Interpreting Thai Religious Change: Temples, Sangha Reform and Social Change

Interpreting Thai Religious Change Thai religion is changing. So is Thai society. To most scholars the connection is obvious: social and especially material changes drive religious ones. So a new middle class causes religious ferment(1) while a crisis in legitimacy explains a militant Buddhist movement(2) as well as the fervour for amulets and forest monks.(3) Such explanations are typical in using extra-religious current events to explain religious change. We need not dispute their specific interpretations to make a larger historical point: today's religious changes are, if only in part, the unintended consequences of a century and a half of Sangha reform that has undermined the local Buddhism of the temple or wat. In effect centralizing reforms took the wat away from locals and, by driving folk practices out of the temple, fostered today's religious "free market". This long-term institutional shift, changing the wat's place in Thai society, can be the context for understanding today's religious changes. My paper has three sections. The first considers the wat in traditional society, the second discusses how reforms undermined the wat as a local institution, and the third reflects on the implications of this change for interpreting contemporary religious change. I conclude by arguing that historically evident change in the wat, being endogenous, should take precedence over exogenous explanations of religious change. Wat in Traditional Society A wat unites monastery and shrine. Early Buddhism had no wat as the monks were wandering ascetics. Many centuries later, when Tai(4) became Buddhists, monks often lived in settled monastic communities, but the early inscriptions do not mention wat literally and, as they record endowments to support each element separately, they do not suggest a wat-like whole.(5) Apparently Buddhism was like its Burmese variant where monastery and shrine are distinct entities.(6) By the late fourteenth century wat appears as a word but usage is inconsistent and so this may still be just an assemblage of sacred elements.(7) Yet over centuries these elements solidified to make the wat into a discrete entity. When the Bangkok era (1782-present) began the wat was already taken for granted as the basic unit of the Thai Sangha and the centre of lay Buddhism. The wat is a Tai creation. Joining monastery and shrine creates a social whole that is a community in itself and often the centre of a lay community. Thai custom makes the wat the moral, social and symbolic centre of a community(8) and certainly farmers say a village needs a wat to be complete.(9) Ethnographic reports generally confirm the functional and symbolic centrality of the wat,(10) but exceptions exist and statistics collected by Jacques Nepote suggest complex regional variations in the actual wat/community relationship.(11) Such variety testifies to localism but apparently everywhere the wat weaves Buddhism into local life. Wat operate like other Thai institutions. Each houses one or many entourages that compete to take care of their own.(12) All wat need resources to survive. Few have endowments, the Sangha itself has no treasury, government stipends are meager, and monastic discipline prohibits earning a living. So the laity must support a wat or hunger drives its monks away, rot brings its buildings down, and thieves loot what is left. Many wat have died that way. Most vanish into paddy fields or jungle, but in one year, 1899, a census of provinces near Bangkok reported 23 deserted wat under the control of 167 active ones, while on the edge of the city land clearance for one new palace revealed the remains of three wat.(13) Even great wat fall. In the nineteenth century Chaophraya Sisuriyawong's patronage made Wat Prayurawong one of the capital's most opulent and prestigious temples, but when he died support collapsed and the wat fell apart. Some monks left, others went hungry, and vandals dared to pick gold from its doors. …