‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century
Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann

The 19th century can be considered central to processes of ‘religion-making’ in Siam (today’s Thailand): over the course of the
century, a religio-secular episteme emerged that included the establishment of the traditional Buddhist term sasana as the standardtranslation of ‘religion’ on the basis of modern “distinctions of religion”,1 and relegated certain elements of the Buddhist tradition(e.g. cosmography, law) to other societal spheres now seen as distinct
from sasana/religion.2 This process enabled the politicisation andregulation of ‘religion(s)’ in the context of the newly emerging Thaistate towards the end of the ‘long 19th century.’
Sasana as ‘Religion’
There seems to be no standardised translation of ‘secular’ in current
online Thai dictionaries: the entries offered vary widely from traditional Buddhist terms such as lokiya (see below) to rather awkward
constructions such as mai kiao kap rueang sasana (literally: not concerning matters of religion).3 By contrast, ‘religion’ is consistently
1

2

3‘Religion-making’ in
Siam

The ‘secular’ in Thai
dictionaries

Cf. for these theoretical concepts Markus Dreßler, “Modes of Religionization: A
Constructivist Approach to Secularity” (HCAS “Multiple Secularities” Working
Paper 7, 2019) and Adrian Hermann, “Distinctions of Religion. The Search for
Equivalents of ‘Religion’ and the Challenge of Theorizing a ‘Global Discourse of
Religion’,” in Making Religion. Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion, ed. Frans Wijsen and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
Earlier developments in regard to processes of the ‘religionisation’ of the Buddhist tradition and trends that later contributed to the establishment of ‘secular’societal spheres differentiated from ‘religion’ are likely to have already occurredearlier, in particular in connection with the presence of Catholic missionaries in
the Kingdom since 1554, but are beyond the scope of this article. Huge lacunae
exist in scholarship on Siam regarding the Catholic missionary project and theirinfluence on religion-making in Siam before 1800.
See, for instance, the entries for “secular” at www.thai-language.com/dict, dict.
longdo.com/search/secular (accessed 23/04/2019). The transcription of Thai inthis article follows the Royal Thai General System. For a more detailed investigaLeipzig University – HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, 2019www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion

1Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

Sasana as ‘religion’

Sasana and the Buddhist system of kingshiptranslated as sasana, a term codified in the current Royal Thai Dictionary (2011) as “the central teachings that human beings believe in,chiefly demonstrating the origin and end of the world.”4
The establishment of sasana as the normalised term for ‘religion’(including its somewhat Protestant connotations of an inner beliefin particular teachings) is the product of a historical process that has
taken place in Siam since at least the early 19th century. Although it
probably has considerably changed in usage and meaning over thecourse of Buddhist history, sasana as it was deployed in early textsof the Theravada tradition contrasts considerably with modern Thai
usages of ‘religion’ and ‘Buddhism’:5 it frequently designated an “established set of teachings” and “systematic injunctions”, and alluded to “a system of training” distinctive of the Theravadian world;6
moreover, sasana often referred to “the life of the Buddha’s teachings after he is gone” and is seen as suffering from constant decline
unless it is actively supported and protected, by the ruling Buddhist
sovereign in particular.7 Consequently, it constituted a key elementin the traditional Buddhist system of kingship: one of Rama I’s epithets in late 18th-century Siam, for instance, described him as the“supreme supporter” of the sasana (akkhasasanupathamphok), andvarious decrees issued under his rule had the sovereign endorse thesasana both in terms of teachings and practice. Its meaning in bothcases seems limited to the Buddhist tradition.8 In contrast to this understanding, it appears that particularly over the course of the 19th
century, a modern usage of the term in Thai became entrenched. Thisnew understanding abstracts from and narrows this tradition, constituting sasana as the “hypothetical equivalent” to ‘religion’9 and a

