In the Land of Lady White Blood: Southern Thailand and the Meaning of History 9781501719172

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Phatthalung and the Problem of History
3. Royal Texts and Local Meanings
4. The Historiography of Southern Thailand
5. Landscape and History
6. National History and Local History
Appendix: The Story of Lady White Blood
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Lorraine M. Gesick

IN THE LAND OF LADY WHITE BLOOD

SOUTHERN THAILAND AND THE MEANING OF HISTORY

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Lorraine M. Gesick

IN THE LAND OF LADY WHITE BLOOD SOUTHERN THAILAND AND THE MEANING OF HISTORY

STUDIES ON SOUTHEAST ASIA

SEAP Southeast Asia Program Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 1995

Editor in Chief Benedict Anderson Advisory Board George Kahin Stanley O'Connor Takashi Shiraishi Keith Taylor Oliver Wolters Editing and Production Audrey Kahin Roberta Ludgate Dolina Millar Kyung Ro

Studies on Southeast Asia No. 18

© 1995 Cornell Southeast Asia Program ISBN 0-87727-717-6

In Memory of My Mother

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CONTENTS vii

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction

1

2. Phatthalung and the Problem of History

5

3. Royal Texts and Local Meanings

20

4. The Historiography of Southern Thailand

37

5. Landscape and History

53

6. National History and Local History

72

Appendix: The Story of Lady White Blood

84

Bibliography

87

Index

93 MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Map 1. Southern Thailand Map 2. Phatthalung-Sathing Phra Region Plate 1. Wat Khian, Bang Kaeo, Reliquary Stupa

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viii 4

Plate 2. Tamra dated B.E. 2242 (1698)

19

Plate 3. Phra Kho Hill, Wat Phra Kho

36

Plate 4. Wat Phra Kho, Reliquary Stupa

36

Plate 5. Ladies of Bang Kaeo, descendants of phlao custodians

52

Plate 6. Wat Sathing Phra, Reliquary Stupa

71

Plate 7. Lady White Blood Manuscript, inner front leaves 1 and 2

82

Plate 8. Lady White Blood Manuscript, leaves 3 and 4

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Map 1. Southern Thailand

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

lthough this book is short, it was long in the writing, and my debts of gratitude are correspondingly many. It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge as many of those debts here as I can. A Ford Foundation Southeast Asia Postdoctoral Fellowship enabled me to visit the Thailand National Library many years ago, when I first read the manuscripts that are the focal point of this study. Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program assisted me twice in the writing of this book, once in 1984-85 by providing me with office space, library privileges, and stimulating intellectual exchange as I began writing the first tentative drafts, and again in the summer of 1990 by awarding me a Luce Junior Faculty Fellowship that allowed me to revise the book substantially, bringing it closer to its present form. The bulk of the research was done in Thailand in 1987 under a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship. During this research, Chaiwut Piyakul and Phitaya Butsararat of the Phatthalung Cultural Center, Sutthiwong Phongphaibun of the Institute for Southern Thai Studies in Songkhla, and Preecha Noonsuk of the Center for Southern Thai Studies at Nakhon were all generous with their time and knowledge. Early exploratory drafts were read by Benedict Anderson, James Boon, Oliver Wolters, and Peter Vandergeest, whose criticisms all helped me to eliminate extraneous matter and sharpen my focus. Conversations with Oliver Wolters during my sojourns at Cornell were especially valuable in helping me shape my thinking about this book. Grant Olsen and David Wyatt offered useful advice about revisions to Chapters Three and Four. Drafts of the entire book in substantially its present form were read by David Chandler, Anthony Diller, Craig Reynolds, Thongchai Winichakul, and an anonymous publisher's reader, all of whose criticisms and suggestions I have tried to take heed of in this final version. I owe David Chandler special thanks for reading the whole manuscript twice, each time giving his careful attention to eliminating at least some of my more annoying stylistic mannerisms. The National Thai Studies Centre at the Australian National University afforded me the opportunity in 1992 to interact with knowledgeable colleagues as I began final revisions for publication. Through his encouragement and advice Anthony Diller made sure I kept working to completion. Finally, I must acknowledge that without the help of Jaroon Kanchanaphen of Kradangnga village, who acted as my research assistant, guide, and occasional interpreter when the southern Thai dialect became too thick for me, this book would not have been possible. He and his wife Bon opened their house to me, and their neighbors and kin numbered prominently among my informants.

