Buddhism in Laos

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Buddhism in Laos is not a single faith so much as a living negotiation. Theravada Buddhism is practiced by sixty-six percent of the population, yet in the province of Sekong, that number falls to just twenty percent. In the province of Champassak, it climbs to ninety-two percent. The gap tells a story about a country that has never been religiously uniform, where a faith arrived in fragments across many centuries and then had to survive war, colonialism, and communist revolution.

  Lao Buddhism is its own distinct version of Theravada. It has survived every attempt to purify, standardize, or suppress it. Spirits, soul rituals, and animist practices run alongside monastery life in ways that practitioners themselves rarely see as contradictory. This documentary asks how Buddhism took root in Laos, how it was shaped by colonial administrators and Cold War combatants, and what it looks like today in a country where the Communist Party and the monastic order have found a working, if uneasy, arrangement.

• 2. Roots and Royal Foundations

  ›

  Theravada Buddhism is believed to have first reached the territory of modern Laos during the seventh and eighth centuries, carried in by the kingdom of Dvaravati. During the seventh century, a second stream arrived from a different direction: the kingdom of Nan-chao, an ethnically Tai state centered in what is now Yunnan, China, introduced tantric Buddhism along with a political idea that would prove durable. That idea was the king as defender and protector of the faith, a bond between monarchy and monastic order that shaped Southeast Asian statecraft for centuries.

  The historical Lao state is regarded as beginning in 1353 CE with the coronation of Fa Ngum at Luang Prabang. Local histories describe Fa Ngum bringing a Khmer Theravada teacher named Phramaha Pasaman to serve as head priest of the new kingdom. Phramaha Pasaman also brought a revered Buddha image that became known as the Phra Bang, the object that gave the city of Luang Prabang its name and became the symbol of the Lao kingdom. Scholar Michel Lorrillard, however, calls this origin story artificial and points instead to the influence of Buddhism from Chiang Mai.

  Whatever its precise source, royal Buddhist authority consolidated over time. Epigraphical evidence shows that Lao kings were being labeled cakkavatti, a Pali term for a ruler who turns the wheel of the Buddhist dharma, from around the middle of the fifteenth century. King Photisarath, who reigned from 1501 to 1547, actively tried to suppress the worship of spirits and deepen the population's Buddhist practice. Those efforts did not fully succeed. Local spirit cults and rituals tied to the concept of khwan, or soul substance, persisted through every purification campaign and remain central to Lao religious life today.

• 3. Monks Under Colonial Rule

  ›

  The French colonial regime did not treat Buddhism as a problem to be removed. It treated Buddhism as an institution to be managed. From early on, the administration sponsored Buddhist education, renovated monasteries, and redesigned the curriculum for monks so that it served colonial purposes. On the 24th of November 1914, the Ecole de Pali was founded by royal decree in Phnom Penh. It was renamed the Ecole Superieure de Pali in 1922, and in that same year two Cambodian monks were sent to EFEO Hanoi for language training.

  The French goal, as researchers Gregory Kourilsky and Soren Ivarsson have argued, was to curtail Siamese influence over the region's Buddhist institutions. Bangkok had been the center of higher monastic education; the French wanted Lao and Khmer monks looking to their own institutes instead. Lao monks first traveled to Phnom Penh to study at the Buddhist Institute, but Lao branches were not opened until 1931, a gap that reflected Laos's peripheral position within the colonial project. The French introduced new curricula based on selected texts, awarded monks certificates, and printed Buddhist books.

  This drive for control was not purely administrative. Buddhist millennial movements had caused serious trouble for the French regime during its early phase, and parts of the Khmer monastic order had also resisted French influence. Sponsoring and restructuring the Sangha was partly a strategy to prevent another wave of Buddhist-led opposition. The reforms held some sway until the political turmoil of the 1950s and the socialist revolution of 1975 displaced their effects. In the years of independence before 1975, a gradual secularization was also visible: as a state school system expanded, monastic education became an increasingly specialized domain.

• 4. The Pathet Lao's Calculated Embrace

  ›

  By the early 1950s, monasteries had become contested territory. Both the Royal Lao Government and left-leaning political forces ran partially clandestine surveillance operations inside Buddhist institutions. The Pathet Lao, the Communist movement that would eventually take power, faced an obvious ideological difficulty: Marxist theory formally rejects religion as a tool used by ruling classes to keep the oppressed subservient. Yet the Pathet Lao chose a different path in Laos.

  Rather than suppressing Buddhism, the Pathet Lao reinterpreted it. They pointed to the life of the Gautama Buddha himself: his rejection of royal status, his choice to become a mendicant, his refusal to assign worth based on caste or wealth. The Pathet Lao argued that the Buddha had already envisioned a classless society. They also emphasized that the Buddha saw poverty as a root of evil and a cause of crime, and that a minimum of material well-being was necessary before the Dhamma could be practised. That position was not far, they argued, from their own aim of redistributing wealth.

