A King Who Had Been a Monk for Twenty Seven Years

Mongkut spent twenty seven years in the monastic order before he came to the throne of Siam, and he used them. Dissatisfied with the standard of discipline and of textual knowledge he found, he took ordination in a Mon lineage he judged more correct, studied Pali intensively, and gathered a reform minded group that became the Thammayut order. Its programme was textual and disciplinary: monastic rules kept strictly and by the letter, the Pali canon treated as the standard against which local custom was measured, and a scepticism about the cosmological claims of popular Buddhist literature where they conflicted with what could be observed. When he became king in 1851 he was in a position to make that reform a state matter, and his successors continued it, eventually organising the whole Thai monastic order under a national administration. The result is that Thai Buddhism carries two ordination lineages, the reformed Thammayut and the older and much larger Maha Nikaya, and a national ecclesiastical structure with a supreme patriarch. Richard Gombrich's social history of Theravada sets that alongside comparable reform movements elsewhere in the Theravada world, which arose in the same century and under similar pressures.