Twenty years of war had left the Siamese monastic order in a condition its own authorities described as disordered. Ordination lines were uncertain, discipline had lapsed in places, and a previous ruler had required monks to prostrate themselves before him on the claim that he had attained a stage of the path, a demand a number of senior monks had refused and been punished for. Rama I reversed that ruling, restored the monks who had refused, and then turned to the order itself.
Between 1782 and 1801 he issued a long sequence of royal decrees on monastic conduct, covering the handling of money, the keeping of the rains retreat, the examination of candidates and the reporting of offences, and he enforced them. Several hundred monks were removed from the order under these measures. The decrees are unusual in that they were issued as law by the crown rather than as rulings by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which set a Siamese precedent: the state, not the order, would regulate the order.
The textual work came alongside. In November 1788 he convened a council at Bangkok, in the model of the councils of Buddhist tradition, bringing together more than two hundred monks and a body of lay scholars to compare the surviving manuscripts of the Pali canon and produce a corrected recension. It sat for five months. The edition it produced, written on palm leaf and stored in the royal monasteries, became the standard Siamese text, and it is the direct ancestor of the printed royal edition issued a century later under Chulalongkorn.