and composition between machines. An important one is the following: "Incorporeal machines, by contrast, are defined by iterability, potential eternity, and the capacity to manifest themselves in a variety of different spatial and temporal locations at once while retaining their identity." (Ibid., 26) Incorporeal machines require corporeal machines to manifest in the world and have an effect. They are incorporeal because they can instantiate more than once concurrently, can be reiterated or copied (with comparatively little resistance, friction and effort in comparison to material machines). A given ritual practice is thus more of an incorporeal machine, precisely because of its iterability. No singular chanting assemblage will be identical, it is not about instantiating an ideal type. Chanting is an incorporeal machine connecting to other machines, however due to its complexity (being made of many other elements) any instance will differ, even just slightly, from another one (between or even within temples). Rituals, I claim, would typically emerge as corporeal machines, since their iterability (or the parts of them that will become iterable) will have to be negotiated, not just among human actors but also other actants, wider material-semiotic conditions, including such things as weather conditions, though once formalized in a tradition, they will become incorporeal machines. As such they need to be meta-stable, find an existence that is flexible enough to appear in different situations, but stable enough to be recognizable in their adaptations. And it is significantly through corporeal machines that traditions become transferable (for the immaterial is always and only accessible through the material), as well as shareable and thus able to develop and adapt. There is no eternally unchanging tradition, no identity preceding impermanence, while there are those built in a way so as to secure as much as possible relative stability of those parts deemed important, such traditions will face much larger hurdles in reproducing themselves in the face of large-scale encounters with their other. Meanwhile, traditions can also be flexible and generative, making it easy to transformatively incorporate newness, with that which remains relatively stable making up only a small part of the assemblage. As new corporeal machines, by way of a transforming world outside of the what the tradition acknowledges as existing, appear and connect to an assemblage, the tensions between iterability of incorporeal machines and entropy of corporeal parts grow, and the incorporeal is pressured to change if it is to retain power. Such a change can include throwing overboard much of the surface-level elements that make it while retaining 'deep' structures, such as happened in Euro-Modernity's so-called secularism that retains much from Christianity in its basic operation. In one place different incorporeal machines overlap and connect corporeal ones in various patterns. Worlds are more than one. It matters how they are composed.
I am immersed. Fully enveloped. Most of my actions are prescribed. There are few other options. There is some leeway for actions that do not directly pertain to those that are to be reiterated by all participants, yet they still inevitably organize around the central ones. Just to keep up requires effort, attention and perception fragment into the process. The 'I' disappears. Consciousness of self disappears. Only resonances moving the body inside out. Even though I cannot claim to have mastered the coordination between eye, hand, mouth and brain, all interacting through the nervous system to bring forth sounds from my body to at the very least not go against the dominant pull, it doesn't matter. The individual disperses into the surroundings, unable to reconstitute itself. Scattering attention. The central axis to connect it all on a habitual basis, the self, is unmade in its pretension to unity and givenness. Corporeal resistances. I am never really taken out of this immersion, despite not having the personalized habitualized skills to straightforwardly fit in. Except for the minimum negative skill of not wanting to disturb. When I force my attention to wander away from the rhythms of the chants to observe the going-ons, it is fast reconnected to them. All of this leads me to think about how this whole event is organized materially. I know that the content of chants is of little hermeneutic significance for practitioners, definitely so in the moment of chanting, which isn't to discount meaning as a possible component altogether. Sometimes it is part, at other times, as indeed in this specific assemblage, it isn't. One shouldn't transpose conventions from entirely different situations and pretend they are always given in the same manner. "Chanting, a form of meditation, serves to transform the mind by helping it develop clarity and stability. By repeating a mantra over and over again, it is hoped that the mind will become focused, distracting thoughts will cease to arise, and the devotee will enter into deep meditation." (Tiyavanich 2003, 244) It also produces merit, regardless of how one enters the scene. So those that come just for a short stint and, unlike me, manage to not get caught in the action, have reason to do so beyond 'community pressure' or anything of that sort.

To continue thinking chanting as an incorporeal machine (disregarding the specifics of how these machines differ among Buddhist traditions as well as time and space more generally), which parts does the concrete assemblage compose of and what does it connect to? The elements will become media, in the sense employed by Marshall McLuhan (famously taking every medium as an extension of man): "Following McLuhan, we will thus say that when one entity enters into structural coupling with another entity, it functions as a medium for that entity." (Bryant 2014, 30) However, in an important difference to McLuhan, relations in the thinking mobilized here are external to their terms, that is,
"machines do not have a use or purpose, but only take on a use or purpose in being structurally coupled to another machine." (Ibid.) This entails a modification to McLuhan's<sup>126</sup> somewhat simple, essentializing model. Levi Bryant writes: "A machine functions as a medium for another machine not only when it amplifies or extends a sense-organ, but also whenever it modifies the activity or becoming of any other machine." (Ibid., 33) This is a two-way street, to use a Benjaminian expression, not only will the chanting machine modify its parts, the parts will modify the machine. Bodies (not just participants' bodies) become media for the chanting machine to become corporeal, the chanting machine becomes a medium for bodies as it modulates them. Any machine is already more than one. How it will appear to the body qua machine coupled to it, is conditioned by the point of view from into which it is plugged in. Thus, the parallel theorizing employed here: a machinic reconstruction decentered by perception and a cinematic one organized around my body and experience. Every time such an incorporeal machine will appear, it will differ. This is intensified for machines that in order to function are composed of wide varieties of other machines that might offer a lot of friction, such as is the case with many rites.<sup>127</sup> The more heterogeneous the elements that plug in, the larger the spaces for friction, the more elements the larger the entropy, the more tensions working against the compositing of the (incorporeal) machine – "a machine is composed of parts that impose constraints on each other's movements." (Morita 2012, 45) Part of any effectivity lies in how movement is constrained. In this, chanting rites are similar to cinema, a possibility to be explored later, where one's constrained movements also open perception up to other dimensions. Thus machinic assemblages, corporeal and incorporeal parts, are always changing, perhaps more as silent transformations (Jullien 2009), especially so long as most parts also remain somewhat stable. When enough of the parts come to change, say because under capitalism many elements evolve rapidly, or because of imperial or other interventions that enforce a hegemonic restructuring of space, infrastructure and symbolism, breaking points will appear, where innovations that would enable to a ritual to appear in a version still relatable to previous ones will not occur fast enough for it not to disappear in the mists of memory or a nationalist fetishizing image of the past put into museums. "It is important to recognize overall that the concept of ritual encapsulates two apparently opposed features, those of continuity vis a vis [sic] those of creativity. Rituals may appear to be unchanging, and their enactors may even stress this as a requisite, yet in practice we find that the field of ritual is dynamic, encompassing change and

<footnote n="126">126 See e.g. Galloway (2011) for a detailed critique and mapping of limits of McLuhan and theorists that follow him too closely.</footnote>

<footnote n="127">127 E.g. as compared to books, which are composed of far fewer corporeal machines in order to function.</footnote>
generating creativity.” (Strathern & Strathern 2021, 1) Those too are machines of course, their function and composition however is radically different, even as parts overlap. As mentioned above, parts by being plugged in, becoming media, effectively change.

The rhythm and speed of the chants, meanwhile, comes as variations.<fnref n="128" /> Different melodies<fnref n="129" /> do appear, but the general effect can be said to be unified. Obviously, as such modulations are precisely what creates the condition for what I have been describing here. Still, some favorites form and I feel happy when one of them is picked up at a later moment, after it seemed to be over. Chanting, the rhythmic recitation of *sūtras* or *dharanis/parittas*<fnref n="130" /> is, in some areas, also called *bhasa*,<fnref n="131" /> recitation of scriptures with melody. Chanting is always collective, in settings similar to the one described above. Further, even during other daily services, there is some responsive chanting: the monks chant and the group responds. Here, some of the chants feature an interplay between the delays of monk and lay people chanting. It is all very sophisticated, and for a contemporary music enthusiast it reminds of drone (music), except with all the sounds being produced by human bodies and not electronically. The monks' text is slightly ahead of that of the lay people, until at some point they converge again, and then depart. This practice is very dynamic indeed. As Chen (2004, 84) writes about Chinese chanting practices: “Philosophically, while music in our modern cultural understanding (associated with the contemporary Western concept) is often seen as thinglike, a work with complete and clearly defined boundaries, a Buddhist chant is perceived and therefore is conducted as process-like, a process that truly reflects the chanters' physical and mental states.” Participants and chant become indissociable. The incorporeal machine of chanting mingles with the corporeal, organizes and transforms, at least

<footnote n="128">128 Buddhist conceptions of music and their historical and contemporary effects are complex and understudied. (Cf. Chen 2001, Liu 2018) The research only rarely engages the entire material complexity of a chanting situation, even when reliant on fieldwork. One thing appears definite: they differ from Occidental Christian ones that came to serve as a basis for modern musical theories. To generalize: music is never just music. Further distinctions are established in practice: “The other decisive distinction between reciting, chanting, and singing involves melodies. One can use any tune for singing, but the tunes for reciting and chanting are carefully regulated.” (Liu 2018, 731)</footnote>

<footnote n="129">129 “In this context, reading without melody should be understood as reciting, and reading with a melody should be understood as chanting.” (Liu 2018, 733) Again, we see that things are not conceived substantially, but relationally or contextually.</footnote>

<footnote n="130">130 These are Buddhist chants, mnemonic codes, incantations, or recitations, usually the mantras consisting of Sanskrit or Pali phrases. Believed to be protective and with powers to generate merit for the Buddhist devotee, they constitute a major part of historic Buddhist literature.</footnote>

<footnote n="131">131 Liu notes that while “[t]he practice of reciting has been described with different verbs in Buddhist texts written in various Asian languages [...], [t]he first Sanskrit verb for ‘recite’ is √bhāṣ, which occurs in a conversation between the Buddha and a novice monk Śroṇakofīkarna.” (2018, 724) And that often verbs translating as ‘to inspire’ are used. I note this to point toward the semantic complexity that fragments any straightforwardly philological engagements with Buddhist tradition.</footnote>
temporarily.<fnref n="132" /> While there is a proper form, or succession of the chants, as led by the monks, lay people are not particularly concerned with that, if at all. Indeed, the lack of form or clear boundaries, the chants blending into each other, as a large part of the voices is trying to catch on to create greater expansiveness to the chant. To note a difference to singing in Christian churches: here, one sits alone and is engulfed by the flow of sounds, there is no sense of community that would appear (based on being able to see each other and to focus on the meaning of the lyrics).

A list of composite elements. This is not an exhaustive list. In fact, it is impossible to do one, due to the fractal nature of complexity and any scene's openness of the world (the inside of the frame always relates to the outside), even if an inside/outside distinction is to some degree established and stabilized by the machines operating: the design of the space, as both the temple and the layout of the mats, statues and monks, form part of the machine. As do the participants, including me that brings a different kind of opening of the machine to its outside. The monks, especially the leading monks who have acquired bodies that are adept at chanting. They learn it, perfect it; though not each monk achieves the same proficiency. Some laypeople also carry the chants, which is noticeable when a monk loses the rhythm, but the group goes on, until the monk(s) join again. The machine preexists any participant, at least once it starts working, operating, performing. The sound flows by itself, as one becomes part of it. Further parts are the microphones and speakers, as well as the ubiquitous lights and fans. Other incorporeal machines plugging in. Flowers surrounding the Buddha statues. The flowers at small altars at the back of the space, where one can do offerings while others chant. This is not disruptive. Offerings are almost silent, certainly drowned out by the chanting. Participants, unless forcefully doing so for ethnographic purposes, don't turn their heads to look back. Here limit spaces occur. They are and are not part of the machine. They are, because they are there, but they are not because they have an agency of their own that does not entirely harmonize with the main machine. Much like the Deleuzian concept of the concept with its 'zones of indiscernability' (Deleuze & Guattari 1994).

As for media, as described, I sensed retroactively, how I had lost myself and my body (sitting

<footnote n="132">132 Wei and Homsombat (2016, 34) note that “[i]nstrumental sounds in a Buddhist context invite the audience to search for the ‘Buddha’ inside, through and beyond the sounds. With a view of ‘emptiness,’ which implies an ‘empty’ nature of the sounds, the ‘Buddha’ in music, if one can see it, can even encompass all forms of sound: whether it is apparently distinguishable as instrumental or vocal, musical or non-musical, Buddhist or non-Buddhist.” In other words, awareness (via teachings) and material conditions must align for full effectivity. This does not contradict the argument I develop here that transformation occurs to every body that comes in contact. It means however that to stabilize said transformation after the ceremonial assemblage is left behind, the teachings become indispensable.</footnote>
mostly still) while chanting. There were moments when I came out of it and became conscious of
myself, but in general, my subjectivity receded into the flow of sounds. Stressful page turning did not
reposit my subjectivity as present, I too became lost in the movement (of eyes seeking guidance and
hands turning pages and body channeling rhythms) which preceded and conditioned my presence, as it
was instantiated by the incorporeal machine of the chanting.<fnref n="133" /> “A machine is a system of operations
that perform transformations on inputs thereby producing outputs.” (Bryant 2014, 38) Part of that
output is the formation of participant sense-perception and subjectivity. Given that ritual is based on
repetition within and between events, regular participation would shape the plasticity of participants
sensory makeup. Subjectivity will become decentered, especially if we work with extended mind
hypothesis (where material surroundings also partake in constituting mind), as proposed by Andy Clark
(2011) and connected to music in religious contexts by Joel Krueger (2016), and consistent with
Buddhist thinking. Chanting is soteriologically effective, but not ultimately. And it creates the
conditions for becoming Buddhist (which one does by doing, not by believing). The affective-aesthetic
dimensions of Buddhist traditions, as infinitely varied as they tend to be, are integral to what it does
and not a mere externality to the truth-content of the teachings. (Greene 2002) The aim of chanting, as
Pi-yen Chen (2001, 35) notes based on research she conducted in the Sinosphere, “is to aid the chanter
in attaining a decentered (unfixed) subjective state.” An important part of monk education is to learn to
chant, and not every monk becomes a master of techniques, as I've been told. It is important to learn to
modify their voice. “The chanting voice had greater loudness, a higher fundamental frequency, and
stronger pitch strength than a normal voice, suggesting the Buddhist sutra is chanted louder and with
higher and stronger pitch.” (Soeta et al. 2015, 76) Also, as Chen notes and I too observed for my case,
monks are also part of the audience. Where I or rather my experience departs, is when Chen mentions
that participants should be aware of how sound impressions arise and dissipate (much like in Buddhist
meditation, where the goal is to reach awareness of transitoriness and construction of being). Such
focus on how the Buddhist mind ought to operate, is, I think, unnecessary. Advanced practitioners may
indeed be able to operationalize this within the pressures of the assemblage, but what is interesting is
precisely that desubjectifying effects precede this more classically Buddhist analysis that remains too
human centered. Cultivating mindfulness is easier here, perhaps, but on another level it appears to me
that mindfulness brings the subject far more into play than common participation. Meanwhile,

<footnote n="133">¹³³ The primacy of the ritual assemblage in relation to the body entering has been noted before: “Rather, [the ritual researchers Humphrey and Laidlaw] describe rituals as ontologically prior to the actors’ performance and intentions; in ritual you both are and are not the author of your acts.” (Strathern 2012, 404)</footnote>
investigating such issues remains challenging due to the difficulty of articulating such process by laypeople and the necessary Buddhist-inflected composition of any statement about such issues by more advanced practitioners. The experiment here is that the body that came to do research retrospectively examines itself with Buddhist and Deleuzoguattarian tools and finds a discrepancy, a material impossibility for the mind-centered Buddhist rendering to simply be the inevitable outcome of chanting.

And then it ends. Chanting books are collected, bodies leave, some stand around, some engage in talk, white mats are gathered. Outside those that will stay prepare for the meditation. When I go there, what was once a wall of black in the night becomes differentiated. There are small lights in the garden and the glow of the city hangs above. I loiter a bit, observe the movements, dispersions. I am equally exhausted and strangely energized. For a while, low-key chatter fills these usually silent spaces. As people scatter, I decide to go home. I pass by groups of four, five walking slowly in focused silence. The air lies still and warm. Memories hit me, memories of the effort and focus it takes to systematically follow a gait whose rhythms differ significantly from those of habit. When I step out the door, motorcycles and cars and tuktuk flit by. Immediately images of Tsai Ming-liang's post-narrative and ongoing 'Walker' series<fnref n="134" /> are conjured: A monk walks at infinitely slow speeds in different places in cities of the world. It is impossible to imagine the slow motion rhythms of enacted walking meditation without having witnessed them – whether as a participant or observer. Indeed, observing the slow-moving monk over an extended period of time makes the observing body partake in the rhythms, however differently composed the rest of the environment may be. Observing is participating in rhythms on a molecular level, and the common practice of participant observation that limits significance to the straightforwardly anthropocentric (as based in humanist definitions of what makes a human) remains a prime example of mistaking the molar for the molecular. <fnref n="135" /> As Lim (2017) writing on Tsai's post-cinema points out, Buddhist teachings wouldn't conceive of experiential events as happening in time, but as time. Soon, I reach my regular walking speed that is far too intense and sweaty for this weather. Adapting the most corporeal of habits proves the most challenging. Resistances

<footnote n="134">¹³⁴ In 2022, the following entries were completed: No Form (2012), Walker (2012), Diamond Sutra (2012), Sleepwalk (2012), Walking on Water (2013), Journey to the West (2014), No No Sleep (2017), Sand (2018), Wandering (2021). The monk, played by the long-term collaborator and main actor Kang-sheng Lee (usually appearing as the character 'Xiao Kang' throughout Tsai's filmography), is named 'Xuanzang,' the historical Chinese monk who traveled to the West, i.e. Buddhist India, and later served as a basis for the famous novel 'Journey to the West.'</footnote>

<footnote n="135">¹³⁵ Following Deleuze & Guattari (1988) molar is that which is perceived as clear and stable and molecular that below the threshold of perception. Nevertheless, they are relational terms and not designations of clear separations out there. Whatever is molar and molecular will change based on what is engaged.</footnote>
abound, whether or not I desire it.
13. Sketches Toward a Buddhist-Derived Conception of Rite and Sound

There are other ways to enter the previous scene(s), to splice up, slow down and redistribute elements
and connect them to that which is called theory. To make for different theory. To no longer pretend that
what is analyzed precedes the theory all the while already pre-packaging the world into neatly
separated components to fit one's theory. Does a tree make a sound when it falls and nobody hears? The
game is rigged, language has already proposed at least four elements: a tree, a sound, falling and a
position from which to hear.<fnref n="136" /> Why these and not others? To riff on Nietzsche, grammar is the
metaphysics of the people. The people being those who project their linguistic convention as universal.
This has nothing to do with background or education. More operations are at work here: reality is
simply posited as existing, regardless of who for, regardless of contact. Sound is proposed as to exist in
itself. Indeed a very banal tradition of thought that turns the world into separate mystical black boxes
that somehow are, but are not to be analyzed further. Except, one element is weaker than the rest, for
the question turns around it, makes it open to uncertainty. Sound has an ontological uncertainty in this
world, perhaps even undecidability, given how continually productive of conclusion-less conversations
the status of sound is. Ontology turns in a hamster wheel. Does it gain pleasure from it like the hamster
that can leave? Sound is connected to hearing here, the uncertainty in the proposition is whether sound
exists with or without a listener. If the logic were consistent, one would arrive either at the conclusion
that sound just happens regardless of who is there, or sound happens only when there's a body to
witness. The first proposition is unverifiable and must remain purely speculative. In the second some
sort of scientific engagement is possible, for empiricism (still tied to naive realism) emerges (tho it is
still based on an unverifiable assumption that precedes any confirmation process). Such a scene can be
imagined and analyzed in more detail, much more indeed than the commonly employed reductive
image does. It matters which images we think problems with. It matters how we imagine scenes to
think with.

