sun. To this day, many peoples who have long been Bud-
dhists still engage in rites that entail a dualistic conception
of the cosmos. The Lao perform a rite toward the end of the
dry season, heavy with sexual symbolism, at which they set
off rockets to inform the gods that it is time to send the rains.
At the end of the rainy season, when the rivers have flooded,
another ceremony is held at which men compete in boat
races. The boats, representing na ̄gas, serve to ensure that the
earth as supreme na ̄ga will accept the flood waters before they
drown the rice. The concern with the power of the earth con-
tinues after the harvest when attention is turned to the Rice
Mother, who is propitiated at the same time that the vital
spirit of the rice is called.
The world in which protohistoric peoples lived was
marked by uncertainty: Crops might fail as a consequence
of late rains or devastating floods; women might be barren,
die in childbirth, or lose child after child; and both men and
women might die young. Hence, people wished to influence
the spirits and cosmic forces that controlled fertility and life.
The fundamental method of gaining the favor of spiritual
powers was through sacrifices. Human sacrifice was rare in
mainland Southeast Asia, although the Wa of northern
Burma and southern China even in recent times took heads
to offer at New Year rites. Most peoples sacrificed domestic
animals, with lesser rites requiring a chicken and more im-
portant rites, a pig or even a carabao. In tribal groups such
as those in Burma and northeastern India, those men who
organized large-scale sacrifices and the so-called feasts of
merit associated with them acquired not only the esteem of
their fellows but also a spiritual quality that was believed to
persist even after their death. Such tribal chiefs are assumed
to be similar to what O. W. Wolters calls “men of prowess,”
who were the heads of protohistoric chiefdoms. What is
noteworthy about the tribal chiefs, and presumably about the
earlier men of the same type, is that because of the vagaries
of life, their potency could never be firmly established. At-
tempts were made to fix this potency by making the remains
of men of prowess objects of cultic attention, especially by
those who succeeded them. Rough stone monuments associ-
ated with early Cham culture in southern Vietnam and up-
right stones found together with the prehistoric stone jars in
Laos have been interpreted, by analogy with the practice by
such modern tribal peoples as Chin of Burma and related
groups in northeastern India, as monuments that perpetuat-
ed and localized the potency of men who had succeeded dur-
ing their lifetimes in effecting a relationship between the so-
ciety and the cosmos. Such monuments were to lend
themselves to reinterpretation in Hindu-Buddhist terms
when Indian influences began to appear in Southeast Asia.
HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS. Prior to the adoption of
Indian or Chinese models, there appears to have been no
priesthood in any Southeast Asian society capable of enforc-
ing an orthopraxy among peoples living over a wide area. As
the ritual effectiveness of men of prowess waxed and waned,
so did the relative power of the polities they headed, thus giv-
ing rise to a classic pattern of oscillation between “democrat-
ic” and “autocratic” communities found among tribal peo-
ples such as the Kachin of Burma even in recent years. What
made it possible for Southeast Asians to imagine themselves
as parts of communities whose members, both living and
dead, were not all known personally was the introduction of
religious conceptions fixed in written texts.Some evidence, especially from among tribal peoples in
what is today southern China, suggests that writing was in-
vented independently by Southeast Asian peoples. However,
the historical fact is that the earliest written records are either
in some form of Indian script or in Chinese logographs.
With these borrowed writing systems came Indian and Chi-
nese texts, rites rooted in the texts, and institutions to per-
form the rites and perpetuate the textual traditions.
Sinitic influences. Chinese influences appear first in
conjunction with the Han conquest of what is now northern
Vietnam. Between the first Han movement into the area, in
124 BCE, and 43 CE, when the Chinese suppressed a rebellion
led by the legendary Trung sisters, Chinese influence appears
to have lain rather lightly on the Vietnamese. From the first
century CE, however, the Vietnamese came increasingly to
see themselves as part of a Sinitic world, which they knew
through the same texts as were used in China proper. This
sense of belonging to a Chinese world remained even after
the Vietnamese gained independence from China in the elev-
enth century.
The Chinese model was most significant for literati—
the Confucian mandarinate, Maha ̄ya ̄na Buddhist monks,
and even some Daoist priests—who derived their cultural
understanding of the world from Chinese and Sino-
Vietnamese texts. As none of these literati ever attained the
role of a dominant priesthood in the villages, pre-Sinitic tra-
ditions, centered on a multitude of local spirits and deities,
continued to be perpetuated by spirit mediums, soothsayers,
and sorcerers (thay). Those Vietnamese who moved out of
the Red River delta in the “push to the south” that began
in the thirteenth century and continued into recent times
came into contact with other traditions—those of the hind-
uized Cham and Khmer, the Buddhist Khmer, and local
tribal peoples. In part because of significant non-Sinitic in-
fluences in southern Vietnam, the impress of Chinese culture
was somewhat less evident in the popular culture of that re-
gion than in that of northern Vietnam. Vietnamese in south-
ern Vietnam have to the present often turned to non-Sinitic
religious practitioners—montagnard sorcerers and Thera-
va ̄da monks, for example—for help in confronting funda-
mental difficulties in their lives. Many of the religiously in-
spired peasant rebellions originating in southern Vietnam as
well as some modern syncretic popular religons have drawn
inspiration from non-Chinese sources. This said, Vietnamese
religion in all parts of the country has assumed a distinctly
Sinitic cast, being organized primarily around ancestor wor-
ship in the Chinese mode. Elsewhere in mainland Southeast
Asia, only migrant Chinese and those tribal peoples such as
the Hmong and Mien who have lived long in Chinese-SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: MAINLAND CULTURES 8643