400 Part V: Southeast Asia
Buddhism and Popular Religion
Anyone who has ever noticed that Americans who consider themselves
Christians may also check their horoscopes, get their palms read by Madam
Ruby, dress up like Dracula on Halloween, or espouse personal ethics that
emphasize competition, success, pursuit of wealth, and materialism already
knows that a canonical religious tradition may mix, in practical life, with an
assortment of other religious practices of obscure origins. Yet we sometimes
express astonishment that in Theravada Buddhist societies, peoples’ actual
religious practices depart considerably from the life advocated in the Thera-
vada texts.
The relationship between Buddhism and spirit cults has been explored by
many scholars. Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah worked in the Northeast Thai
village of Baan Phraan Muan (Tambiah 1975), a few miles from the Mekong
River. Historically, Baan Phraan Muan has been on the frontiers of competing
states—Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Angkor, Bangkok, Phnom Penh.
Baan Phraan Muan is typical of most Thai villages in the region. The rela-
tion between formal Buddhism and lay members of Buddhist society is visible
in the spatial organization of the typical village. The village will be composed
of many households clustered in a not particularly orderly fashion along sev-
eral narrow lanes. Someplace on the periphery of the village is a wat, or Bud-
dhist temple. The most accessible part of the wat for laypeople of the village is
the sala, a large wooden building where monks preach to villagers, where vil-
lage meetings are held, and the village school may hold its classes. A more
restricted building is the bood, where laypeople are generally not admitted.
Here the ordination of monks takes place and monks hold their own private
services, such as confession. Finally, most restricted of all, is the khuti, or dwell-
ings of the monks. Between the wat where the monks represent Theravada Bud-
dhism in the most classical, canonical sense, and the village of lay Buddhists,
where Buddhism mixes with many unorthodox and pre-Buddhist traditions,
there exists a complicated interdependence.
One of the immediate and obvious interconnections between village and
wat, layperson and monk, is in their interdependent modes of livelihood.
Monks are strictly forbidden to engage in any agricultural activity; they are
wholly supported by lay villagers whose livelihood comes from agriculture.
Many of the resources that flow from villagers to monks do so through wat cer-
emonies that are closely linked to rice cultivation. Each of the three major sea-
sons of the agricultural cycle—planting and transplanting, the growing, and
harvest—is marked by rites in which villagers and monks are collectively
involved, engaged in spiritual and material exchanges.
However, the ritual emphasis shifts from season to season: from the first
expected sprinkles of the rainy season when the first planting is going on,
through the three months of rain ending in October after which harvest will
commence is the “high Buddhist” period. The central event is three months of