If there's nothing to witness the event of falling, it simply doesn't happen (for us). The witness
can be a mechanical capturing of said event, with or without sound, or a passerby present enough to
eventually communicate the event in a manner intelligible for others interested in it. Thus it gains

<footnote n="136">¹³⁶ Grammatical (im)possibilities, conditionings are even more difficult to notice, much less learn to think differently. For an exploration of some alternatives to the subject-object dichotomy, see Course (2010). I want to stress here that the issue is not with the implicit metaphysics of a linguistic system, the problem is with its projection as universal.</footnote>
reality. A bee passes by and presumably has little interest in communicating the falling tree to a human. Meanwhile, the falling tree, hypothetical now, has immediate material effects on its surrounding. These may yet reverberate in unexpected ways to have an impact on the body asking the hypothetical question. If there is an impact, one might seek tools to reconstruct the complex chains of enmeshed effects and end up with the proposition that a tree has fallen and made a sound. This is a different event than the tree falling and being heard, much more different even than that hypothetical manipulative question that keeps pretending that epistemology and ontology are separable and not instated in one and the same (separating) gesture. Some language(s) can't help it. Or maybe it can, but not in the ontology being composed from the tradition I have come to be and think and write through (well, before coming to engage with non-representational theories in any case). Some people will ontologize all they read. The game is rigged in favor of the ignorant powerful, or powerfully ignorant. Others won't. There are claims that Chinese thought, that behemoth when it comes to (uninterrupted) time-span, integration of otherness and number of participants, is not ontological. (Jullien 2003, Hui 2021) In the location I am at, the networks I move in, I already propose a way the world works simply by writing about it. Indeed, the text writes a world. Writes an anthropology. A ritual theory. When images, experienced as the flow of life or as images, are added, they might resist the world made by the text, or support it. When a body enters a new situation, the material-semiotic support networks that somewhat stabilized it, might continue that support until it returns, almost unscathed by all the newness, always already intent on self-sameness. When another body enters, it might not have the same support networks to ensure stability, or it might have practiced attunement to changes ever so slight. Another even, might use such attunements for a temporal redirection later, to reenter that image of the past, and try to conceive of an alternative to what had happened to it.

The world rumbles, differences proliferate. They enact openings, however troublesome it is to actually write such images and connect with slippery concepts, using a medium against itself. What else is one to do when the academic industry keeps operating on the principle that there is some straightforward line connecting great or even lesser textual works. That the so-called Occidental tradition somehow, magically, self-evidently connects. “Western culture is not just a collection of ideas; it is a collection of ideas that are taught in textbooks and discussed in lecture halls, cafes, or literary salons. If it were not, it would be hard to imagine how one could end up with a civilization that begins in ancient Greece, passes to ancient Rome, maintains a kind of half-life in the Medieval Catholic world,
revives in the Italian renaissance, and then passes mainly to dwell in those countries bordering the
North Atlantic.” (Graeber 2007, 289) When put like this many might shake their heads: but we take
seriously others now. This illusion dissipates the moment one tries to publish an article that puts non-
Western thought explicitly on the same level as that of the great self-proclaimedly universal tradition.
Immediate, (not always) subtle push-back: you have to explain this and this and that. Other concepts,
concepts of others can't just operate, they have to be reduced to what already exists. Rarely does
anyone ask: what if I'm just assuming the concepts and images I employ are self-evident and easy to
grasp? What if a text can never actually include it's own explanation and one must always defer
elsewhere? Not just a textual elsewhere, of course. Unironically pretending that writing is a neutral and
self-consistent way to express research, describe (in images) a world and humans or to even think is
one of the pastimes of many academic elites with their pretensions to easy universalism. It is operating
at the very based of modernity and has far-reaching colonial conditions. This has been demonstrated in
various ways. (See e.g. Goddard 2021) As Peter Skafish writes in the Introduction to Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro's *Cannibal Metaphysics* (2014, 18): “Once it is accepted that an alien body of thought is
indeed thought, and there is no longer anything to decipher except for what its coordinates, values,
suppositions, and truths are, and how these throw our own into disarray by depriving them of
universality and transforming them.” It is of note that how one engages other thought is a question of
practice or a practical relating that precedes intellectual engagement qua interpretation. It
operationalizes the famous Deleuzian dictum: monism = pluralism. (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 20) The
more than one-world world is still one world for there is no other planet (Nail 2022): one-world ≠ one
world. Dhammic production, far from being as docile as it is generally made out to be by the colonial
edifice of Buddhism, at times shines through in its otherness in a variety of research. I have been
connecting these minor aberrations to assorted problematics that destabilize notions all too eagerly
projected as necessary and settled. Sound and rite, in Buddhist worlds, have a rather direct connection
to textuality, as will be evident as the argument eventually circles back. Now let's recall, reenter, tweak
and reimagine the chanting scene explored previously.

## Buddhist Chanting and the non-Subject

A far-reaching sound resonates. It carries calmly through bodies. It surges from bodies and purifies them. Makes shake from the inside, join and reverberate. Sometimes it speeds up. Sometimes it slows
down. Voices, deeply resonant add only to disperse immediately in the rhythm of the sonoric commons. Pure as a small roaring waterfall. Subtleties differentiate it, sometimes get lost as a new swell surges, or a new rhythm transforms. An attentive lull making good feelings. Never excessive, tranquility persists. The there-ness of sound. A reverbing hum. When contact occurs, the conditions are in place. The consciousness of the ear grasps the form of the sound. Groupings of sound finding correspondence in material flow and auditory faculty. These groupings here deliver Buddhist doctrines. Their shapes make positive feelings. Deeply resonant, they lead to calmness. Joyfulness is felt. Subjectivation would appear, were the sounds composed differently. A subject that grasps and misgrasps conditions and thinks stable what is not. Here, consciousness appears, but no illusory stability. It is a compound of previous actions, acting as conditions for future actions. The sound here enters those futures, perhaps liberatory. Yet, it is pleasant, attachment could occur. That is the paradox of teaching the dhamma – what is needed to teach it, is also the condition of attachment. Otherwise, it would be simple, now wouldn't it? Here, conditions appear that share moods to draw one to the teaching – peaceful, thundering, warmhearted, rapturous. Sound transforms. Different sound transforms differently. Perhaps such moods will compel to return or support a practice elsewhere. Help to intensify focus, if just for a while, or carry a happy humor to make life easier to deal with.

So, what if one were to write a generally Buddhist theory of sound? Not just let it hang empty in the air, but even relate it to the assemblages under study. Make it resonate. When materiality is not simply separate, when it can be neither directly accessed nor not accessed at all, it's all about combinations and effects. For a soteriological Buddhist teaching, there are inherent challenges in the sensory: "I find that the Buddha's concerns about the potentially distracting aspects of musical sound have shaped the metric rhythm of the Pali texts, and also affect the sorts of melodic and rhythmic sounds produced in chanting practices today." (Greene 2004, 45) These rhythms have developed, have come to be codified into varied chanting styles for the different sects. (Greene et al. 2002, 153) Chanting has to navigate a field of tension between disinterested laypeople and the dangers of attachment, of too much decoration, too much melody. These sonic patternings will have entered fields shaped by varied local practices, needs and imaginations, and have to direct mindfulness to Buddhist concerns and even texts. Additionally, the patterns are there to aid monks and (advanced) laypeople to memorize chants, both as form and textual content. Chanting and the reciting of verses for different purposes thus act as media for many related patternings of reality and conditionings of subjectivities.
Simultaneously, the emergent forms, clusters of sounds and their melodic developments, beautiful thought they may feel, shouldn't make forget about impermanence. They are to stay away from extremes, and in general refrain from melodies in favor of rhythms, which, as anyone that ever heard Buddhist chants, resonate very deeply from and in bodies. To my untrained ears any of the modulations different schools might have was and continues to be beyond differentiation. In any case, these concerns organize the higher strata of sound. Already arranging into rhythms and refrains. Buddhist concerns with attachment and enlightenment begin ontologically earlier, even as the experience of all this happens at once. Theravāda Buddhist meditation practice is after all about techniques to take apart this seemingly continuous flow to show discontinuity of experience and the emptiness of forms that constitute it.<fnref n="137" /> Crucially, Buddhist teachings have shaped practices of making sounds as well as the spaces within which sounds expand. These sounds are to have deliberate and controlled effects on participants. Effects that are multiple and will differ between common laypeople, advanced practitioners, and monks. Effects that at the most common but also least conscious are to bring about states of awareness and tendencies in feelings that are, for lack of more precise vocabulary, good or positive. And, experimental research as well as my interviewees, attest to the precisely such beneficial effects attending Buddhist rites, including chanting, have on (human) bodies (cf. Walsh 2007, Peterson 2022; on possible pitfalls in encounters with scientific method, see Fauré 2017). Bodies entangled in exchange cycles of merit-making and sharing, and practices that help achieve good mental states generally indicated by the words calmness and happiness.

As for the content of suttas, music is mentioned without typically being called so. And, when it appears explicitly, “it is usually in the context of the activities (singing, playing) of celestial beings.” (Chen 2001, 26) This is after all an activity that makes life pleasurable, indicates well-being, and in doing so indicates good rebirths but also less than optimal conditions for attaining nibbana.<fnref n="138" /> Analogous tensions are to be negotiated at altars and meditation halls, with the play of neon lights and the generally soothing ambiance. The actualization of heavenly affects on earth ease meditation

<footnote n="137">137 In stark contrast to how ‘presence’ is commonly conceived in (not only) common sense, typical Western Buddhist practitioners or phenomenology: “Ironically, Buddhist meditation disciplines are often and wrongly considered to be similar to phenomenology because of what seems to be their valuation of attention to experience ‘just as it appears.’ But in practice Buddhist meditators display attitudes toward ‘experience’ that are very different from those of popular phenomenology.” (Klima 2002, 213)</footnote>

<footnote n="138">¹³⁸ For it is from human bodies only that it can be achieved, as they are in the middle of pleasure and pain, compared to celestials, animals or those populating hells.</footnote>
practice by creating conducive atmospheres, concurrently they produce attachment. They might be
conceived as acoustic milieus, designed for sound to happen. (Wang 2018) In order for Buddhist sound
to happen, other sound has to recede. As explored previously, different spaces make for different reality
(effects). In Mahāyāna sūtras at least, “[t]here is a rich lexicon in Buddhist literatures on terms used to
describe the quality of sound: wonderful, far reaching, sonorous, resonant, deep, loud, pure, tranquil,
thunderous, surging, compassionate, charitable, magnanimous, joyful, intelligent, wise, and so forth.”
(Chen 2001, 26) Associations with auspicious conditions or conditions conducive to achieving
Buddhist virtues can be tied to a single body or communal ones.

Sound and music are not the same. Distinctions are in order. The instrumental sounds that
enable “devotees to see ‘Buddha’ throughout and beyond the religious ceremony, and the attributes of
its undertaking can be summarised as: – A sound that delivers Buddhist doctrines and/or positive
feelings. – A sound that is modifiable to appropriate a condition. – A sound that avoids short-lived
sensations. – A sound that avoids musical aesthetics as well as the arousal of human desires but leads to
the direction of calmness. – A sound that feeds lay Buddhists but should be void at an advanced stage.”
(Wei & Homsombat 2016, 34) The Theravāda love of lists permeates even research articles! This is
quite an analytical yet context-based list. Sound is not just sound. It relates to other bodies, to sensing.
There is no general sound, rather differing levels of advancement on the path, which operationalizes
differing effects varying sounds have.

To further understand the conceptualization of music and sound in Buddhist thought, one must
have an adequate image of how Buddhist teachings understand the composition of individual existence.
Famously, one of the central tenets is that of no-self, *anatta* in Pali, more commonly known in the
transcription from Sanskrit *anātman*. Anthropologists have continually noticed that this shapes
everyday reality in areas that have long histories of being materially formed by Buddhist traditions.
“Above all, according to standard Buddhist doctrine, there is no unified cognitive being-as ego, or self,
or I. In Buddhism, what we call a ‘being,’ an ‘individual,’ or an ‘I’ is only a combination of ever-
changing physical and mental forces or energies, which may be divided into five groups or aggregates.
They are the aggregates of Matter, Sensations, Perceptions, Volitions, and Consciousness.” (Chen 2001,
26) Potent images for thought for those tired of simply auto-positing selves. Selves are aggregates, with
advanced practitioners being able to take apart the flow into parts in practices that extend analytics into
materiality, (re)composing flows of different elements.<fnref n="139" />

As such it operates analogously to music. Composed of parts, experienced as continuity. Yet, under Buddhist analytical powers continuity falls away as an ultimate ground of experience, as it does with sound. This is not to deny any protention/retention dynamic in the process of constructing an always differing and personal experience of music, film, or anything, one that builds and connects past and future. (Stiegler 2014) It shows rather that even such deeply seated automated corporeal processes can be cut if the appropriate techniques and cosmological presuppositions are operationalized.<fnref n="140" /> Once again, the frameworks, concepts, images and practices that are related to matters, no matter how challenging it might be to one's habits to not ultimately fall back onto a universe of essences already finished.

"Sound in the context of the five Buddhist aggregates is understood as Matter, as in effect an object in the external world that corresponds to our faculty of hearing." (Chen 2001, 26) Sound, like all world, including emergent (no-)selves is constant flux. Appearance disappearance too fast to notice for the untrained. Music as grouping of sonic activities. That is a certain form, a certain cut – one that makes perception possible by separating some of these materialities from others, so that sounds emerge as sounds in the first place. "When auditory contact happens, viññāṇa is the there-ness of sound." (Klima 2002, 214) Without there-ness, no sound occurs. Sound is not something simply out there, but the coming together of a range of elements. No sound-consciousness without sound-occurrence. There is no simply pre-existing consciousness, nor flow or continuity thereof to grasp sound. The outside and the inside are not just connected, they become together. Such a conception of consciousness disaggregates any simple body-bound one: "Consciousness has six domains: the consciousnesses of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and thought organs. Each domain performs two functions:

<footnote n="139">139 Theravāda compared to Mahāyāna is said to be more pragmatic in the statements about the world and emptiness it enables. For Mahāyāna all is empty, a groundless ground. Theravāda is concerned with sharing teachings and tools to be able to grasp emptiness without claiming that as the ultimate (non)ground. So the claim and confirmed experiences of practitioners that the flow of experience can be taken apart into smaller constituents that for the layperson succeed each other in such a fast manner as to be unnoticeable, like frames in cinema. Which in turn can be reconstructed into a flow, thus showing that neither is actually the ultimate ground, is a thoroughly performative statement. (Klima 2002)</footnote>

<footnote n="140">140 Stiegler's technicity-conscious updating of Husserl is necessary to mention not just for its cinematic construction of consciousness, but also as it brings phenomenological accounts actually close to Buddhadharmic conceptions I actualize here. In the end, Stiegler suggests "that human consciousness has its own technicity, which is hard-wired to be mechanically reproduced and then reinternalized by the consciousness, Stiegler returns to a cynical notion that human beings are enslaved to technics and technology" (Fan 2022, 16) and thus remains within the metaphysical confines of a world and human already formed.</footnote>
differentiating forms from one another and manifesting such differences as an image.” (Fan 2022, 15) It would be a mistake to consider any of these as an ultimate reality. There are no sounds as such, quite like consciousness, just movements with certain qualities that can be perceived by the ear organ, a faculty equipped to recognize, pick out certain materialities but not others.<fnref n="141" /> Still, mindfulness as practice is always apposite. “As sense data, sound in Buddhism is regarded as dust (*guna*)-things that can cause the human delusion in which misconstructed objects of attachment appear to have an abiding reality. Thus Buddhist teaching dissolves away any self and aims to see things as they really are.” (Chen 2001, 27)

Earlier I demonstrated that machinic theory makes this apparent in the composition of the chanting rite. The research there occurred temporally prior to my armchair research into Buddhist sonorities. Dissolving the self becomes an immersive material-performative activity, not just an effect of consciousness (as in meditation where the aim is enacting a cut where inner and outer sense data connect), but something that modulates all five aggregates of clinging.<fnref n="142" /> Chanting creates auspicious conditions and effectuates good mood. However, sound also potentially binds, as mentioned, thus chanting will not be the ultimate practice for achieving soteriological goals, just one part of the compositing path. As the incorporeal machine of chanting spread, it adapted to the linguistic particularities of the new spaces it entered and was in turn adapted through them. This was perhaps easier, precisely because the material form and its effect on the participants is crucial, and not the semiotic/linguistic content. The latter gains its force only once systematic interest is established, for it, just on pragmatic grounds, requires infinitely more devotion, and thus a material support system that enables ‘leisure’ or ‘non-productive’ activity (if we frame it in a Western secular economist cosmology).<fnref n="143" /> The many hours of chanting do not contain any explicit verbal commands, one just struggles to keep up with those who know which page to turn to. And is carried with the shared rhythm. This is said to be the same in Chinese Buddhist rites explored in Chen (2004). Teachings and visual

<footnote n="141">141 “These six domains operate interdependently. With them, the abilities to nāmarūpa (name and give form) are dependently originated. Nāmarūpa refers to the differentiation between the saṃāyatanas/ṣaḍāyatanas (internal rūpas or forms: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and thought organs) and the āyatana (external forms: sight, sound, odor, taste, touch, and thought). As the internal and external forms make phassa/sparśa (contact), vedanās (sensations and affections) and tanhā/trṣṇā (longing or desire) are dependently originated.” (Fan 2022, 15)</footnote>

<footnote n="142">142 The so-called skandhas (Skrt.) or kandhas (Pali), the five mental and material factors through which clinging arises, are: form (or material image, impression) rūpa, sensations (or feelings, received from form) vedanā, perceptions saṃjñā/saññā, mental activity or formations saṅkhāra, consciousness (viññāṇa). One might notice the complexity of the system, as terms make their appearances in different contexts, to connect and shift meanings.</footnote>

<footnote n="143">143 Given the beneficent effects that attending temple activities has for laypeople, a strictly productivity oriented separation is of course non-sensical.</footnote>
aesthetics tend to be very different between (*de iure*) traditions, however much they (*de facto*) actually mix on the ground, yet, general tendencies in the organization of materiality and its preconscious effects on subjectivities, as well as basic tenets, do exhibit affinities. Buddhist teachings do condition realities as much as Christian-Secular ones do, even if the latter are taken to simply be neutral (for encounters with otherness never occur on equal terms) – and much effort by those hegemonic powers is being put into taking away the force of any other worldings, whether Buddhist or not, to (co)shape futures.