A

Map 2. Phatthalung-Sathing Phra Region

1 INTRODUCTION

The problem now is to explode the concept of history by the anthropological experience of culture. The heretofore obscure histories of remote islands deserve a place alongside the self-contemplation of the European past—or the history of 'civilizations'—for their own remarkable contributions to an historical understanding. We thus multiply our conceptions of history by the diversity of structures. Suddenly, there are all kinds of new things to consider. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History his book is an attempt to uncover, through the examination of a group of manuscripts and the communities that preserved them, the historical sensibility of rural southern Thailand from the seventeenth century to the present. Akin to this sensibility were those of the related historiographical traditions found throughout the Tai world before the present century. In contrast to them is the discourse of Thai "national history" that has emerged in the course of the twentieth century and that has increasingly submerged or reworked these older discourses for its own uses. Also in contrast is the discourse of modern academic history which also reworks other historical traditions for its own purposes, or, if they prove unmalleable, consigns them to non-history. Thus, although it confines itself to the examination of the particular and the local, this book also is inevitably a commentary on broader questions of the nature of "history." It questions the assumptions of these modern discourses, seeing the concept of history itself as problematic. As one might expect of a book pursuing such concerns, it is experimental. I call what I have done "ethnographic history," an attempt to ally the rigors of textual study to the sensitivity of cultural interpretation.1 Chapter Two, the first substantive chapter, sets the stage by posing the confrontation at the beginning of the twentieth century between a southern Thai world that worshipped but did not read its historical manuscripts and a modernizing Thai elite who appropriated such manuscripts as potential "documentary sources" for a newer

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* Cf. Craig Reynolds' suggestion that "the representation of Thai historical thought in English [be approached] as an ethnographic task." Craig J. Reynolds, Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today, (Ithaca, 1987), preface. Cf. also, Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York, 1984), pp. 3-7, 257-63, where Darnton argues for the utility of doing history as an exercise in cultural interpretation along the lines suggested by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

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In the Land of Lady White Blood

