Buddhism in Thailand

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhism in Thailand is not merely a religion practiced by its people. It is the organizing principle of Thai civilization itself, woven into the legal system, the monarchy, the calendar, and the daily rhythms of over 67 million lives. Around 92.5 percent of Thailand's population identifies as Buddhist, making it home to the largest Buddhist population in the world by some counts. Yet the tradition practiced there is not monolithic. It is a living accumulation of centuries of royal patronage, foreign missionaries, forest monks, political intrigue, and folk spirits that predate written history. How did a faith born in northern India become so thoroughly Thai? And why, after nearly two thousand years of relative separation, did the state and the sangha begin to merge so tightly that a military coup in 2014 could reshape who leads the country's monasteries? Those are the questions worth sitting with. The answers stretch from the court of the Indian Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE to the raid of four Thai temples by soldiers in May 2018.

• 2. Roots in Pre-Thai Kingdoms

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  The Sri Lankan chronicle the Mahavaṃsa records that during the reign of Ashoka, roughly 268 to 232 BCE, two monks named Sona Thera and Uttara Thera were dispatched to a region called Suvannabhumi, somewhere in Southeast Asia. Whether they reached what is now Thailand cannot be confirmed, but archaeological digs in ancient Mon cities like Nakon Pathom have uncovered Dharma wheels, Buddha footprints, crouching deer, and Pali inscriptions that point to an early Buddhist presence in the region. The Mon kingdom of Dvaravati, which flourished from roughly the 6th to the 11th century CE, likely received those earliest missionaries. Its Buddhist art has been compared to the Amaravati style from India, and the original structure of the ancient Phra Pathom Stupa is thought to have resembled the Stupa of Sanchi. Later kingdoms layered additional traditions onto this foundation. The Khmer Empire, which controlled parts of modern Thailand from around 802 to 1431 CE, and the Indonesian kingdom of Srivijaya, active from roughly 650 to 1377, both brought Mahayana Buddhism and Sanskrit traditions into the region. Archaeological finds at Phra Phim and Nakon Sri Thammaraj in southern Thailand confirm that Mahayana was actively practiced there. The turning point came around the 11th century, when Sinhalese Theravada monks began a gradual conversion of most of Southeast Asia to the Mahavihara sect. The Burmese king Anawratha, who ruled from 1044 to 1077, championed Theravada across the Bagan Kingdom, including portions of Thailand he had conquered. By the time the first ethnic Thai states emerged, they were walking into a landscape already shaped by centuries of Buddhist practice.

• 3. Sukhothai and the Sri Lankan Bond

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  Thai people began migrating from China into Southeast Asia starting around the 7th century, gradually absorbing Buddhist practice from the kingdoms they encountered and eventually conquered. The first ethnic Thai kingdom, Sukhothai, was founded in 1238, and at first it hosted both Theravada and Mahayana alongside Khmer Brahmanism. The decisive shift came when Thai monks traveled to Sri Lanka to ordain in the Sinhalese Mahavihara lineage, known in Thailand as Lankavong. Archaeological evidence places the earliest center of this Sinhalese Theravada presence at Nakon Sri Thammarath in the south. King Ram Khamhaeng, who ruled in the late 13th century, gave that movement royal force. He invited Lankavong monks to his capital, built monasteries for them, and sent additional monks back to Sri Lanka to study. Under his reign, stupas reflecting Sri Lankan influence rose across the kingdom, including Wat Chang Lom. Thai pilgrims returning from Sri Lanka also brought back a root cutting from a Bodhi tree, the very tree under which the Buddha was said to have attained enlightenment. That act founded the Thai tradition of venerating Bodhi trees, which endures today. Ram Khamhaeng also created the position of sangharaja, or leader of the monastic community, to administer the sangha. That structural decision would echo through every subsequent reform of Thai Buddhism. One of the most intellectually ambitious Sukhothai kings was Mahathammaracha I, who reigned from 1346 to 1368, became a monk himself for four months, and is attributed with the Tribhumikatha, a treatise on Buddhist cosmology considered one of the oldest traditional works of Thai literature. His reign also saw the arrival of a second wave of Sri Lankan monks led by Somdet Phra Mahasami, who was associated with a forest monastery named Udumbaragiri. Mahasami and his lineage would go on to shape Buddhism in the northern Thai kingdom of Lan Na as well, where King Keu Na invited him to establish his forest sect at the newly built Wat Suan Dauk.