4
5
6
7
8
9

2

tion of secularity in Thailand cf. now Tomas Larson, “Secularisation, Secularism,
and the Thai State,” in Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Thailand, ed. Pavin
Chachavalpongpun (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
www.royin.go.th/dictionary/ (accessed 23/04/2019). The Royal Thai Dictionary is
the official and prescriptive dictionary of the Thai language today.
John R. Carter, “A History of Early Buddhism,” Religious Studies 13, no. 3 (1977):
266.
Carter, “A History of Early Buddhism,” 266.
Alicia Turner, Saving Buddhism. The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), 1.
Yoneo Ishii, “Thai Muslims and the Royal Patronage of Religion,” Law & Society
Review 28, no. 3 (1994): 455.
Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice. Literature, National Culture, and Modernity(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 19.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

separate field of discourse and practice “available for considerationfrom the outside”,10 an outside that is thus simultaneously constitutedas ‘secular’.
19th-Century Christian Missionary Activity and Buddhist Reform
Two connected developments in the first half of the 19th century canbe seen as the fertile ground on which later processes of ‘religionisation’ in the development of the Thai state between the middle of the
19th and the early 20th century are based: the reformist undertakingsof the Siamese elite towards the Buddhist tradition, which was intertwined with the increasing presence of Western actors, particularly(Protestant) Christian missionaries.
As the leader of a small group of Buddhist intellectuals in the
1830s and 1840s, Mongkut, a monk who would later become King
Rama IV, engaged closely with Western knowledge (such as medical knowledge) and technical inventions (such as printing presses),
many of which were brought to Siam by missionaries. Early on hestood in close contact with the Catholic bishop Jean-Baptiste Pallegoix (1805–1862) as well as with the Protestant missionaries Jesse
Caswell (1809–1848) and Dan Beach Bradley (1804–1873).11
Mongkut also founded the Thammayut Nikaya, a modernist
Buddhist reform order that became a model of similar reform movements in the region.12 The Thammayut has been described as advocating a “rational interpretation of Buddhist teachings” understood
to be the authentic doctrine of the Buddha himself.13 It attempted
to redefine “virtually all aspects of religious life” on the basis of the
Tripitaka scriptures and declared “non-Buddhist spirit worship andthe veneration of Hindu deities as inconsistent with the ancient

Catholic and ProtestantMissions in 19th-Century
Siam

Thammayut Nikaya: a
Buddhist reform order

10 David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 68.
11 For details cf. Sven Trakulhun, “Moderne Buddhisten: protestantische Mission
und Wissenstransfer in Siam (1830–1871),” in Globalgeschichten: Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven, ed. Boris Barth et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014).
12 Cf. Craig Reynolds, The Buddhist Monkhood in Nineteenth Century Thailand(PhD Thesis, Department of History, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1972);
Barend J. Terwiel, “Mu’ang Thai and the World. Changing Perspectives during theThird Reign,” paper presented at the seminar on “Asia: A Sense of Place” (Australian National University, Canberra, 1986).
13 Thongchai Winichakul, “Buddhist Apologetics and a Genealogy of Comparative
Religion in Siam,” Numen 62, no. 1 (2015): 78.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

scriptures.”14 This reworking of the Buddhist tradition also implied a
new relationship between the Buddhist ‘religion’ and modern ‘scientific’ interpretations of the world (see below).

The 1855 Bowring Treaty

4Siam’s Unequal Treaties and ’Religion’
Siam still figures in national historiographical narratives as the only
country in South-east Asia that was ‘never colonised,’ but scholarshiphas by now established Siam’s wide-ranging inclusion in the European imperial project in economic, legal, cultural, and politicalterms.15 One of the most important legal documents in this context
is the 1855 Bowring Treaty, which constitutes the first in a whole series of ‘unequal treaties’ that Siam concluded with mostly European
powers during the second half of the 19th century, and was designed
to open the country to Western trade.16 Officially called a treaty of“friendship and commerce”, it was – unlike its prototypes concluded
in China and Japan – not forced upon the Siamese; rather, the kingand his officials invited treaty negotiations to support an economic
opening already well under way.17 Nevertheless, in international legal
terms, the unequal treaties made Siam’s sovereignty dependent on
European powers, because extraterritoriality regulations exempted
specified foreigners from Siamese jurisdiction and thereby paved theway for European interference into Siam’s internal policies.18
The treaties’ impact on the Buddhist tradition in the kingdom
has mostly been overlooked, however. Importantly, all of these
14 Sven Trakulhun, “Chaophraya Thiphakorawong: A Book on Various Things(Thailand, 1867),“ in Religious Dynamics Under the Impact of Imperialism and Colonialism. A Sourcebook, ed. Björn Bentlage et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 66.
15 Cf. Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson, eds., The Ambiguous Allure of theWest. Traces of the Colonial in Thailand (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2010).
16 Until 1870, Siam concluded similar treaties with fourteen additional countries,
including the United States, France, Denmark, Prussia, Sweden and Norway, Belgium, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Spain. Cf. Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: Family,
Law and Colonial Modernity in Thailand (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2002), 41.
17 Cf. the discussion in Loos, Subject Siam, 41, fn. 38; Barend J. Terwiel, “The Bowring Treaty: Imperialism and the Indigenous Perspective,” Journal of the Siam
Society 79, no. 2 (1991); Shane Strate, The Lost Territories. Thailand’s History of
National Humiliation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), 28.
18 M. Barry Hooker, “The ‘Europeanization’ of Siam’s Law 1855–1908,” in Laws ofSoutheast Asia. Volume II: European Laws in South-East Asia, ed. M. Barry Hooker(Singapore: Butterworth, 1988), 532.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