kind of history. In order to deal with this confrontation, the notion of historical sensibilities, derived from Clifford Geertz's writing on cultural systems, is proposed. It is suggested that "history," like "religion," is an abstraction covering a variety of culturally rooted phenomena that respond to sensibilities, equally culturally rooted, that are yet recognizable cross-culturally as pertaining to a field of human concerns more or less "historical" (or "religious") rather than, say, "technological." Formulated thus, there are histories but not history, except as an abstraction. Each of these histories or historiographical traditions arising from a particular historical sensibility has its own criteria for historical "truth" and historical "proof" informed by that historical sensibility. Implicit throughout this book is the argument that to apply the criteria for historical "truth" of one historical sensibility to evaluate the products of another is, at best, misleading if not condescending. The third chapter pursues the notion of historical sensibilities through a semiotic reading of one category of texts in the manuscripts under study: seventeenth-century royal decrees preserved in communities in southern Thailand. One aspect of the historical sensibility thus uncovered is the power nexus between the spoken and the written word, the written text having value in proportion to the "powerfulness" of the original spoken utterance. The fourth chapter continues the textual analysis but shifts to a second category of texts in the manuscripts: locally written southern Thai histories kept as companions to the decrees. Although the focus of this chapter is still on written texts, the ramifying connections between these texts and a surrbunding world of orality become increasingly apparent and important. Also taken up and discussed in the context of the southern histories is a suggestion made in Chapter Two, that pre-modern Thai historical discourse outside the royal capital was multi-vocal, in which more than one version of a story could be "true," depending on locale. Chapter Five takes this theme of multi-vocal history further as the focus shifts almost entirely to the world of oral storytelling in response to the question: before modern education and mass media, what would "history" have connoted to southern Thai villagers? After looking at several stories and the places in which they were told, I suggest that the historical sensibility of rural southern Thailand saw the past as embedded in the landscape, a landscape of enduring places indelibly marked by ancestral power.2 The last chapter is not so much a conclusion as an epilogue, or perhaps the prologue to a new story, briefly narrating the fate of the southern Thai manuscripts in the twentieth century, including their re-appropriation by southern Thai scholars now writing in a modern idiom informed by a modern historical sensibility. Yet, as I also note, in some southern Thai villages the older sensibility still lingers. Accordingly, the last word is left to a southern Thai abbot. The title of the book, In the Land of Lady White Blood, is both metaphor and description. It is meant both to convey my sense of sojourning in unfamiliar intellectual terrain and to suggest one way in which the southern Thai landscape, where I worked, has been perceived by its inhabitants. In the historical imaginings of the people of the Phatthalung region, the area has figured for uncounted centuries as a land copiously imprinted with traces of the life and deeds of Lady White Blood, the mythic ancestress with whom all histories of the region begin. There is no single 2

This argument is foreshadowed in my 1985 article "Reading the Landscape: Reflections on a Sacred Site in South Thailand/' Journal of the Siam Society 73:1, 2 (January, July, 1985): 157-61.

Introduction

3

story of Lady White Blood; rather each place marked by her passing has its own variant. I discuss some of these variants in Chapters Four and Five. At the risk of privileging one version over others—a double risk since it is drawn from the oldest extant written text of the story and therefore is easy to regard as the "most authentic"—I have given in the Appendix a translation of the Lady White Blood story found in an early eighteenth-century manuscript. Readers impatient to know this story might begin there before going on to Chapter 2. Although this book is steeped in southern Thai particularities, I believe its argument has wider application. The notion of historical sensibilities seems an apt tool in this post-modern, post-structuralist age for investigating the many different ways different human communities have imagined their pasts. The theme of the stubbornness of locality in such "other" imaginings certainly is applicable elsewhere in Southeast Asia and possibly far beyond. One is reminded here of Bruce Chatwin's description in The Songlines of how Australian Aborigines sing the landscape into existence as they travel through it by singing each feature's story. (Perhaps the reason Europeans in Australia were unable to recognize this historical sensibility as "history" was because it was "linear" in space rather than time.)3 The notion of the "pastness of places" is particularly alien to American thinking, with our chronologically shallow local history (unless we include native American history, which with unthinking arrogance we usually do not) and our emphasis on mobility, reinforced in this century by the automobile and modern communications technology. Indeed, such mobility has become global, a hallmark of modernity, and all places are coming to look more and more the same, including, ironically, historic districts "restored" for tourist consumption. Perhaps in the rush to the modern we need to take time to savor other (endangered?) historical sensibilities in order to renew our sense of possibilities. 3

Paul Carter, The Rood to Botany Bay: Explorations in Landscape and History (Chicago, 1987), pp. 335-52.

