full creation, and those who are delighted in creations of others; and four realms of
misery: purgatory, animals, suffering ghosts, and the realm of demons. The second
world is comprised of 16 realms of Brahma (mind and matters) and the third world
is about four stages of immaterial meditation.
The kingdom of Ayutthaya was founded in 1350 and later dominated and
engulfed the Sukhothai polity from 1438 onwards (Tambiah 1976 : 89). In the early
Ayutthaya period, Ayutthaya borrowed Kmer (old Cambodian) civilization through
the trans-nationalization process. Tambiah ( 1976 ): 89 reports:
...the Thai borrowed from the Khmers many features of their administrative and political
institutions, art forms, system of writing, and vocabulary, especially that associated with
honorific court language. Most importantly, they borrowed the major features of the Khmer
royal cult and imported Cambodian brahman priests to conduct the rites.
Although the indigenous Thai village culture is basically matriarchal (Klausner
1997 : 64), it shifted to become patriarchal in this period. The impact of patriarchy
on sexuality resulted in polygamy, which was recorded for thefirst time in the early
Ayutthaya period. Baker and Phongpaichit ( 2005 : 8) explain that, when one
political Tai zone was defeated, the defeated ruler had to send a daughter or sister to
become his overlord’s wife as a tribute. In special cases, the overlord might grant
the subordinate a royal or noble wife.
In the proto-globalization period (from 1600 to 1768), the power of Sukhothai
shifted to Ayutthaya. Siam became a large Kingdom. Ayutthaya adopted the
devaraja (God-King) cult of polity from Khmer as a starting point of the hierar-
chical system. This concept is incompatible with Pali Buddhist ideas (Tambiah
1976 : 91). This is good evidence that hybridization between Theravada Buddhism
and Hindu-Brahmanism occurred.
It was in this period that thesakdinasystem^1 was introduced reinforcing the
lower status of females (Baker and Phongpaichit 2005 :16–17). Females in the
lower class were subjected to the sakdina lords. It was a tradition that the royals had
many wives to ensure the production of enough sons to assist with administrative
tasks and enough daughters to build marriage networks within the elite.
Well-established relationships between the Ayutthaya monarchs and the Sangha
were recorded in The Chronicles (Ishii 1986 : 63). In this period, King Boromakot
dispatched a chapter of Buddhist monks to Sri Lanka (Ishii 1986 : 64). This is
evidence of grassroots globalization in this period. For female subordination, Ghosh
( 2002 :30–31) explains that, in traditional Siam, the number of wives and female
servants indicated the prestige of a man. During this period, spirit-medium cults and
magic must have been practiced as shown in a royal decree promulgated by King
(^1) The sakdina system was the hierarchical structure of service nobility codified in lists of official
posts, each with its specific title, honorific, and rank measured in areas of land they were allowed
to possess (Baker and Phongpaichit 2005 : 15, Ongsakul 2005 : 115, Servaes and Malikhao 1989 :
33, Servaes 1999 : 211, Srisootarapan, 1976 ; Suwannarit 2003 :9–12).
4 1 Thai Buddhism, the Mass Media, and Culture Change in Thailand