## Bidhikamma: Ceremony, Connectivity and Intention

So what if, connecting to Buddhist theory of sound, a different ritual theory is written? Perhaps one that draws on local ways of dividing the chaosmos. It still writes a world where there is a thing such as ritual. Only maybe not as simply as the dominant tradition might project it. The point is, with any characterization of ritual whatsoever, even disregarding its specific history as a series of Christian transformations of Roman practices (Asad 1993), to consistently apply its formal definition to the sensory world. A pragmatic experimental approach then, less concerned with contingencies than with performative consistencies. Applications to a reality, regardless of one's habitualized classification of what is immediately perceived, or what immediately associates. The projected image need not fully overlap with the perceived image. So the concept, whatever it may be, and research in general, actually and consciously comes to act its full emancipatory force, to change the world and not just in a typical colonial fashion merely classify reality (co-creating in the same act) into a hierarchy that preexists science.<fnref n="144" />

When in Thailand interacting in English, I didn't hear the word ritual, except out of my own mouth. It was always and only ceremony. I throw the ritual ball, and the ceremonial one comes flying back. While the academic discourse has its own varied takes on the difference between ritual and ceremony (Grimes 2014), those are not my focus here, as frankly, they amount to little more than semantics, word-play hiding a naive realism so typical of analytical philosophy and all too many

<footnote n="144">¹⁴⁴ Philosophical rigor has always been the downfall of metaphysics and a path toward openness. As much as (not only) philosophers keep mistaking their own imaginaires for reality, as well as misperceiving the effect of philosophy in the intellectual practices of humans and institutions (the remnants of theology in all sciences are still with us), at times it happens that thought goes on not being held in check by any kind of preconceived image. Spinoza, the prince of philosophers, comes to mind.</footnote>
research paradigms, even those that nominally draw on the same (meta)theoretical tools as I do. I do not care to investigate the history of translations between Thai, English or other languages to trace the reason for the common use of ‘ceremony’ and the lack of the use of ‘ritual.’ I am interested in how ceremony might be alternatively defined here and what this definition does when taking on the world. A recent Thai research paper, which as far as I can tell is neither intentionally Buddhist nor Thai, but presents a ritual theory as universal as any other only from a Thai Buddhist positioning, enacts an immediate displacement: “Rite or ritual, rendered into Thai word as ‘Bidhikamma,’ means a ceremony. This word ‘Bidhikamma’ means religious worships or forms practiced.” (Choosukhserm et al. 2021, 61) So straightforward are the equivalences, as to almost seem comical for a ritual studies scholar. And surprising given the non-use in daily Thai anglophone life. Not only is no difference between the three words made, equivalence is explicitly posted. Throughout the piece the words are treated interchangeably (that is both are used). Importantly, bidhikamma or พิธีกรรม is composed of two parts bidhi or พิธี and kamma or กรรม. Bidhi is commonly translated as form, ceremony, formality or observance, not as ritual, and can compound with other words to create ceremonial meanings, including wedding, house warming, ordination, graduation, water sprinkling, baptism and many others. And kamma, pronounced kam in Thai, translates as action, act or deed, that is karma in the Buddhist sense, not the one common in the Western cultural subconscious: “Kamma is a Pali word meaning action. In its general sense Kamma means all good and bad actions. It covers all kinds of intentional actions whether mental, verbal or physical thought, words and deeds. Whatever you do with your limbs is physical action. Verbal action means the words that you utter. Mental action means the thoughts that occur in your mind. In its ultimate sense Kamma means all moral and immoral volition.” (Vati et al. 2018, 162) That renders bidhikamma into something else than mere formality, repetition of already instated patterns. For actions beget other actions and were themselves conditioned by previous ones. Still, material conditions must be right, must be there, for sensing to occur. Like with acts and their (longterm) fruition, that happens in appropriate conditions. Sense organ and corresponding material flow as thereness. The coming together of internal and external forms is nāmarūpa. In case something doesn't fit in an experience, that's a matter to investigate. In interviews I conducted, participants referred to karma as acts and their consequences. This seems a part of Thai ways of doing the world. From a complex Buddhist position, the everyday conception of kamma necessarily overlooks complexities, is an ad hoc variant for laypeople. Regardless, it makes for a different world. I know my world changed when I began thinking and acting in kammic terms, regardless of my beliefs in their
truth-content. I became more aware of acts, their causes and consequences, deconstructed my self, my body into smaller parts, awareness of connections and being conditioned complexified and that of unity and givenness receded. As discontent, *dukkha* came to be part of everyday explanations, the perceived deeds and misdeeds of others came to be experienced more as a result of the difficulty of living without awareness and the feeling of personal offense disappeared entirely. Almost as if compassion, *karuṇā* was the logical effect of making Buddhist kammic worlding actively real in life.

What we have here, is a partial overlap of definitions. What is seen, what appears is and isn't the same. As with the rabbit/duck image, except there the overlap is full but different. Or with the irreducibility of the images constructed in *Krabi, 2562* (Suwichakornpong & Rivers 2019) to this or that ontology. One must keep in mind that when thinking (in) Buddhist worlds, nothing is simply disconnected and self-contained. A ritual or any act does not secondarily enter into exchange with other acts. All acts are in some ways transformations and continuations of previous ones. Under certain auspicious conditions like buddha-fields, certain acts take on a stronger force. Acts, or at least correct ones according to Buddhist practice, come to be something else entirely compared to worlds that continue to inadvertently ontologize a primary neutrality the moment they inscribe ritual or ritualization as dualistically special.<fnref n="145" /> Here, all is always already entangled and entangling, a separation between inside and outside ritual must be established elsewhere. The authors of the article continue. “Bidhikamma means ritual action that completes the wanted result or ritual action that leads the wanted action. It is the mutual activity of the community, the tool that trained self-control or the basis to develop other virtues such as training the body and speech to be in self-control which causes the happiness to happen in that society.” (Choosukhserm et al. 2021, 61–2) I want to slow down here and enter this definition. One that really introduces a new element compared to common ones found in research.<fnref n="146" /> Well, more than one element, in fact. In the first sentence, a formal definition, for it is not

<footnote n="145">145 The separation has been deconstructed by Hollywood (2002), however, as she is following the Anglosphere humanities reception of Derrida, Butler, etc. line of thought, then explores Bourdieu and Bell, with their slightly different approaches. The author arrives at an unacknowledged impasse, as no larger or positive conclusion is being proposed, for in the end her writing inadvertently posits some reality or world preexisting performativity. World as such haunts her. One that exists and is not in the process of being composed. Rather it must forever remain outside, in good Derridean fashion.</footnote>

<footnote n="146">146 In a dictionary definition of ceremony and rite, one might notice the multiplicity of the term and how a specifically Euro-Christian history is being actualized:
> “Ceremony (or ‘ceremonial’ as noun). 1. Following conventional Roman Catholic usage, the actions of worship as opposed to its words, which are referred to as ‘ritual.’ 2. Following Victor Turner, rituals that confirm rather than transform. 3. Following Berard Haile (in the study of Navaho religion), religious rituals. 4. Following Ronald Grimes, the legally or politically significant layer of a ritual.” (Grimes 2014, 339)</footnote>

<footnote>“Rite. 1. In liturgics, sometimes used to designate the words sung or spoken in worship as distinct from ceremonial,</footnote>
stated what the wanted result or action would be. So in fact any act that fulfills its purpose fits,
assuming from the previous part that it is tied to something so-called religious, which, in a typical way
to scientific definitions acts as an external grounding. One that is simply assumed but never explained.
Look, there, I see a ritual! Like hailing a ritual into existence. Everywhere but in the secular world of
the Moderns. Researchers typically, almost parodically can point to one but not actually 'purely'
formally conceptualize one, much like with the concept of religion. This has been taken apart,
deconstructed thoroughly and repeatedly before. Theories of ritual, much like all other definitions
cannot be entirely consistent, they must refer to something outside in order to stay limited to the field
of so-called religion as thing out there. As such they are metaphysical objects that propagate the
implicit ontology of their makers, without them ever being able to describe a ritual without resorting to
contingent externalities. When this is deconstructed, we move to a world of ritualization, where the
difference between ritual and non-ritual becomes blurred. (Hollywood 2002) It remains fascinating to
unearth the images operationalized by various thinkers in their definitions and deployment of concepts.
Those lucky enough working on so-called Asian worlds and with some sensibility to cracks appearing
in the ideological edifice of modern categories are fast faced with the dilemma of either keeping the
theory (modern image of the world) and throwing out the world (empirics), or the other way around.
Luckily, there are alternatives to such dualisms, other conceptualizations of worlds, of relation between
world and representation, outside of the demands of all or nothing. If one were to continue down this
path, it could lead to a pragmatic experimentalism: since there is no simple way to distinguish ritual
from non-ritual without resorting to some kind of common sense essentialism, which itself is
constructed and contingent, why not see what happens when we apply a formal definition of ritual (we
happen to employ at the moment) to random externalities beyond that of ideological common sense? I
am getting ahead of myself, the powerful lure of speculation. I wrote earlier about slowing down. The
next sentence, somewhat predictably and in line with most automatic movements of research on ritual
introduces community, a concept-image that faces the same constrictions as any other, as per what was
explained above.<fnref n="147" />

It is in the second part only of the article that uncommon elements are introduced. They are

<footnote>what is done. 2. Also used in liturgics to designate one of the seven Christian liturgical 'families,' e.g., the Roman rite, the Byzantine rite, the Gallic rite. 3. Following Ronald Grimes, a specific enactment in a specific place and time, synonym for 'a ritual.'" (Ibid., 343)</footnote>

<footnote n="147">¹⁴⁷ Take note that the community here ontologically precedes ritual, the way it is phrased. While I would, in this context maintain, that the two co-constitute each other.</footnote>
immediately Buddhist and tied to that tradition's 'virtues,' considered as "a tool that trained self-control" and a basis for developing "other virtues such as training the body and speech to be in self-control." (Choosukhserm et al. 2021, 61-2) Which, importantly, are also verifiable means to cause happiness.<fnref n="148" /> The world made here is definitely one that differs from the Christian-Secular universe stubbornly actualized in Western research on ritual. It does not pretend neutrality, at least not from the position I find myself in. Even formalized actions lead to something, or at least ought to – the issue of whether ritual is or isn't effective (with special focus on meaning and belief), so long a point of contestation in the very Protestant history of religious and other such studies (and the related general pretension of textuality organized around one truth principal as a neutral ground for science), isn't an issue. Action after all begets action. The distinctions to be made would be between kinds of effects on what kinds of bodies. Hence the Buddha or other awakened beings teach differently to different audiences, and suttas feature context dependent solutions. Causes and effects are intertwined, albeit not in obvious surface level ways as in the commonly naturalized Cartesian mechanism of (post-)Enlightenment Western ways.<fnref n="149" /> It is a combination of effects on a singular body, in terms of training to self-control and the common good of happiness. Some effects, entangled in magical materialities, can be unlinked and taken elsewhere – a pocket of felicitous conditioning, as with the *sai sin*, cut and redistributed. Some have asserted its effectiveness in interviews, even while expressing skepticism as to common explanations of its mechanism. Ritual here then as something that acts in between, so to speak, directly forming private corporeal habits that lead to more incorporeal social effects. As mentioned above, chanting effectuates all manners of bodies, whether biological or social or other. While the criterion of happiness (whether or not defined in a Buddhist manner) is rather free and open to interpretation, it does introduce an element that will not make each and any 'ritual' (classified according to Western common sense) pass the bar. The focus and the general approach echoes throughout my encounters with Thais, who keep talking about how all religions are fine as they promote social well-being and good behavior. There are merely different traditions in different parts of the world.

"So, Bidhikamma is an activity, culture, tradition, and behavior that human beings supposed it *up by intention* according to their beliefs, has its steps in clear communication and action to attain the

<footnote n="148">¹⁴⁸ Self-control comes to be a different thing in this world of no-self to that of Christian-derived conceptions an Occidental reader might habitually fill in. It appears that modulation is a more fitting word than control, the latter of which implies a top-down consciousness first conception, the former one of constantly shifting milieu of a self devoid of essence.</footnote>

<footnote n="149">¹⁴⁹ For a summary, see Kalupahana (1975), 54–60.</footnote>
hope, happiness, abundance, rich, safety and other *objectives that one expected*. Bidhikamma is a way to create the fundamental discipline, support spiritual power to live together, living one's life and the beginning point to develop other virtues high by the principle of Bidhikamma in that religion." (Ibid. 62, my emphasis) A further, very Buddhist element is introduced – that of intention. Intention is conceived as *cetanā*. "The one that prompts these three actions is nothing but the mental concomitant, *cetanā-cetasika* that occurs in the mind of beings. *Cetanā* impels you to perform a certain deed because *Cetanā* is responsible for the completion of every Kamma action." (Vati et al. 2018, 162) It is intention, *cetanā*, that is also called action, kamma. (Klima 2002, 275) In Buddhist thought, and this was also something expressed in interviews (without necessarily linking it to Buddhist teachings), thought is action and intention matters. In general, in Buddhist teachings, there are three types of action – bodily, verbal, and mental. It is part of the Noble Eightfold Path.<sup>150</sup> Now, obviously, Buddhadharma considers a different set of intentions as right or correct or good than other teachings (if we follow the conceptions of other 'religions' as teachings). So this definition here is very much in a secular vein – except that it demonstrates that there is no such thing as a neutral secularism (which most certainly is not the secularism of individual containedness and neutral public space), in fact, there would be multiple ones. Ritual activity has to lead to objectives one expected (or was promised by the rite) – this is a personal effect of an activity that also has other, social effects. It is multiple. It is a formal definition, where this or that so-called religion comes to be plugged in with which the disciplines, virtues and personal goals will change. It leaves space for its outside. The concept of religion here too is left unexamined, and presumably, given the previous phrasings, it would be a system of virtues that enhance happiness and make communal living easier. Perhaps coordinate disparate interests and preferences that appear because everyone is different.

The high pervasive insistence of ‘feeling good’ and ‘doing good’ by those encountered in fieldwork, regardless of their ‘religious affiliation,’ points toward strong permeation of Buddhist ethics in these worlds.<sup>151</sup> Analogously to how Christian manners of thought and aesthetics operate in so-called secular Europe. Worlds differ not because humans are different, humans are different because all manners of elements constitute worlds, and certain patterns emerge based on complex movements of

<footnote n="150"><sup>150</sup> The Eightfold Path consists of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. For elaboration, see Finnigan (2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="151"><sup>151</sup> This implies neither that ‘feeling good’ is only a Buddhist concern, nor that ‘feeling’ and ‘doing’ and ‘good’ are self-same anywhere. The ‘Buddhist’ proposed here is a framework constructed via a combination of empirical inquiry, Buddhist and Western theory, so as to make other possible worlds appear where commonly only givenness might be projected as being there.</footnote>
the past conditioning futures, that in turn shape pasts. So what if I were to use this definition, with its
‘Buddhist’ framing? Many otherwise self-evident rites would not pass the bar, while on another level of
analysis, even solitary actions would fulfill it – most certainly when other media are employed to
enhance meditation or focusing or other such practices. This conception of ritual cuts across established
divisions and points to other possible worlds. In one of the few texts on the problem of ritual in
Buddhist tradition (Sharf 2009) many important and astute observations are made when it comes to
distinguishing individual and communal action. While the latter in general is a commonly assumed
presupposition for ritual, the former because the individual is just assumed to be and is rarely tied to
anything ‘self-evidently’ religious are usually left out of consideration. (Cf. Bielefeld 2009)

And while there are literally dozens of indigenous Asian terms for different varieties of
Buddhist ceremonies and rites, and many more terms referring to stages on the path, there
is no precise Asian Buddhist analogue to our distinction between ritual and meditation.
From the perspective of Buddhist epistemology, the distinction itself is suspect:
traditional Buddhist exegesis holds that all cognition, including exalted “meditative states
of consciousness,” is mediated and contingent, since consciousness of any sort arises in
codependence with its object. The inner/outer, subject/object dichotomies that underlie
our distinction between ritual and meditation might seem to be confuted by indigenous
analysis of Buddhist practice. (Sharf 2009, 260)

While I will engage the meditation/mediation tension in a future chapter, the issue is worth mentioning
here, because what is put into crisis when engaging Buddhist worlds, given auspicious conditions for
such awareness to arise, are separations themselves. Both as they would be (as if ontologically) outside
of perception, through the fitting organ of perception, and as that (as if epistemologically) which ones
gets to experience and think. And among these are the no longer self-evident nor self-positing
separations between individual and society, action and thought, inside and outside. In short, there is
nothing that wouldn't be contingent in a Buddhist world (if one were to be consequent), except for
dhamma as a cosmic or 'natural' law<fnref n="152" /> – so one cannot treat actions seemingly (for the Western
observer) pertaining to the individual and those that are social separately. In a similar manner, because
such worlds turn around effects and not essences, one comes to understand that all research organized

<footnote n="152">¹⁵² This makes for a different ‘Nature,’ of course.</footnote>
around questions as ‘what is (a ritual)’ to be very much the effect of one particular history of thought and the ontological propositions in its tow. It is not and does not have to be the only one.

Thought continually moves away from the realist image with its muddled Christian metaphysics of an always already finished world with transcendence lurking everywhere. Rarely is it left to wander though, as countless bodies labor to keep it at bay. Not least in the practice of most sciences and their literary production that continue to pretend that language and the generated truth are somehow beyond history and at the same time universal and same. Even as the theory employed nominally acknowledges contingency or directly offers alternative infrastructures and practices of thought. Reading countless Buddhist suttas, though arguably it is more common in those associated with Mahāyāna, one enters a world where writings announce their own performativity: “In Buddhist societies, canonical texts are considered to be intrinsically potent, as if imbued with the power of the Buddha’s speech. Specific texts express an awareness of their own protective power and speak about this explicitly [...]” (Shulman 2019, 216) – something curiously often ignored by research on Buddhadharma. In other words: the edifice of Buddhism, an actualization of Western metaphysics. The horrifying destructive power of obsession with truth and essence as organized by the One can but lead to exclusion of that which is deemed unfit, disrupting. The problem for any metastable system is how to enable flows between its outside and inside without dispersing, how to adapt to new circumstances, or even be able to acknowledge them, without disassembling into flux or other more stable entities. Buddhist teachings cut right across seemingly ontological categories and have varied histories of articulating such manners, albeit with unexpected tools (linguistic or not) that can transform entire edifices of thought, practice and infrastructuring.

In order to give force to other thought, to not contain it in some fantasy of ineffective culture (while conveniently only leaving the Western tradition to keep not just positing, but defining Nature and Reality), such other formulations of common concepts such as ritual must be fashioned in new ways, based on complex and equal encounters, and given their own proper power. (Cf. Jensen & Morita 2012) Buddhist traditions are undoubtedly in countless ways much more than what is drawn on here.<fnref n="153" /> Everything connects, without fitting directly like pieces of a puzzle. Rather, like machines the insides

<footnote n="153">153 I am not denying the hierarchies that are part of the tradition in different ways and cosmologies that go with it, that offer splendid tools for building empires. The argument relates to the establishment of borders, to treating inside and outside, to eternalizing differences and hierarchies.</footnote>
of which are visible. There's always friction in machines, as heterogeneous elements align to have an
effect. The conception of sound and of *bidhikamma* are not easily separated. Feeling good and doing
good, or rather being conducive to these two effects in the connecting bodies, are basic operations of
both. Good is here aligned with happy, content, of positive intent, and all those actions that support the
attainment of such states in others. Activities conducive to such states are of importance, and these need
not be dependent on the humanity as an entity. When connected, further elements must be thought
through. Adapted, changed. These are no mere metaphors, the world changes when other thought
combines. Hence it is such a challenge to do such research that doesn't just project a convention, a
definition from above, pretending the world just fits, cutting off what doesn't without an afterthought. A
world constantly composing, in a text and outside. In chanting, the very way it came to be, already
effectuates conditions for felicitous intentions etc., making the ceremony more effective. As to where
anything starts and anything ends, it's perhaps a wrongly posed question: the application of concepts
does something and each inquiry will enact a different cut.

