SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: MAINLAND
CULTURES
Mainland Southeast Asia has been termed the “crossroad of
religions,” for in this region, today divided into the countries
of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, Cambodia (Kampuchea), and
Vietnam, a large diversity of autochthonous tribal religions
are intermingled with Hinduism, Therava ̄da and Maha ̄ya ̄na
Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity,
as well as the modern secular faith of Marxist-Leninism. Be-
neath this diversity there are many religious practices and be-
liefs that have common roots in the prehistoric past of peo-
ples of the region. This is not to say, as have some scholars,
that the historic religions are merely a veneer and that those
Southeast Asians who adhere to religions such as Buddhism
have been, as Reginald LeMay said of the Northern Thai, an-
imists from time immemorial. Although certain beliefs and
practices can be seen as linking peoples of the present to an-
cient Southeast Asian religions, they have often been refor-
mulated to make sense within worldviews shaped by historic
religions. The processes of religious change have, moreover,
intensified in the wake of radical shaking of traditional orders
taking place throughout the twentieth century.
Mainland Southeast Asia is not only a region of religious
diversity; it is also a veritable Babel. Insofar as historical lin-
guistics permits a reconstruction of the past, it would appear
that most of the earliest inhabitants of the region spoke Aus-
troasiatic languages ancestral to such modern-day descen-
dants as Khmer and Mon. Many of the tribal peoples living
in the highlands of central Vietnam and Laos, as well as a
few groups found in northern Thailand and as far distant as
Assam in India and Hainan Island belonging to China, speak
Austroasiatic languages. Speakers of Austronesian languages,
whose major modern-day representatives are the peoples of
Indonesia, Malaysia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, as well as
parts of Melanesia and Madagascar, were also present from
prehistoric times in what is today southern Vietnam and the
Malay Peninsula. Cham living in southern Vietnam and in
Cambodia, as well as tribal peoples such as the Rhadé and
Jarai in southern Vietnam, speak Austronesian languages. In
the northern uplands of the region and in what is today
northeastern India and southern China most peoples in pre-
historic times appear to have spoken languages belonging to
the Tibeto-Burman language family. The present-day Bur-
mans and such tribal peoples as the Chin, Kachin, Lisu,
Akha, and Lahu all speak Tibeto-Burman languages. Speak-
ers of Tai (or Daic) languages seem to have originated in
southern China and did not begin to settle in mainland
Southeast Asia until much before the tenth century CE.
Today, however, Thai (or Siamese), Lao, Northern Thai (or
Yuan), and Shan—all speakers of Tai languages—constitute
the major peoples of Thailand, Laos, and the Shan state of
Burma, and Tai-speaking tribal peoples such as the Tho, Red
Tai, Black Tai, and White Tai are found in northern Viet-
nam as well as northeastern Laos. Modern-day Vietnamese,
which linguists assign to the distinctive Viet-Muong lan-
guage family, is believed to have evolved from an Austroasiat-
ic language that was transformed under the influence of Chi-
nese. The distinctive Karennic languages spoken by peoples
living on the eastern border of Burma and in parts of western
Thailand are thought by linguists to be descendants of Tibe-
to-Burman stocks. Speakers of Miao-Yao languages, distantly
connected to Tibeto-Burman and Sinitic language families,
have migrated from southern China into mainland Southeast
Asia only within the past century or so. Major migrations
from China and India, spurred by the economic changes
during the colonial period, also led to the introduction into
the region of large numbers of speakers of Sinitic, Dravidian,
and Indo-European languages.
PREHISTORIC FOUNDATIONS. People have lived in mainland
Southeast Asia for as long as there have been Homo sapiens,
and there is evidence of Homo erectus and even earlier homi-
nid forms in the region as well. Paleolithic hunting-and-
gathering peoples must have constructed their religious un-
derstandings of the world out of images drawn from their ex-
periences in their environments and from the workings of the
human body. Beyond this, little can be said, for there is no
mainland Southeast Asian equivalent of the cave paintings
of Lascaux to provide insight into the world of Paleolithic
humans. It would, moreover, be quite illegitimate to project
the religious beliefs of the Negritos of the Malay Peninsula,
the last remaining significant groups of hunter-gatherers in
the region, into the prehistoric past, for these beliefs have de-
veloped through as long a period as have other religions and
have, moreover, been influenced by the religions of neigh-
boring peoples.The first significant evidence of religious beliefs and
practices in mainland Southeast Asia comes from the period
when humans in the region first began to live in settled agri-
cultural communities. The domestication of rice, which may
have taken place in mainland Southeast Asia before 4000
BCE, led to the emergence of a powerful image that was to
become incorporated in almost all of the religious traditions
of the region. To this day, most Southeast Asians think of
rice as having a spiritual as well as a material quality; rice,
like humanity, has a vital essence and is typically associated
with a feminine deity. The recognition of rice as fundamen-
tal to life among most peoples in mainland Southeast Asia
has been intertwined in religious imagery with the nurturing
attribute of a mother.Neolithic burial sites, many only recently discovered,
are proving to be sources of knowledge about prehistoric reli-
gions in Southeast Asia. The very existence of such sites sug-
gests that those who took so much trouble to dispose of the
physical remains of the dead must have had well-formed
ideas about the afterlife and about the connection between
the states of the dead and the living. In the mass burial sites
of Ban Chiang and Non Nok Tha in northeastern Thailand,
the graves contain many items, including pottery, tools, and
metal jewelry. The items found in the graves may be inter-
preted, on the basis of ethnographic analogy, as constituting
goods believed to be used by the dead in the afterlife. In com-SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: MAINLAND CULTURES 8641