• 4. Royal Patronage and Its Complications

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  Lan Na king Tilokaraj, who ruled from 1441 to 1487, threw his support behind the stricter of two competing Sri Lankan sects after one was accused of accepting money and owning rice lands. He built several monasteries for the more rigorous order, including Wat Chet Yot and Wat Pa Daeng, and enlarged Wat Chedi Luang to house the Emerald Buddha. Around 1477, during his reign, a Buddhist council convened in Lan Na to review the Pali Canon, regarded as the eighth such council in the Thai tradition. Buddhism in Lan Na reached its peak under Tilokaraj's grandson, Phra Mueang Kaeo, who ruled from 1495 to 1528. His reign produced major works in Pali literature, among them the Jinakalamali, a historical chronicle composed around 1517. Meanwhile, in the south, the kingdom of Ayutthya, founded in 1351 by King Uthong, continued the same pattern of royal patronage. King Borommatrailokkanat, who ruled from 1431 to 1488, encouraged the arts and literature, built monasteries in Ayutthya, and himself ordained as a monk for eight months at Wat Chulamani. A major literary achievement of his era was the Mahachat Kham Luang, an epic poem about the Great Birth of Vessantara Bodhisattva, blending Pali verse with Thai poetry. The story of the supremely generous prince Vessantara remains one of the most popular Jataka tales in Thailand to this day. A century and a half later, during the late 17th century, French visitors described a formal state examination system under King Narai that tested monks on Pali and Buddhist doctrine. Those who failed were released from their vows. Those who excelled were awarded officially recognized ranks. Even then, the Thai state was already reaching its hand into the sangha, calibrating who was worthy to remain a monk. Boromakot, who reigned from 1733 to 1758, sent 25 Thai monks to Sri Lanka to help restore higher ordination that had been lost there to warfare. Those monks helped found the Siam Nikaya, which remains one of the main monastic orders in Sri Lanka to this day. The fall of Ayutthya's capital in 1767 destroyed much of the written record of this period, leaving the history of Thai religion during those centuries fragmentary.

• 5. Reform, Centralization, and Mongkut

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  Rama I, who founded the Rattanakosin Kingdom in 1782, set the modern institutional template for Thai Buddhism. He built Wat Phra Kaew in the new capital to house the Emerald Buddha, appointed the first Supreme Patriarch of Thai Buddhism, and convened a Buddhist Council attended by over 250 monks to review and publish a new edition of the Pali Canon, the Tipitaka Chabab Tongyai. His successor Rama III, who reigned from 1824 to 1851, built or repaired more than 50 temples, including the stupa at Wat Arun, the Golden Mount at Wat Sraket, the Metal Temple at Wat Ratchanadda, and Wat Pho, which housed the first university in Thailand. The single most transformative figure in modern Thai Buddhism, however, was King Mongkut, who ascended the throne in 1851 after spending 27 years as a monk. He was a distinguished scholar of Pali, had studied western science and the humanities, and learned both Latin and English. During his monastic years, exposure to the stricter discipline brought by Burmese immigrants prompted him to found a new monastic order at Wat Samorai called the Dhammayuttika Nikaya, meaning "yoked to the Dhamma." Restrictions for its members included not using money, not storing food, and not taking milk in the evening. The Dhammayuttika movement rejected certain post-canonical texts, including the very Traibhumikatha that Mahathammaracha I had composed centuries earlier, and sought to strip away folk beliefs in favor of a rationalized, Pali-Canon-based Buddhism. As king, Mongkut used state power to promote this reformed Buddhism. Wat Bowonniwet Vihara in Bangkok became the administrative center of the order and the center of Pali studies in Thailand. A 1859 law he issued formalized sangha administration through eleven articles. His successor, Chulalongkorn, made these reforms permanent and national through the Sangha Law of 1902, which divided religious administration into four main divisions, each with a patriarch and deputy, all answering to a supreme Sangha Council of Elders. A 1900 survey counted 7,206 monasteries in Thailand. The law required that monks be assigned to a registered monastery and carry identification when traveling. Any new monastery required state approval under Article 9.

