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FEATURE | EASTERN HORIZON 25

established by and through the SSC, but it does not A second reason for the oversight by scholars of
enforce them. The NOB’s website serves as a, if not the, Thai Buddhism is clearly the effect of disciplinary
official face of Buddhism in Thailand. However, serving orientation: most scholars of Buddhism in Southeast
as the official face of Buddhism in the country does not Asia have been trained either as anthropologists or as
mean that it represents the interests of all monks, let historians of religion. Our units of analysis, thus, are
alone all Buddhists. more likely to be the individual monastic, the texts
they have produced, or monasteries, rather than the
In addition, the scope of the power wielded by the wider institutions that they build or inhabit. Erick
SSC is ambiguous. There is a clear bureaucratic White has suggested that since the early 1980s
edifice to the Thai Sangha, with the SSC at its head, scholarly attention has turned away from the “mundane,
which is also established in the Sangha Act. However, conventional, veryday world of monastic affairs,”
the responsibilities and reach of this ecclesiastical and argued for turning to look at how a variety of
bureaucracy are spelled out in subsequent regulations bureaucratic organizations—such as Buddhist schools
only in very general terms. This has important and universities, among others—structure the lives of
repercussions for governing monks in Thailand. Thai monks and novices. As he highlights, much more
For example, when monks commit infractions, work needs to be done on the way that the bodies like
jurisdiction for trying and punishing these monks is the SSC both govern Thai monks and intersect with state
often ambiguous, leading to delays or the avoidance of institutions. While recent work in the study of religion
punishment altogether. in Japan and Tibet has argued for the need to ask
sociological and legal questions, with a few exceptions,
Thus, while Thai monks are formally under the this work remains limited in the study of Buddhism in
authority of the Supreme Patriarch and the SSC, the Thailand and Southeast Asia.
Sangha Act also gives individual abbots a great deal of
autonomy to run their temples as they see fit. Because Beyond disciplinary orientations, a third reason, I
of the autonomy that individual abbots wield, even with suspect, is that Buddhist studies, at least in Thailand,
something like the Supreme Patriarch’s call for temples may also continue to have a romance problem; that is,
to provide food for laity described above, authority is the field still echoes the orientalist assumptions that
murky. The Supreme Patriarch is a powerful figure, were present at its founding. We are more likely to see
and monks do listen to his instructions, but individual Buddhists as religious actors primarily, rather than as
abbots are not required to take up his instructions. people who also do Buddhism. This inclines us to look to
Clearly, some temples followed them, but not out of their religious actions first, and may end up missing the
compulsion. prosaic relief efforts that do not always look religious,
but could emerge from a variety of institutions. This
Scholarship on Buddhism has seemingly not known means we tend to look at who we want Buddhists to be,
how to describe the institutions of Thai Buddhism, as it rather than paying attention to what they may actually
is neither state nor not state. As a result, we have very be doing. EH
little understanding of how the institutions work, of
how monks govern one another beyond the disciplinary September 3, 2020
rules of the Vinaya, or how the monastic institutions
interact with state institutions. In other words, we
do not really understand how power and authority
function in Thai Buddhism.