agreements also contained articles specifying matters of ‘religion’that secured the privileged status of Christian missionaries who, in
fact, themselves often took part in the treaty consultations. As partof the negotiations, John Bowring, for instance, obliged the Siamese
authorities to allow the free intercourse of the missionaries that accompanied him, and the final treaty document reads:

Treaty articles onmatters of ‘religion’

All British subjects visiting or residing in Siam shall be allowed thefree exercise of the Christian religion, and liberty to build churches
in such localities as shall be consented to by the Siamese authorities.19

Even more explicit in this regard, one of the subsequent agreementsthat Siam concluded with France in 1856 contained detailed entitlements for French missionaries, allowing them to preach and teach,travel freely throughout the kingdom, and build churches, schools,
and hospitals if the authorities consented.20 The treaties’ significancehere is threefold: they obliged Siam to accord with standards of‘civilisation’ defined by Western powers and eventually sparked aprocess of modernisation that included a complete overhaul of thelegal system; they contributed to a codification of sasana as the standard translation for ‘religion’; and they further entrenched a separate‘religious’ sphere of missionary activity.
The article contained in the Bowring Treaty is also telling in another regard: the Thai translation deploys the term sasana to translate ‘religion’ together with the verb ‘to hold’ (tue), abstracting from traditional
usages (see above) and deploying a rather Protestant understandingthat centres around the notion of ‘beliefs’ held by an individual. In fact,
only three years after signing the treaty, King Mongkut issued a declaration on ‘religious freedom’ in Siam that indicated how this conceptual shift became politically relevant: Mongkut therein coupled sasana
as the abstract and universal translation of ‘religion’ with the notionof ‘belief ’ (kan thue), assuming that people of all races and languages‘have’ a ‘religion’. Moreover, he defined different ‘religious beliefs’ of his
commoners as a private issue to regulate certain public practices – especially those that supposedly disturbed the public order.21

Entitlements for
Christian missionaries

Sasana and the notionof ‘belief’

19 John Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam. With a Narrative of the Mission tothat Country in 1855, vol. 2 (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857), 258–59, 218.
20 British and Foreign State Papers, XLVII: 995.
21 Thanks to Anthony Irwin for pointing out this declaration. For a more detailed
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5Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

Kitchanukit as animportant text

The Kitchanukit and the Distinction of Two Pathways
Despite the lack of success in terms of conversion, the Christian
missionary presence sparked a range of controversies that wereincreasingly held publicly through various books and periodicals
printed on presses that the missionaries had established in Siam.22
The most important Siamese text published in the course of
these debates is the Nangsue Sadaeng Kitchanukit (“A Book Explaining Various Things”). The Kitchanukit was authored by Chaophraya Thiphakorawong, a royal official close to King Mongkut. Whenmissionary printing presses refused to print the book because of
its negative remarks on Christianity, Thipakorawong assembled his
own lithographic press and published a first edition of 200 copies in
October 1867.23 The Kitchanukit, as its title indicates, indeed covers
a huge variety of topics, including geography, medicine, and different ways of calculating time, and thus constitutes one of the mostimportant texts to reconstruct epistemic and conceptual changes in
19th-century Siam.24 Most important for our purposes, the Kitchanukit documents the culmination of changes in the understandingof the (Buddhist) ‘religion’.25

