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#1
- Turning the Tables
 Protestant
missionaries and other Christians in Thailand sometimes accuse
Buddhism of teaching people to be selfish. Merit-making, this
line of reasoning argues, is an inherently self-seeking act that
denies the spiritual and theological "fact" that only
God saves. Recently, I heard a similar criticism of Christianity
made by a Buddhist in Ban Dok Daeng. He puts his criticism in
the form of a series of questions. He asks, "Why are Christian
always asking for things? Why are they always praying to God to
get things? Why does Christianity teach people to be so selfish?"
Implicit
in these questions is a response to Christians who criticize Buddhism
for teaching people to be selfish. Two, that is, can play the
criticism game and with equal cause. If one listens to many a
sermon and reads a smattering of Christian literature, it is not
difficult to arrive at the conclusion that Christians do, in fact,
believe that the chief end of God is to answer greedy Christian
prayers. It is a conclusion that is unfair and focuses on the
worst, rather than the best in the Christian faith, to be sure;
but, then, so too is the Christian criticism of Buddhism nothing
more than a decision to see our neighbors of another faith at
their worst, rather than choosing to see them at their best.
#2 - Religion
& the Latest Ideas
Question:
What did twelfth-century Buddhist, seventeenth-century Catholic,
and nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries have in common?
Answer: all three facilitated the spread of modern learning in
the Siam of their day.
Working
backwards, it has long been known that the nineteenth-century
Protestant missionaries engaged in active, sometimes aggressive
Westernization as apart of their evangelistic strategy. As for
the Catholics, Van der Crysse, in his book Siam & the
West 1500-1700, argues that Catholic missionaries performed
much the same function in the seventeenth century. They, like
the Protestants two hundred years later, even went so far to as
to use Western scientific thought as a medium for their religious
message. (See the book review Siam
& The West 1500 - 1700 in HeRB
4). It would appear, then, that there is a pattern in Thai
history whereby Christian missionaries have engaged in Westernization
as a part of their program of evangelization.
The pattern
is there, but it does not stop with Christian missions. Writing
about twelfth-century trade routes in what is now Thailand, Wyatt
notes that, "Chief among the commodities moving along these
and other trails in the twelfth century was Buddhism. It would
be a mistake, however, to think of this simply as the transfer
of religious ideas. In addition to religion, Buddhism also brought
with it the 'latest' ideas of science, law, medicine, the letters,
and so forth; and these moved as quickly as they did because they
were coming into an area where Indic ideas were long established."
[Wyatt, Siam in Mind (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002),
10-11.]
International
missions, that is, has been one important mechanism for keeping
Siam/Thailand in touch with the world of learning beyond its borders.
Globalization,
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furthermore, is nothing
new to Southeast Asia. It has been going on for at least nine
hundred years.
#3 - Archipelagic
Isolation
In his description
of the history of "Champa" in The Cambridge History
of Southeast Asia, Keith Taylor argues for a new understanding
of "Cham history." Champa, located along the central
coast of modern day Vietnam has generally been viewed as an early
Southeast Asian political state; but Taylor argues that it actually
"was comprised of small island-like enclaves defined by the
sea and the mountains." It was not a unified state. He writes,
"It was the closest that a continental terrain could approximate
the morphology of an archipelago." (page 153, emphasis added).
Taylor does not explain in any detail what he means by the phrase,
"morphology of an archipelago," except to note that
it involved isolated enclaves ruled over by strong local rulers.
The phrase
itself, however, is striking in light of the historical experience
of the old-time Presbyterian missionaries in Siam. After the fashion
of the Cham, they established a series of "small island-like
enclaves" stretching from Nakhon Si Tammarat in the south
to Chiang Rai in the north. These enclaves were Christian rather
than Buddhist (or Muslim) and American rather than Siamese; the
foods eaten, clothes worn, architecture of the buildings, holidays
celebrated, and activities pursued in these Presbyterian islands
were often strikingly different from those of the surrounding
Buddhist Siamese sociocultural ocean. The missionaries themselves
keenly felt their archipelagic isolation, furthermore, especially
when only one or two families staffed a station. A future social
history of Presbyterian missions in Siam, in sum, could very easily
be woven around this phrase, "the morphology of an archipelago."