When a tree falls, does it make a sound? Theravāda Buddhist tradition permutes this,
categories are destabilized, settled reality unsettles: when a tree falls next to a body, but the body is
unconscious, does hearing occur? “Without viññāṇa, there can be no occurrence of phenomena, that is,
they are not there, such as when an unconscious person is kicked. In that case there is the sense object
(a boot), the sense organ (the nerve receptors in the body), but no viññāṇa (no consciousness, no actual
there-is-ness).” (Klima 2002, 214) A no resounds through the ages, as phenomena appear only when
consciousness appears. These appearances are related. In fact, the meaning of to appear transforms.
Meanwhile, the tradition offers practical tools and spaces to hack regular consciousness and disengage
from the pressures of the common condition. That is, now, attention can turn to meditation and how it
changes with the emergence of cinema, or other new technologies to do and think. As for this
anthropologist body, once chanting ceases, it moves on elsewhere. It never even entered the situation
with the appropriately auspicious intentions. Yet, it was transformed. It felt joy, tranquil elation and
positivity for a while at least. The conditions for connecting to what some interviewees said about their
reasons for going to temples and at times even attending events. It creates positive feelings and helps to
focus. Regardless of how much one is invested in the soteriology of it all.
14. Historical Images, Transforming Encounters

The anthropologist multiplies. He becomes archaeologist, unearthing a layer of first contact, where neither Siam not Buddhism were yet a solid construction in the Western practice of culture, or even present at all. As some show on material from other, distant parts of the world, but connected through the network of Jesuit activities, there was a time when neither culture nor religion were stable conceptual or even separate entities. (Viveiros de Castro 2011a) What connects all the varied activities at the borders of a world accepted as known and knowable, was the problem of how to intellectually articulate the encounter with the new and unknown. This is what puts Jesuit efforts into direct conversation with those of the anthropological endeavor. And, unlike sailors and other such bodies mingling with otherness, Jesuits were eager to write things down in their efforts to understand in order to convert and their systematic solidification of long-distance networks of stabilized knowledge. (Harris 1996) This was long before any literary realism was developed. Long before any of the scientific conventions that have been overturned countless times even appeared. How does one engage such a world?

The basic operation remains the same, only effectuated with different material: to construct and explore images of encounters and otherness in a generative way. The sources for such construction are necessarily varied, though details will be dominantly drawn from two French travelers' writings, both of which arrived in Siam as part of embassies. The Jesuit Guy Tachard (1651–1712) traveled with the embassy in 1685 and in 1687, the latter being led by Simon de la Loubère, a diplomat and mathematician. Their travelogues serve as primary sources. These I conceive as primary not because they were there, for the same (if not more) challenges as with anthropological being-there and source interpretations appear, but rather thanks to the difference their writings bring into the contemporary world, as they followed other customs, perceptions, conventions. With every text read, if habitually treated as representational of a past that was there before the text, one fills in the gaps with conventions simply assumed to be true by way of habit, however much they change through time. Secondary sources provide analogous supplements in mobilizing contemporary concepts, imaginaries and techniques, for no text is ever full. It always connects to an outside, often through the body of the reader and its habits and surroundings. The way primary sources are employed here is to amplify difference in the fashioning of ‘otherworlds,’ both as the worlds the two travelers encountered as
filtered through their conventions and as those a reader enters here. This implies the taking seriously of
what is written, even if it appears orientalist. Not as in: this is what the Frenchmen really saw. It's about
trying to construct a world where what they wrote down would make sense, a world that works
differently. A combination then of the methodological proposition of the ontological turn (taking
seriously) and the speculative turn (what if the world were different). As for dealing with sources in
general and creating a historical backdrop for the problems explored that does not merely reiterate
conventional orientalist tropes masked as historical realism, it is pertinent to think and write with
Donna Haraway's (1988) concept of *situated knowledges*, an affirmation of the partiality of knowledge
given one's historicity. Objectivity is not acceding to a view from nowhere, the God's eye, that is
impossible as is, even as an ideal-type orientation for the eventual accumulation of all knowledge,
rather objectivity rests in acknowledging limits and conditions. Instead of projecting one's own position
onto the world, it enables the transformation of this position through encounters with what is new or
other for that situation.

It becomes evident from their writings, that there are connections to be made between the two
and an anthropologist, or even this researcher body specifically. If, with Wagner (1980), the figure of
the anthropologist is somebody who in trying to understand a relationally constituted ‘other,’ has to
invent ‘culture’ to accommodate this difference thereby enacting newness within one's own
conventions, then the writings of those two envoys definitely fit into the anthropological category.
What differs is the world, the background against which they innovate, for the world has after all
changed, as a whole and for the specific conditions of anthropological encounter specifically, the
concept of culture has appeared and become stabilized. The mediating relation of accounting for the
other in terms of the same in a way that exceeds reduction and enables some transformation is
paralleled. Reading the travelogues, one senses that some encounters really fractured the Frenchmen's
certainties and they did not just dismiss, but had to think, to create to accommodate what they
encountered.

Thus, I treat these two 17th century figures as (proto-)anthropologists who in their encounters
with what was for them unknown, save for imagery and concepts drawn from earlier, often rather
fantastical accounts, reformulate their own cultural conventions in acts of counter-invention. In this
they contrast with quite of few other earlier travelers, mostly missionaries, who were nothing but
dismissive of anything they encountered. (van der Cruysse 1992) There had of course been images,
narratives of the ‘outside,’ of what today is stably established as the so-called Far East and elsewhere,
much of it sourced from Ancient writings and imaginations, but by virtue of being present in the
cultural field, these were not actually images of an outside. (Cf. Phillips 2013) One ought to rather treat
these as interior to the world, at once projecting outward and protecting from that otherness which
could disintegrate what seems stable and given. The ‘other’ of (Medieval) Latin *Christianitas*, or more
precisely, of the self-image of *Christianitas*, as otherwise one would imply a unity within Europe that
was not.<fnref n="154" /> What I here term the ‘outside’ is in a sense doubled, as it is both the practical-material
outside of the concrete experiences of most people whose contact with (not only) the Far East was
mediated by chains of exchange, and the imageric-conceptual outside of cultural representations of the
world or cosmos as constructed in elite and popular circles of the colonial powers to be. The age of
concern here was one where practical contacts with that ‘outside,’ due to intensifying direct trade,
colonial ambitions (of direct control and exploitation) and other contacts made it necessary to
reformulate the latter, make it part of the cosmos in a way that transformed its basic constituents,
leading up to the foundations of modernity that seem all too eternal to many today. An outside that is so
forceful in its difference combined with economic and political power, perhaps even the sheer awe it
evokes in travelers, that it cannot just be translated away into variations of existing conventions. In
other words, images of the other become heavier, they are thicker with information and detail. They
resist. All images as conceived here would always be *partial images* as compared to a more common
usage of the word. (Maniglier & Zabunyan 2011) With the sensory richness of images in difference to
textual encounters or hearing stories, less is being filled in through the habitual memories sourced from
other senses. A more resistant otherness, like with complex iconicity of the (cinematic) image that
overflows with concrete information and is at the same time more open to interpretation due to its
conceptual openness. (Taylor 1996) The feedback loops connecting bodies, memories and encounters,
inside and outside attain greater complexity. It is because of the conceptual openness and informational
overflow that noticing the elements I work with here is so challenging. This does not mean that they

<footnote n="154">154 It is further notable that what counted as most alien in the imagination of Christian writers shifted through the Middle Ages. The European North and Northeast continued to be associated as kingdoms of the other, of evil even after Christianization. This was in continuation of a general Roman cosmographic frame, thought details differed greatly, as well as the Bible. (Fraesdorff 2002) The changes to such codification also connect to emerging technologies: “With the increasing practical use of the magnetic compass during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, the cardinal direction north came to be representative not of the presence of evil, but of locatability.” (Akbari 2009, 49) The Orient meanwhile, as a direction, was the location of earthly paradise, with maps being oriented with the East at the top. It was the early direct contact with various Orients by Occidental-Christian travelers and the narratives and imagery they brought with that also contributed to transforming the cosmo-geographic framework of the Middle Ages. (Ibid., 11ff.)</footnote>
cannot be discerned and connected to other research concerns. What is certain, is that research habits honed solely on textual grounds make bodies blind to all of this.

Such cosmological transformation is traceable in the changing representations of the world as Europe passed from what came to be conventionally termed the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and beyond. (Rubiés 2017) The activity is nevertheless specific, in that this sort of invention is not a universal. All natural history, for there is no simple line dividing nature and history, is transformation of forms, all happening locally, even as conventions appear to project forms originating from specific conditions universally, after certain worlds achieve hegemonic powers. Nevertheless none of these are fully consistent and always contain minoritarian otherness. New forms, infrastructures, concepts keep being formed, even without awareness of such process. Evolution is open-ended natureculture transformation. These travelers' creations are also noteworthy for the study of how capitalist modernism emerged, for they were active in the time when technologies to govern vastly different and distant lands and societies began to be formed.<fnref n="155" /> The global project was at its inception. Other empires, while not as immense as Western modernity as it was eventually formed, also necessarily had to have organizational technologies for governing immensely varied lands or seas. What differentiates this new formation is that it was conceptually organized by a universalism drawn from Christian tradition and its basis in essence, sameness, and the unchanging One.

The jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (2003) operationalized the word *nomos*, or rather, ‘second *nomos***’ for this specific formation, one that is closely related to Westphalian states as what we have today. (Legg 2011) Here I aim to trace the limits of the emerging modern universalism as rooted in a specifically Christian tradition which, though in the process of being formed and stabilized in the 16th and 17th centuries, reaches back to late Antiquity. (Buck-Morss 2007) This new territory, imagined and practiced as a plane where anything can be connected (with hierarchies being secondarily imposed and often unacknowledged by the original proposition of sameness) could only appear after the arrival of Christians in what came to be known as the Americas, which conditioned a radical change in how the world could be thought and made.<fnref n="156" /> The Schmittian *nomos* is a world where European powers imagined and eventually formed the world beyond their ‘internal’ lines, where laws and treaties

<footnote n="155">155 I use technologies as they are thought in STS. Technologies thus include both material and conceptual parts. For a discussion of technologies used for Western empires, see Law (1984).</footnote>

<footnote n="156">156 The violent Columbian exchange also led to immense biological migrations and interactions.</footnote>
were to be upheld. In this 'outside,' force and violence may be used freely and native territories are considered as free lands to be taken, much like treaties with other powers, including empires such as the Chinese, were not to be upheld. (Ruskola 2010) Of course, it helps to have nominal allegiance to God and Christianity, and with that to classify the others as unequal or even inhuman. When God or Truth or Humanity or any variation of such concepts takes precedence over actually existing relations, anything goes. While breaking treaties was hardly unknown in the world, many of those outside did not expect whites to continually break their own treaties – whenever they felt more powerful than others. (Allen 2000) It would seem as treaties were made in bad faith from the start. As some like to point out, the Americas would not have been colonized if locals wouldn't have helped whites, if they treated Christians the same way these treated the indigenous the moment they felt strong enough to prevail. While in the Americas (after the early toppling of extensive empires), passing through God or Christianity all local lands were systematically appropriated by the settler colonial system (Bauman 2009), in Asia where strong, recognizable and above all large and powerful state formations existed, direct land grabbing was more difficult, so it was through legal means and manipulative wars that a restructuration of material worlds occurred over centuries in order to extend Empire and make all value flow in one direction with giving little back. (Pitts 2012, Belmessous 2015) (Pauline) Christianity is a nifty little thing, it ties you to God and not to the world around you. You come to speak in forked tongues, separating categories so as to never have to always be able to pretend to uphold own moral standards with regards to humans while at the same continually breaking them. Always alternating about claims of what there really is in the world, yet definitely always denying the realities of others. (Latour 1991) If only white Empire could be more Nietzschean instead of taking centuries to build a complex system of lies in order to protect a Christian moral self-image rooted in ressentiment. Undoubtedly, as world-building is highly complex and enmeshed, to be able to perceive this reality one is made into from a displaced position and through that as neither given nor necessary does not come easy. It can begin with an openness to other images and images of oneself through the other. Endless accumulation of data and experimenting with ways of connecting it is necessary for alternative worlds (from which to see the radical contingency of the one onto-socialized in) to emerge. All worlds must be practiced into existence, regardless of however much they are already here.

Images connect, layer, collide, metamorphose, even exclude. It is crucial to put next to each other scenes from varied corners of the world, to evade bringing it all back to some unarticulated, yet
always assumed European neutral reality as the ground. The text will be thinking Siamese-French encounters and the figure of the anthropologist through a couple of variations without hierarchy. Ayutthaya is a focal point, a contraction, not a privileged site for such explorations in general. Each scene is a staging of comparisons and uncertainties in terms of what exactly it is that is encountered, of European observers attempting to create a framing so as to understand irreducible difference encountered in a manner that it talks back to them. A seeing oneself in the work of the other, staring back in a way that displaces certainty. An outside as other possibility of world is acknowledged, however begrudgingly. Here, these sites are put into communication by being put next to each other. Jesuits, whether or not as part of diplomatic missions, were among the first to establish and uphold long-distance networks along which information, as well as goods, could travel in relatively stabilized forms as sort of proto-corporations as well as conditions for modern science to emerge. (Law 1984; Harris 1996, 1998, 2005; Wu 2017) It is the establishment of such networks that rendered it possible to stage comparisons between scenes set apart in time and space such as here. It is the establishment of such networks that is a condition for the project of (modern) anthropology as it came to be.

It is not just networks that establish connections here, the figure of the (proto-)anthropologist reappears in variations throughout. The scenes sourced from different parts of the globe will serve as imageric-conceptual backgrounds for the further discussions against which new elements in the writings of Western-Siamese encounters will appear. This is the contraction mentioned above – in focusing on scenes composed of an Ayutthaya long gone while organizing other images and concepts as that through which patterns appear. Ayutthaya constructed from these old travel writings as a focal point. And that which can therefore be perceived, can then be stabilized and used in other contexts. Nothing is self-same, all appears different based on the webs of images and concepts into which it is enmeshed. One and the same thing, say a statue of Jesus, is different for a European and for a Siamese. Of course there is an overlap, this is not to deny a connection, yet in a world focused on effects over essences, awareness arises that a complex connection and overlap should never be mistaken for identity.

A conscious comparison is indispensable to at least partly dethrone any implicit image of (European) neutrality we have habitualized with Christian realism. It matters what scenes we think other scenes with, or figures or matters or concepts. To be as explicit as possible: I don't take the two
sources (treated as primary) as ‘truthfully’ describing whatever they may have encountered, if this word
is taken in any referential sense. Such naive realism has been shown to be untenable by more authors
than could fit these pages, including the other chapters I composed. I take them to be ‘truthful’ in the
sense that I take them at their word, but their words here mean an extension and reformulation of their
own premises. To some extent and as a heuristic device I take it that they did their best, that they did
not consciously manipulate, that they were not aware of their own acts of constructivism. It is also in
this that they are treated as anthropologists, for, as discussed extensively in an earlier part, it is
necessary to leave awareness of one's own construction of the object of knowledge out-of-frame.
(Wagner 1980) Their knowledge is situated, and I make certain assumptions about the situation through
which I understand it. The fact that knowledge is situated still leaves many versions of the situation,
many frameworks through which the situation can appear. I further take them to think in a strong sense,
for the event of encountering something that was hitherto external to their world made it necessary to
extend and reformulate what would have previously appeared as incontestable. Real encounters are
events, they shock, disturb, make aware that worlds are not set in stone. The creation of new conceptual
tools to deal with such events becomes paramount. Guy Tachard (1688) and Simon de la Loubère
(1691) found themselves between worlds and became inventors (of culture).<fnref n="157" /> What they wrote is to be
taken as the emergence of a framework that is a transformation of previous Occidental-Christian
cosmological conventions. If one wants to get a whiff of other cosmological framings sourced in
related times and places, unsurprisingly Chinese sources are also available. (Reid 1988, 1993) The last
centuries were an intensification (not creation as modern myths would have it) of more direct contacts
between worlds leading to cosmological transformations so rapid they could be noticed, while before
they had been interlocking localities, or chains of markets. The increasing density of encounters with
concrete Otherness, by elites and commoners such as sailors, led to the reduction of more ‘fantastical’
accounts of Asia and other worlds.<fnref n="158" />

During the rainy season of 2228 of the modern Buddhist era<fnref n="159" /> Guy Tachard, more commonly

<footnote n="157">157 On the complex history of de la Loubère's writing, see Love (1994).</footnote>

<footnote n="158">¹⁵⁸ It is important to note that ship crews were composed of people of a wide variety of origins, mixing and mingling and communicating. (Mack 2013, 29) The most radical of such ad hoc communities only ever half controlled by state power came to be the pirates as studied by anarchist historians today. (Rediker 2004) Europeans have always had very multiple contacts with so-called Others, none of it can be reduced to the official stories of the landed powerful and their projections of identities to serve as the fictional basis of national states.</footnote>

<footnote n="159">¹⁵⁹ When referring to activities in Siam in this section, I will consistently use the modern Buddhist calendar, or rather the Thai solar calendar, which was itself based on the Burmese calendar and became the official version in 1888 CE. Other calendars, such as the lunar one, continue to be used for ritual events. The difference in years is 543 ahead of the</footnote>
known as Père (Father) Tachard, a Jesuit arrived, after a long and according to his writings somewhat arduous voyage in the river city of Ayutthaya, or as he and his French contemporaries called it, Siam. The city appears to have been unlike anything he had seen before, as his overt fascination with local customs and imagery found in his writing attests. The Jesuit Father had traveled far and wide, as far as the Caribbean to the West about eight years prior to this voyage. Indeed, recent research has made it evident that the institutional structures of the Jesuit empire ran parallel to the emerging 'East India Companies,' both of which have become precursors to our contemporaries, the global corporations. (Harris 1996) Father Tachard, on his second trip to Siam, two years later and one year prior to his first writings on Siam being published, was accompanied by a diplomat and mathematician, Simon de la Loubère, who later exchanged letters with Gottfried Leibniz about the famous 'Siamese method' for creating n-odd magic squares, on an expedition with the *Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales*. Today, the word 'Siam' commonly stands in for the whole of Thailand, a state entity that was yet to be formed, and adapting to a world where its reference differs is easily undercut by intellectual habit. Systematically enforcing the association of Siam with a historical Ayutthaya is impossible, as with other words employed here, we cannot but fill in gaps and references through our habits and bring a past closer to the present, always fabulating despite conscious efforts not to. Among the phenomena that received constant attention in Tachard's writings is the encompassing presence of water in the city, the adaptation of local ways of world-making to this water world, the combination of excessive ritualism and extreme pragmatism in the comportment of 'natives' and an uneasy relationship with the *talapoin*, the then common way to refer to Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia by Occidentals.<fnref n="160" /> Indeed, in the writings of de la Loubère similar preoccupations also keep appearing.

