The Dhammakāya Text Genre and Its Significance for Tai-Khmer Buddhism and Modern Marginalisation
By Woramat Malasart
16 pagesI examine a corpus of documents belonging to the Dhammakāya text genre and its different functions, revealing how a single genre can, in fact, fulfil functions from meditation, on the one hand, to consecrations and protective chanting on the other. I then conclude that the disappearance of the Dhammakāya text genre from Central Thai practice is further evidence for the suppression of Siam’s “boran”, or pre-reform, Buddhism in response to modernist concerns about canonicity and textual authenticity.