Sisavang Vatthana

Lao kingship and Lao Theravada Buddhism were built into one another. The king was the patron of the sangha, the guarantor of the ordination lineage and the sponsor of the great annual rites, and the legitimacy ran in both directions: monks conferred merit and standing on the throne, and the throne funded and protected the monks. The old royal capital took its name from the Pha Bang, a standing Buddha image treated as the palladium of the kingdom, and possession of it had been part of what made a ruler the ruler. Sisavang Vatthana succeeded his father in 1959 into that arrangement, already under strain, as the country was drawn into a wider war.

The reign ran through coalition governments, foreign intervention on more than one side, and a long insurgency, and it ended in 1975 when the Pathet Lao took power and he abdicated. The atlas records what that removed rather than only who lost office. A Theravada sangha in this region had never existed without a royal patron, and the institution that had ordained, funded, disciplined and protected it for centuries stopped existing in a single year.

The relationship had a physical centre. Merit made by a king was understood to benefit the kingdom and not only the man who made it, so royal sponsorship of ordinations, of temple building and of the great festivals was a public act with public effects, and the ceremonies at which the king appeared were the points where the two institutions were visibly one. Removing the throne therefore did more than remove a funder. It removed the occasion on which the relationship was performed, and there was no substitute ready.

The new government did not abolish Buddhism, which would have been impossible in a country where most men had spent time in robes, and it did not leave it alone either. The sangha was reorganised under state supervision and folded into the mass organisation structure, the older hierarchy was replaced, monks were expected to teach in terms compatible with the new political order, and some practices judged wasteful or superstitious were discouraged. A considerable number of monks disrobed or left the country. Over the following decades the state moved back toward using Buddhist symbols as national ones, and the great stupa at Vientiane returned to the centre of official ceremony, so the position now is neither the old patronage nor the early hostility.

The king and members of his family were taken to a re-education camp in the north east. He died there. The government did not announce it, no date has been established, and the accounts that circulate come from former detainees and from officials speaking long afterwards and do not agree. The atlas records the death as unrecorded rather than supplying a year, because supplying one would mean choosing between testimonies that cannot at present be checked.