There are those that, basing their research on Chinese accounts of the polity demonstrates and contrary to previous theories of statehood that presuppose that all states formed in the same way based on land, the emergence of Ayutthaya occurred from the water, the sea, as a commercial center and not as an empire based on agricultural hinterlands. (Baker 2003) That is, it formed as a polity controlling the flow of goods, trade routes, supply sources only eventually becoming a territorial power. The city is

<footnote>Gregorian calendar. Any encounter between societies is also an encounter between different times. (Eade 1995)</footnote>

<footnote n="160">¹⁶⁰ According to the Collins dictionary, *talapoin* is a French version of the Portuguese *talapão*, in turn taken from the Mon *tīla puin*. The latter is composed of the Mon *tirlaa*', meaning Lord, and Pali *puñña*, meaning merit. A *talapoin* is then a Lord of Merit, or, the Buddha. Alternatively, it is a version of the Mon *tala pōi*, taken to merely mean Our Lord, which appears to me as a very Christian rendering of whatever these words might have meant. Here, I will not engage the implications of the possible convergence or identity of singular Buddhist monks with the Buddha. Suffice to note the central importance of merit.</footnote>
furthermore said to have been immediately urban, in an implicit criticism of the teleological
assumption that all societies develop from rural to urban, which gets projected onto the region. (Baker
& Phongpaichit 2017) Thus, the rural Siamese realities a hundred years ago would not have been any
primordial condition of a one directional development, but the effect of historical circumstances that
led to a ruralization. Southeast Asian territorial formations generally shared sovereignty over smaller
entities with other powers, and borders that were permeable. In this competitive environment political
success meant legitimatizing rule as an exceptional *cakkavattin* by gathering allies, which included
collaboration with the other powers such as the Dutch. (Winichakul 1998, 85–8, 233) When reading
about rulers in the region and how power was maintained, comparisons to Big Men, known from
anthropological accounts where exceptional humans through charisma and talent concentrate wealth
and power only for it to fall apart at their deaths, seem obvious, except already meshing in combination
with Hindu-Buddhist state technologies that enable more stable foundations. It is indisputable that
territorial conceptions differed from the then emerging modern polities in Europe as described by
scholars such as Schmitt.

The multiplicity of worlds in the wider area is nicely expressed in the inscriptions left more than
two centuries earlier by the famous Muslim Chinese admiral Zheng He in Sri Lanka. They were “[a]
Chinese language record of his donation to a local Buddhist shrine, a Persian language recording of his
donation to the shrine of a Muslim saint, and a Tamil language record of his donation to a Hindu
temple.” (Hall 2010, 112) Traditions here do not operate as exclusive identities based on eternal truths,
rather in the ways the powerful sought to pay respects to many, to make use of all manners of
knowledge and backgrounds for governing purposes something else and far messier than the modern
concept of (homogeneous) culture is operationalized. The concept of culture, or rather the ontology
performed through and with Culture (as ontologically bounded category), has a very specific history
tied to its Christian realist one-world world origins and is in manifold ways connected to an exclusivity
that does not fit well with the ambivalent complexity of the worlds Siam was part of. When traditions
are not necessarily organized around truth and falsehood, inside and outside, or other conceptual
binaries, but rather around practices and participation, a different kind or realities is fashioned, with
other sets of challenges and conventions. How and what culture is one to assign to people that follow a
variety of practices and may change them according to the places they are in, as appears to have been
common among traders in the Indian Ocean? (Reid 1988, 1993) One where it appears that people were
often multi-lingual, as was the case in polities built on trade such as Siam. It is this world-making that I
try to engage here in a generative way so that the encounter may lead to some transformation in the cosmological framework habitually employed.

"We may, above all, think of these months and years on the road and at sea as a continuation of their training, when new skills were acquired and knowledge learnt back home was put to the trial of an unfamiliar and arduous setting for the first time." (Wu 2017, 60) The distinction between home and abroad, pragmatically considered, is one of continual transformation through experimentation, never a clear-cut binary. That distinction is a framing operationalized so as to ensure the stability of identity and with it allegiance, identification. An analogical procedure to what held together Jesuit networks and identity occurs with the anthropologist. "Jesuit missionaries navigated across different long-distance networks, and their work was accordingly oriented in various directions." (Wu 2017, 52) The world is vast and to build an archive of knowledge assistance from locals and access to existing infrastructures were and continue to be necessary. Such vastness and continuing transformation acts as a centripetal force. It's only from on high, living and thinking in and around the very centers of power that the becomings of the world appear self-evident and uninteresting. The very conditions most researchers live in appear to be what lends itself to idealist projection. For knowledge to be accumulated, things must be put into place that act centrifugally, to ensure bits and pieces will not disperse, and all will remain more or less mutually intelligible and compatible. The infrastructures that condition the possibility of exploration and comparison in the first place, whether established as more or less hegemonically unified (with notable exceptions) as today or as sets of varied networks as when early Jesuits and diplomats traveled, a possible object of study themselves, disappear from the common anthropological view, focused as it is on comparison and human activity rather than media-technological mediation. Here, images of encounters between worlds are focalized, and according cuts are made. The infrastructures established are what render the layering of and experimenting with images possible.

The scenes brought together move from Ancient Siam as the site from which the two travelers'
observations spring to three historical moments drawn from the work of more contemporary
researchers that treat the encounter of Europeans with another, how in these meetings borders were
reformed, and traditions enmeshed, and how these anthropologists draw radical possibilities for other
futures based on their studies. These three will be the encounter between Charles Darwin, his shipmates
and Fuegian Indigenous peoples as described by Michael Taussig (1993), the now legendary scenes at
the Caribbean beach between the indigenous and Spanish crusaders as found in Claude Levi-Strauss
and creatively dealt with by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2011a), and the
encounters between Chinese sages and Jesuits as drawn from the historical works of Jean Gernet
(1985) by Marshall Sahlins (1996). In these chapters, I will also focus on the very material differences
in the circumstances of these encounters and those of Tachard in Siam. Subsequently, I will turn to his
writings, and to a much lesser extent those of Simon de la Loubère, to see how the previous chapters
make it possible to read them in new ways. How a Christian cosmos came to perceive a Buddhist one,
and vice versa, all of which evolve and acquire new cosmological frameworks in the process. The
centering of scenes of encounters with other worlds and the destabilization of certainty that goes with it
is what brings this historical section squarely into the field of anthropological questioning and as such a
variation on the other chapters. Cinema thought enters in a variety of ways too, as is fairly obvious. I
would like to point out a method that recent transformations of cinephilia made appear that has
evocative resonances with what is fabricated here: each cinematic artifact as project can be taken as a
proposition of a world, of the (im)possible characters peopling it, of gestures and movements and types
of bodies, of actions and reactions, of what elements and politics and possibilities are there, and of how,
sometimes, the film stares back at the viewer, a moving point of view that can take on such force as to
dislocate the world of the observer. Texts can be fashioned analogously, especially when the organized
around idiosyncrasies and strangeness with a view toward expanding and complexifying circuits of
prehension instead of compartmentalizing into orientalist tropes.
15. Commercial Worlds of Water and Ritual

After the sacking of Ayutthaya by the armies of Pegu (in today's Burma) in 2310 most historical documents gathered up to that time in the kingdom were burnt. Thus, apart from inscriptions there are few local written sources from the past. These inscriptions do not pertain to the encounters with *farang*, the occidental foreigners, and are thus of limited use for the project here, namely to deal with the limits of cosmologies. Also, in order to reconstruct historical worlds, archaeology combined with foreign written sources, often Chinese but also European, have been among the most important. It is evident that images of the past are multiplicities. They are made up of parts of different provenience, held together by the very idea that there were unified scenes of the past, if only one can shed the cultural additions of the various sources. For now, I will follow this method.

So what is it that early occidental travelers noticed the most? By early I mean the first one's at
the cusp of the forming capitalist territory a hundred or more years prior to the sacking of Siam, from
which resulted a significant power shift toward Bangkok, which is a settlement mentioned in the
writings I will work with later. That is around 2200 of the modern Buddhist era. Such authors, often
using the genre of travel writing<fnref n="161" /> worked under different rules than today, where travel writing is at
best a diversion for the masses; however important a role it may play in the imagination of the world,
as opposed to anthropological writing (meaning, that travel writing is still quite evidently engaged in
the perpetuation of Western cosmology without any strongly differentiating encounter with the Other).
As for the genre in earlier times, “[t]he demand for truthfulness refers to the fact that in the early stage
of Enlightenment in Europe travel literature was not only regarded for fiction and light reading, but
also to be of great importance for the scientific knowledge of the world.” (Trakulhun 1995, 77) Into the
early 20th century of secularized Christian time, travelers<fnref n="162" /> repeatedly noted three motifs: the presence
of water, something they often considered to be excessive ritualism, and what we would today call
multi-culturalism, or at least something to appear as such.<fnref n="163" /> The first of these is certainly present in
today's academic imagination, as Southeast Asia is commonly considered to be a “world of water”

<footnote n="161">161 Historically linked to anthropological writing techniques and aesthetics. (Clifford, 1997)</footnote>

<footnote n="162">¹⁶² Apart from the two that I reference, e.g. Nicolas Gervaise, Duarte Barbosa, M. de Ribadeneyra. The accounts of Forest Monks, in the late 19th up to the mid 20th century, sourced mostly from Western travelers' writings by Kamala Tiyavanich (1997, 2004) are also full of such imagery, albeit without the massive rites, given the regional context far away from the centers of power.</footnote>

<footnote n="163">¹⁶³ Multi-culturalism has of course a Christian-Secular genealogy and definitely differs from what travelers encountered in Southeast Asia at least in that a neutral ground (hegemony) is assumed as natural and all other people's (assumed) practices and beliefs are cultural and secondary.</footnote>
(Boomgard 2007) and for example Chris Baker (2003) reads Siam against this background. As for the other two, the court ceremonial used today wasn't introduced until the time of King Rama IV (r. 1851–1868 CE). Earlier, the power of the monarch was constituted through an elaborate ritual that some consider to be more suited to a divinity than a mere human. (Terwiel 1991, 38) But then again, reality as experience is co-produced through ritual and one should not presuppose what a human is or can be. (Kapferer 2004) According to one European observer, “there has never been any court anywhere in the world more ritualistic than the court of the king of Siam.” (Trakulhun 1995, 78) Within this allegedly hyperritualistic framework, there was room for a wide variety of non-locals who entered this ritualized space through ritualized activities that formed part of a larger ceremonial system. These foreigners generally fit the category of ‘ambassador’ and were but a small subset of all those who had been living and trading in Siam. Apart from the many merchants and foreign enclaves in the city, non-locals were also found in ‘regular’ employments (a few Europeans, but also various Muslims and Chinese), as well as in the entertainments. (Tachard 1688, 185ff.) Given that at least some of the people living in the enclaves stayed for generations, it seems unfitting to use the concept of a foreigner, which naturalizes a world-view where locals belong solely to one ethnic group. While there did not appear to have been any attempt to fully change the foreign into the local, as in contemporary Western onto-political practice, this does not mean that locality is solely defined by ethnicity (itself hardly a universal concept). Rather, the number of foreigners in a space was considered a sign of wealth, of prestige. But what does this mean when linked with different cosmologies?

The discursive construction of a pre-modern cosmos as well as any other is always a fabulatory, not in the least as living a world and describing said world are already different things. This world is one where there would seemingly not have been any dominant signifier to organize and essentially subordinate varieties of life is all the more challenging, given how naturally modernist metaphysics come to most doing research.<fnref n="164" /> The Thai state slowly began participating in this modern world, when kings, informed by Western thought and technologies, started working on creating a history for the Thai ‘race.’ By all accounts the main reasons were so that the English, French and other colonial powers wouldn’t see the Thai state as uncivilized and could thus not conquer it with military power under the excuse of a ‘civilizing mission.’ Though this process originated in the 19th century of Christian-Secular time keeping, media archaeology has further made evident that the technology of photography played a

<footnote n="164">¹⁶⁴ The ritually elevated role of the monarch did quite evidently not serve to override difference or anchor the entirety of the symbolic system qua transcendental signifier.</footnote>
central role in another reinvention of royal power from the late 24th century of the Buddhist era onward, as photography made it possible for the King to be in every place at once, so to speak. (Morris 2009) Transformations abound, and unlike in the surrounding state formations, they did so with significant input of the local elites, as they too rearticulated their position in the new world. As to the material organization of real space, Western engineers hired by the powerful from the early 25th century onward began reorganizing space according to principles familiar to them: land is the basis from which to think and make reality, and land extends into water. The aim of public engineering is to subdue the water by eliminating its presence. Historians of science have shown that earlier, other cosmologies shaped such practices, namely those based on thinking with water. They coin it as a difference between terrestrial and amphibious ways of intervening in deltas. Land as a variation of water, and not water as a variation of land. (Jensen & Morita 2017) While, as a Thai friend of mine told me during my fieldwork in Bangkok, in her town of Nakhon Si Thammarat in the country's south, as well as other regions, people were still dominantly using waterways and not roads twenty to thirty years ago, at least the centers of power in Thailand had been extensively remade on this model during the past century. Unsurprisingly, nowadays, the whole of Southeast Asia is commonly subjected to large floods which are hard to deal with given this Euro-infrastructure, which may have made practical sense in low lying Holland but not in rainy and humid lowland Southeast Asia.<fnref n="165" />

These are just some of the radically altering reality processes that distance a contemporary from the realities encountered by and lived through by early visitors to the area. The world of Siam literally differed. I aim to use images provided by early travelers to organize the material I am working with. Not that I can take their claims fully at face value, but as I relate them to different methods that open up once the operations of Christian realism have been substituted, I hope to achieve a certain liberating alienation that brings the text somewhat closer to an affirmation of SF, science fiction, speculative fabulation. The practices of the sort of realism where the world is always already done and precedes any non/human activity are also already speculative, they entail cutting off some elements that don't find this kind of world-making. The practices of attention the ontological turn and media theories introduce make it possible to notice such operations and experiment with what could happen when non-Christian based conceptions of reality are plugged in. This I do because it ought to make it easier to

<footnote n="165">¹⁶⁵ The Dutch engineer Homan van der Heide was hired as an irrigation planner by the king Rama V and, being an engineer, in an eminently material way introduced an entirely different way of thinking water-land relations. (Morita & Jensen 2017)</footnote>
engage other conceptual worlds after that which appears to be immediately given in its objectivity has
been reconstituted in a way other than one is used to. As a further method of alienation, I quote
extensively from the ancient English translations of these old texts and keep their images and strange
linguistic conventions, without always pointing them out with a 'sic.' All too often practices of
translating previous versions of contemporary languages normativize (for the sake of convenience) a
linguistic reality that is anything but eternal. Second-order awareness of such difference and material-
semiotic encounter of it are not the same. Further, I am too much of a materialist to be content with a
mere engagement of conceptual worlds.<fnref n="166" /> I hope then that the early sections will implicitly lend greater
credulity to the more speculative work done by me and the two travelers in the last section. To organize
readers' perceptions I focus on some motifs found in Tachard's and de la Loubère's accounts. They are
intertwined and thus not clearly separable:

I.

"As he [the ambassador] went ashore, he was received by a great number of *Mandarins* drawn up in two ranks, having the Governor of *Bancok* and *Piplis* at the head of them, and he was conducted to the Lodging that had been prepared for him in the Town. The Streets through which he past were perfumed with *Aquila* which is a very precious wood, and of a rare smell." (Tachard 1688, 153) Indeed, such scenes of movement crossing the uncertain borders between two elements, this coming and going ashore is a very common image in his account. Processions with ships of various shapes and sizes are also recurring. Often these scenes are described in ways that stresses the presence of all kinds of personnel taking part in ritualized activity. Another thing to notice here are the perfumed streets. At least in Buddhist tradition, smells are an important part of technologies of life and are discussed in various suttas, in relation to humans and Buddhas. (Schopen 2015) This makes one think of how reality might have been experienced in places where such culture was influential in shaping materiality. Imagine walking through perfumed streets! Makes for a wholly different bodily experience. It reminds me of how pleasing it is to spend time in Thai malls to me, as opposed to any I've visited in the so-called West. A different world, one where other sets of values have ecological-aesthetic impacts.

Later, the author mentions a Siamese prince actively participating in a water ritual: “He was

<footnote n="166">¹⁶⁶ For a discussion between the more generatively materialist approach to the ontological turn by STS, as parallel to and extensive of the linguistic-conceptual approach most common in anthropology, see Gad et al. (2014).</footnote>
accustomed on that occasion heretofore, to do the Ceremony of cutting the Waters, that's to say, to strike the River with his Dagger at the time of the greatest inundation, and to command the Waters to retire: But this Prince having found by many years experience, that the Waters encreased sometimes, for all they were ordered to abate, hath left off that ridiculous Ceremony, and though it enough this year by going as in Triumph to the Pagod, to show the zeal he has for his Religion." (Tachard 1688: 187) And again we get elemental images with nigh Tarkovskian<fnref n="167" /> vibes: "About two Leagues from the Town upon a vast Plain covered with Water, and reaching out to fight, we met with a new Spectacle; and that was the Obsequies of a famous *Talapoin*, chief of the Religion of the *Peguins*. His Body was laid in a Coffin of Aromatic Wood. The Coffin was mounted upon a Funeral Pile, round which were four great Pillars of gilt Wood, which carried an high Pyramid of several Stories. This kind of burning Chappel was accompanied with several little pretty high and square Towers made of Wood, and covered with Pastboard very rudely painted, with a great many Paper Figures. All this was surrounded with an Enclosure built square, upon which several other Towers were placed at competent distances. Four of them were as high as the Pyramid in the middle, and stood in the four Corners [...]" (Ibid., 191) The olfactory sense makes its appearance once again, and what more, the *Peguins* hold an elaborate ceremony in the waters around Siam. This was not a space reserved for 'local' rituals only. One might even notice that this rite was very elaborate and materially expressive, not anything people would do if they had wanted to remain inconspicuous.