Plate 1. Wat Khian, Bang Kaeo, Reliquary Stupa

2 PHATTHALUNG AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY

n 1902 a Thai royal prince, in his capacity as minister of posts and telegraphs, toured the Siamese provinces in the Malay Peninsula, keeping a travel diary of his journey.1 Prince Naris, a man of wide interests and lively intelligence, not only recorded information pertinent to his official business but described and commented on anything that happened to catch his interest, from archaeology to lacquer tapping to the features by which one judges an elephant. Among the phenomena that rated mention in his journal was a group of manuscripts shown him during his visit to Wat Khuha Sawan, a famous old monastery on the outskirts of the town of Phatthalung. After describing his visit to a sacred cave in the monastery precincts, Prince Naris noted:

I

The abbot brought some old books for me to see. There was a case inside of which were bark-paper [phlao, ivjen] manuscripts labelled "Manuscripts of the Wat Khuha Ricefields" [nuaiuiiflflvn]. They were old. No one dared read them. They just kept them to worship. Inside were five manuscripts written in black pencil on khoi paper sewed along the top in the manner of Chinese books. [Here he gives an excerpt from the beginning of one of the manuscripts.] I borrowed them from their owner, an old grandmother, the wife of an old grandfather. Her husband was unable to come so she had her son bring [the manuscripts]. Women were not allowed to touch them. The old grandfather was kin to the 'monastery folk' [mnluyTfl]. It was understood that originally whoever had such a manuscript was exempt from the ricefield tax because in the manuscript there was a list [of exempt ricefields]. They said that there was another box with the lists of monastery ricefields, but it was taken to Bangkok by Khun Thipsuk, where it disappeared when he died.2 1 Somdet Chaofa Kromphraya Naritsaranuwattiwong, Chotmai rayathang pai truat ratchakan laem Malayu r.s. 121 [Record of a journey of inspection in the Malay Peninsula, Bangkok Era, 121 (1902)] (Bangkok: Printed for the cremation of Khun Nakhonratkhet [Sunthorn Tamthai], 1974). 2 Ibid., p. 38. All translations from Thai are my own, unless otherwise stated. Khoi and phlao both mean paper made out of the bark of the khoi tree. The meaning phlao is restricted to soft paper manuscripts, whereas khoi can mean either soft paper or paper stiffened to make the characteristic accordion-shaped books. No date for Khun Thipsuk's death is mentioned.

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In the Land of Lady White Blood

I came across this passage in 1983 when a friend sent me a copy of Prince Naris's diary. It would be only slight exaggeration to say it hit me like a revelation. Several years earlier I had examined a group of manuscripts in the Thailand National Library that also had come from Phatthalung and that were almost identical in form and subject matter with those described by Prince Naris. As I read Prince Naris's observations, I was struck by the remarkable contrast between the context in which I encountered the manuscripts and the context in which Prince Naris had encountered manuscripts of similar age, character, and provenance. On the one hand was the world of village Phatthalung in 1902, where such manuscripts were so sacred that no one dared read them, where their owner, as a "polluting" woman, felt she must not even touch them.3 On the other hand was my own world of late twentieth-century academic historical research where such manuscripts had become "historical documents," open to the inspection of anyone with the proper credentials, including me, a woman, who both touched and read the manuscripts, actively assisted by the National Library staff, without ever feeling I was doing anything "daring." The passage from Prince Naris's journal and the contrast it evoked jolted me into thinking about the manuscripts I had seen in an entirely new way. Any historian's act of entering an archive, requesting and reading an historical document or documentary source, is fraught with unexamined cultural assumptions. Implicated are a whole set of notions about texts categorized as "documentary sources," about their proper housing, treatment, accessibility, and uses. The metaphors so often employed by historians to describe their sources—"a rich mine of information," "the raw material of history"—give us a clue to these notions: the metaphors are extractive. "Sources" are to be "mined" for "raw material," which, through the action of the historian upon it, is to be refined into the finished product, the "pure gold" of historical narrative. These attitudes, common to all historians, toward the category "documentary sources" might perhaps be seen as defining "the historian."4 Although contextualizing—taking due note of when and where and by whom and, sometimes, for whom or for what purpose a document was written—is an essential part of the historiographical enterprise, often less attention is paid to the textual aspects of a document—its style, rhetorical devices, imagery, and so on.5 Also, the document's own history, how it came to be an "historical document," is often overlooked or taken for granted. What I hope to show is that there is often much more in the "mine" than the "ore" one goes looking for, and that (to shift metaphors) 3