22

23

24

25

6

translation and interpretation, cf. Ruth Streicher, “The Operation of a Secular
Grammar Imperial Siam: Rereading the ‘Book Explaining Various Things’,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (forthcoming).
In 1844, the Catholic bishop Pallegoix published a catechism that aimed at rebutting the Buddhist tradition and defending the Christian God (Thongchai, “Buddhist Apologetics”, 81). Around the same time, the Protestant missionary John
T. Jones (1802–1851) produced a book titled The Golden Balance, in which hechallenged Buddhist cosmology; cf. Sven Trakulhun, “Among a People of Unclean
Lips: Eliza and John Taylor in Siam (1833–1851),” Asiatische Studien 67, no. 4(2013). Debates also took place in the Bangkok Recorder (1844–1845, and starting
again from 1865), a bi-weekly published by the Protestant missionary Bradley.
Phirotthirarach Somjai, The Historical Writings of Chao Phraya Thipakorawong(PhD Thesis, Department of History, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL,
1983). A partial contemporary English translation of the Kitchanukit is available
in Henry Alabaster, The Wheel of the Law. Buddhism Illustrated from Siamese
Sources (London: Trübner & Co., 1871).
See especially: Craig J. Reynolds, “Buddhist Cosmography in Thai History, with
Special Reference to Nineteenth-Century Culture Change,” The Journal of AsianStudies 35, no. 2 (1976); Tony Day and Craig J. Reynolds, “Cosmologies, Truth
Regimes, and the State in Southeast Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2000).
Cf. Thongchai, “Buddhist Apologetics;” Trakulhun, “Chaophraya Thiphakorawong;” Streicher, “Rereading;” Ruth Streicher, “Scripting a Secular ‘Buddhist
Canon’: King Chulalongkorn and the Siamese Tripitaka Edition of 1893,” Modern
Asian Studies (forthcoming); Adrian Hermann, Unterscheidungen der Religion.
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Thus, the text is particularly informative in the different ways
in which it deploys the notion of the sasana. The foreword alreadyprogrammatically announces a conceptual split that grounds thewhole architecture of the book: problems should be solved “in thepathway of the world [kan lok], and in the pathway of religion [kansasana]”.26 Sasana has now become part of a key conceptual split
between ‘religion’ and the ‘world.’ The Kitchanukit embraces thissplit and related binaries of knowledge/belief and modernity/tradition, especially when dismissing the three-worlds cosmography(see below).
In the context of the Theravada tradition, this split has to be related to the conceptual distinction between two notions that appear
in Pali Buddhist texts as lokiya and lokuttara. These two terms havebeen widely interpreted as expressing a binary between this-worldly,
secular or mundane vs. other-worldly, religious or sacred, andhave been applied to differentiate the world-renouncing path ofthe monk from the this-worldly path of the laypeople.27 Critics ofthis interpretation have highlighted, however, that loka, the nounon which the adjective lokiya is based, “means ‘this world’ but also
includes other realms of existence in the whirl of samsara”,28 theendless cycle of Buddhist rebirth, such as different heavens andhells. Lokiya might thus rather be translated as a “customary mode”
of traditional practice that contrasts with a mode of existence thathas already gone beyond (uttara) this cycle – lokuttara.29 Crucially,both modes operate within the Buddhist tradition and depend on

26
27

28
29

Sasana in the
Kitchanukit

Conceptual split
between kan lok andkan sasana

Lokiya and lokuttara‘Religion’ in buddhistischen Kontexten des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 323–61.
Chaophraya Thiphakorawong, Sadaeng Kitchanukit (Bangkok [1872] 1971), 1–2.
E.g. Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer. A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Monica Lindberg Falk, Making Fields of Merit.
Buddhist Female Ascetics and Gendered Orders in Thailand (Copenhagen: NIAS
Press, 2007).
John R. Carter, “Traditional Definitions of the Term ‘Dhamma’,” Philosophy Eastand West 26, no. 3 (1976): 336, fn. 7.
John R. Carter suggests distinguishing the “customary mode” (lokiya) from a“transcendental mode” (lokuttara) – the latter term, however, carries strong
Christian connotations. Cf. John R. Carter, “The Notion of ‘Refuge’ (Sarana) in
the Theravada Buddhist Tradition.” In Studies in Pali and Buddhism. A Memorial
Volume in Honor of Bhikkhu Jagdish Kashyap, ed. A.K. Narain (New Delhi: B.R.,
1979).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

