Spatial Media of Secularity
Buddhist Cosmo-Geographic Space in the 19th Century
Adrian Hermann

What could be called “scientific media of space” played an importantrole in transformations of the cosmo-geographical imagination in
19th-century Theravada-Buddhist Modernism.1 Christian missionaries used these instruments and devices – maps, globes, compasses,
and astronomical models – in their debates with Buddhists all over
the Theravada world and deemed them essential to their challenge to
traditional notions of space. This mobilisation of science in attempts
at conversion to Christianity, though often unsuccessful, hints at theways in which ‘religious’ actors contributed to conceptual distinctions
in regard to “Western science”2 and paved the way for later differentiations and the emergence of a religio-secular episteme.3 In Siam, forexample, the missionaries’ expertise was highly welcomed by most of
the Buddhist elite, and King Rama IV became quickly convinced thatthese new “geographical knowledges [sic]” had to be understood as“true facts of the world”.4 This view that Western geographical learning was no longer to be challenged by indigenous knowledge traditions demonstrates how a new understanding of geographical andastronomic space had, at least among the elite, replaced traditional
concepts. In exploring the intimate links between spatial notions and
1

2
3
4

Christian mission andscientific media of space“True facts” ofmodern geography
and astronomy

What follows is an abbreviated version of the detailed argument presented in
Adrian Hermann, “‘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, ed. István Keul (Routledge: London, 2018).
Cf. Marwa Elshakry, “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections,” Isis 101, no. 1 (2010): 102–03.
Cf. Markus Dreßler, “Modes of Religionization: A Constructivist Approach to
Secularity,” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond
the West, Beyond Modernities” 7 (Leipzig, 2019).
Letter (1855), quoted from John Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam. A
Narrative of the Mission to that Country in 1855 (London: John W. Parker and Son,
1857), 445; Cf. Hermann, “‘True facts of the world’,” 11.
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1Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

the media through which they are conveyed, Bruno Latour’s conceptof the “immutable mobile” provides insights into the material ways inwhich the “true facts” of modern geography and astronomy travelled
to the Theravada world.

Spatiality and mediality

Imagination andmedia of space

Scientific Media of Space
The term “media of space” highlights the idea that spatiality andmediality are intimately linked, 5 and “that every mediatic dispositive produces a specifically structured space. Stages in the history of
space are therefore also stages in the history of media.”6 This view
makes it possible to ask “which spaces can possibly be constituted
through which media at a particular historical point in time?”7 While
any medium – e.g. a text or an image – can thus be understood asa medium of space, a specific range of scientific media of space canbe identified that claim to be conveying scientific knowledge as wellas to be faithfully representing geographical-physical spatial conditions. Such media (like the modern map for example) are understoodas the historical condition of possibility – “matrices of imagination”– for distinctly modern notions of space.8 The geographical imagination9 linked to these different media points to the particular notionsof space which are imaginable in the context of a certain order ofknowledge at a specific point in time.10
Hermann Doetsch, “Einleitung. (II) Räumlichkeit und Schriftkultur,” in Von Pilgerwegen, Schriftspuren und Blickpunkten. Raumpraktiken in medienhistorischer
Perspektive, ed. Jörg Dünne, Hermann Doetsch, and Roger Lüdeke (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2004); Tristan Thielmann, “‘You have reached yourdestination!’ Position, positioning and superpositioning of space through car navigation systems,” Social Geography 2, no. 1 (2007); Tristan Thielmann, “Locative
Media and Mediated Localities: An Introduction to Media Geography,” Aether.
The Journal of Media Geography 5 (2010); Jörg Dünne, “Die Karte als Operationsund Imaginationsmatrix. Zur Geschichte eines Raummediums,” in Spatial turn.
Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Jörg Döring and
Tristan Thielmann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008); Jörg Dünne, Die kartographische
Imagination. Erinnern, Erzählen und Fingieren in der Frühen Neuzeit (München:
Fink, 2011).
6 Doetsch, “Einleitung,” 73.
7 Dünne, “Die Karte als Operations- und Imaginationsmatrix,” 49.
8 Cf. Dünne, “Die Karte als Operations- und Imaginationsmatrix;” Dünne, Die kartographische Imagination.
9 Cf. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
10 Cf. Dünne, “Die Karte als Operations- und Imaginationsmatrix,” 50.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

