Chulalongkorn

The Siam that Chulalongkorn inherited was a kingdom of tributary centres rather than a bounded state, and its monastic order matched that shape. Lineages in the north, the northeast and the peninsula ordained on their own authority, followed their own reading of the discipline, and answered to local abbots and local rulers rather than to Bangkok. As the crown replaced tributary relationships with provinces, salaried officials and surveyed borders, the monastic order was one of the few institutions still organized on the old pattern, and it reached into every village in a way the new bureaucracy did not yet.

The Act of 1902 resolved that by absorbing the order into the shape of the state. It placed a supreme patriarch at the head of a hierarchy running down through regional and provincial ecclesiastical officers to the abbot of each monastery, made appointments at every level subject to royal approval, and gave the hierarchy statutory authority over ordination, property and discipline. It also recognized two lawful fraternities within the order, the older Mahanikai and the Thammayut reform movement founded by the king's father, thereby freezing a distinction that had been informal.

The reasoning was not only administrative. A single order teaching a single standard curriculum in a single language was a way of making Siamese subjects out of Lao, Khmer, Malay and northern Tai populations who had recently owed allegiance elsewhere. Monastic schooling became, for several decades, the closest thing the kingdom had to universal education, and it taught a Buddhism defined in Bangkok. Later Thai governments of every kind have used the structure the Act created, which is why arguments about the appointment of the supreme patriarch remain political arguments in Thailand.

The reform was designed and carried out by the king's half-brother, Prince Wachirayan, who had ordained as a monk and rose to become supreme patriarch of the whole order. Having a member of the royal house inside the monastic hierarchy solved a problem that reforming rulers elsewhere have rarely solved: the changes came from a monk of unquestioned learning rather than from a lay official, which made them far harder to resist as an intrusion by the state.

Wachirayan wrote the textbooks. He produced a graded course in the discipline and the doctrine in Thai rather than in Pali, set national examinations against it, and required monastic candidates to pass them, so that a monk in a village in the northeast studied the same material as a monk in Bangkok. He also wrote for a lay readership, and the style he established, doctrine presented in plain modern Thai and stripped of the local legendary material that had grown around it, shaped what Thai Buddhism has looked like in print ever since. Some of that legendary material has since been reclaimed by scholars as the substance of practised religion rather than as clutter.

The printing of the canon belongs to the same effort. A royal edition of the Pali texts in Thai script was produced under Chulalongkorn in the 1890s and distributed to institutions abroad as well as at home, a gesture that presented Siam as a modern state with an ancient textual tradition of its own. It was among the first printed editions of the canon produced anywhere, and it made the text portable and checkable in a way palm leaf had never allowed.