A new epistemologicalregister

New descriptions ofreligious plurality

Islam in the Kitchanukit

8each other. It is only after a conceptual transformation, which is theresult of the modern processes of “religionisation” just described,
that the lokiya/lokuttara distinction comes to be equated with themodern secular split that disconnects ‘Buddhism’ from a secular‘world’.
The Kitchanukit further accentuates this important conceptual
shift that characterises the modern religio-secular episteme in late
19th-century Siam: it replaces the traditional terminology of the lokiya/
lokuttara distinction with notions of the ‘world’ (lok) and ‘religion’(sasana), and deploys this distinction in a new epistemological register by announcing that ‘problems’ have to be ‘solved’ in either ofboth pathways.
It is this secularising move that not only preconditions the objectified notion of a ‘Buddhist religion’ that the Kitchanukit reifies, butalso permits its comparability to other religions, which forms one of
the main concerns of the book.30 Thus it deploys the term sasana in
combination with geographical or religious categories to describe thedifferent religions of the world, such as sasana isuan narai (literally:“the religion of Shiva and Vishnu”) for ‘Hinduism’, thereby mapping
different sasanas onto different places of the globe, including “Hindustan”, “Arabstan,” and “Europe”.31 And it compares these ‘religions’according to their beliefs: besides Christianity, most importantly,
Islam figures centrally, highlighting its local significance. After all,one of Siam’s vassal states was a Muslim sultanate called Patani, andefforts to incorporate Patani into the modern Siamese state had already begun by the end of the 19th century. In fact, Thipakorawong
had interviewed a local imam from Patani for another book on the
biography of Prophet Mohammed, and probably used his insights
for the Kitchanukit.32 Both the transformation of traditional cosmography and new state regulations on the Siamese “Buddhist Order”
demonstrate the material effects of this new religio-secular episteme.

30 Cf. Thongchai, “Buddhist Apologetics.”
31 Thiphakorawong, Sadaeng Kitchanukit, 128, 143–44.
32 Cf. Streicher, “Rereading.”
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

Thai-Buddhist Cosmo-Geography and the Kitchanukit
The Kitchanukit also represents an early culminating point of transformations in regard to the Buddhist elite’s attitudes towards traditional notionsof cosmo-geographical space.33 Until the middle of the 19th century, spatial
notions in Siam were dominated by the Mount Meru cosmology, in which
the world-system is imagined as a flat disk and Meru is considered to be
the centre of the world.34 After 1830, this view was challenged not only
by Christian missionaries, but increasingly by the Siamese political andmonastic elites themselves. John T. Jones writes about Mongkut in 1836:

Buddhist notions ofcosmo-geographicalspace[H]e has an eighteen inch celestial globe […]. He seems tolerably
well to understand the Copernican system of astronomy as to its
most important facts, and to believe it.35

Jones also expected that this interest in Western knowledge “mustaffect his religious beliefs”. Christian missionaries were convincedthat modern maps were presenting an objective representation of
the Earth’s surface and could therefore be used to delegitimise other,
competing depictions and notions of space.
In the Kitchanukit, the kan lok and kan sasana distinction is put
into practice in regard to the assumption that scientific astronomy and its model of the Earth as a sphere is superior knowledge.
As an argument for this conviction, Thiphakorawong presents thediscovery of the New World by Columbus, as well as a number ofother observable phenomena.36 Conceding the scientific untenabilityof Mount Meru, however, does not mean that all Buddhist stories
connected to this cosmology are rejected:

The impact of Western
astronomy

The Earth as a sphere

33 Cf. for details Adrian Hermann, “Spatial Media of Secularity. Buddhist Cosmo-Geographic Space in the 19th Century,” in Companion to the Study of Secularity, ed. HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”(Leipzig University, 2019), www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion/css_hermann_spatialmedia.pdf, as well as the detailed argument presented
in Adrian Hermann, “‘True facts of the world’. Media of Scientific Space and theTransformations of Cosmo- Geography in Nineteenth-Century Buddhist-Christian Encounters,” in Asian Religions, Technology and Science, ed. István Keul
(Routledge: London).
34 Cf. Akira Sadakata, Buddhist Cosmology. Philosophy and Origins (Tokyo: Kosei
Publishing, 1997).
35 John T. Jones, “Extracts from the Journal of Mr. Jones,” The Baptist Missionary
Magazine 16, no. 10 (1836): 233.
36 Cf. Winichakul Thongchai, Siam Mapped. A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 41.
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9Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