Inside the palaces, ceremonies were held too: "When the door of the Court is opened, the Ambassador appears prostrate with the Interpreters of his Nation, and the Gentleman who commonly serves on such occasions as Master of the Ceremonies. All together perform before his Majesty the *Zombaye*, which is a profound inclination of the Body; and then come creeping along upon hand and knees, till they come to the middle of the Court, then raising themselves thrice on their knees, with their hand joined upon their head, they bow down and knock their forehead as often against the ground. When that is done, they advance, creeping as before till they come to a pair of stairs betwixt the two Halls where the great Men are prostrate, and there having made the *Zombaye*, the Ambassador waits till the King do him the honour to Speak to him." (Ibid., 155) While our French traveler obsesses about excessive ritualization, it is important to note that royal encounters and international embassies were ritualized in France too at the time, though possibly to a lesser extent if viewed comparatively by a

<footnote n="167">¹⁶⁷ The Russian director Andrij Tarkovskij being famous for combing above all water and fire in the same images, with long takes and impossible spaces, with interiors dripping and fires burning while rain is pouring.</footnote>
Modern.<fnref n="168" /> On the following page Tachard describes the many mediating figures between the king and the audience. The system appears to take the form of chains of communication, which would not have been allowed to be broken, thus making the royal reality one of distance. He also mentions how commoners avert their eyes when royals enter common spaces. The material-semiotic organization of space and practice seems to have aimed at engendering a distance between commoner and royal. At the same time, there is a tension in this account. When royals or ambassadors arrive, it is an event for the people: “The Shouts that the Water-men made, according to the Custom of the *Siamese*, as if they had been going to charge an Enemy, brought Crowds of People to both sides of the River to be Spectators of that August Ceremony.” (Ibid., 162) Reading the account, one is not sure which of the parts it's composed of can be trusted, taken at face value even for speculative purposes, as this interplay between curious proximity and ritualized distance is never explained or elaborated.<fnref n="169" /> Other Europeans complained about these ceremonies, as they took them to interfere with their work, because the preparations for ceremonial and festive activities took a lot of time and human power, which organizations such as the Dutch East Asia company needed for its functioning. One can discern the distinction between a specific European capitalist utilitarianism and what stands in the way. This world then while commerce based was not capitalist. The profit motif and constant pressure of time or time as lack were something that was forming in Europe, but was and is not the only way to do business and shape the world. As scholars have shown, even in Europe it took much violence (especially against women and the poor, but also the aristocracy) and power-struggles for this cosmology to become really real. (Federici 2004) The violence operating in the Americas and other continents meanwhile has become general knowledge. Those who wrote about ‘other’ worlds, be it Siamese or not, did so from their partial perspectives and situatedness, whether Jesuit or merchant. As mentioned earlier, there would be some cosmological overlap between these two positions. Meanwhile the perception of the destitute lowly European sailor or the aristocrat, who rarely made it into these regions for obvious reasons, left fewer traces, which reminds us mostly to not universalize or even generalize onto European worlds the sources available. Rather it would be prudent to seek cracks in these merchant renderings of the worlds encountered. Joost Schouten, a member of the council of the Dutch East India

<footnote n="168">¹⁶⁸ The fact that European diplomacy was ceremonial, yet the ritualistic nature of Siamese diplomatic ceremony appears to be a source of differentiation for the authors smacks of Orientalism. Whites often have double vision, denouncing among others what they do themselves. For discussions of European ceremonial procedures of these times, see Roosen (1980) or Anderson (1993). For a critical account of the encounter between two differing ceremonial systems, see Havard (2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="169">¹⁶⁹ Perhaps strange, given there was no hereditary aristocracy and powerful families could fall to commoner status as easily as other could accede. Or perhaps precisely this proximity could link to such distance-creating ritualization.</footnote>
company, was a chronicler of local ceremonials as well as a chronic complainant: “[We] could not obtain any labourer because everyone accompanied the King on his voyage. This month [October or November] is the most inopportune period of the year when the nobles and the common people spend time on making offerings to gods and recreational trips so zealously and uselessly, as if their life and well-being depended on this.” (Quoted in Ruangsilp 2007, 83) The highly ritualized ways of European aristocrats of the time might have given rise to a different conception of this.

Ruangsilp (2007) in his work on Dutch merchants in Siam stresses that taking part in these ceremonies was productive of merit and thus important for locals' lives, reframing the issue of the relation between Buddhist cosmology and work/trade. Moreover, he mentions that others complained not about the use of material resources for court and other ceremonials, but about the greediness, and arrogance of Siamese and their exploitation of foreigners. This, and I will come back to it later, stands in marked contrast to what other Europeans, including our two Frenchmen, wrote about Siamese.

## II.

"Betwixt *Bancock* and *Siam*, you meet with a great many *Aldees* or Villages, that almost everywhere border the River. These Villages are no more than a great many Huts or Hovels raised upon high Pillars, because of the Inundation." (Tachard 1688, 146) Settler patterns are organized around waterways and yearly floods. One may also notice the pillar architecture prevalent into the mid- to late 20th century of our time.

The observer also noted: "The Kingdom is divided by many Rivers, and watered with frequent Rains, which for six Months of the year and more, overflow all the Countryside. That abounds in Rice, Fruits and Cattel. The Houses are commonly of Wood, and raised upon Pillars because of the Inundations, without any thing of the Grandeur or Regularity that is to be found in the Houses of Europe. The Chinese and Maures have built several pretty neat stone-houses in Siam." (Ibid., 265) Tachard was attentive to building styles and returns to the usefulness of wooden houses, as well as to the general minimalism in how the houses were furnished. Architectural styles and technologies were varied based on the origins of the builders. He notes how the local commoners spend lavishly on rituals
and (Buddhist) temples, but don't seem to own much in personal objectified wealth.<fnref n="170" /> (Ibid., 265, 306) Reading this, I am reminded of the practices in Bali described by Gregory Bateson (1972, 125): "There are very few Balinese who have the idea of steadily maximizing their wealth or property; these few are partly disliked and partly regarded as oddities. For the vast majority the 'saving of pennies' is done with a limited time perspective and a limited level of aspiration. They are saving until they have enough to spend largely on some ceremonial." After all, as mentioned, food grows with relatively little effort, and some researchers today point out that it was not until our 19th century that large parts of Thailand became agricultural, with the forests removed, whereas before it was a combination of making life off rivers, with some riziculture and a lot of commerce. (Baker & Phongpaichit 2017) One can see how Bateson's experiences of Bali around the middle of the past century could apply: "Essentially, we are dealing with an economy of plenty rather than an economy of scarcity. Some, indeed, are rated 'poor' by their fellows, but none of these poor are threatened by starvation, and the suggestion that human beings may actually starve in great Occidental cities was, to the Balinese, unutterably shocking." (Bateson 1972, 125) Commerce was important in the whole region, which was well connected with the whole known world at least since the times of the Romans. (Basa 1994–5, Hall 2010a) And, as argued by historians, there was never a reason to be afraid that commerce would end, as Southeast Asia lies at the crossroads of many trade routes. (Wolters 1999) It appears that local rulers only very exceptionally attempted to control the sea and any general maritime peace was not disturbed. It was only once Europeans, in recognition of this, started to control at times very distant parts militarily in order to bring trade under their control. These lands then cannot be thought of as closed and only recently opened, but rather the whole region was permeated through lines and connections. And if anything, it would have been more open, in some senses, than today. Among the lines that traversed the ocean were those of Buddhist teachings, which later became the foundation of modern Southeast Asian state ideology of unbroken transmission. (Blackburn 2015) Recent research further emphasizes the connection between trade and Buddhist monks' travels. (Tripati 2017) There was, as demonstrated by Baker (2003), no inside preceding an outside. At the same time, difference was not absorbed into one multicultural hodgepodge. Variety, differentiation was a part of this space. Asia was not a pre-contact zone, the difference that came about is the directness and amount of contacts with Europeans, as well as the new technologies developed in the West, including of course, governing technologies and modernist cosmotechnics of unified states and ethnicities with clear borders.

<footnote n="170">170 One might infer the relationship to a merit-making cosmos organized around *anattā* or no-self, insofar as personal property is necessarily organized around a self, while supporting a temple isn't.</footnote>
Engseng Ho (2004, 217) points out how other notions of space and sovereignty arrived with the modernizing Europeans in the Indian ocean: “In the fifteenth century, the Indian Ocean hosted a transregional network of peaceable trade and social exchange that was experienced by its diasporic natives as an extensive domestic realm. The transformation of that realm by the Portuguese, into an arena of military and commercial geo-strategy, was to give both religion and diaspora new meanings, in this first encounter of a Muslim transoceanic world with Western empires.” As stated by the Sultan of Makassar in today's Indonesia: “God has made the earth and the sea, and has divided the earth among men and made the sea common to all.” (Lockard 2010, 219) Though in contrast to Portuguese and Dutch expansion, early French policy was “connected rather with national interests. As a result, Gervaise intended to give a ‘complete knowledge of the habits and propensities’ for those, who ‘go there for the intention of settling there.’” (Trakulhun 1995, 78) Hall (2010a, 113) called this “poly-centric networked realm,” as there was no hierarchical or centralized trade structure.

Bodies played a role in establishing connections. In her overview of female sexuality and social position in the region in the times discussed here, Barbara Watson Andaya points out that sexual relations were often in the form of short-term marriages and were used to gather commercial allies, as she puts it, “to welcome traders in the community.” (Andaya 1998, 13) There was a continuum linking sex, gifts, and hospitality. Furthermore, it was women who controlled retail trade, so sexual unions were not only kinship alliances but also the establishing of paths to gain goods. If a woman had foreign partners, it was considered as desirable, positive and powerful, since that meant she would be able to do better business due to all the possible new relations she had access to. Such focus on relation-making with strangers naturally led to many ‘mestizo’ offspring and oftentimes easy assimilation or creation of new arrangements between the seamen (only exceptionally there were seawomen among the emerging dominant ethnicities), which eventually became thorns in the eyes of consolidating colonial powers. Ruangsilp (2017) writes about how locals did not mind mixing, only the whites, meanwhile rulers did use children of foreigners as hostages. A century later the position of the ‘temporary wife’ was replaced by that of the patriarchal prostitute.

It appears that there was very little gender differentiation in outward appearance (documented at least until the end of the 24th century BE), at any rate as perceived by the Jesuit: “The *Siamese* are not magnificent in their Apparel. The inferior sort of People Men and Women are Cloathed much alike.
They have a *Longuis* which is a piece of very simple stuff about two ells and a half long, and three quarters of an ell broad. They put this *Longuis* about their Body, so that it makes as it were, a kind of Coat reaching from the Girdle below the knee, but the Womens come down as low as the Ankle." (Tachard 1688, 266) The modest clothing of commoners would seem to fit the aforementioned frugality of their accommodations. All this in the *City of Angels*: "The meaning of that is, Angelical, admirable and extraordinary Town ; and they call it Angelical, because they think it impregnable to Men. Seeing all Nations are well received at *Siam*, and that People are suffered to live there in the free Exercise of their Religion, there are some of almost all Nations in that Country." (Ibid.) This openness seems to already form in the daily habits of the locals: "The *Siamese* are very good natured and civil, they live in good intelligence one with another, and they are not wanting in compleasance to Strangers." (Ibid., 267) This stands in stark contrast to the negative views on the Siamese mentioned earlier. One of the stranger things Tachard mentions, which doesn't entirely fit with what I have been describing here, is that women get respect by men turning their backs toward them. The Jesuit does not comment on it any further and neither does this peculiar custom appear in other sources. Reality doesn't fit into neat patterns.

### III.

Tachard stresses how 'pious' locals were: "The multitude and magnificence of their pagods, and their liberalities to the *Talapoins*, are Arguments of their Piety. They say that in the Kingdom there are above fourteen thousand Pagods and fifty thousand *Talapoins*. What ever is within those Temples is looked upon as Sacred, and to steal any thing from thence is death ; about five years agoe five Robbers were surprised in a Pagod, and they were Roasted alive by a gentle fire." (ibid., 272) Surely, not an activity associable with any Buddhist tradition in its contemporary image. And then, "[i]n their morning prayers which they never miss, they call to mind three things. God and the Law which he hath left them to observe ; Their Parents and the benefits which they have received from them ; Their Priests and the Reverence they owe them ; when a Missionary would speak to them of our Religion, for a Present he may have free access to them, and that also will dispose them to hear it." (Ibid.) He sees monks as similar to Christian priests, though with differences in social organization and attire. Here and elsewhere one senses that Tachard may be exaggerating for his own audience in France, to render them more pious too. To show them an image of piety so as to remind them of theirs. He is after all a priest.
One might also note the translation of what certainly was not God into said concept. As a historically situated actor, Guy Tachard could not draw on other possibilities for linguistic conceptualization, which does not mean his use of God was in bad faith, that is deliberately and consciously Christianizing. As I will show later, he appears to have actually put effort into coming to terms with a different world by extending, even subverting the conceptual tools his world had to offer. Much like an anthropologist would.

Life in Siam seems to have been somewhat laid-back: “Seing they live upon a small matter, and that their countrey supplies them with all that is necessary for life without much Labour and Husbandry, they spend their time in Idleness. They improve not their minds by any Science and are curious about nothing but future contingencies. To know such they not only consult Astrologers, but make use of also other means full of Superstitions.” (Ibid., 272) Apart from becoming a colonialist ploy, idleness is here linked to the lack of interest in science, whatever that may have meant at the time. Though in other travel writings, it is evident that some elites evidently were interested in Western scientific artifacts and then forming practices. (Morita 2017) Tachard notes this right next to the apparently excessive interest in predicting or influencing the future. Is there a way to understand this as not superstition, thereby normativizing one's own world, but as the effect of a different cosmology? Not to mention that astronomy and astrology were overlapping practices in Europe, as any clear separation was beginning to be constructed in Tachard's time.

If we concede locals lived in a world intensely shaped by Hindu-Buddhist cosmotechnics, Buddhist and other Indic ritual and ethical practices, with animist ones continuing in various shapes without being subordinated to the more universalist traditions, then it was one where impermanence and thus uncertainty is ontologically central. A world that has not been made by a Creator-God and only given to humans to look after, but not affect in any significant way. It is a kammic world, one where today's actions co-shape the future, which thus is and is not set, as much as past actions in complex webs of influence-production shaped what appears now. As for the environment, this was and at times still is an area with perpetual flooding (and houses built on stilts or floating), immense storms, uncontrollable natural growth and fast-paced commercial change, not to mention the instability of long-range trade routes. Given the uncertainty people lived in and which was the focus of influential teachings, this obsession with the future seems to make good sense. Perhaps this even fits the
‘heterarchy,’ formulated by Hall for the greater region: “A heterarchy is defined as including horizontally linked equitable urban centers that shared common goals, acknowledged the political independence of its ‘members,’ and included multiple networked power centers that had different levels of connectivity, and were based upon some degree of acknowledged cultural homogeneity.” (Hall 2010a, 113) One can see how such dispersal of power possibly creates a world of greater uncertainty. And, as expounded by Stanley Tambiah (2013) in his writing on the galactic polities of Southeast Asia, the borders of these state formations were permeable and more than one could symbolically claim the same geographical place. After all, much of the area was formed by and from near impenetrable forests. Much like any clear notion between outside and inside of a polity seems to fall apart, so does uncertainty and instability make more sense as a part of the fabric of life.<fnref n="171" />

While Ayutthaya was oriented toward the South China Sea, Engseng Ho's account of the Indian ocean is still useful to perceive a difference in the conception of space and sovereignty: “From the European perspective, what was strange about this rich world of the Indian Ocean and its international economy was that no one state controlled it, or even had the idea of doing so. The Portuguese, with the scientific geographers assembled by Prince Henry the Navigator, were the first to think of this ocean as a unity and to thereby dream up a systematic strategy to monopolize the means of violence within it.” (Ho 2004, 217) The innovations that Europeans brought around this time lay in a new combination of existing technologies tied to an ontological reconceptualization of space: “The marriage of cannon to trading ship was the crucial, iconic innovation. Whether markets were free or not, power over the ocean itself needed to be monopolized. Portuguese and American views, which cap the period at each end, share this assumption, and strategic security becomes an end in its own right, first among all goods.” (Ibid., 218–19) This market, at least within Siam worked differently: “Likewise, the Abbé De Choisy, who was a French diplomat to Siam in 1685, saw no good in the way the Siamese Kings hoarded gold and silver in their treasuries, instead of spending them, thereby allowing them to circulate in the

<footnote n="171">171 While Ayutthaya was oriented toward the South China Sea, Engseng Ho's account of the Indian ocean is still useful to perceive a difference in the conception of space and sovereignty. He makes it clear, that before space became something to be occupied by only one power, there were lines of relations traversing the waters. Of course, without a consolidating power, piracy was also common, though given the number of wars brought about by colonization, violence was certainly not higher through piracy. Though pirates repeatedly appear in traveler's accounts. Ho (2004, 217) claims: “In the fifteenth century, the Indian Ocean hosted a transregional network of peaceable trade and social exchange that was experienced by its diasporic natives as an extensive domestic realm. The transformation of that realm by the Portuguese, into an arena of military and commercial geo-strategy, was to give both religion and diaspora new meanings, in this first encounter of a Muslim transoceanic world with Western empires.” Meanwhile Wolters (1999, 46) mentions that locals turned to piracy only after Western incursion that led to a breakdown of open trade routes, commerce, and hospitality.</footnote>
country's economy." (Ruangsilp 2007, 88) We have here a world fundamentally at odds with that of the Europeans, yet still compatible enough for trade and other relations to flourish. As Anna Tsing (2005) has demonstrated for the current global economy, people don't have to share the same ideas or worlds to be able to cooperate. Much like machines and the operationalization of heterogeneous elements that bring about (not necessarily compatible or perceptible) effects without any synthesis. (Morita 2014)

IV

There is another motif in the Frenchmen's writings, one that has a curious affinity with Christian colonial complaints about the indigenous of Amazonia, namely their inconstancy. (Viveiros de Castro 2011a) Travelers object to how locals cannot be trusted, because they keep changing. And, specifically on Siamese, whoever that may be a reference to, de la Loubère writes about how they see no problem with concurrently holding contradictory opinions,<fnref n="172" /> and locals even recommending occidental travelers to not hold onto their views too much, since tomorrow they will have changed anyways.<fnref n="173" /> This is almost comically Buddhist, given it's central principle being impermanence, that is inevitable change. The difference to a regular Modern with contradictory opinions is that with them, the official position is denial of contradiction and fragmentation, whereas here it appears that this condition is affirmed. "For as to the Orientals, all know that they tell thing not as they are, but as they fancy you could wish they were ; wherefore they little care to contradict one another, as to matter of Fact they have declared, provided they comply with the inclinations of him that puts the question to them ; so that it they be taken in any contradiction, it does not at all trouble them to be told of it. [...] What pleased you yesterday, will the say unconcernedly, displeases you to day, and that makes us speak to day in another manner then we spake yesterday." (Tachard 1688, 264)

Such a world did not produce subjects to whom the Christian creed had much to offer. While King Narai appeared to be enthusiastic about Christian knowledge, as well as other, mostly

<footnote n="172">172 In Buddhist tradition Nāgārjuna, and I am not claiming this thinker was influential in Siam at this time (if anything that his conclusions come from a Buddhist world, i.e. a world organized by Buddhist teachings works differently and makes some conclusions more probable than others), demonstrated the non-viability of the excluded middle thus throwing some of the most cherished Western ontological principles into stark relief. (Garfield & Priest 2003)</footnote>