In regard to cosmo-geographical notions, media of space can beconsidered even more important, since this space is never experienced directly through sensory perception, but only ever conveyed
and imagined through media, be they traditional or scientific. Therefore, novel and modern media of space, like the modern map and theglobe, played a decisive role in challenging the traditional Buddhist
cosmo-geography.
The Mount Meru Cosmo-Geography
In classical Indian and Buddhist cosmo-geography, in which theworld-system is imagined as a flat disk, Mount Meru is considered
to be the centre of the world, encircled by seven concentric rings ofmountains and oceans. These are surrounded by another saltwater
ocean in which four continents are located in the four cardinal directions, and which is circumscribed by an outer ring of iron mountains.
The Southern continent Jambudvipa is populated by humans and animals. The different ‘hells’, inhabited by ghosts (peta), anti-gods (asura)and hell beings (naraka) are located below these four continents.
Along the slopes of Mount Meru and above it, the six heavenly realms
in which the gods (devas) dwell are situated. These eleven realms (ofhell beings, anti-gods, ghosts, animals, humans, gods) make up theworld of the senses (kamadhatu), beyond which the sixteen realms
of form (rupadhatu) and the four formless realms (arupadhatu) can
be found. Sun and Moon circle around Mount Meru inside of a ringof wind, which is located exactly midway between the surface of theocean and the top of the mountain and also contains the stars.11
In his study of Pali-Buddhist concepts of nirvana, Steven Collins considers this “cosmo-geography”12 a central part of what hecalls the “Pali-Imaginaire”.13 In his view, this extraordinarily stable“mental universe created by and within Pali texts”14 was held together
11 Akira Sadakata, Buddhist Cosmology. Philosophy and Origins (Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 1997), 38–39. For a Bhutanese 19th-century depiction see https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Bhutanese_thanka_of_Mt._Meru_
and_the_Buddhist_Universe.jpg&oldid=329073843 (accessed June 11, 2019); forschematic diagrams see “Tibetan Cosmological Models”, https://web.ccsu.edu/
astronomy/tibetan_cosmological_models.htm (accessed June 11, 2019).
12 Steven Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities. Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 301.
13 Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities.
14 Collins, 41.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

Transformations of the
Pali-Imaginaireby the common language as well as the world contained within the
Pali-texts, giving rise to a relatively stable world-view in the different regions of the Pali-Buddhist ecumene.15 In the modern periodof Buddhist history since the 19th century, in a “reaction to westerncolonialism and science”, as Collins argues,16 important transformations in regard to this Mount Meru cosmo-geography took place.
Controversies about Cosmo-Geographical Space inChristian-Buddhist Encounters in Ceylon
In 1826, the Church Missionary Society’s The Missionary Register
printed a letter by the Methodist missionary Benjamin Clough(1791–1853), to which it gave the heading “The Faith of a Buddhist
Priest Shaken”.17 In this letter, Clough relates a long discussion witha learned Buddhist abbot. When asked if the Buddha should be considered omniscient and therefore “all which he has said and caused
to be recorded” should be regarded as infallible, the monk answers in
the positive. Clough questions this omniscience:
Then, may I ask how it happened that your god should, in the courseof his orations and religious revelations, have given to the world soerroneous a view of the geography of the world?

Christian-Buddhist
debates in Ceylon

The abbot answers that this is impossible, which leads Clough toclaim that he can prove the Buddhist geography to be false. The restof the report goes as follows:
I produced some maps, a globe, a quadrant, and a compass; andproceeded to give him as correct an outline of our geography, navigation […], as I could […]. “And now,” said I, “not a day passes but wemake fresh discoveries that Buddhu mistook. He represents the world
as a vast plane. Now,” said I, “on this principle, if a ship leave a port,
and for two years together continue to sail at such a rate in a direct
westerly course, then at the end of that two years she must be so many
thousand miles from the place she left.” “Certainly,” said he. “But,” said
I, “our ships have often tried this; and […], instead of finding themselves many thousand miles from the place they left, they have foundthemselves in the port from which they sailed.” Having a globe before

4

15 Collins, 51, 63–64.
16 Collins, 54.
17 Benjamin Clough, “The Faith of a Buddhist Priest Shaken,” The Missionary Register for 1826… (1826), 610–11. Typographical errors in the original have beencorrected.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

me, I now explained the matter, and he immediately apprehended it.
“Besides,” said I, “here is this quadrant, and this compass, by which instruments we find our way to every part of the world. And I can assureyou, that Buddhu has referred to oceans, to continents, to islands, andempires, and people, which never had an existence! […]” And here I
handed him a list of all the places mentioned in their books, as wellknown by him; and, showing him a map of the world, said, “This listof yours does not include one quarter of the world.” By this time thePriest was in a pitiable state: […] his whole frame was agitated. Whenhe recovered, he […] said, “Sir, […] how are we situated in other respects?” “Well,” said I, “your astronomy, your history, and in fact, thewhole system of your theology, is precisely in the same state. It is all
error!” With great emotion he now rose, […] and said he never could
have expected such discoveries to be made to him; […] and begged me
to become his spiritual instructor.

