Dangerous Friendships in Eighteenth-Century Buddhist Laṅkā and Siam (original) (raw)
The kingdoms of Kandy (now Sri Lanka) and Ayutthaya (now Thailand) were briefly connected across Indian Ocean waters in the mid-eighteenth century by Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC) traders, leading to the importation of valuable Siamese Buddhist monks and their ordination lineage to the island. Two series of events related to the VOC's search for and delivery of these monks demonstrate that the patronage of connected religious dynamics—not just the contingencies of trade, land, labour, and statecraft—was an essential aspect of Company business. At the same time, mediating Buddhist connection was a dangerous, sometimes perilous undertaking. Analysing VOC records alongside Laṅkān and Siamese historical chronicles and travelogues reveals that what were initially friendly connections at first necessitated, and later intensified certain forms of danger. We begin with perilous shipwrecks and diplomatic impasses across monsoon waters that eventually led to the restoration of an important but defunct Kandyan Buddhist ordination lineage, and conclude with the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt in 1760 against the royal patron of that lineage transmission. I advance the notion of “dangerous friendships” to characterise how Buddhist courts and European traders worked together to first generate, and then exploit, friendly religious connections.
Related papers
Journal of Social Sciences (New Series), Research Centre for Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2022
Kandyan historical chronicles and biographies of its influential monks and monarchs have tended to characterize the mid-eighteenth-century arrival of Ayutthayan monks, and the rescue of Laṅkā’s defunct Buddhist monastic lineage, as a singular instance of meritorious religious patronage carried out by wholly virtuous agents. This article aspires to interject a more complex apprehension of these activities and the experiences of king, bhikkhu, and Dutch trader, especially in the decade following three importations of Siamese monks and royals on Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC) ships between 1753-1759. This article considers the failed assassination attempt against Kandy’s King Kīrti Śrī Rājasiṃha (r. 1747-1782) in 1760, plotted by disaffected courters together with Kandyan and Siamese monks, and especially its aftermath. I focus on the VOC’s extensive efforts to track down one of the Siamese plotters, a troublesome Ayutthayan monk-prince named Krommuang Thep Phiphit. Between 1760 and 1764, in the context of the Kandyan-Dutch war, the Company attempted twice to bring him back to the island and install him themselves as a puppet king. By engaging VOC colonial surveillance in both Kandy and Ayutthaya alongside Siamese historical chronicles, this article suggests that the tendentious and short-lived moment of religious diplomacy between two independent and predominantly Buddhist kingdoms and the VOC had the effect of magnifying destabilizing political intrigue and perilous personal animosity in addition to reviving a defunct monastic lineage for Kandyan Buddhist monks.
Buddhist Connections in the Indian Ocean: Changes in Monastic Mobility, 1000-1500
Since the nineteenth century, Buddhists residing in the present-day nations of Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka have thought of themselves as participants in a shared southern Asian Buddhist world characterized by a long and continuous history of integration across the Bay of Bengal region, dating at least to the third century BCE reign of the Indic King Asoka. Recently, scholars of Buddhism and historians of the region have begun to develop a more historically variegated account of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, using epigraphic, art historical, and archaeological evidence, as well as new interpretations of Buddhist chronicle texts.1 This paper examines * I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers at JESHO for their incisive and helpful comments during the preparation of this article and to Dr. Paolo Sartori for his dedicated editorial guidance. Early versions of some of the material discussed here were presented at the Asia
Journal of Global History, 2007
In the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchant ships to Chinese merchant colonies in East and Southeast Asian port cities to establish or maintain monasteries. Typically, Chinese seafarers and merchants sponsored their travel, and sovereigns and elites abroad offered their patronage. What were these monks and their patrons seeking? This study will investigate the question through the case of one Chan master, Shilian Dashan, who journeyed to the Vietnamese kingdom of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) in 1695 and 1696. In Dashan, we see a form of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: that is, Buddhism as a ‘missionary religion’ able to propagate branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies, and to form monastic communities within the host societies that welcomed them. This evident agency of seafaring Chan monks in early modern times suggests that Buddhism’s role in commerce, diaspora, and state formation ...
Journal of World History, 2022
This article analyzes and discusses the modes and forms of cooperation between various groups of foreign nationals sojourning in Ayutthaya during the seventeenth century. It argues that Siamese monarchs' religious and ethnic tolerance toward foreigners as well as the large scope of autonomy they granted to overseas incomers was paralleled by the kings' predatory usage of law and inherently conflictual system of exploitation of foreign merchants that satisfied the court's fiscal needs. In effect, traders residing in Siam reacted by creating among themselves cross-national informal networks and by reaching out to court officials and Buddhist clergy. These networks superseded global conflicts raging between the kingdoms and treading companies (such as Portuguese and Dutch wars and the Dutch East India Company war against Ming loyalists, etc.). Moreover, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the long-standing cooperation between various nations led to a significant cultural amalgamation and growing uniformization in customs and modes of consumption. Due to the strong state institution and specific multiethnic and multireligious social structure, Ayutthaya provides a fascinating early example of reasons, forms, and limits for social and cultural integration within the globalizing entrepôts of early modern Asia.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Related papers
Indian Ocean Trade through Buddhist
Franck Billé, Sanjyot Mehendale and James W. Lankton (eds), The Maritime Silk Road: Global Connectivities, Regional Nodes, Localities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University press, 2022., 2020