I have explained about this matter of Meru, and the other mountains, as an old tradition. But with respect to the Lord preaching on
Davadungsa as an act of grace to his mother, I believe it to be true,
and that one of the many stars or planets is the Davadungsa world.37
Hybrid knowledge inthe Kitchanukit

A new religio-secular
episteme

The modern Thai state

10

In an instance of hybrid knowledge formation, the traditional storyof the Buddha preaching to his mother in the Davadungsa heaven is
relocated as having taken place on one of the many planets of the new‘scientific’ cosmo-geographical space. As in many other Buddhist
contexts, the encounter between the new scientific knowledge andtraditional ideas was used to purge the ‘true doctrine of the Buddha’
from later accretions and to claim a full compatibility of this modern
Buddhism with science, which became a central strategy of Buddhist
modernism in the 19th century. It was the new religio-secular episteme constituted by the reimagining of the lok/sasana distinction
and adjacent processes of religion-making over the course of the 19th
century that made it possible to create this modern Buddhism and to
distinguish it from the traditional notions of space.
The Emergence of the Thai State
This discursive shift in the 19th century was deeply entangled with thepolitical transformation of the Siamese kingdom into a modern state:these new geographical ideas of space (materialised in the visual
representation of the map) constituted the basis for a new kind ofpolity that based its legitimacy on a bounded territorial space. Afterall, the traditional Buddhist cosmology of Mount Meru had directly
mirrored the traditional system of Buddhist kingship where vassal
states were structured around a centre that represented the universal monarch and where sovereignty was defined by loyalty of vassals
rather than territorial boundaries. The lok/sasana split enabled theruling elite to step outside this tradition so that, as Benedict Anderson has remarked, “it became possible to ‘use’ Buddhism for political
purposes in a more drastic and cold-blooded way.”38
37 Translation from the Kitchanukit in: Alabaster, The Wheel of the Law, 17.
38 Benedict Anderson, “Studies of the Thai State. The State of Thai Studies,” in The
Study of Thailand. Analyses of Knowledge, Approaches, and Prospects in Anthropology, Art History, Economics, History, and Political Science, ed. Eliezer B. Ayal
(Ohio: University Center for International Studies, Southeast Asia Program,
1978).

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

The suppression of rebellions in the North-east of Siam in the
1890s represents an early example of the politicisation of sasana: as
a reaction to the enforced centralisation policies of the royal government that disempowered many local ruling elites, people in thenorthern and north-eastern parts of the country started to resist byfollowing local ‘holy men’ that they saw as future incarnations of
the Buddha. The royal government reacted not only by using armed
force but also by dismissing the popular jataka stories (stories of
the Buddha’s birth) as incompatible with modern Buddhism.39
In legal terms, the most important decree that politicised sasana
was the “Buddhist Order Administration Act” of 1902, which explained in the preamble:
Whereas the amendment of the law and the reformation of the administrative system of the State have brought about manifold developments and outstanding progress to the country, it is obvious thatthe religious affairs of the Buddhist Order are also of no less importance to the development and prosperity both of Buddhism and of
the country in that, systematically administered, they will serve toattract more people to the study and practice of Buddhism under
the guidance of Bhikkhus [Buddhist monks], thereby leading themto the right mode of living in accordance with the Buddha’s instruction.40

Note not only the split between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in this decree,
but also the hierarchy implied: “religious affairs” are to serve the“progress of the State” with a view to managing the “right mode ofliving” of the Buddhist population. ‘Buddhism’, in this sense, can now
be mobilised by state forces to secure the progress of the country.
Conclusion
A variety of processes of “religio-secularisation” can be observed in
Thailand over the course of the 19th century. Not only is the Buddhist
tradition reconfigured as modern Buddhism, but this goes hand inhand with the emergence of an understanding of Christianity and ofIslam (as well as other traditions) as comparable ‘religions’.41 At the

Politicisation of sasana

The “Buddhist Order
Administration Act” of1902

A split between ‘religion’and ‘politics’“Religio-secularisation”
in 19th-Century Thailand