It might be fruitless to try to read this account written by a Methodist
missionary in 19th-century Ceylon as an accurate report on if andhow this meeting took place and which positions the Buddhist monk
actually defended. Nevertheless, the letter illustrates two important
aspects of the 19th-century Christian-Buddhist encounter: the attitudes of Christian missionaries towards the scientific knowledge ofthe time, especially in the areas of astronomy and geography, and thecentral role of controversial debates about spatial concepts and ideas
linked with traditional Buddhist cosmology. In this respect, Clough’s
letter relates a typical example of the widespread 19th-century missionary conviction that the whole Buddhist system would fall apart– opening the way to a later acceptance of Christianity – as soon as
its cosmological basis was shattered.18 In pursuing this strategy, Western actors often relied on the argumentative evidence of scientificmedia of space like the map and the globe, not only in Ceylon, butalso in other parts of the Theravada world like Siam. Here, Christian

Christian missionaries
and scientificknowledge

18 Cf. Richard F. Young, and G.P.V Somaratna, Vain Debates. The Buddhist-ChristianControversies of Nineteenth-Century Ceylon (Wien: Sammlung de Nobili, 1996),
69–70; Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism & Science. A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 53–57. On this general point and theChristian missionary movement’s relationship to science, cf. Elshakry, “WhenScience Became Western,” 102: “Perhaps because conversion is itself a kind oftranslation, missionaries played a key role in vernacular science translations
around the world […]. And yet, while missionaries were important vectors forthe globalization of the modern sciences from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
centuries, the ambiguities and paradoxes in their enterprise meant that they promoted a very particular vision of ‘science’.” See also her overall assessment of thisLeipzig University – HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, 2019www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion

5Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

Scientific media of spaceand delegitimisationof traditions

missionaries were equally convinced that these media could be used
to delegitimise other, competing depictions and notions of space. In
1846, the missionary Jesse Caswell wrote to the American Board of
the Commissioners of Foreign Missions:
A little money expended in purchasing a few articles of apparatus
illustrative of scientific truth may probably obtain that for the causeof Christ which is greatly needed, and cannot be obtained from anyother quarter, while at the same time it contributes to enlarge theminds of those who render the service and qualify them the better tooperate on the minds of their fellow countrymen.19

Buddhist elites andWestern knowledge
in Siam6

Buddhist Modernism in 19th-Century Siam and the ScientificMedia of Space
Beginning in the 1830s, Siam experienced a transformation of notionsof cosmo-geographical space that was mostly the result of contacts thatdifferent members of the political and monastic elites established withrepresentatives of Western powers and especially the Protestant missionaries who had newly arrived in the country.20 In this process, the engagement with the claims of a new geographical knowledge and the confrontation with modern scientific media of space turned out to be crucial.
Until the middle of the 19th century, spatial notions in Siam were
dominated by the Mount Meru cosmology sketched above. After
1830, these were challenged not only by the representatives of Western powers and Christian missionaries, but by the Siamese politicaland monastic elites themselves. The monk and future King Mongkut(1804–1868, r. 1851–1868) emerged as the leader of a small group of
Buddhist intellectuals that engaged closely with Western knowledge
and technical inventions. The early Protestant missionary Karl Gützlaff
enterprise: “science (and medicine) became critical weapons in the missionaries’ spiritual arsenal—albeit ones that, in the age of Darwin, had a propensity tobackfire.” This therefore “constituted a highly uncertain strategy for conversion”
despite hopes that “science would pave the way to God. Its rationality would
testify to the superiority of Protestantism over the benighted superstitions of theEast” (Marwa Elshakry, “The Gospel of Science and American Evangelism in late
Ottoman Beirut,” Past and Present 196, no. 1 (2007): 177, 214).
19 Caswell, quoted in William L. Bradley, “Prince Mongkut and Jesse Caswell,” The
Journal of the Siam Society 54, no. 1 (1966): 40.
20 Cf. Thanet Aphornsuvan, “The West and Siam’s Quest for Modernity. Siamese Responses to Nineteenth Century American Missionaries,” South East Asia Research17, no. 3 (2009).

