142 CHAPTER SEVENOn one level, this quest has been expressed through reforms sponsored by
royal patrons, who have sent missions to foreign lands in search of Pali texts
and pedigreed ordination lineages, and who have encouraged strict practice
and Pali studies in the monasteries they have supported. On another level, the
quest has been expressed in a return to the forest by meditators trying to re-
discover the roots of their tradition in an environment similar to that in which
the Buddha found the Dharma in the first place. These two expressions of the
quest have nurtured each other over the centuries and together have managed
to keep not only Theravada but also the entire syncretic Buddhist tradition
alive. With one small exception-the island ofBali in Indonesia-the mixture
ofBuddhism and Hinduism that once characterized the entire region has now
survived only under the protective umbrella ofTheravadin orthodoxy.
The split between historical and ahistorical attitudes has characterized not
only the Buddhists in this region, but also the modern scholarship devoted to
studying them. Historians' trend analyses have focused on specific events in
the ups and downs over the course of time in the quest for orthodoxy. An-
thropologists' structural analyses of religion as a social phenomenon have
tended to focus on how orthodox and heterodox elements typically interact at
a particular point in time. Recent studies paralleling the combination of pre-
sent and past factors in the doctrine of dependent co-arising (see Section 1.4.3)
have attempted to capture more of the tradition by combining these two ap-
proaches, but even together they cannot depict the entire tradition as it is
actually practiced. There is more to the past than an intelligible narrative
can contain; there is more to the present than a neat model can hope to en-
compass. Nevertheless, there seems to be no better way to capture at least
something of the co~plex world of Buddhism in the region than through
combining these two approaches. Thus this chapter will follow the same dual
pattern, providing both a narrative account of the tradition over the centuries
as it can be pieced together from chronicles and archaeological sources, and a
structural model of one part of the tradition-the syncretic Buddhism of a
central Thai village--at a recent cross section in time.
7.2 BUDDHISM IN "FURTHER INDIA"
A. Southeast Asia. A Sri Lankan narrative tradition maintains that King Asoka
in 247 B.C.E. sent missionaries to Suvannabhuma, which has been identi-
fied with the Mon country in Lower Burma (Myanmar) and central Thai-
land, but otherwise there is no written or archaeological evidence
indicating that Buddhism was practiced in the area at that early date. In-
dian records dating from the first century B.C.E. indicate that Indian
traders were familiar with the region, and within a short period of time
the traders had begun importing Indian culture to its people. By the first
century c.E., the region's first Indianized Southeast Asian states-ones
whose rulers accepted Indian culture, including Brahmanical and Bud-
dhist beliefs-appeared.