148 CHAPTER SEVENmeans of making personal merit and stabilizing their political achievements.
This perception was reinforced by the cautionary tale that many of them read
in the fall of the great Indian universities after the rise of Tantrism, the moral
of the tale being that dominant Tantrism, with its deprecation of social con-
vention, leads to political disaster. Whatever the truth of this perception, it
spurred the ruling elite to take a serious interest in the state ofBuddhist prac-
tice in their kingdoms. This interest was a major factor in ensuring that en-
claves of Buddhism survived in the face of mounting Islamic pressure
throughout the medieval period.
In the early fourteenth century, a forest-based version of the ordination
line established by Parakramabahu II was welcomed into Lower Burma by a
Mon king, and into Thailand by the kings of Sukhothai and Chieng Mai,
whose countries had recently gained their independence from the Khmers.
Sukhothai abandoned Khmer architectural styles in favor of the style devel-
oped jointly by Pagan and Polonnaruwa, and quickly went beyond imitation
to become a major center ofBuddhist art. Its bronze Buddha images in par-
ticular are among the most graceful ever produced. Theravada also spread to
Laos, where it quickly became the state religion.
In the fifteenth century, another forest-based Sri Lankan line was estab-
lished in Ayudhaya (by then the new capital of central Thailand) and, at the
invitation of King Tilokaraja, in Chieng Mai, where it reformed the now-de-
generate remnants of the previous century's Sri Lankan reform movement. In
the latter part of the same century, King Dhammazedi ofPegu (Burma) re-
quested a new ordination line from Sri Lanka that he used to reform the
Burmese Sangha. At about this time, Theravada was also brought to the Dai
tribes in southern Yunn~n. Southern Vietnam, however, came under the con-
trol of the Chinese-dofiunated court from the North, which brought the en-
tire country into the sphere of Chinese Mahayana. Thus from this point on,
the religious history ofVietnam properly belongs with that of China (see Sec-
tion 9.9), although a few pockets ofTheravada still exist near Cambodia.
In the mid-eighteenth century, tables were turned when-after the com-
plete degeneracy of the Sri Lankan Sangha-King Kirti Sri Rajasinha ob-
tained help from the Thai court at Ayudhaya, sent him Pali texts and reinstated
a proper ordination line in his kingdom. Later in the same century the
Burmese destroyed Ayudhaya, burning its libraries and even melting its Bud-
dha images down for their gold. When King Rama I finally established a new
capital at Bangkok, he began an active campaign to destroy all remnants of
Tantric practices and beliefs-which he blamed for the fall of Ayudhaya-and
sent emissaries to Sri Lanka for reliable editions of the Pali Canon. His grand-
son, Rama IV, instituted a reform movement in the Thai Sangha by sponsor-
ing a spread of the ordination line King Dhammazedi ofPegu had brought
from Sri Lanka four centuries earlier.
Modern scholarship has revealed that the chroniclers of these reform
movements tended to exaggerate the purity and success of the reforms. For
example, in terms of purity, King Parakramabahu I's edict on the cleansing of