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity(1803–1851), who in 1831 met with Mongkut, referred to him as a“decided friend of European sciences”.21 John T. Jones writes in 1836:“[H]e [Mongkut] 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.”22 Jones also expected that
this interest in Western knowledge “must affect his religious beliefs”.
Many other members of the Siamese elite in the middle of the 19th century had equally accepted Western geographical learning and modern
geographical maps as a form of knowledge no longer to be challenged
by indigenous knowledge traditions.23 How can the novelty of thesescientific media of space be described and their role in the transformation of notions of space be analysed? In what ways do they differ fromother media of space and earlier mapping practices?
After 1569, Mercator’s grid of longitudes and latitudes spanned
the whole world and located every reachable point in the world in thissurveyed space. This homogenous “objectivistic vision of the world”24
now stood in competition with alternative topographies. It would bewrong to think, however, that substantial records of geographicalknowledge exclusively developed in Europe and were introduced to
non-Western contexts only in the modern era. In Siam, a plurality of
local conceptions of space existed well before the 19th century. Whilein most instances these were linked to Buddhist notions of space,
there were also a number of other topographical records resulting in

Novelty of scientificmedia of space

Local conceptionsof space

21 Karl Gützlaff, “Journal of Three Voyages along the Coast of China,” in Early Missionaries in Bangkok: The Journals of Tomlin, Gutzlaff and Abeel, 1828–1832, ed. A.
Farrington (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2001), 67.
22 John T. Jones, “Extracts from the Journal of Mr. Jones,” The Baptist Missionary
Magazine 16, no. 10 (1836): 233.
23 With respect to the development of Western geography and cartography, the 15th
century should be regarded as the period of the most crucial advances. Cf. David
Woodward, “Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space,” in Circa 1492:
Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. Levenson (New Haven: Yale University
Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1991). Earlier European maps were mostly
either medieval mappae mundi based on the T-O scheme or local topographicaldepictions produced for specific occasions. The rediscovery of Ptolemy laid thefoundation for modern methods of projection, and in 1569 Mercator’s isogonal
cylindrical projection combined geographic coordinates with straight compass
routes in a single map.
24 Bernhard Siegert, “Repräsentationen diskursiver Räume. Einleitung,” in Topographien der Literatur. Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, ed. Hartmut
Böhme (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), 6.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

Modern map as a‘a-perspectivical medium’

Globe representsbounded andhomogenous space8

cartographic depictions.25 While at first glance it therefore appears tomake sense to differentiate clearly between indigenous and Western
topographical depictions, the theoretical perspective presented above
has highlighted the close relationship between mediality and notionsof space and thus makes a different assessment possible: rather thanbeing distinguished by on the one hand conveying imaginary geographies and on the other hand objective geographical knowledge,
the spaces being constituted by pre-modern as well as modern scientific maps emerge in an interplay of perception, imagination and the
media of space that co-produce them.
Based on a geometric projection, the modern map is an ‘a-perspectivical medium’: its depiction of space is significantly not seen from aperspective. The earth can never be seen as it is depicted on a map which
is ruled by a mapping grid.26 On the contrary, the spatiality constituted by the map as a medium of space is only available through a formof cartographic imagination enabled by the map itself. This is as muchthe case for the map as it is for the globe, which can only be observedin parts – even from a bird’s-eye-view. At the same time, the globe is acentral medium of the bounded and homogenous space of modernity.
As Denis Cosgrove writes: “on the globe the ‘ends of the earth’ cannot beignored”.27 Therefore, while Western maps and globes are not in themselvesrepresentative of superior knowledge, they nevertheless lay claim to a
25 In contrast to the primarily Buddhist and cosmographic representations, thesemaps (e.g. a manuscript from 1776 showing the paths of rivers and Ceylon, amap of coastlines from Korea to Arabia, or a strategic map of today’s northeastern
Thailand used for military purposes in 1827) represented segments of the Earth’s
surface. Pre-modern indigenous notions of space should not be understood as
generally cosmological and imaginary, but rather as already pointing to complex
combinations of different notions of cosmological and geographical space. Nevertheless, there are no surviving globes or non-cosmological world maps frompre-modern Southeast Asia; see Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “Conclusion to Southeast Asian Cartography,” in The History of Cartography. Volume 2, Book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, ed. Harley, J. Brian,and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 839. The
surviving maps from Siam do not include any information on how the topography depicted on them relates to the totality of the Earth’s surface, see Thongchai
Winichakul, Siam Mapped. A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 31.
26 Cf. Robert Stockhammer, Kartierung der Erde. Macht und Lust in Karten und Literatur (München: Fink, 2007), 27.
27 Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 13.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

different space than do the local maps. Subsequently, any notion ofcosmo-geographical space therefore enters into a competitive relationship with any knowledge flagged as scientific.28
A key new development we can observe over the course of the 19th
century is therefore the emergence of a strict binary contrast between
traditional cosmographic notions and new ‘scientific’ knowledge.
The impact of these transformations of cosmo-geographical space inSiam can best be understood by looking at a book printed in Siam in
1867. The Nangsue Sadaeng Kitchanukit (“A Book Explaining Various
Things”), written by Chaophraya Thiphakorawong, can be regarded
as a central text of early Buddhist modernism, not only in Siam.29
Thiphakorawong’s perspective is based on the assumption that
Western scientific astronomy and its model of the earth as a sphere issuperior and convincing knowledge, which has to replace traditional
notions of cosmo-geographical space. As an argument for this belief,
he presents, among other things, the discovery of the new world by
Columbus.30 As Thiphakorawong points out, however, the Buddha
himself never taught this false cosmology:

