A little section from my textbook on Southeast Asian history contains a brief introduction as to how Buddhism – one of the three ‘world’ religions, the others being Islam and Christianity – made its way to this part of the world, and how each school of Buddhism – Mahayana and Theravada – found popularity in the various regions (Mahayana: Vietnam; Theravada: Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar). You can also find out about the social organisation of the sangha in relation to the societies that they live in.





Quoted from Norman G. Owen (ed.). The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005, pp36-42, pp50-51


… Other religions too played formative and important roles in the life and beliefs of Southeast Asia’s peoples. By the eighteenth century three such religious systems originating outside the area – Buddhism, Islam and Christianity p had established themselves. For historical reasons, each was primarily associated with particular parts of the region: Buddhism with the mainland countries from Myanmar across to Vietnam, Islam with much of the Malay Archipelago, and Christianity with the Philippines.


Varieties of Buddhism

Buddhism is named after its founder, Gautama, prince and heir-apparent of a ruling family in Nepal around 600BCE, who eventually became known as ‘the Buddha’ (the Enlightened One). In his twenties, he embarked on a nomadic life of meditation, until he finally understood life and death. Thereafter, he wandered over northern India teaching that life is cut short by attachment to things and people, and that the goal of life should be to avoid greed, lust and attachment, ultimately reaching not death but Nirvana, a state of being that transcended both life and death, escaping the never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. In its purest form, Buddhism reveres the Buddha not as a god but as a teacher. His sermons were collected to form the core of the Tipitaka (or Tripi-taka), the ‘three baskets’ of teaching still upheld by Buddhists today.

Mahayana Buddhism is the ‘northern school’ of Buddhism, which spread historically from India to Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan, and northern Vietnam. Theravada Buddhism (sometimes called Hinayana) is the ‘southern school’, which spread from India to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Siam, Cambodia and Laos. To cite some of the differences between the two schools, Mahayan insists on a broad and eclectic interpretation of the scriptures, whereas Theravada venerates only the Buddha himself as the founder of the religion and emphasises his own teachings rather than the many sytras attributed to others found in Mahayana. Mahayana worships bodhisattvas – self-denying saints, lay or in order, who had become Buddhas-to-be but compassionately helped others to reach Nirvana before entering it themselves; Theravada considers such worship to be idolatrous. Ideally, followers of Theravada practice religious devotion to save themselves, Mahayanists to save themselves and others. Mahayana tends to allow laymen and women a greater role in its religious community than does Theravada, which strictly separates monks from lay people. Theravada monks in such countries as Thailand and Myanmar wear saffron robes and accept alms for their food, while Mahayana monks in Vietnam wear brown robes and do not accept alms.

Theravada Buddhism from Sri Lanka spread rapidly between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries through the countries of mainland Southeast Asia, from Myanmar to Cambodia and Laos. On its arrival it had to contend not only with well-established animism (see below*) in both village and court (the oath of allegiance in all the courts included the threat of being punished by spirits if one broke the oath) but also with court and folk Brahmanism. In the first millennium CE, many courts in Southeast Asia had adopted rituals learned from India, performed by religious specialists called ‘brahmins’, as a means of codifying and legitimising their rule. The beliefs associated with this practice, which developed in the subcontinent into what we call ‘Hinduism’, do not appear to have spread widely among most local Southeast Asian populaces and are openly retained today only in Bali, but, like animist beliefs, they occasionally surface even among practitioners of other world religions.

The Brahmanical tradition, unlike Buddhism, offered absolute certainty in its explanations of natural and human action. As long as Buddhism was incapable of giving equally certain answers when asked whether, for example, a military campaign should be undertaken or a marriage contracted, Brahmanism remained of primary importance in everyday life. Over time, however, the Brahmanical element in religious life weakened with the strengthening of Buddhist scholarship, the popularisation of sophisticated cosmological ideas, and eventual official and popular disapproval of Brahmanical rites and practices. The same developments worked to reduce animism to an essentially residual category for the explanation of phenomena beyond moral and scientific reason. Hindu religious sites, such as the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and Brahmanical institutions, such as the concept of the devaraja or god-king, fitted easily into Buddhist terminology and practice.

Throughout the Theravada areas by the eighteenth century every village had a monastery. A village was considered incomplete without one, though it might consist only of a small preaching hall (vihara), an uposatha building for ordinations and rites, and a dormitory for the monks. Around these, other buildings and tower-like monuments (pagodas, stupas, or cetiya) containing the relics of ancestors or exceptional men might in time be built, with nearby a sacred tree reminiscent of that under which the Buddha preached his first sermon. The typical monastery was inhabited by a small group of monks clad in saffron or yellow robes who had taken permanent or temporary vows of poverty, chastity, and devotion to a life of religious study and meditation. Their activities were governed by 227 specific disciplinary rules. Forbidden to touch money and bound to accept alms for their food, they began their day with a walk through the village accepting the food offerings of willing householders. The monks returned to eat at their monastery, where food was served to them by students or willing volunteers. Food obtained from the faithful was supplemented by garden produce and delicacies – but never meat – offered to the monastery by people eager to gain merit.

