Luang Puu Ngon Sorayo that modern urban Thais were able to weave an elaborate and colourful tale.

During his incarceration for 15 days by the Burmese, Ngon had a vision in his meditation (nimit) of Suphankalaya who revealed to him her real story.¹⁹ In Ngon’s vision, Suphankalaya offered herself in exchange for her war captive younger brother King Naresuan, eventually becoming a wife of the powerful Burmese King Burengnong (Bayinnaung, r. AD 1551–1581). Then, after his death, she became the wife of his son, the new Burmese monarch. Suphankalaya had two children from the first king and was pregnant to the second monarch when he killed her in rage after hearing that Naresuan had shot his own son.²⁰ Seemingly, it was only after Ngon’s vision that Suphankalaya’s sad spirit (winyaan) was set free and the national urban folk tale first narrated in 1995.²¹

This tale was criticized in the media to a point where, in 1999, a nationally acclaimed (silapin heng-chaat) folk singer named Waiphot Petch’suphan produced a widely distributed recording of her story and in defence of Luang Puu Ngon.²² In fact Ngon wrote a Gatha (sacred Pali verses) to the princess. Waiphot also criticized the crass commercialization of the princess in urban centres, especially her reproduced pictures and other memorabilia which he saw as an insult to Ngon’s pure vision and her plea to the monk to help release her spirit back to her home country.

The tale of the princess is not simply a case of rethinking the plot of national history, an exercise in historical memory, or even a question of whether she appeared as the imagining artist portrayed her in the many pictures circulating in the mid–late 1990s.²³ This modern myth-making articulates a contemporary relevance in the context of a resurgent national identity, politics and cultural re-territorialization.

The fact that, according to standard Thai histories, no one knows much about the real Suphankalaya is irrelevant. The important point is that she is represented as real in much the same way as the national body was perceived to be in pieces during the post-economic crisis. She is seen as real, especially to her devotees who visit the statue of Naresuan in a western outlying province of Bangkok with its nearby re-imagined picture of the princess at her shrine. It was at Nong Sarai near the province of Suphanburi that the famous battle between the Thai and Burmese kings reputedly took place on elephants, vividly depicted on many mural paintings and posters. Perhaps disturbing from the point of view of state-sanctioned history is that Suphankalaya was created from popular consciousness, as a representation from the imagination of the masses rather than as a standard (legitimizing) royalist history penned by, for instance, Prince Da...