Nangsue Sadaeng
Kitchanukit (1867)

The Buddha andtraditional cosmology

Those who have studied Pali know, that the Lord […] never discoursed about cosmography. […] For if he had taught that the world
was a revolving globe, contrary to the traditions of the people, who
believed it to be flat, they would not have believed him.31

This argument makes it possible to retain the doctrine of the omniscience of the Buddha.
Conceding the scientific untenability of Mount Meru, however,does not mean that all Buddhist stories connected to this cosmology
are rejected:
28 Cf. Winichakul, Siam Mapped, 21–22.
29 For more information on the importance of the Kitchanukit for conceptual transformations in 19th-century Siam, cf. Ruth Streicher and Adrian Hermann, “‘Religion’ in Thailand 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_
streicher_hermann_thailand.pdf. The Kitchanukit was partly published in an
English translation in 1871 as the first part of Henry Alabaster, The Wheel of theLaw. Buddhism Illustrated from Siamese Sources (London: Trübner & Co., 1871).
All quotations are taken from this translation.
30 Cf. Winichakul, Siam Mapped, 41.
31 Quoted in Alabaster, The Wheel of the Law, 15.
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9Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

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.32
Relocating the
Davadungsa heaven

Buddhist modernism
and science

The power of scientificmedia of space

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.
The example of the Kitchanukit shows that the confrontation
with the scientific cosmo-geography had profound consequences for
the Siamese elite, but did not lead to an abandoning of Buddhism.
Rather, in Siam, as in many other Buddhist contexts, the encounter between the new scientific knowledge and traditional ideas wasused to purge the ‘true doctrine of the Buddha’ from later accretions and claim a compatibility of Buddhism and science, whichbecame a central strategy in Buddhist modernism all over Asia. In
Thiphakorawong’s case, the fact that the other religions had proposeda flat earth even led him to the following claim: “One who thinks thatthe earth is flat is a follower of those who believe in God the Creator. For
one who believes that the earth is spherical is following the Buddha’s
words about what is natural”.33 The strategy the missionaries wereusing to de-legitimise Buddhism was thus redirected at them, notonly in Siam but also in Ceylon, where the claim to possess the true
understanding of cosmo-geography was not given up so easily.
Scientific Media of Space as “Immutable Mobiles” in
19th-Century Ceylon
The encounter between Rev. Clough and the monk, related above,
served as an illustration of the epistemological fissures which opened
up in the encounter of geography, cosmology, and the confrontation
with Christian missions. At the same time, it was left undeterminedfrom where media of space draw their effectiveness that makes themso useful in challenging traditional conceptions of space, and how
they differ from their pre-modern counterparts. How can the powerof scientific knowledge and its media be described without resorting to a history of scientific progress which in retrospect can only
32 Alabaster, 17.
33 Quoted from Winichakul, Siam Mapped, 41.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

consider these media to be conveying a naturally superior, objective,
and scientifically correct geography and astronomy? How can a situation be analysed, in which the possibilities of reaction and the formsof knowledge formation were much more hybrid, and in which theresult of a displacement of traditional notions of space was all but tobe expected with certainty?
These questions become even more urgent if we consider the factthat such instruments and devices had, for example, already been inhigh demand in Siam in the 17th century. At the end of his reign, King
Narai (r. 1656–1688) possessed “a model of the solar system constructed of silver and gold, various watches, and many other piecesof scientific equipment”.34 However, according to Ian Hodges,35
Narai’s interest in European knowledge and technology in the 17th
century did not have a lasting influence on spatial and cosmological ideas. This pre-history of the Siamese interest in Western maps
and technical devices illustrates that the mere availability of scientificinstruments was not sufficient to initiate a transformation of spatialconceptions. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, this can be understood as a failure to extend the network in which scientific facts
are constituted and enabled to spread.36
Following Latour, scientific media of space like maps and globes
can be understood as “immutable mobiles”37. He explains the special
power of scientific knowledge and its technological-material representations as an effect of the combination of a consistent repertoireof cultural techniques and describes the media-technological superiority of the West in a way that makes the assumption of a “great divide” between pre-scientific and scientific cultures unnecessary.38
Latour focuses on practices of inscription that are connected to paper media like the printing press, the linear perspective, geometricalMedia of space in17th-century Siam

Scientific media of space
as “immutable mobiles”