The Buddhist monkhood in village society provided all males time and opportunity to perfect their moral being, to seek enlightenment, and to preach the Dharma, the teachings Buddhism, to the community. The institution of the monkhood can be seen as an outlet for the community’s desire to meritorious deeds. Women could best improve their moral state and hope for rebirth as men in their next incarnation by regularly giving food to the monks, attending preaching services, and offering their sons for ordination.

In day-to-day terms the monkhood’s most important function was to offer boys and young men a rudimentary education in reading and writing and the principles of their faith. For this reason probably more than half the men of Siam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia in the eighteenth century were functionally literate, at least able to read a simple piece of vernacular prose. To those who had the time or were unusually talented, monks offered advanced instruction not only in religious subjects, but also in the arts and sciences of Indian civilisation, from mathematics to astronomy to poetics and medicine. Such instruction, however, was not often available. It was generally concentrated in the monasteries under royal and noble patronage in the towns, which could encompass large monastic populations, support paid teachers, and provide incentives for the best trained, offering them official positions or ecclesiastical advancement.

At every level of society, however, the monastery was the repository of whatever the population – which, after all, provided the monks – admired and needed in the way of sciences and arts. In out-of-the-way monasteries some of this learning was un-canonically connected with manipulating events, interpreting dreams, and setting astrological rules for conduct. In village society the institutions of monastery and monkhood provided a coherent model of religious action and belief that transcended local concerns and tended to draw the community together by ties wider and deeper than those provided by language and agricultural custom.

In each of the Theravada countries, the abbot and monks of the village monastery belonged to a hierarchical ecclesiastical organisation, the sangha, that extended parallel with the civil hierarchy all the way to the king. The sangha was a channel for the transmission of information in both directions, up and down, and a vehicle of social advancement for those inside it. Monks frequently carried the complaints of their villages to higher authority, bypassing secular intermediaries, and the abbot was often the most respected leader in the village, sometimes more effective in his leadership than the headman, who deferred to him. Ambitious young men who found secular avenues to their advancement closed off by law and custom could, through ecclesiastical education and promotion, circumvent the restraints against social mobility and advance to positions of authority. Moreover, if they found the monastic life too encumbering, they could leave it and be ‘reborn’ into the secular world at a point higher than the one at which they had left it.

The Buddhist hierarchy was for the most part organised territorially in each of the Theravada countries, save that the more remote forest-dwelling (Arannika) monks were organised separately. Each district and province had its own chief abbot, who was subject to the authority and discipline of the supreme patriarch (sangharaja) in the capital, whose decisions and injunctions were given force by civil authority. In Siam the monkhood was carefully supervised by the crown, and during some periods prince-monks held high ecclesiastical offices. Royal patronage, steadily strengthened, had reached the point by the seventeenth century where the monarchy was fully supporting religious education through the sponsorship of royal monasteries, which became virtual universities for religious and secular studies. The teachers of noble and royal sons and preceptors of monarchs found it difficult to remain free of political entanglements.

Popular literature and chronicle accounts, however, suggest that on the whole the sangha was ultimately a strong and independent influence in Theravadan Southeast Asia. Monks could, and probably did, mobilise public opinion for or against kings and officials. They had so established their moral influence by the last half of the eighteenth century in Siam that no king could rule without their approval. As if to mark the success of Theravada’s rootedness and domestication in the region, monks from Sri Lanka visited Siam and Cambodia to obtain valid ordinations and copies of religious texts then lacking in Sri Lanka, the original source of Southeast Asian Theravadan Buddhism.

Vietnamese affinity with Chinese culture led to a predisposition to accept and adapt Mahayana Buddhism, because Vietnamese were more likely to read Buddhist scriptures and religious tracts written in classical Chinese than those written in Indian languages. Buddhism in Vietnam, moreover, intermingled with Daoism and with popular version of Confucianism and existed as one element in a religious compound the Vietnamese called ‘the three religions’ (tam giao). The Chinese and Vietnamese religious worlds overlapped so much in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that many southern Chinese priests emigrated from Guangdong (Kwangtung) and Fujian (Fukien) to Vietnam and developed large followings there.

This harmony, although an integral part of Vietnamese Buddhist political thought, remained an unattainable ideal in the eighteenth century. At that time the Confucian court feared Buddhism not as a highly organised political rival but as an indirect ideological influence that could undermine the court’s intricate bureaucratic order. The greatest writer of this period, Nguyen Du (1765-1820), under Buddhist influence, quite explicitly declared, in his ‘Song Summoning Back the Souls of the Dead’, that in paradise ‘the superior and the lowly of this world are reseated in rank.’ In his poem he also reminded the wandering souls of former court officials that ‘the more prosperous you were, the more hatred you accumulated… Carrying such a weight of hatred, do you really think you should seek to reincarnate yourselves?’

