394 Part V: Southeast Asia
modernist, orthodox. These new Muslims, influenced by reform and counterre-
form and feeling connected to an international Islamic brotherhood, are known
as santris. Thus revitalized, Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia is a culturally and
spiritually vigorous dimension of Southeast Asia’s continuing complexity.Theravada Buddhism and the Thai State
The Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya was profoundly Buddhist, as was (and
is) its successor in Bangkok. How it came be Buddhist was described by a Thai
monk in the Jinakalamali legend recounting the founding of Ayutthaya (Tam-
biah 1976). It was written in Chiangmai in 1516 by a monk named Ratanapanna.
It tells the whole history of Buddhism in India and Sri Lanka, culminating with
the monk Sumana visiting Sri Lanka and then bringing Sinhalese Buddhism to
Sukhothai. The legend refers to competitors to the east, Angkor, and to the west,
Pagan (Burma), characterized as incompletely Buddhist states. According to the
Jinakalamali, King Anuruddha of Pagan went to Lanka on his magical steed,
while the rest of his party followed by boat. There he acquired two treasures of
Theravada Buddhist piety. The first was four copies of the Tipitaka, the Buddhist
Canon (the Pali Canon); the second was the Emerald Buddha.
Each major region where Buddhism has flourished has produced its own
canon—the Sanskrit Canon, the Chinese Canon, the Tibetan Canon. The Pali
Canon is the version of the Buddhist scriptures that was written around 20
B.C.E. at the Mahavihara monastery in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. Theravada
Buddhists believe that this canon was established by the Third Council of
Ashoka and thus is the oldest and most authentic of all Buddhist texts.^1
According to Stanley J. Tambiah, “the Pali Canon was substantially fixed in
Ashoka’s time, so far as the Vinaya and the Sutta [teachings of the Buddha and
his disciples] discourses are concerned... doctrine as such has been transmit-
ted in the southern school relatively unchanged” (Tambiah 1970: 33).
The Emerald Buddha has a more mysterious past. According to the
Jinakalamali, the monk Nagasena (the same monk who was advisor to the
Greek king Menander) wished to propagate Buddhism by making an image of
the Buddha that would be indestructible. Indra heard this wish and went to Mt.
Vibul where the chakravartin had seven precious stones with supernatural pow-
ers. He offered Indra an emerald with the same powers as these jewels, which
Indra gave to Nagasena. King Anurudha put these two treasures in separate
boats for the risky sea journey back to Pagan, but only one boat arrived safely.
The boat carrying the Emerald Buddha and two copies of the Tipitaka was
blown off course and ended up in Angkor Thom, the Khmer capital. Eventu-
ally, however, Ayutthaya received the Tipitaka from Pagan and the Emerald
Buddha from Angkor, and thus became a more complete Buddhist civilization
than either of its predecessors.
The Emerald Buddha, despite its mythological history, really does exist; it
became the premier symbol of the Thai state. Historians have traced its path