<footnote n="173">173 As anyone self-aware enough realizes, even with the principal of essence and constancy operating, one's opinions change even if perhaps slower. One also holds contradictory opinions, because society is rife with contradictory opinions and thoughts. Consistence is a mere mirage even for Christians, for how else would it come to be that theology, given it is based on the principle of the unchanging One, cannot agree on anything? Of course, the active presence of the concept of basic consistency and that of constant change makes for different worlds.</footnote>
astronomical tools<sup>174</sup> and let Christians proselytize freely, generally few locals in Southeast Asia converted, except for a child here and there, though without accumulative effects. (Halikowski-Smith 2011)<sup>175</sup> Jesuits, not being able to see outside of dualism, mistook this openness of the King for eagerness to convert and at first wildly overestimated their (possible) influence. Christian ways seem to have been more of a way of gaining prestige within and beyond the court by establishing connections with foreigners with an access to science. Westerners had learned in China that elites were very interested in Western science in general,<sup>176</sup> and astronomy in particular and applied it in Siam too. (Ruangsilp 2007) What meaning scientific artifacts and processes might have took on in Siam is challenging to construct. The lack of interest, at least as stated in the writings of Tachard, has manifold origins. Among the reasons, and I will go into more detail later, were a different conception of the private-public distinction, the strangeness of the Jesus figure and also a general pragmatism, when locals lost their regard of Portuguese once they were of no further use. (Tachard 1688) As for those members of the Portuguese community that were not evicted, they left due to the changing circumstances, were executed after the governmental overthrow of 1688, and some eventually assimilated. (Halikowski-Smith 2011) At least initially it appears that local worlds continued in the cosmopolitical relation-making, without aspiring to a world that would be “monolithic, transcendental, universal, unified.” (Ho 2004, 27) Viveiros de Castro (2011a, 1ff.) in his rethinking of Amerindian worlds and the very concept of culture writes that Europeans “grow into statues of marble” while Indians “grow into statues of myrtle.” The former, formed in a society that takes stability and essence as given or at least desirable grow to become according to their ontology. The latter are meanwhile receptive to any shape, they are ‘anthropophagous,’ symbolically and literally, eating the other to become. Europeans, as they came to be, did not not literally eat the other (unless in extreme conditions), but did like to work the other to death, systematically, while appropriating the value created. In this sense, some variant of eating the other can too be discerned, however perversely.<sup>177</sup> According to Jesuits they were also, much like people in Siam, ignorant of the principle of non-contradiction or at least it's alleged universal necessity. Culture can no longer be taken as something

<footnote n="174"><sup>174</sup> According to Ruangsilp (2007), Nidhi Aeusrivongse has convincingly explained that King Narai used foreigners in his service to counterbalance the power of indigenous administrative officials. His explanation emphasizes internal politics – instead of the contacts with the West – as a moving force in the history of the period.</footnote>

<footnote n="175"><sup>175</sup> What this implies for social bonds is anyone's guess, though I assume these children had been abandoned.</footnote>

<footnote n="176"><sup>176</sup> Something akin to Science had been practiced in China, at least, though the conceptual worlds and with them the ways of producing technological artifacts and knowledge differed. See the ground-breaking study by Yuk Hui (2016).</footnote>

<footnote n="177"><sup>177</sup> Christian obsessive focus on anthropophagy cannot be unlinked from their own practice of eating the human turned God, whether literally as for Catholics or symbolically for Protestants. It is one of the practices strangest to those they encountered.</footnote>
one has and carries through time against the onslaught of the outside. Rather, as the Brazilian anthropologist-philosopher suggests, it can be taken as “a set of potential structurations of experience.” (Ibid., 34) Neither firm belief nor fixed identity were crucial for these structurations, the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil offered them an opportunity to change their identity. Now, Siam certainly differed from the situation in Brazil. For one, Christians had no problem identifying a ‘religion’ with ‘priests’ and ‘temples,’ even if their meanings, functions and productivity were different from what Christians imagined and practiced. And while anthropophagy was neither commonly practiced, nor symbolically constitutive in any sense, it does help notice one important operation: openness toward the outside as a chance to change. And, similarly, inconstancy was singled out by Tachard and, if we gather some of the reports by travelers, Siamese were at the same time described as generous and greedy. Perhaps the reason why different travelers had divergent experiences, apart from being conditioned by their differing interests and ideological aims, is that these peoples’ subjectivities were not organized around a constant identity as in the Christian-Secular tradition, but at least heavily influenced by the Buddhist tradition which famously argues against a self and constancy as being basic ontological categories.

Given the above described practice of making reality, which includes incessant mixing of elements, who or what is Siamese or Thai or local or Buddhist or Hindu-Buddhist or animist, is impossible to say. James Clifford (1988, 344) once wrote: “Yet what if identity is conceived not as a boundary to be maintained but as a nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject? The story or stories of interaction must then be more complex, less linear and theological. What changes when the subject of ‘history’ is no longer Western? How do stories of contact, resistance, and assimilation appear from the standpoint of groups in which exchange rather than identity is the fundamental value to be sustained?” This seems more fitting: a nexus of relations and transactions. And many formulate this nexus for Southeast Asia through the figure of the stranger-king, to which I will return later, when discussing scenes composed by Viveiros de Castro. For now, I turn to encounters at the edges of the emerging capitalist territory. Places where what is real is put into question.
## 16. Worldly Encounters

### Darwin's Mimesis: December 18, 1832 [Sailors and Naturalists]

It is said that the name Tierra del Fuego, used in the modern Western cosmos for the south of the South American continent, comes from the journey of the infamous Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle to the area. The crew of the ship had sighted fires presumably lit by the locals upon seeing the vessel. Two days later, the sailors went ashore. This scene has been described by two sources – in Charles Darwin's notebooks and in those of Captain Fitzroy. The anthropologist Michael Taussig in his seminal work *Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses* (1993) presents an analysis, so to speak “across the colonial divide,” while playing these two perspectives against each other to make evident the limits and through them the creativity of the Western self-image as always constructed through the other. (Said 1978) Such images of the other are not innocent and can lead to viciously savage acts, when white settlers see the other through or only in their own images of the savage other leading to horrific behavior on their part against natives who in turn are also affected by this. (Taussig 1987)

The more influential of the two expresses fascination at what he considers to be excessive adeptness of the indigenous at miming the European sailors after they have set foot on the shore. Darwin even goes so far as to write: “All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry.” (as quoted in Taussig 1993) He presents an image, a scene:

> perched on a wild peak overhanging the sea and surrounded by woods. As we passed by
> they all sprang up and waving their cloaks of skins sent forth a loud sonorous shout; this
> they continued for a long time. These people followed the ship up the harbour, and just
> before dark we again heard their cry and soon saw their fire at the entrance of the
> Wigwam which they built for the night. (Darwin quoted in Taussig 1993, 73)

One does not even have to reach for the prose of Joseph Conrad to be transported into a world of darkness and looming savagery. A description and style noticeably different from those written almost two centuries earlier in Siam. Notice already how non-language is creeping in with the sonorous shouts. Decades later, the Austrian priest and ethnologist Martín Gusinde took iconic photographs of
the Fuegians. The first time I encountered these, and even later, in the Chilean director Patrício Guzmán's *Nostalgia de la luz* (2010) which presents the lands of Chile as seen by the indigenous from the coastal areas and references the voyage of the Beagle, what astounded me most is how utterly the boundaries between human and non-human are erased visually. These are new forms, new bodies as known only from the most fantastic of cinemas. The way human bodies flow into the unconventional shapes of headgear, covering faces entirely. At times even the whole body. It would appear that a completely different conception of the human, of clothing, of shapes, and of borders structured these phenomena. By now, the Selk'nam people as they are today referred to, are all but extinct or assimilated. In the late 19th century, during the Gold Rush, they had been actively hunted by whites, so that by the time the ethnologist came to the area, only 279 remained.

> I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage & civilized man is. It
> is greater than between a wild & domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is
> greater power of improvement. The chief spokesman was old & appeared to be head of
> the family ; the three others were young and powerful men & about 6 feet high. from
> their dress etc etc they resembled the representations of Devils on the Stage, for instance,
> *Der Freischutz*. [sic] The old man had a white feather cap, from under which, black, long
> hair hung round his face. The skin is dirty copper colour. Reaching from ear to ear &
> including the upper lip, there was a broad red coloured band of paint; & parallel & above
> this, there was a white one; so that the eyebrows & eyelids were even thus coloured. The
> only garment was a guanaco skin with the hair outside. This was merely thrown over
> their shoulders, one arm & leg being bare; for any exercise they must be absolutely
> naked. (Ibid., 74)

Now, what is interesting here is the wealth of ‘similarities’ Darwin employs, that he ties together,
ranging from metallurgy to opera. It is evident that reality here is being made through an enmeshment
of all kinds of references and building blocks, which is why it is impossible to untangle and pinpoint
any one clear source that would be the last principle on which ‘objectivity’ would reside. The naturalist
continues:

they are excellent mimes: as often as we coughed or yawned or made any odd motion,
they immediately imitated us. Some of the officers began to squint and make monkey like faces; but one of the young Fuegians (whose face was painted black with white band over his eyes) succeeded in making far more hideous grimaces. [...] The Australians, likewise have long been notorious for being able to imitate and describe the gait of any man, so that he may be recognized. (Darwin quoted in Taussig, 74–5)

Mimicry for Darwin becomes the sign of difference between civilization (defined negatively by what it is not) and the other, all the while of course having to take recourse the mimetic faculty, the faculty to perceive and create similarity, to be himself able to notice similarity in the activities of the now-called Fuegians. The fascination with adeptness at imitating is a recurrent motif in colonial literature and one that, given some of the Orientalist motifs through which East Asians are being denigrated, continues to operate today. (Cf. Havard 2007, 540) Now, the eminent naturalist's description or perhaps rather construction of the scene may appease those who think themselves superior, but Captain Fitzroy sets the scene slightly differently. The Captain, according to Taussig, can be taken as a sort of theoretician of culture, in that he appears to be more thorough than the naturalist, much like I will later take the Jesuit Tachard:

> Fitz Roy's [sic] explanation of *why* looking at the savage is interesting is that such looking is in itself a form of theorizing society and historical process. The first reason he gives is that one should appreciate that we British were once like the Fuegians, and that is how Caesar found us – painted and in skins. The second reason is that there is something absorbing in observing people displaying childish ignorance of matters familiar to civilized man. And the third reason is the interest occasioned by the Fuegians' healthy, independent state of existence. (Ibid., 75–6)

Specifically, there is one element omitted by Darwin that shines a new light on the whole encounter:

> "They expressed satisfaction or good will by rubbing or patting their own, and then our bodies; and were highly pleased by the antics of a man belonging to the boar's crew, who danced well and was a good mimic." (Fitzroy quoted in Taussig 1993, 76)
All of a sudden, the originators of movements are unclear. Is it the sailor or the locals? Indeed, the imagination of a Western sailor as to how indigenous people would behave also enters into this relation. The anthropologist also reminds his readers that this is something already described by Walter Benjamin, when he notes how adults act like children (how they imagine children to behave), which is what the child starts imitating, as that is the behavior it is surrounded by, thus becoming the very image adults imitate. Orientalist trope or perhaps just personal cliché, material act, imitation of imitation become one event, whatever the further effects on reality. Encounters at the ends of the world come to be productive of new worlds, where fact and fiction, difference and similarity, virtual and actual, become indistinguishable.

I do not want to enter into the discussion of the mimetic faculty and how this scene helped Michael Taussig formulate his revolutionary approach to anthropology. I merely want to draw some connections to the scenes in Ancient Siam I will be presenting later. At the edges of territories encounters happen and they came to be folded into the very fabric of the territory itself. Outside the perception of which is conditioned by the inside becomes inside that conditions the perception of the outside. In this case, mostly on the level of forms, though these too are already enmeshed with concepts.

## Last Decades of the Era of Wanli Emperor, Ming Dynasty [Jesuits on Earth]

In his account on the limits and Christian underpinnings of modern capitalist cosmology, or, what one Japanese reviewer termed ‘reverse anthropology’ in the text's comments section, Marshall Sahlins summarizes the encounters between Jesuits and Confucian literati. “They detest life,” it says in the title of the passage. “When Jesuit missionaries installed themselves in southern China in 1583, they opened a cultural debate of cosmological proportions with the Confucian literati.” (Sahlins 1996, 414) This series of meetings appears to have been radically different from the one taking place in Tierra del Fuego two and a half centuries later. Here there were encounters by what would have been considered the intellectual elite from two highly hierarchic societies, and of course, early European travelers were famously vowed by the grandeur of the Sinosphere, if less than enthusiastic about its teachings. It was not until centuries later that China lost its admirable status in Western eyes. The encounters are
linguistic and conceptual, but no less concerned with similarity and difference. In describing these
debates, the anthropologist draws on the work of the French sinologist Jacques Gernet (1985). While
the accounts of such meetings in Siam also quite apparently draw on debates with elites, the Chinese
situation is different, because there are Chinese sources discussing them, while whatever sources there
might have been in Siam, are lost.<fnref n="178" /> Sahlins plays these two perspectives out against each other,
making evident the radically different understandings of events. Pointedly, he writes “the Western and
Eastern intellectuals differed not just on particular points but fundamentally – ontologically.” (Sahlins
1996, 414)

For the Chinese literati, Western dualism made little sense: there was no distinction between creature and creator, self and world, sensible and spiritual. Given this cosubstantiality of Heaven and Earth, the locals proved resistant to ideas about the fall and basic sinfulness of life. Confucian tradition is said to be inherently optimistic about life, the goal being tranquility and goodness; whatever we Moderns might think today of the effects Confucian notions of goodness actually had on the earthly life of all. This very different orientation, one without the fall, but an expectation of the seed of goodness in every man (woman?), led to the reaction when confronted with Christian teachings: “They detest life.”

The famous Jesuit Mateo Ricci was similarly unenthusiastic: “If I were to tell foreign kingdoms that in China there are educated men who say that animals, plants, metals and stones are all intelligent and of the same kind as man, they would be dumbfounded.” (Ibid.) But, perhaps the most interesting point Sahlins makes is one that presents two different notions of materialism: “In the end, the Jesuits concluded that the Chinese were materialists, since they considered ‘brute matter’ and Heaven to be all of the same substance. The Chinese literati for their part concluded that the Jesuits were materialists, ‘since they deprived the universe of its invisible forms, turning it into brute matter directed from outside and lacking the spontaneous intelligence that all creatures display.’” (Ibid., 414)

Worlds vary. Conceptual, habitual, sensory dimensions can differ and are contingent. An encounter with a radical and powerful other does not necessarily create an opening, or rather perhaps a break in bodies certainty strong enough to be irreducible to a mere extension of dominant conceptual habits. The more some worlds become dominant, the less equal the encounters, the more difficult it is

<footnote n="178">¹⁷⁸ With the notable exception of murals. (Halikowski-Smith 2011) Meanwhile, what exactly to interpret based on images of Westerners is challenging to reconstruct. (Skilling 1997)</footnote>
for a breakdown of certainty to force itself through the networks of protective mechanisms. There is an outside to every system, every world, yet not every world and everyone therein is propitious at establishing circuits with it. Obviously, any outside will become culturally coded in its influence, as described above. What makes for an outside too transforms. Still, such an event will make preconceptions one has appear in a way that could otherwise not have happened. That which is so natural as to not appear at all can at times become evident as historically contingent. Meeting otherness in different places will result in varied transformations, conditioned by singularities of each assemblage. Something that comes from the outside and brings new elements into the world. Chances to experiment and make new connections, at least for those open enough. And, habitually, regular people engaging in trade and other professions often went local, adding new elements to traditions that change with them.<fnref n="179" /> Though these people living their lives as pragmatically as they could generally did not become theoreticians of culture. These would be innovations that just happen as the world changes. They are experiments and new connections, but it is not the creation of culture in the Wagnerian sense which happens on the propositional level: culture as thought, not as lived (if for a moment we indulge such a clear-cut distinction).

Even for Jesuit literati this challenging encounter then led to innovations, though not necessarily essential ones. Though if we are to follow what was going on in Jesuit encounters in India around the same time, these scholars asked the Vatican to be able to reclassify Brahmins from a religious to a social group, thus making it possible for Jesuits to ‘go native,’ go Brahmin and adapt their teaching, practice and habits to local tastes. (Chakravarti 2014) Tachard mentions how Brahmins were reclassified by the Vatican as class and not religion based, so that Jesuits are allowed to adapt and adopt local customs: “It was considered at *Rome*, and it being represented to the Cardinals that the Habits the *Bramens* [sic] wore were no Mark of Religion, but of Nobility and eminent Quality, they permitted that Father and some other Jesuits who approved his Judgment, to try that last way for the Conversion of those people.” (Tachard 1688, 204) Similar mimetic adaptation was practiced on the Japanese archipelago. (Colla 2008) Likewise, in Southeast Asia, preachers adopted and adapted to practices that while remaining orthodox (within the evolving convention) were powerful to impress local converts, especially since they were interested in practical efficacy (traversing the very modern distinction between natural and supernatural). “His opinion echoed the views of his predecessor. Although Van

<footnote n="179">¹⁷⁹ Reid (1988, 1993) is a treasure trove of examples.</footnote>
Nijenrode was rather impressed by the religious tolerance of the Siamese, he, too, was disturbed that the Siamese ‘waste great sums of money and copious means on their gods, shrines and temples,’ which was yet ‘of little help to them.’” (Ruangsilp 2007, 88) One wonders what practices Van Nijenrode indulged in others might see of little help to him.

One more thing is crucial here. Marshall Sahlins takes this example from a Japanese turned Jesuit turned Buddhist monk.