39 Patrick Jory, “Thai and Western Buddhist Scholarship in the Age of Colonialism: King
Chulalongkorn Redefines the Jatakas,” The Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 3 (2002).
40 Quoted in Yoneo Ishii, “Church and State in Thailand,” Asian Survey 8, no. 10(1968), 865–66.
41 Cf. Thongchai, “Buddhist Apologetics,” 88–97 for some broad strokes of the continuation of this development of ‘comparative religion’ throughout the 20th century.
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11Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

same time, distinctions between sasana – the term established as thestandard translation of ‘religion’ – and a ‘secular’ world (lok), as well
as between elements of the Buddhist tradition and ‘scientific’ knowledge (particularly in regard to cosmo-geography) become important
for the Thai elite and the developing state. Nevertheless, other Thai
Buddhist traditions continue to develop beyond and in entanglementwith the official discourse of ‘sasana/religion’ promoted by the stateover the course of the 20th century.42

1242 Cf. Peter A. Jackson, “Royal Spirits, Chinese Gods and Magic Monks. Thailand’s
Boom Time Religions of Prosperity,” South East Asia Research 7, no. 3 (1999); Justin T. McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk. Practicing Buddhism
in Modern Thailand (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

Quoted and Further Reading

Alabaster, Henry. The Wheel of the Law. Buddhism Illustrated from Siamese Sources.
London: Trübner & Co., 1871.
Anderson, Benedict. “Studies of the Thai State. The State of Thai Studies,” in The
Study of Thailand. Analyses of Knowledge, Approaches, and Prospects in Anthropology, Art History, Economics, History, and Political Science. Edited by Eliezer
B. Ayal, 193–234. Ohio: University Center for International Studies, Southeast
Asia Program, 1978.
Baker, Chris, and Phongpaichit Pasuk. A History of Thailand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Bowring, John. The Kingdom and People of Siam. With a Narrative of the Mission tothat Country in 1855, vol. 2. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857.
British and Foreign State Papers, XLVII, (1856–1857): 993–1001.
Carter, John R. “Traditional Defi nitions of the Term ‘Dhamma’.” Philosophy Eastand West 26, no. 3 (1976): 329–37.
Carter, John R. “A History of Early Buddhism.” Religious Studies 13, no. 3 (1977):
263–87.
Carter, John R. “The Notion of ‘Refuge’ (Sarana) in the Theravada Buddhist Tradition.” In Studies in Pali and Buddhism. A Memorial Volume in Honor of Bhikkhu
Jagdish Kashyap, edited by A.K. Narain. 41–52. New Delhi: B.R., 1979.
Chaophraya Th iphakorawong. Sadaeng Kitchanukit. Bangkok, 1971 [1872].
Day, Tony and Craig J. Reynolds. “Cosmologies, Truth Regimes, and the State inSoutheast Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 1–55.
Dreßler, Markus. “Modes of Religionization: A Constructivist Approach to Secularity.” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond theWest, Beyond Modernities” 7, Leipzig, February 2019. www.multiple-secularities.de/media/wps7_dressler_religionization.pdf.
Harrison, Rachel V., and Peter A. Jackson, eds. The Ambiguous Allure of the West.
Traces of the Colonial in Thailand. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Hermann, Adrian. “‘True facts of the world.’ Media of Scientific Space and the Transformations of Cosmo-Geography in Nineteenth-Century Buddhist-Christian
Encounters.” In Asian Religions, Technology and Science. Edited by István Keul,
11–30. Routledge: London, 2015.
Hermann, Adrian. Unterscheidungen der Religion: Analysen zum globalen Religionsdiskurs und dem Problem der Differenzierung von ‘Religion’ in buddhistischen Kontexten des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck& Ruprecht, 2015.
Hermann, Adrian. “Distinctions of Religion. The Search for Equivalents of ‘Religion’ and the Challenge of Theorizing a ‘Global Discourse of Religion’.” In Making Religion. Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion. Edited byFrans Wijsen and Kocku von Stuckrad, 97–124. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Hermann, Adrian. “Spatial Media of Secularity. Buddhist Cosmo-Geographic Space inthe 19th Century.” In Companion to the Study of Secularity. Edited by HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”. Leipzig University,
2019. www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion/css_hermann_spatialmedia.pdf.
Hooker, M. Barry. “The ‘Europeanization’ of Siam’s Law 1855–1908.” In Laws ofSoutheast Asia. Volume II: European Laws in South-East Asia. Edited by M.
Barry Hooker, 531–77. Singapore: Butterworth, 1988.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

