The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets

Abstract

The central actors in this book are some reclusive forest-dwelling ascetic meditation masters who have been acclaimed as 'saints' in contemporary Thailand. These saints originally pursued their salvation quest among the isolated villages of the country's periphery, but once recognized as holy men endowed with charisma, they became the radiating centres of a country-wide cult of amulets. The amulets, blessed by the saints, are avidly sought by royalty, ruling generals, intelligentsia and common folk alike for their alleged powers to influence the success of worldly transactions, whether political, economic, martial or romantic.

Introduction: Legacies, Trajectories, and Comparison in the Anthropology of Buddhism

“…But without constructing Buddhism as an analytical category as well, would we not be left without the means to ask certain important and notably comparative questions (something to which we shall return below)? Would there still be a place for a tradition of inquiry about what makes a Buddhist (or, e.g., Indianized) socio-religious or socio-political order, as Paul Mus (1933) and Tambiah (1970Tambiah ( , 1976Tambiah ( , 1984, each in his own way, have done-or, more recently, as Brac de la Perrière (1989) has been looking at these questions from the 'subaltern' perspective of the Burmese spirit cults? In this process, of course, we should not forget the historical complexity of emic perspectives themselves: see, for example, the recent scholarship on the emergence of the category 'Buddhism' (or similar vernacular categories) across Asian Buddhist (particularly colonial) contexts, under the influence of Western studies of 'world religions' (Masuzawa 2005).…”

“…In Bangkok, the sheer diversity of forms of spirit possession provides a striking illustration of the inadequacy of models of shared culture that far too often still underlie studies of Buddhist contexts (see White 2014 and this volume). In northeast Thailand, wandering ascetic monks-at the center of Tambiah's (1984) celebrated study of charisma-but also local Lao mo tham exorcists have been key agents in the integration of the region into "larger orders of power (Buddhism and the state)" (Hayashi 2003: 303). Charismatic virtuosi in Thailand, or Burmese cults that have sprung up around weikza, figures of perfection and immortality, can however also feed millenarian aspirations and sometimes opposition to the state (Brac de la Perrière et al 2014;Ladwig 2014).…”

Réalités et mirages : les espaces psychiques et sociaux de la réinsertion

“…Ainsi, si l'on reprend à cette lumière l'analyse de rituels thérapeutiques dans différentes sociétés, on se rend compte que la majorité d'entre eux amé-nagent au sein du processus initiatique ou thérapeu-tique des espaces de retrait plus ou moins importants, qui ont généralement été occultés ou minimisés par les anthropologues plus intéressés à décrire les processus actifs de réinsertion dans un univers social et culturel. Certaines sociétés ont également intégré au coeur même de leur univers culturel des positions structurées sur le retrait; on peut en citer comme exemple les statuts de l'ermite ou du moine, ou encore celui des « saints de la forêt » décrits par Tambiah (1984) dans les sociétés indiennes. Toutefois, si l'on fait abstraction de ces dernières positions de retrait institutionnalisées, on peut dire que les rituels thérapeutiques permettent beaucoup plus facilement que chez nous le passage entre retrait et insertion, tout en fondant ce passage sur des signifiants culturels centraux.…”

Enchanted Parklands

“…In Thailand, forest temples are occupied by monks who have sought refuge from the world of people in order to practise meditation and cultivate supernatural powers (Tambiah 1984). Over the last few decades these monks have taken a leadership role in the nature conservation movement in Thailand, partly in response to the way that, beginning in the 1950s, commercial logging has decimated the very forests within which the forest temples were situated (Payulpitack 1992;Taylor 1991).…”