34 Ian Hodges, “Western Science in Siam: A Tale of Two Kings,” Osiris 13 (1998): 88.
35 Hodges, “Western Science in Siam,” 90.
36 Cf. Bruno Latour, Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers throughSociety (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 167, 250.
37 Latour, Science in Action; in regard to maps cf. Denis Cosgrove, Geography and
Vision. Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008),
167–68.
38 Cf. Erhard Schüttpelz, “Die medientechnische Überlegenheit des Westens. Zur
Geschichte und Geographie der immutable mobiles Bruno Latours,” in Mediengeographie. Theorie – Analyse – Diskussion, ed. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 69.
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11Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

projections and cartographic advances, as well as statistics, tables,and diagrams. While each of these inventions is of central importance in itself, he treats these cultural techniques and their products
mainly as elements whose power lies in their being immutable as well
as mobile. The superiority of scientific knowledge therefore cannot
be attributed to a mental superiority of Western actors or a basic difference in the quality of knowledge. Rather, the power of scientificknowledge lies in the combination of a multitude of observations andparts of knowledge in, and with the help of, immutable mobiles. Thisdrawing together takes place in “centers of calculation” in a process
in which the combination of inscriptions of immutable mobiles produces new immutable mobiles of a higher order.39 With the conceptof the immutable mobile, therefore, Latour answers his own question
regarding the power of the media of scientific knowledge:
how to act at a distance on unfamiliar events, places and people?
Answer: by somehow bringing home these events, places and people.
[…] By inventing means that (a) render them mobile so that they
can be brought back; (b) keep them stable so that they can be moved
back and forth without additional distortion, corruption or decay,and (c) are combinable so that whatever stuff they are made of, they
can be cumulated, aggregated, or shuffled like a pack of cards.40“Immutable mobiles”
and actor-networks

Modern maps as“immutable mobiles”

12

The existence of scientific knowledge is not independent of the immutable mobiles and the actor-networks constituted through them.41
The persuasion of another of the knowledge transported through theimmutable mobiles is the same thing as the expansion of a network
linking actors and things with the centres of calculation in which thisknowledge was produced. The scientific facts which play a role inthe constitution of new notions of cosmo-geographic space in the
19th-century Buddhist-Christian encounter could not arrive in Bangkok or Colombo independent of the devices used to transport them.42
The modern map is a prime example of an immutable mobile asa material device which is used as a medium of scientific knowledge
and its claims to truth. It combines pieces of information collected in
39 Cf. Latour, Science in Action, 232–47.
40 Latour, 233.
41 Bruno Latour, “Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world,” in Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, ed. Karin Knorr-Cetina andMichael Mulkay (London: Sage, 1983), 167.
42 Cf. Latour, Science in Action, 250.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

many different places, which have been collated and combined in acentre of calculation and then, in an immutable mobile of a higher
order, been put into circulation again.43
From this Latourian perspective, the devices and instruments obtained by King Narai in the 17th century did not function as media of
scientific facts, because they did not form part of an actor-networkin which these facts could have been transported. King Mongkut andthe other members of the Siamese elite since the 1830s, however, did
become integrated into such a network, partly through the work ofsuch devices. As Latour stresses, however, such a network (in whichscientific facts are constituted and transported) is only expandable
and stable if the scientific controversies at issue are resolved. This canbe illustrated by a last example from Ceylon.
In a famous public controversy at Panadura in 1873 between missionaries and monks, the Rev. David de Silva challenged the Mount
Meru cosmo-geography as follows:

Christian-Buddhist
debates in Ceylon 1873

Where, then, is this great mountain […] situated? How is it possiblethat it could not be seen to the eyes of men? This globe represents theearth. (Here the globe was shown.) In this the shape of the earth, its
dimensions, the great rivers and seas, and the positions of the countries, etc., are all represented. […] Men at no period ever saw such amountain, nor have they known by science that there could be such amountain. […] Mahameru44 […] must be placed on the earth; if not,Buddhism must be rejected at once.45

Rev. de Silva’s use of the globe and his argumentation can be read as
an attempt to extend the actor-network of the scientific knowledge
connected to this immutable mobile and to enforce an alternative
understanding of cosmo-geographic space. Coincidentally, this debate at Panadura has become famous because, in the opinion of manyobservers, it was not the missionaries but the monks who emerged
victorious from the debate.
The Buddhist debater, Rev. Migettuwatte, responded by conceding that the scriptures quoted by Silva show that the Buddha had proposed the existence of Mount Meru. However, instead of abandoning
43 Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 167–68.
44 Mount Meru is often also referred to as Mahameru [Great Meru].
45 Quoted from Pranith Abhayasundara, ed., Controversy at Panadura or Pānadura
Vādaya (Colombo: State Printing Corporation, 1990), 140–43.
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13Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