And among the many who commented on the disproportion between the first crime and the punishment, Fabian Fucan wrote in 1620 from Japan [...]:

> A holy law forbade Adam and Eve to eat the *macan* [a Portuguese term used in Japan to denote a kind of persimmon]. It is really the height of absurdity! It is like setting out to fool an old woman or gull a child. A persimmon could not possibly be a direct or indirect cause in an affair as important as attaining the highest Heaven or else falling into hell. In all the five prohibitions and the laws of Buddha and in all the Buddhist codes of discipline, I have never found any precept that warned against persimmons. (Sahlins 1996, 414)

The persimmon is not just a variation of the apple, if we follow the intellectual trajectory of the ontological turn, it becomes something entirely different when read through the imagery of Buddhist or Chinese tradition. Interestingly enough, the attitude that a fruit is just a fruit and cannot be the cause of anything cosmic, or more generally a thing being just a thing, has been explored for 19th century Japan, as there illness was taken to be illness, something to take away from life and to be healed if possible, without any kind of additional meaning. (Karatani 1993) The point here being that the ways the world comes to be made are varied and the ways Western tradition does things (pretension towards being objective) might actually be further away from its own projected standards than others. Such differences in perspective, in reality, return in Tachard's account of why many Siamese and other locals had essential trouble accepting the significance of Christ on the cross. But more on that later.
16th Century, Brazil and Puerto Rico [Ontological Experiments]

Intensifying relations between the European backwaters with the powerful and glamorous realms in Asia famously led to the eventual nigh annihilation of the populations and exploitation of resources of the newly accessible continents. In this process, there were all kinds of encounters with one of these finding its way into the anthropological imaginary. Jesuits wrote a lot about their conversion attempts in the Americas, where they faced an entirely different set of obstructions than in Asia. While in much of Asia, with a few exceptions, they were unsuccessful, because people were not interested or had intellectual tools that made the inadequacy of Christian doctrines apparent (Halikowski-Smith 2011), many indigenous in what is Brazil today had no trouble adopting Christian beliefs and practices. The problem, it seems, started later – when they found out they have no use for it, they let it go. It is related to an entirely different world without priests, institutions, liturgies or theologies. (Viveiros de Castro 2011a) One can also sense that whatever was adopted, it was not the general cosmological framework. The technologies of conviction Christian history had to have created, were not enough to deal with this new situation. Like a displaced inversion of the encounters in Asia then. Viveiros de Castro notes that a further issue for Jesuits was the apparent non-existence of religion, of priests, rites or anything else that would have reminded whites of Christianity. In Asia on the other hand, people perform many practices at the same time. On one side of the territory encounters with no religion, on the other with too much of it. On one side encounters with seemingly eager conversion, on the other with almost none. And whether there is too much of it or too little, uncertainty appears about whether these are religions at all. And, as far as traditions like Buddhadharma and the teachings of Confucius go, these ambivalences persist, for locals and researchers. (Josephson 2012)

But before any such encounters could have appeared, there was one event from today's Puerto Rico, thus presumably the participating parties were Spanish and Taínos. Claude Levi-Strauss recounts an anecdote, creates an image, which he had taken from Oviedo's History:

> In the Greater Antilles, some years after the discovery of America, whilst the Spanish were dispatching inquisitional commissions to investigate whether the natives had a soul or not, these very natives were busy drowning the white people they had captured in order to find out, after lengthy observation, whether or not the corpses were subject to
putrefaction. (Lévi-Strauss 1952, 12)

The image is actually two. A court, the ‘Valladolid controversy,’ investigating the immaterial dimensions of the natives, and a physical experiment in water investigating the quality of the bodies of whites. Both can be said to have inquired into the humanity of the other – an encounter of cosmological proportions indeed. As Viveiros de Castro understands it, these two practices belie two radically different cosmologies. The whites are extending a multi-culturalist world, where humans share the same nature, but differ in culture, the soul. Animal bodies quite evidently for them do not have souls and are thus not subjects of tribunals.<fnref n="180" /> The islander natives meanwhile did not doubt whether those that arrived has souls, but were in doubt about the being of their bodies. (Viveiros de Castro 2011a) Or, even, paraphrasing Latour (2004a), whether they had bodies at all.

To put it in the words of the Brazilian anthropologist: “the other of the Other was not exactly the same as the other of the Same.” (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 51) Latour summarizes the encounter: “Each side conducted an experiment, based on its own premises and procedures: on the one side to determine whether Indians have souls, and on the other side to determine whether Europeans have bodies. The Amerindians’ experiment was as scientific as the Europeans’.” (Latour 2004, 452) If the conquistadors drowned and rotted, it would have been clear they were human, if not, they could have been spiritual entities. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote it perhaps most elegantly, at least as worded by Bruno Latour: “the whites were invoking the social sciences while the Indians had more confidence in the natural ones.” (Ibid., 452)

As far as I know, no such experiments happened on the shores of the Chao Phraya river. Much like with the encounters in China, but unlike those in Tierra del Fuego, neither side doubted the humanity of the other. Though some imagery through which the ‘East’ was perceived was already made, the Orientalist colonial machine was in its infancy. After all, commerce had been an ongoing relation-making activity for centuries. And yet, the encounters were far from symmetrical, not only because the concept and connected imagery of the human differ vastly. In the next chapter, I will explore these asymmetries based on the images I have presented here, as they made it possible for me to see the materials in new ways. Or, to put it differently, I analyze the following data from the point of

<footnote n="180">¹⁸⁰ One may note here, that such a cosmology was not yet formed in the Middle Ages, where animals and humans were conceptualized as being in greater proximity rather than separated by an unbridgeable gulf. (Cohen 1994)</footnote>
view of the questions the images hitherto presented.
# 17. Recentering Siam

## Siam, 2221 [Rationality & Wisdom]

In the following passage, wherein the author evaluates the behavior of Siamese (it is unclear which classes are being referred to), his judgment is somewhat ambivalent:

> In general they have more moderation than us [...] They act only by necessity, and do not like us place merit in Action. It seems not rational to them that Labour and Pains should be the Fruit and Reward of Virtue. They have the good Fortune to be born Philosophers, and it may be that if they were not born such, they would not become so more than we. I therefore willingly believe what the Ancients have reported, that Philosophy came from the Indies into Europe, and that we have been more concerned at the Insensibility of the Indians than the Indians have been at the wonders, which our Inquietude has produced in the discovery of so many different Arts, whereof we flatter ourselves, perhaps to no purpose, that necessity was the Mother. (de la Loubère 1693, 76)

Seeds of treating the entire Orient as one undifferentiated entity are present, noticeable in the swift jump from Siamese to Indians, this despite a large part of the book being devoted to the complicated voyage through many different societies between which he does notice differences. Then arrives the trope of sloth, commonly ascribed to tropical peoples, and that of Asian wisdom, here for now still expressed as the origin of philosophy. Indeed, and this is unexpected, when compared to later orientalist tropes, indigenous are still seen as philosophers, though not through learning or work but innately. Technology and the interest in it becomes a marker of difference. While in some parts of the writings, Siamese or other locals are presented as negative inversions of the author's image of his society, and in others, those concerned with their devotion, as positive models to be emulated, here the relation is more complicated. At once natural inheritors of the philosophical inclination of the Ancients (as opposed to the presumably non-natural inheritors, the whites) and insensible to or disinterested in the achievements of the Occidentals. Perhaps one can hear more than faint echoes of the experience in China, where whites wanting to trade encountered the problem that they could offer very little of interest to the locals of all classes, while having enormous interest in Chinese products. It was not until
centuries and countless manipulations such as the Opium Wars<fnref n="181" /> later that whites as they came to be changed the rules and flows of world markets. However, these words by de la Loubère transform when combined with other passages of his contemporaries. Additionally, images, deconstructive reading practices, bits and pieces of information and conventions sourced from this contemporary world as it comes to be drawn together by this body writing enmesh with these old writings. Conditions must be right for some things to appear. Nothing is just in and of itself. Such a world would be too simple, almost ready-made to be immediately grasped by those denying difference, contingency, impermanence against the clamor of worlds.

Père Tachard was born in 2191 of the Buddhist era and entered the Jesuit college in Bordeaux in 2211, being ordained as a priest in 2222. In 2223 he joined Jean II d'Estrées, a naval commander under Louis XIV who had fought battles in the Caribbean against the Dutch before, on a voyage to the West Indies. He spent four years in and around (not yet) Latin America. He was thus an experienced seafarer and had encountered all kinds of otherness before becoming part of the embassy to Siam.<fnref n="182" /> The journey to Siam as described in his writings led him to many stops along the way, from the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia. He was thus acquainted with the far reaches of the Empires under construction and, based on his writings, seems to have always attempted to actually form an understanding of local situations, albeit necessarily with an eye towards eventual conversion. Simon de La Loubère, born 2185 in Toulouse, became the secretary of the Ambassador to Switzerland after studying law in Paris. He was much less experienced in encounters with otherness and sea voyages than the former. It was the Jesuit's second journey to Siam that their paths overlapped.

Tachard and the other Jesuits, accompanied by diplomats like de la Loubère, had two goals: to establish or expand commerce and to convert the Siamese King. (Tachard 1688) The two were intimately intertwined. It seems evident that in Southeast Asia it were not just things that were exported and relations established, but a whole cosmology was to be imposed. King Narai, the Siamese ruler at the time, on the other hand appears to have had interest in the commerce, technology (especially and for his own personal pleasure that relating to astronomy), but not so much the conversion. (Alberts 2013) Indeed, Tachard repeatedly laments this while at the same time as if overstating the king's

<footnote n="181">¹⁸¹ Graeber (2011) argues that in China there existed markets without capitalism, but rather they were promoted by the Confucian bureaucracy, which of course the emerging Western capitalist empire had to violently recode.</footnote>

<footnote n="182">¹⁸² Wu (2017) shows how many Jesuits in general had experience from all kinds of encounters with ‘others,’ as they were part of many journeys and each single one of them necessitated meeting wide varieties of ways of doing the world.</footnote>
inclination toward the Christian creed. It seems as if technological objects, commerce and to some degree technology could travel without having to carry a whole world with them. Tara Alberts (ibid., 9) notes also the difference between what conversion would have meant for Christians and non-Christians, for in Southeast Asia it is more of an “entering a tradition or customs.” The very notion of an all-encompassing religion was and continues to be foreign to the wider region. (Holt 2017) Rulers had always employed tools from a variety of traditions.

In a world without any concept of conversion, one where the concept of entering into a tradition operates instead and the related variety of religio-social positions such as monk or brahmin, the Jesuits had to become creative.183 As an example, the Portuguese in Vietnam used the entirely non-anthropophagy associating “entering the belly of the Portuguese,” which would have meant becoming Portuguese, ceasing to be Cochinchinese, which locals allegedly mocked. (Alberts 2013, 10) Just reading those words one might come to the conclusion the Portuguese ate people, metaphorically or otherwise. One wonders whether (cultural) Christians had any sense of humor at all about such matters before the ironies of the Enlightenment. When dealing with the Siamese king other rhetorical strategies were employed. How many of the following words even had equivalents in local linguistic worlds?

"To Submit Your Grandure to this God who governs Heaven and Earth, is much more Rational, Sir, than to refer them to the other Deities that are worshipped in the East, whose Impotence, Your Majesty, who hath so much Light and Penetration, cannot but easily see." (Tachard 1688 1688, 170) We notice here too, how the language of rationality, of light and penetration (!) enters into the essays of conversion. Discard your gods for the true one, it will be prestigious. This does not exactly sound as a conversion yet. The concern is to present the Christian God as grander than all others – in very abstract terms. In the letter of the French King to the Siamese King (Tachard 1688), the former evokes not only the knowledge of the true God and the holy law, but also eternal happiness after. For societies reared on different notions of rebirth and awareness of impermanence offers of eternal afterlife can appear quaint, naive or just generally unappealing. In arguing for the excellence of Christianity, there is always the danger of going too far, as Jesuits and representatives of some other orders not receiving papal or systemic approval knew well. It's these dangers the immediacy of which disappeared as the colonial

<footnote n="183">183 More generally, and this is something that can be extended from the modern Vietnamese context Tara Alberts (2013, 11) mentions, is the difference between words for ‘ancestral teaching/to follow a doctrine’ or *sāsana* and ‘belief/to look up to’ or *chua* in Thai (today associated with trust and obeying).</footnote>
orders of truth became more established to flow into the reactionary late 18th and 19th century's
philosophical grandeurs.

If these scenes remind rather of the encounters in China, there are other moments that draw
more on the mimetic. In the description of entertainment, the encounters in Tierra del Fuego echo:
“Betwixt the *Chinese* and the *Laos* there was a Troop of *Siamese* Men and Women, cast into a Ring,
who danced after a pretty odd manner, that is to say, with their hands as well as feet, making as many
Figures with the one as they did with the other. The voices of some Men and Women, who sung a little
in the Nose, joyned to the noise they made with their Hands, regulated all the cadence.” (Tachard 1688,
185) The whites are unnerved by techniques of the body, which work with a body, where each
performative part can work separately. At least from these words it would appear that the acting was
cinematic *avant la lettre*. Walter Benjamin (2008) famously observes how acting for the camera
apparatus entails a decomposition into acting, or the repetition in variants of gestures and expressions,
with body parts, later recomposed as a succession of images. Some anthropologists have noted that
until recently at least, there were views of the body in the region where each body part has its own
spirit. (Holt 2017) Here we don't have that mimetic feedback loop, as this was a court performance and
not an encounter between whites and locals seeking to establish common ground. Still, bodies become
sites of difference.

As far as the rest of the bodies are concerned, the Father notes: “The perswasion they are in, that
it is undecent for a man to have his Teeth white like Beasts, makes them take a great deal of pains to
blacken them. For that end they make use of a Varnish made for the purpose, which they renew from
time to time when it begins to wear off. That they may give the colour time to stick on, they eat nothing
for some days, and even dispence with *Betle* and *Areca*.” (Tachard 1688, 268) It would seem then that
what makes a human human in this world of rebirth is the cultural technique of blackened teeth. What
does this make of Europeans or Chinese who did not blacken their teeth? Black teeth as a sign of
differentiation between man and beast. Distinctly a different world than the (post-Renaissance)
Christian one where human and animal are separated by an ontological gulf. A gulf Moderns seem to be
very invested in, perhaps because what else would remain for them to see themselves as exceptional? A
quaint hang-up indeed for a society allegedly tied to an ideal of equality. The color of teeth appears, at
least to a Westerner, hardly as an essential quality. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as in Buddhist and other
cyclical cosmologies humans, deities, ghosts and animals share an ontological affinity by virtue of the
possibility of being reborn in any of these states. The same basic unity, where the difference between
humans and animals is a matter of “combinations and degrees,” appears in the criticisms of Christianity
by Chinese scholars. (Gernet 1985) And presumably for animist cosmologies which continue to persist
and adapt in the region. (Århem 2016) “For the *Siamese* believing the transmigration of Souls into
other Bodies, kill no Animals, for fear, as they say, for driving out from thence the Souls of their
Relations, which may very well be lodged there.” (Tachard 1688, 144–5) The Jesuit has taken note of
this cosmodifference, never mind that at other times he describes how locals kill mosquitoes and deal
in very violent ways with elephants they aim to domesticate. Notice the “may very well be lodged
there.” This is a world of uncertainty, one where the future is not yet set, one where engaging in
activities aimed at influencing of predicting what is to come makes pragmatic sense. One may also note
how far back the Western construction of Buddhist tradition reaches, notably also the practice of not
actually trying to understand how a Buddhist society would work, as I wanted to show with the issue of
violence against animals. Viveiros de Castro (2014, 131) writes about indigenous multinaturalism that
“when everything is human, the human is an entirely different thing ...” and something analogous is at
play here.

Mirror of Christianity: Creating Images of Buddhist Worlds

Some encounters are expedient to keep in mind when doing humanities based research on (half missed)
encounters of worlds. What mingles in the analysis of Rey Chow (2002) is her anthropological
straddling of two worlds, Chinese and English-speaking, a body part of both that has the skills and
knowledge of actual workings of languages and projected tropes, all the while making use of this
middle position not to denounce one but to articulate a new position that enables to see what is usually
missed: the orientalist misconstruction of Chinese writing by Jacques Derrida, drawing on a long line
of misconceptions of Western scholars, is what enabled his deconstruction of Western logocentrism.
The French philosopher attributes to Chinese characters a pure ideography, while in real practice it is a
phonetic system of notation, considered to also be logocentric by many. The Hong Kong scholar here
shows how stereotyping can be productive. What comes to play here is also the entanglement of
mimesis as these stereotypes do emerge from a real encounter with the otherness of Chinese writing (it
is not imagined as fantastical beasts populating the East in medieval cosmology), but not out of a
thorough engagement with how a different tradition would work. The essentialization of both an
imagined East and a half-imagined West is also necessary for this deconstruction. Of course, the racial
stereotype of the 'inscrutable Chinese' is also activated, as it is the reduction to a surface that operates
in taking Chinese writing as exclusively ideographic. The important thing to take with from the
analysis is that surface readings, half-truths and general misconstructions can be productive in ways
that go beyond the perpetuation of a stereotype. This is a process that happens in recent times as much
as in earlier encounters. What Derrida and the travelers discussed here share are the attempts at
theorizing the world beyond 'immediately practical' concerns of what I assume were present for most
Occidentals traveling to Siam. In other words, experimenting with frameworks to which to tie the
phenomena analyzed.

In his encounter with a different world, Father Tachard qua Jesuit perhaps above all tries to understand why there are so few converts and in order to do so he constructs a cosmology based on his knowledge of local tradition. A recurring motif is that of two figures, which tend to converge in his account: that of the doctor and that of the monk, the *Talapoin*. As one learns in contemporary Buddhist studies, in Buddhist traditions these two were often one and the same, yet it is curious that Tachard rarely presents them as the same. Meaning that he either writes of *Talapoin s* or of doctors. I do not have access to information as to be able to discern whether these two figures were separate at the time, nevertheless the use of the word doctor here is curious: “interested Doctors, teach, that the more Experience is made in the Obsequies of a dead man, the more advantageously his Soul is lodged in the Body of some Prince, or some other considerable Animal. In that Belief the *Siamese* many times undo themselves by making magnificent Funerals.” (Tachard 1688, 193) Here, he notes the importance of the material constitution of the funeral for a better rebirth, which again is an activity that makes pragmatic sense.

As Tachard (ibid., 275) is trying to grapple with Buddhist teachings, he writes: “The *Siamese*
believe a God, but they have not the same notion of him that we have. By that word they understand a
being perfect after their manner, consisting of Spirit and Body, whose property is to assist men. That
assistance consists in giving them a Law, prescribing them the ways of living well, teaching them the
true Religion, and the Sciences that are necessary unto them.” Much like in China, this is an immanent
system without duality, and similarly to the above mentioned Confucian tradition and some Ancient
Greek teachings, it is focused on ‘living well.’ Those familiar with Chinese history and thought know that what ‘living well’ means, is far from agreed upon within and between traditions, and the same goes for the region engaged here. Even the comment on the ‘Sciences’ can be framed so as to make sense, insofar as Buddhist teaching is said to be open to new things, as long as they are effective in relation to the soteriological aim.

“The perfections which they attribute unto him are all the moral virtues, possessed by him in an eminent degree acquired by many acts, and confirmed by a continual exercise in all the Bodies he hath past through.” (Ibid., 275) A perfection acquired by acts throughout many rebirths. “He is free from passions, and feels no motion that can alter his tranquility; but they affirm that before the arrived at that State, he made so prodigious a change in his Body by struggling to overcome his Passions, that his blood is become white. He hath the power to appear when he pleases, and also to render himself invisible to the eyes of men; and he hath such wonderful agility, that in a moment he can be in any place of the world he pleases.” (Ibid.) Here, the Buddha, the ‘God’ appears closer to Mahāyāna conceptions as conceptualized in Buddhist studies today. “He knoweth all without having ever learnt anything from men, whose Doctor and Master he himself is, and that universal knowledg is inherent in his state, having possessed it from the instant that he was born God; it consists not as our does, in a train of consequences, but in a clear, simple and intuitive vision, which all at once represents to him the Precepts of the Law, Vices, Virtues, and the most hidden secrets of Nature, things past, present and come, Heaven, Earth, Paradice, Hell, this Universe which we see, and even what is done in the other Worlds which we know not.” (Ibid., 276) While in the passages before the French envoys wanted to convert the Siamese king through the knowledge of the supreme God, this here shows the limits of their approach, since Buddha already knows everything, awakened in time (not before), gaining knowledge in an instant. An immanent awakening that appears to bring all the knowledge of a transcendent God. And again, the confluence with the Doctor.<fnref n="184" /> Buddha further remembers his past lives, though it is strange our author feels the need to mention it, since he is supposed to know every secret of the world – perhaps individual chains of rebirths are not conventional parts of nature, or perhaps Tachard feels the need to stress the kammic system. However the Buddha figure is not merely a universal being, but intimately enmeshed with locality.

<footnote n="184">¹⁸⁴ The figure of the Buddha, the figure of a doctor and medicine, not in the least many suttas with imagery distinctly connected to healing. (Salguero 2009)</footnote>