Source:
Keith W. Taylor, "The Early Kingdoms," in The Cambridge
History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling, 137-182
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
#4 - Railroad
Research & Communist Contextualization
Last March,
while on the train to Bangkok, I had a long, fascinating chat
with a woman who was a student at Tammasat University in October
1976, at the time of the student unrest that was brutally suppressed
by the government. She subsequently spent three years of her life "in the forest" along Thailand's western border with
Burma as a member of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT). She
told me a number of fascinating stories about her life as a revolutionary.
She went into the forest because of her dream for a better Thailand,
and she made it clear that she feels sad and depressed about the
fact that Thailand today is, in her opinion, no further down the
road towards a just, happy society than it was in the 1970s.
I asked
her why the CPT revolution failed? She said that the primary reason
for that failure was internal dissension within the CPT itself
between the old-time revolutionary leadership and the young students
who fled Bangkok to join the revolution. The point of disagreement,
which ultimately sent the students back to their former lives,
was the hard line Maoist ideology of the CPT leadership. The students
believed that the revolution had to be adapted to Thai society,
while the leadership sought a pure, Chinese-like revolution. In
the end, the students could not accept the fatal failure of the
CPT to conduct a Thai revolution rather than a foreign one. Their
point: only a Thai revolution could achieve a just Thai society.
This is
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not, I should add, merely her
opinion alone. Historians of that era have reached the same conclusion.
The church,
if I may beat this horse yet again, persists in conducting a foreign
revolution; and Thailand, particularly lowland Thailand, persists
in ignoring the revolution. One hears rumors of foreign missionaries,
who in their arrogance and ignorance are still telling local Christians
they can't do this, that, and the other thing as those Christians
seek to rethink their faith in terms of their own lives. Those
who don't learn from the past pay the price of their ignorance.
#5 - S.E.
Asia Historiography: A One Paragraph Summary
Taylor summarizes
his article on the early kingdoms of Southeast Asia (see citation
in Short Note #3, above) by stating, "The
diverse narratives we have constructed remind us that the attempt
to schematize early Southeast Asia history is bound to be unrewarding.
The peoples of Southeast Asia experience a remarkable range of
options in organizing their societies and polities. The choices
they exercised upon these options reveal a region that continues
to resist any convincing simplification. Southeast Asia's imperviousness
to all-encompassing historiographical agendas that endeavor to
construct a total regional vision of the past may be an indication
of what is less perceptible under the heavy layers of scholarship
in which our knowledge of other parts of the globe is embedded,
or it may reflect distinctive regional conditions. Historians
of Southeast Asia benefit from the lack of a coercive interpretative
tradition. My intention in writing this essay has been to strengthen
resistance to any such tradition." (pages 180-181).
Without
debating the wisdom of his conclusions, one does sense that Taylor
is, to an extent, sewing a pig's ear over into a silk purse. Historians
of Southeast Asia generally labor under the serious twin handicaps
of a lack of good historical sources and a dearth of colleagues
engaged in the study of those sources. If we had more sources
and more historians, I suspect we would also have more of "a
coercive interpretative tradition."
#6 Recommending
Wyatt
The same
article by Taylor (see citation in Short Note #3,
above) contains a bibliographic essay of sources for the study
of the various polities of early Southeast Asia. For most of those
polities, the essay gives a fairly substantial paragraph's worth
of citations. For Lan Na, Ayutthaya, and the other Tai kingdoms,
Taylor simply writes, "For the early Tai kingdoms, one cannot
do better than to consult D. K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History,
New Haven, 1984." (page 182). Now, that is a recommendation!
#7 Calvin Against
Contemplation
McGrath,
in his widely respected biography of John Calvin, states, "Calvin
thus treats the notion of the 'contemplative life' with a certain
degree of cynicism, insisting that Christian meditation and prayer
must take place in the midst of, rather than detached from, the
cares and concerns of everyday mundane life. The believer is not
called to leave the world and enter a monastery, but to enter
fully into the life of the world, and thus to transform it." (p. 232).
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Somewhere
in this paragraph lies an insight into one of the central differences
between Western Protestant Christianity and Southeast Asian Buddhism.
It is a difference in the way each locates itself in the everyday
world.
Source: Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study
in the Shaping of Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),
232.
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