Ishii, Yoneo. “Church and State in Thailand.” Asian Survey 8, no. 10 (1968), 864–71.
Ishii, Yoneo. “Thai Muslims and the Royal Patronage of Religion.” Law & Society
Review 28, no. 3 (1994): 453–60.
Jackson, Peter A. “Royal Spirits, Chinese Gods and Magic Monks. Thailand’s BoomTime Religions of Prosperity.” South East Asia Research 7, no. 3 (1999): 245–320.
Jones, John T. “Extracts from the Journal of Mr. Jones.” The Baptist Missionary Magazine 16, no. 10 (1836): 233–37.
Jory, Patrick. “Thai and Western Buddhist Scholarship in the Age of Colonialism:
King Chulalongkorn Redefi nes the Jatakas.” The Journal of Asian Studies 61, no.
3 (2002): 891–918.
Kirichenko, Alexey. “From Thathanadaw to Theravāda Buddhism: Constructionsof Religion and Religious Identity in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century
Myanmar.” In Casting Faiths. Edited by Thomas David DuBois, 23–45. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Larson, Tomas. “Secularisation, Secularism, and the Thai State.” In Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Thailand. Edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun. London:
Routledge, forthcoming.
Lindberg Falk, Monica. Making Fields of Merit. Buddhist Female Ascetics and Gendered Orders in Thailand. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2007.
Loos, Tamara. Subject Siam. Family, Law and Colonial Modernity in Thailand. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.
McDaniel, Justin T. The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk. Practicing Buddhism
in Modern Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Reynolds, Craig J. “Buddhist Cosmography in Thai History, with Special Reference
to Nineteenth-Century Culture Change.” The Journal of Asian Studies 35, no. 2(1976): 203–20.
Reynolds, Craig. The Buddhist Monkhood in Nineteenth Century Thailand. PhD
Thesis, Department of History, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1972.
Sadakata, Akira. Buddhist Cosmology. Philosophy and Origins. Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 1997.
Scott, David. Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality. Princeton, NJ:
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Streicher, Ruth. “The Operation of a Secular Grammar Imperial Siam: Rereadingthe ‘Book Explaining Various Th ings’.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies(forthcoming).
Streicher, Ruth. “Scripting a Secular ‘Buddhist Canon’: King Chulalongkorn and
the Siamese Tripitaka Edition of 1893.” Modern Asian Studies (forthcoming).
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University Press, 1976.
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Terwiel, Barend J. “The Bowring Treaty: Imperialism and the Indigenous Perspective.” Journal of the Siam Society 79, no. 2 (1991): 40–7.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Ruth Streicher, Adrian Hermann: ‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century

Terwiel, Barend J. Thailand’s Political History. From the 13th Century to Recent
Times. Bangkok: River Books, 2011.
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Religion in Siam.” Numen 62, no. 1 (2015): 76–99.
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(Thailand, 1867)”. In Religious Dynamics under the Impact of Imperialism andColonialism. A Sourcebook. Edited by Björn Bentlage, Marion Eggert, andHans-Martin Krämer, 63–76. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
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Th is text is part of the Companion to the Study of Secularity. The intent of the Companion is to give scholars interested in the concept of Multiple Secularities, who are
not themselves specialists in particular (historical) regions, an insight into different
regions in which formations of secularity can be observed, as well as into the key
concepts and notions with respect to the study of secularity.
It is published by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies (HCAS) “Multiple
Secularities − Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”. For as long as the HCAS
continues to exist, the Companion will be published and further expanded on the
HCAS website. Towards the end of the Multiple Secularities project, all entries will
be systematised and edited in order to transform the Companion into a complete
open access publication.
Ruth Streicher would like to thank the Fritz Th yssen Foundation for the generous
support of a postdoctoral scholarship to research the entangled histories of “Buddhism” and “Islam” in 19th-century Siam.

Please cite as:
Streicher, Ruth and Adrian Hermann. “‘Religion’ in Th ailand in the 19 th C entury.”
In Companion to the Study of Secularity. Edited by HCAS “Multiple Secularities– Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.” Leipzig University, 2019. www.multiplesecularities.de/media/css_streicher_hermann_thailand.pdf

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