Defending Mount Meru

the traditional cosmo-geography, Migettuwatte defends it and questions the basis on which de Silva made his claims:
The Rev. Gentleman no doubt alluded to Sir Isaac Newton’s theory[…]. The little globe which the Rev. Gentleman produced was one
made on Newton’s principle […].46

This principle, however, Migettuwatte claims, is not uncontroversial:even amongst Englishmen there were serious […] differences of
opinion as to whether Newton’s theory was correct or not. Amongothers, Mr. Morrison, a learned gentleman, had published a bookrefuting Newton’s arguments […]. (Here he produced and handedaround the ‘New principia’ by R. J. Morrison, F. A. S. L., published in
London.) How unjust, then, to attempt to demolish the great Buddha’s sayings by quoting as authority an immature system of astronomy, the correctness of which is not yet accepted.47
Re-opening thescientific controversy

Questioning thestatus of the globe

Migettuwatte thus questions the globe’s status as a scientific medium
of space. Instead of a device which represents ‘natural facts’, it isturned into the object of a scientific controversy.
In analysing such a situation of conflict between ‘scientific’ and‘religious’ knowledge, it is especially important to take a non-deterministic position. Latour’s third rule of method is helpful here, whichclaims that decisions about “nature” are only the result of the end of
a controversy and therefore cannot be used to explain how the decisions in the controversy were taken.48
While the missionary de Silva regards the controversy aroundthe spherical form of the earth as a closed issue and the globe as a
medium of this secure knowledge, the monk uses the book by R.J.
Morrison49, a proponent of a geo-centric worldview in the Englandof the 19th century, to question the status of the globe as a medium
46
47
48
49

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Quoted from Abhayasundara, Controversy at Panadura, 153.
Quoted from Abhayasundara, 153–54.
Latour, Science in Action, 99.
Richard James Morrison published the first edition of his book The New Principia;
or, True System of Astronomy. In which the Earth is Proved to be the Stationary
Centre of the Solar System, and the Sun is Shewn to be Only 365,006.5 Miles fromthe Earth, and the Moon Only 32,828.5 Distant; While the Sun Travels Yearly in an
Ellipse around the Earth, the Other Planets Moving about the Sun in Ellipses Also in
1868. The book was at least successful enough to warrant a second edition in 1872.
Cf. Lopez, Buddhism & Science, 56.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

of secure knowledge.50 By referring to this book, the monk now tries
to recruit Morrison as an ally in a network against the missionaryde Silva, a network which now suddenly spans the great distance
between London and Colombo and turns both into actors in a newly
flared-up scientific controversy.
Conclusion
Theravada elites in Ceylon and Siam reacted to the authoritative
claims of geography and cosmology with a reformulation of the Buddhist tradition, retaining central pieces of the cosmological traditionas possibly true – and literally true –, but at the same time locatingthem in the context of modern science. Scientific media of space, themaps and globes discussed above, appear in this process simultaneously as manifestations and agents of change. In constructing religious and scientific knowledge as two different kinds of knowledge
and in referring to the pretensions of a universal scientific geography,
they deny alternative Buddhist notions their veracity. In reaction tothese claims, Buddhist modernists either appropriated this universalism and began to treat the classical Mount Meru cosmology as
pre-scientific and un-Buddhist, or confronted the challenge on thelevel of science itself as in the example from Ceylon.

