Buddha Images and the Monkhood
Buddha Images and the Monkhood
Monastic Political Power beyond the Cloister
The Mūlasāsanā chronicles narrate the history of two monastic sects, the Flower Garden (Suan Dok) and the Redwood Grove (Pa Daeng), in Lanna. The texts describe a furious feud between the orders in the sixteenth century. The accounts contradict Weberian conceptions of monks as withdrawn from the wider secular world. The orders deliberately drew the laity into the feud by emphasizing that patronizing the wrong order carried mortal risks. The monks deployed Buddha statues and stories about them; as images arise from the agencies of monks and lay devotees, they are connected to both and thus the ideal means for the monkhood to embroil the laity in the dispute. Accounts of Buddha statues from the Burmese Glass Palace Chronicle likewise reflect this conception of the image as both the Buddha himself and as an object subject to human manipulation, and therefore as an object whose agencies must be managed.
Keywords: Mulasasana, Suan Dok, Pa Daeng, Keng Tung, Chiang Mai, Max Weber, Glass Palace Chronicle, iconoclasm
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