  In the First Coalition government of 1957, the Pathet Lao held religious affairs as one of their two portfolios. The minister, Phoumi Vongvichit, was a Communist. The Ministry of Religious Affairs supervised the Sangha directly, which meant the Pathet Lao now controlled a communication network that reached from Vientiane into the most remote villages. Ministry funds were used to pay for monastic meetings where pro-communist ideas could be spread. A seized Pathet Lao document dated the 14th of January 1968 describes thirty-three monks sent out to preach revolutionary ethics, protect Buddhism, and resist what the document called the psychological warfare of American imperialists.

• 5. The Rightist Counter and the Broken Sangha

  ›

  The rightist government of Phoui Sananikone, which took power after the collapse of the First Coalition, moved to bring the Sangha under state control through legislation. Royal Ordinance number 160, passed on the 25th of May 1959, gave government officials the power to veto elections of abbots and elders, and required Cabinet consent for candidates seeking higher positions. Correspondence between administrative divisions of the Sangha had to pass through the civil administration.

  The law backfired. It created resentment within the Sangha and handed the Pathet Lao a propaganda advantage. The Americans responded by training some monks to speak against the Communists and sending Lao-speaking monks from Thailand into the country to join the ideological contest. These monks came from the Thammanyut-nikay sect, a reform minority sect, which placed them at odds with the majority Maha-nikay sect and created fresh tensions. Two underground movements emerged with Pathet Lao backing: the Movement of Young Monks Against the Thai Thammanyut Monks and the Movement of Novices to Demand their Rights.

  The Sangha's internal divisions were also shaped by class resentments built up under French rule. The French-educated Lao elite had access to government employment; those educated in monasteries were told their religious training was irrelevant to government work. Many monastery-educated men had no option but to remain as monks, and they harbored grievances against the state. Those grievances made parts of the Sangha susceptible to Pathet Lao overtures, and by the time the Pathet Lao proclaimed the Lao People's Democratic Republic on the 2nd of December 1975, they had already won significant support inside the monastic order.

• 6. Pressure, Flight, and Survival: 1975-1979

  ›

  After the proclamation of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, the new government needed to establish its legitimacy across territory that had until recently been controlled by the right. The Pathet Lao promoted an eighteen-point political programme built around the slogan "Laos: Peaceful, Independent, Neutral, Democratic, United and Prosperous." The fifth point called for the respect and protection of all religions, especially Buddhism. The Sangharaja, or Supreme Patriarch of Buddhism in Laos, urged monks to work with the revolutionaries for the good of the nation.

  But the relationship turned coercive quickly. Monks were among the first sent to Pathet Lao political seminars; attendance began as voluntary and became compelled. The traditional Sangha hierarchy was abolished, including the Sangharaja's office, and the elaborate fans that symbolized senior monks' ranks were smashed. The Sangha was restructured as the Lao United Buddhists Association, placed under the Department of Religious Affairs within the Ministry of Education, with executive positions filled by Party appointees. The regular Patimokkha recitation, the fortnightly recitation of 227 verses of monastic discipline in Pali, became a forum for criticizing monks who deviated from the Party line.

  At the beginning of 1976, a harder campaign began. Teaching religion in primary schools was prohibited. Monks were harassed by local cadres. Public opposition forced the regime to pull back by the end of 1976, but pressure on the Sangha increased again between 1976 and 1979. By 1979, one thousand monks had reportedly been confined to re-education camps. In March 1979, the eighty-seven-year-old Sangharaja of Laos, Venerable Thammayano, fled to Thailand by floating across the Mekong River on a raft of inflated car inner tubes. He reported that youths were being dissuaded from joining the Sangha and that monastic teachings had to conform to government guidelines.

• 7. Revival and Renegotiation

  ›

  Official attitudes toward Buddhism began to soften in the late 1980s, moving in parallel with economic liberalization. By the early 1990s, lines of monks accepting morning offerings from the faithful had returned without interference. At the annual Pha That Luang Festival, most members of the Politburo could be seen making offerings to monks. In 2003 and 2010, the Ministry of Information and Culture inaugurated statues of King Fa Ngum and King Anouvong, staging rituals of state patronage designed to connect the current government with a Buddhist royal past.

  Scholar Vatthana Pholsena has described the state's approach as projecting a secularized image of Buddhism in order to reconcile official ideology with religion. The Sangha remains under Party control and monks must study government policy, but since the 1990s the monastic order has been repositioned as a primarily religious organization. Buddhist institutes such as Champasak Sangha College have expanded teaching of the Dhamma's foundations, Pali, and the Buddhist canon. Monks now appear on television and radio and are permitted to speak in schools and visit patients in hospitals.

  A form of socially engaged Buddhism has also developed. Monks take part in HIV and drug-prevention programs and environmental protection efforts. The UNESCO world heritage status of Luang Prabang has connected the city's Buddhist institutions to global networks. Maha Khamchan Virachitto, the highest-ranking monk of Luang Prabang, who lived from 1920 to 2007, maintained transnational connections even through the socialist period and is credited with a major role in Buddhism's revival in Laos. The large collection of photographs he left behind, along with images gathered from other monks and laypeople across the past century, is now being assembled into an archive that will document the religious history of the city.