Scientific media of spaceas agents of change

50 Cf. Latour, Science in Action, 97–98.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

Quoted and Further Reading

Abhayasundara, Pranith, ed. Controversy at Panadura or Pānadura Vādaya. Colombo: State Printing Corporation, 1990.
Alabaster, Henry. The Wheel of the Law. Buddhism Illustrated from Siamese Sources.
London: Trübner & Co., 1871.
Aphornsuvan, Thanet. “The West and Siam’s Quest for Modernity. Siamese Responses to Nineteenth Century American Missionaries.” South East Asia Research 17, no. 3 (2009): 401–31.
Bowring, John. The Kingdom and People of Siam. A Narrative of the Mission to that
Country in 1855. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857.
Bradley, William L. “Prince Mongkut and Jesse Caswell.” The Journal of the Siam
Society 54, no. 1 (1966): 29–41.
Clough, Benjamin. “The Faith of a Buddhist Priest Shaken.” The Missionary Registerfor 1826… (1826): 610–11.
Collins, Steven. Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities. Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo’s Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western
Imagination. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Cosgrove, Denis. Geography and Vision. Seeing, Imagining and Representing theWorld. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.
Doetsch, Hermann. “Einleitung. (II) Räumlichkeit und Schrift kultur.” In Von Pilgerwegen, Schriftspuren und Blickpunkten. Raumpraktiken in medienhistorischer Perspektive. Edited by Jörg Dünne, Hermann Doetsch, and Roger Lüdeke,
73–7. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004.
Dreßler, Markus. “Modes of Religionization: A Constructivist Approach to Secularity.” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond theWest, Beyond Modernities“ 7, Leipzig, 2019.
Drover, Lauren. Christen in Thailand. Am Beispiel der Karen und der Akha. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012.
Dünne, Jörg. “Die Karte als Operations- und Imaginationsmatrix. Zur Geschichte
eines Raummediums.” In Spatial turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- undSozialwissenschaften. Edited by Jörg Döring, and Tristan Th ielmann, 49–70.
Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008.
Dünne, Jörg. Die kartographische Imagination. Erinnern, Erzählen und Fingieren in
der Frühen Neuzeit. München: Fink, 2011.
Elshakry, Marwa. “The Gospel of Science and American Evangelism in late Ottoman Beirut.” Past and Present 196, no. 1 (2007): 173–214.
Elshakry, Marwa. “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections.”
Isis 101, no. 1 (2010): 98–109.
Gregory, Derek. Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Gützlaff, Karl. “Journal of Th ree Voyages along the Coast of China.” In Early Missionaries in Bangkok. The Journals of Tomlin, Gutzlaff and Abeel. 1828–1832.
Edited by Anthony Farrington, 65–90. Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2001.
Harley, J. Brian, and David Woodward, eds. The History of Cartography. Volume
2, Book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Hermann, Adrian. “‘True facts of the world’: Media of Scientific Space and theTransformations of Cosmo-Geography in Nineteenth-Century BuddhistChristian Encounters.” In Asian Religions, Technology and Science. Edited by

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

István Keul, 11–30. Routledge: London, 2018.
Hodges, Ian. “Western Science in Siam: A Tale of Two Kings.” Osiris 13 (1998):
80–95.
Jones, John T. “Extracts from the Journal of Mr. Jones.” The Baptist Missionary Magazine 16, no. 10 (1836): 233–37.
Latour, Bruno. “Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world.” In Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. Edited by Karin KnorrCetina, and Michael Mulkay, 141–70. London: Sage, 1983.
Latour, Bruno. “Visualisation and Cognition: Th inking with Eyes and Hands.”
Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture and Present 6 (1986):
1–40.
Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers throughSociety. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Lopez, Donald S. Jr. Buddhism & Science. A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
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.
Sadakata, Akira. Buddhist Cosmology. Philosophy and Origins. Translated by Gaynor Sekimori. Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 1997.
Schüttpelz, Erhard. “Die medientechnische Überlegenheit des Westens. Zur Geschichte und Geographie der immutable mobiles Bruno Latours.” In Mediengeographie. Theorie – Analyse – Diskussion. Edited by Jörg Döring, and Tristan
Th ielmann, 67–110. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009.
Schwartzberg, Joseph E. “Conclusion to Southeast Asian Cartography.” In The History of Cartography. Volume 2, Book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East andSoutheast Asian Societies. Edited by Harley, J. Brian, and David Woodward,
839–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Streicher, Ruth and Adrian Hermann. “‘Religion’ in Thailand in the 19th Century.” In
Companion to the Study of Secularity. Edited by HCAS “Multiple Secularities –Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.” Leipzig University, 2019. www.multiplesecularities.de/publications/companion/css_streicher_hermann_thailand.pdf.
Siegert, Bernhard. “Repräsentationen diskursiver Räume. Einleitung.” In Topographien der Literatur. Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext. Edited by
Hartmut Böhme, 3–11. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005.
Stockhammer, Robert. Kartierung der Erde. Macht und Lust in Karten und Literatur. München: Fink, 2007.
Th ielmann, Tristan. “‘You have reached your destination!’ Position, positioning andsuperpositioning of space through car navigation systems.” Social Geography 2,
no. 1 (2007): 63–75.
Th ielmann, Tristan. “Locative Media and Mediated Localities: An Introduction to
Media Geography.” Aether. The Journal of Media Geography 5 (2010): 1–17.
Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped. A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994.
Woodward, David. “Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space.” In Circa
1492: Art in the Age of Exploration. Edited by Jay. A Levenson, 83–7. New Haven:
Yale University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1991.
Young, Richard Fox, and G.P.V Somaratna. Vain Debates. The Buddhist-ChristianControversies of Nineteenth-Century Ceylon. Wien: Sammlung de Nobili, 1996.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Adrian Hermann: Spatial Media of Secularity

Th is text is part of the Companion to the Study of Secularity. Th e 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 diff erent
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 “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 Multiple Secularities project, all entries will
be systematised and edited in order to transform the Companion into a completed
Open Access publication.

Please cite as:
Hermann, Adrian. “Spatial Media of Secularity: Buddhist Cosmo-Geographic
Space in the 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/media/css_hermann_spatialmedia.pdf

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