Bangkok

When Rama I established his capital on the east bank of the Chao Phraya in 1782, he built the palace and its chapel around a single image. The Emerald Buddha is a seated figure some sixty six centimetres high, carved from green jade rather than emerald, whose recorded history begins in the fifteenth century at Chiang Rai and runs through Lanna and then through more than two centuries in Laos before it was brought back as war booty. Possession of it has repeatedly accompanied claims to legitimate rule in the region.

Wat Phra Kaew, the temple that houses it, stands inside the palace walls and has no resident monks, which makes it a royal chapel rather than a monastery. Three times a year, at the changes of the hot, rainy and cool seasons, the king personally changes the image's costume, an act performed by the monarch alone and understood as part of what a Thai king is for. The cloister walls carry a painted version of the Ramakien, the Thai telling of the Ramayana, which sets a Hindu epic around a Buddhist shrine without anyone finding this contradictory.

The relationship works both ways. Thai kingship draws legitimacy from its patronage of the sangha, and the sangha is organised under a Supreme Patriarch appointed by the king, with a governing council and a state department of religious affairs. Bangkok is therefore the administrative centre of Thai Buddhism as well as its largest concentration of temples.

Religious practice in Bangkok is visible before breakfast. Monks walk in the early morning receiving food from householders, and the transaction is understood as merit given to the donor rather than charity given to the monk. Many Thai men ordain temporarily, often for the three months of the rains retreat, and the merit is directed to their parents. Wat Pho, one of the oldest monasteries in the city, holds a reclining Buddha forty six metres long and is also the seat of the traditional medicine and massage school, whose instructional reliefs are inscribed around the compound.

Alongside the monastic institutions runs a much wider field of practice. Amulets blessed by respected monks are collected, valued and traded in a substantial market. Almost every building has a spirit house in its compound, kept supplied with drinks and figures. And at a busy commercial intersection stands the Erawan shrine, built in the 1950s to a four faced form of Brahma after accidents during a hotel's construction, where petitioners who receive what they asked for pay for resident dancers to perform in thanks. A bomb there in 2015 killed twenty people.

Thai Buddhism contains its own arguments about all of this. Forest monastic lineages have criticised urban institutional practice for centuries, reformist voices object to the commerce in amulets and to the fundraising of large modern movements, and disputes over the leadership of the sangha have repeatedly involved the state.