Merit, Monarchy and What Reform Did Not Reach

The Siamese monarchy defined itself through Buddhism, and the mechanism was merit. A king built and endowed monasteries, sponsored ordinations, supported the copying of texts and led public acts of giving, and in doing so demonstrated the accumulated merit that explained his position and generated more of it. That is a religious theory of legitimacy quite different from the Chinese mandate or the European divine right, and it made royal patronage of the monastic order a structural necessity rather than a personal choice. What the nineteenth century reform did not do was displace the rest of Thai religious practice.

Justin McDaniel's work on Buddhism in modern Thailand describes a landscape in which amulets, protective tattoos, spirit shrines, monks with reputations for power and stories of saints and ghosts operate alongside and inside the canonical tradition, and are not experienced by practitioners as a separate religion. Reform movements have periodically tried to prune this and have not succeeded, which McDaniel treats as evidence that the categories used to describe Thai Buddhism from outside fit it badly. The country was renamed Thailand in 1939, and the atlas holds Siam as the historical polity under which the settlement described here was made.