Thai Buddhism
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The forms of Buddhism practiced in Thailand.
Thai Buddhism is predominantly Theravādan, but shows a variety of influences, including indigenous Shamanism, Chinese and Indic gods brought in by traders, and modernist reforms, which have combined to give Thai Buddhism its distinct flavor.
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Lay people relax in front of the Phra Phuttha Sihing at the "Front Palace" of what is now the Bangkok National Museum. The Buddha image is considered second in importance only to the Emerald Buddha housed at the Grand Palace. Buddhism in modern Thailand is strongly entangled with the Thai state. (Photo by Anandajoti Bhikkhu, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Table of Contents
Books (18)
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380 pages
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316 pages
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238 pages
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Our cultivation of the mind is aimed both at firmly establishing calm and at developing the arising of true wisdom and insight. We depend on the practice as laid down by the Lord Buddha which I have been explaining in stages.
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Readings (47)
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The [newborn] baby is bumped softly on the floor in order to acquaint it with the fact that harsh and startling events may occur in the world of the humans where it has now been received.
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A thorough overview of the monastic hierarchy in Thailand as it apppeared from the perspective of the monks and laymen of Chiang Mai in the early 1970s.
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The khwan may therefore be described as something in the nature of a principle of life, vital to the welfare of man and animals.
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the religious life and work of Khunying Yai Damrongthammasan, who appears to have produced one of the first significant Buddhist treatises ever authored by a Thai woman.
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These arguments and cultural practices point to complexities of concepts on authorship in Thai Buddhism and strongly invite an analysis and deconstruction of ideas of ‘authorship’ as a clear-cut category.
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A brief survey of some Pāli inscriptions found in Thailand in the 1980s giving a look at the archeological evidence for medieval Theravāda Buddhism.
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A major challenge in the historical study of female monasticism in Thailand is the paucity of texts written by or about Thai Buddhist female practitioners prior to 1950…
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We very much doubt that most Thai Buddhists would be bothered by any need to distinguish a “miraculous” category. Their traditional religion teaches that at the highest level of enlightenment all forms are illusions; thus the whole world and everything in it can be interpreted as metaphors or “names” ultimately. Nothing in such a world can, in essence, ever be real or unreal, illogical or logical in the Western Aristotelian sense.
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In a lecture which he gave in his monastery on the 12th of June 1971, Buddhadāsa criticised this Three Lifetimes Theory with sharp words. He compared this presentation of paṭiccasamuppāda with ‘cancer, an incurable tumour of Buddhist scholarship’.
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A retelling of the wholesome, spiritual friendship between Kruba Srivichai and Luang Pu Mun: the Bodhisattva and the Arahant.
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a concise history of amulets and an overview of amulet culture in Thailand.
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Four monks’ life narratives, two from the Vipassana group and two from the Vidayagom group, are used as case studies. The study reveals that the narratives of these monks follow the structure of the Buddha’s life due to the Buddhist tradition of using the Buddha’s life as a paradigm to compose religious persons’ stories. However, the miraculous power of each monk is highlighted in his narrative. There is both miraculous power as found in the Buddhist canon and as influenced by Thai cultural beliefs and practices.
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The story of a rural, Thai villager’s struggle with addiction and how his Buddhist culture helped set him on a path to recovery.
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… harbingers of death, visions of hell, the Lord of the underworld, and the benefits of making donations to Buddhist monks and temples, can be understood within the framework of beliefs and customs unique to Southeast Asia.
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In the past, the temple was the center for learning, where elders taught their grandchildren how to chant and pay respect to monks. But in contemporary Thailand, this system is quickly losing influence. Because of this, a number of strategies have recently developed to communicate Buddhist teachings to Thai youth. This paper investigates two significant strategies: private schools with Buddhist-inspired curricula and media targeted towards Thai youth.
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Be a V-Star!: Dhammakāya Programs to Cultivate Virtue in Thailand’s Youth (2021) – Rachelle A. Scott
youth initiatives have remained a popular vehicle for support and recruitment despite numerous criticisms and scandals over the past decades.
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It actually saddens me as a monk that women don’t have the support to renounce. If we had bhikkhuni ordinations and monasteries just like we have for monks, women would flourish. That’s why we have to work really hard.
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I 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.
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we are dealing here not with two groups but with three: the Dhammayut order of the Third and Fourth Reigns, which is the parent group; the Dhammayut order of the Fifth Reign and later, which is the royal child; and the Forest tradition, which is the parent group’s peasant child.
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Spirits, ghosts, fairies, demons, or speaking collectively, ‘pi’ (ผี) may be divided into three classes: ‘Pi’ which are the ghosts of the dead or living; ‘pi’ which exist on their own account, and do not originate from human beings; and thirdly ‘pi’ belonging to other worlds…
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Mae chee, while debarred from the alms round, both receive alms from the laity and donate alms to monks.
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To be spiritually and superstitiously effective, sak yant tattoos traditionally require their bearer to follow a certain lifestyle.
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Samādhi, in all its glory is Samudaya.
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in a living tradition of Buddhism such as in Thailand, the members of that tradition themselves are often not quite aware of how the whole system is meant to work.
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The heart is what is aware. When the current of sound dealing with the Dhamma comes in and makes continual contact with the heart, the heart won’t have any chance to go slipping outside, because the Dhamma is something calming and absorbing.
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With illustrations from the contemporary Thai religious landscape, we can observe how various forms of relational karma intuitively account for spirits and material objects as an agency of relations.
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These incidents have tarnished the reputation of Thailand’s monastic community, raising concerns about the integrity of the religious institutions in the country and questions about what reforms may be needed.
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To practise Dhamma means to apply the Dhamma, to use the Dhamma in conducting your life and work.
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The symbolic ordination of trees as monks in Thailand is widely perceived in Western scholarship to be proof of the power of Buddhism to spur ecological thought. However, a closer analysis of tree ordination demonstrates that it is not primarily about Buddhist teaching, but rather is an invented tradition based on the sanctity of Thai Buddhist symbols as well as those of spirit worship and the monarchy. Tree ordinations performed by non-Buddhist minorities in Thailand do not demonstrate a religious commitment but rather a political one.
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No one visiting a Siamese monastery, popularly known as a ‘wat’, would fail to notice a certain structure, pyramidal in form with a slender tapering spire at the top…
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We must practice putting the mind back into shape. Before we do anything, while we’re doing it, and after it’s done, we have to practice keeping the mind cheerful and bright, with a constant sense of well-being.
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Audio/Video (13)
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Each year, the local community celebrates the day that Khru Bah Neua Chai Kositto became a monk.
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A leading expert on South and Southeast Asian Buddhist art explores the evolution of Buddhist architecture and art in Thailand over millennia, naturally intertwining it with the country’s rich history in this excellent, introductory lecture.
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Katherine Bowie is interviewed by Eric Jones, Kanjana Thepboriruk, and Matthew Trew about the famous, Northern Thai monk Kruba Srivichai and his role in modern Thai history.
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The Western adoption of Buddhism was fascinated by the intellectual side, but its enormous success in Southeast Asia and elsewhere came about by becoming so deeply embedded in the society.
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International tourists are increasingly visiting Chiang Mai to experience Buddhism and the local temples are begining to formalize their offerings to this new “market.”
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The Buddha statues of Southeast Asia have long been coveted and plundered. In this abbreviated recording, Angela Chiu explains how Thai Buddhists justified these iconic thefts in myth and legend.
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