The court embarked on a policy of religious control, manipulating the recruitment of Buddhist monks and priests. To become a Buddhist ecclesiastic in Vietnam in the early nineteenth century, a peasant or scholar required an ordination certificate from the court. Applicants for these certificates had to travel to Hue, where they were given religious examinations. Furthermore, no Buddhist temple could be built in Vietnam at that time without the permission of the Nguyen court. The numbers of monks and acolytes at the larger temples were fixed by the laity, and the village chiefs who did not report surplus monks at local temples were punished. The court itself paid the salaries of the head monks at the major temples. It endowed important temples with their land and even gave them their names. It bestowed on them tea, paper, incense, candles, and medicinal drugs, which it imported from China. At its command, Buddhist temples would celebrate a ‘land and water high mass’ (in origin a Chinese ritual) for the souls of dead soldiers who had served the dynastic house. In addition to controlling existing temples, the court sponsored and financed the construction of new ones, usually in the vicinity of Hue, where they were easier to supervise. Hue’s emergence as a centre of Vietnamese Buddhism dated from this period of court patronage and control.

Considered purely as an organised institution, Mahayan Buddhism occupied a much more modest place in Vietnamese society than Theravada Buddhism did in Myanmar, Siamese, or Cambodian society. Needless to say, the heavily patronised Vietnamese sangha became little more than a political instrument of the Nguyen emperors. By itself it was poorly organised. There was no hierarchy of temples controlled by a central monkhood as well as by the court. There were no societywide Buddhist religious organisations to compete with the Confucian bureaucracy. The Vietnamese sangha of the early 1800s was small compared to those of the Theravada states.

The values of Confucian family worship and filial piety (which required the procreation of sons to continue the family and its ancestor worship) also made monasticism less popular in Vietnam than in neighbouring societies. Widows and elderly women, however, commonly joined the important associations of temple nuns in every village that possessed a temple. These women did good works, participated in temple worship at least on the first and fifteenth days of every lunar month, and paid rice dues to the temple in the same way that village men contributed to village communal feasts. There were also major sources of salvation conceptualised in female terms, such as the Goddess of Mercy (Quan Am).

Village religious life tended to be more stable – and more parochial – in the north than in the south. Pilgrimages to religious shrines in the agricultural off-season were a feature of Vietnamese rural society. But such pilgrimages were especially popular in the south, in regions like Ca Mau and Rach Gia, where there were few long-established temples to cater to worshipers or where the monks did not yet have sufficient prestige.


*Animism and the Localisation of World Religions

Unsurprisingly, the world religions that enjoyed such a powerful presence in eighteenth-century Southeast Asia – Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity – found it necessary to accommodate themselves to pre-existing beliefs about the natural and supernatural worlds, and to the life and culture of environments and societies very different from those of India, Arabia, and Europe, from which they had spread. Everywhere in the region a wide variety of spirit belief and practices had long characterised the daily and seasonal life of most communities, marked by the precariousness of climate and harvests, sickness and bereavement, personal misfortune and occasional good luck. Such complexes of folk beliefs, not confined to Southeast Asia, were first termed ‘animism’ by mid-nineteenth-century Western social theorists, from the Latin word anima, meaning breath or soul. Animists, in this sense, believe that departed ancestors and everything in nature – from plants and animals to features of the landscape – are inhabited by spirits or souls through which they can influence human affairs, making them amenable to human supplication and propitiation.

Though the purpose of animistic ritual was less to adorn life than to try to control the conditions in which it was lived, it led to rich and colourful accompaniments to mundane existence in Southeast Asia, in ways that helped to unite communities as well as safeguard them from misfortune. Life-cycle rituals ensured that the passage into and out of life, birth and death, were appropriately marked, and the agricultural year was punctuated by seasonal ceremonies aimed at ensuring good harvests, placating the soul of the rice during harvesting, and acknowledging the power of sea and river spirits over the fortunes of fishermen. Illness and emotional disturbance, in societies with little in the way of elaborate medicines or understanding of the causes of disease, required the intervention of specialist healers and shamans to deal with the spirit possession of those affected. Belief in the power and presence of spirits and the need to cajole, reward and placate them led to the development of song, poetry, invocation, and dance-drama directed toward praising the spirits and reciting the virtues of the community.

Rather than being seen as in conflict with Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity, many animist practices, and sometimes even the beliefs that underlay them, were perceived by most eighteenth-century functionaries of the established religions as at least akin to their own and capable of a measure of acceptance – as part, indeed, of a single continuum reflecting humankind’s attempts to grasp and come to terms with unfathomable and unseen powers. Theravada monks in the lowland villages of Myanmar, Siam, and Cambodia, while maintaining the primacy of Buddhism, also provided essentially the same assistance as shamans did in the uplands. …

Only later, mainly toward the end of the nineteenth century, did the doctrinal and scriptural concerns of reformist movements prompt serious attempts to purge religious belief and practice of local, noncanonical elements associated with animism. …