• 6. The Forest Tradition

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  While the Bangkok-centered sangha bureaucracy was expanding in the early 20th century, a very different Buddhist movement was taking root in northeastern Thailand, in the region known as Isan. Ajahn Mun Bhuridatto, born in 1870, and Ajahn Sao Kantasīlo, born in 1861, led a back-to-the-forest movement called the Kammaṭṭhāna Forest Tradition. Its practitioners focused on asceticism, known as dhutanga, and intensive meditation, seeking direct awakening rather than textual mastery. They were openly critical of the text-based approaches of city monks, and early on some friction arose between them and the official sangha hierarchy. The forest tradition would grow steadily through the 20th century. Students of Ajahn Mun, including Ajahn Maha Bua, Ajahn Chah, Ajahn Thate, and Ajahn Lee, each built influential monastic communities. Ajahn Chah's lineage proved especially important in carrying Thai Buddhist monasticism to the western world. Wat Pah Nanachat, a monastery built specifically for international monastics, attracted practitioners who went on to found monasteries in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, and the United States. The forest tradition faced a physical crisis in the closing decades of the 20th century, as extensive deforestation reduced the wilderness the movement depended on. In the 1990s, members of the Forestry Bureau responded by deeding tracts of land to forest monasteries as a preservation measure. Those monasteries and the surrounding land became, in effect, forested islands within an otherwise cleared landscape.

• 7. State Control After the 2014 Coup

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  After the 2014 coup d'etat, the military junta known as the National Council for Peace and Order, or NCPO, significantly expanded state influence over Thai Buddhism. A religious reform committee led by former senator Paiboon Nititawan and former monk Mano Laohavanich was established. Calls for reform were driven in part by right-wing monk Phra Buddha Issara, known for close ties with junta leader Prayut Chan-o-cha. In 2015, the junta's National Reform Council proposed requiring temples to open their finances to public scrutiny, ending short-term ordinations, requiring monks to carry smart cards, increasing control of temple bank accounts, changing abbots every five years, and placing all temple assets under the Ministry of Culture. In 2016, Phra Buddha Issara requested that the Department of Special Investigation, or DSI, investigate the Sangha Supreme Council itself. An alleged tax evasion case against Somdet Chuang, the most senior council member and next in line to become supreme patriarch, did not result in charges. But it delayed his appointment long enough for the government to change the law, allowing the junta to bypass the Sangha Supreme Council and appoint the supreme patriarch directly. In 2017, Somdet Chuang's appointment was withdrawn. King Rama X, drawing from a list of five names given to him by NCPO leader Prayut Chan-o-cha, appointed a monk from the Dhammayuttika Nikaya instead. In February 2017, Article 44 of the interim constitution was used to replace the head of the National Office of Buddhism with a DSI official. In May 2018, the NCPO launched simultaneous raids of four temples and arrested several monks. Among those arrested, to many observers' surprise, was Phra Buddha Issara himself. He faced charges including alleged robbery, detaining officials, and unauthorized use of the royal seal. All monks arrested in those raids were defrocked before any trial was held. Anthropologist Jim Taylor characterized the arrests as an attempt by the ruling palace regime to consolidate royalist power by removing non-royalist high-ranking monks. In July 2018, the junta passed a law giving the Thai king authority to select members of the Sangha Supreme Council directly, completing the shift from a self-governing monastic body to one appointed by the secular state.

• 8. Practices, Tensions, and the Living Tradition

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  Thailand's roughly 300,000 monks serve 38,000 temples and collectively handle between three and 3.6 billion US dollars in annual donations, most of it untraceable cash. A 2017 Health Ministry study of 200 Bangkok temples found that 60 percent of monks suffer from high cholesterol and 50 percent from high blood sugar, a consequence of monks being required to eat whatever is offered on their alms rounds while being prohibited from cardiovascular exercise as undignified. The National Health Commission Office responded by issuing the National Health Charter for Monks. Short-term ordination remains one of the most distinctive features of Thai Buddhism. Most young men ordain for a single vassa, or rainy season, lasting about three months. Unordained men are euphemistically described as "unripe," while those who have been ordained are described as "ripe." Musician Pisitakun Kuantalaeng, for instance, became a monk following his father's death, observing that ordination even for a short period could generate substantial offerings. The question of women's ordination remains contested. A 1928 law banning women's full ordination was reviewed by the Thai Senate beginning in 2002 and found unconstitutional as a violation of religious freedom. More than 20 Thai women have since ordained at temples in Samut Sakhon, Chiang Mai, and Rayong. Thailand's two main Theravada orders, the Mahanikaya and Dhammayutika Nikaya, have not officially accepted fully ordained women into their ranks. The broader tradition also absorbs folk religion and Brahmanical ritual that formal doctrine does not endorse. Phi spirits, the guardian deities of places, territories, and ancestral lineages, are propitiated at communal festivals with food offerings, and many rules observed by rural monks derive from folk magic rather than the orthodox Vinaya. Scholar Kate Crosby has noted that the southern esoteric meditation tradition called Borān kammaṭṭhāna, which left traces in a northern Thai inscription dated to the 16th century, predates any other living meditation tradition in the contemporary Theravada world.