The power in women's bodies that issues forth in menstrual blood is believed to be able to neutralize the power of sacred amulets and objects (and perhaps male potency, too, judging by the fact that women should not hang their lower garments on clotheslines high enough for men to walk under. This "polluting" power does not seem to end with menopause, however.) Cf. the northern Thai story of Queen Chammathewi and the chieftain Bilanka; she tricked him into wearing her sarong on his head, causing him to lose his fearsome strength, see Donald K. Swearer, "Myth, Legend and History in the Northern Thai Chronicles/' Journal of the Siam Society 62,1 (1974): 81-82. ^ Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 9-43 and 134-42, discusses this attitude at some length, showing how it unites historians as widely divergent in outlook as G. R. Elton and E. H. Carr. Carr's What Is History? (1961), and Elton's The Practice of History (1967) are the classic statements of these contrasting views. 5 LaCapra, History and Criticism, pp. 134-42. See also Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca, 1983), pp. 23-71.

Phatthalung and the Problem of History

7

paying attention to other aspects of documentary sources might open doors, previously hidden, onto new landscapes and adventures.6 The old woman of Khuha Sawan seemed to beckon me to such an adventure, and this book is the result. It is both a narrative and, as stated earlier, an experiment in ethnographic history. The story is in part that of the Phatthalung manuscripts and in part that of the communities or audiences that at various times from the seventeenth century to the present have given meaning to or found meaning in them. Above all it is the story of the monasteries and villages in southern Thailand where the manuscripts were so long preserved. Inevitably it is also the story of my own intellectual odyssey as I have journeyed down unfamiliar paths in the quest for historical meaning. Before I ever set foot in Thailand I had been drawn to the history of the south as a result of reading the Phongsawadan Muang Phatthalung [Chronicle of Phatthalung] when I was a graduate student at Cornell.7 In the Phongsawadan Muang Phatthalung I encountered for the first time Nang Liiad Khao, ("Lady White Blood"), her twin brother/husband Phraya Kuman, and their preternaturally wise elephants. There I also read the stories of the magical monks Phra Khru In of Bang Kaeo and Somdet Chao Phra Kho of Wat Phra Kho. As a student I approached the doing of history in the "mining mode" just discussed; stories about magical monks and elephants, however appealing to the imagination, did not seem to me to fit into serious history. Nevertheless, I did note that the author of the Phongsawadan Muang Phatthalung indicated in his notes that his chronicle, written in 1918, was based on several old manuscripts from Phatthalung. In the course of browsing in the library I became aware that some of the manuscripts Luang Siworawat used had been printed and that the originals were available in the Thailand National Library.8 Still, although I spent many months in this institution in 1973-74, it was not until a few years later that I came back to examine the Phatthalung manuscripts. My object in looking at them was still to mine them for economic data, not to see them as having a story that went beyond that data.9 6

Natalie Zemon Davis, in her Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in SixteenthCentury France (Palo Alto, 1990), pp. 3-6, also discusses these issues and suggests that paying more attention to the literary qualities of historical documents can be as rewarding to historians as to literary critics. See also Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, 1990), especially chapter 4, "Literary Discourse and the Social Historian," pp. 7994. Moving in a converging direction from another point on the spectrum is the literary critical movement that has come to be known as the "New Historicism," the pracitioners of which suggest literary critics should pay more attention to the historical context of works they analyze; see for example the volume edited by H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism (New York, 1989). ^ Luang Siworawat, Phongsawadan miiang phatthalung (Bangkok, 1920). There have been numerous reprints of this chronicle over the years. The edition I have used for all citations is Phongsawadan miiang songkhla lae phongsawadan miiang phatthalung, published for the cremation of Khunying Khae Phetraphiban [Khae Na Songkhla] in Bangkok, B.E. 2505 [1962]. 8 For example, several of them are printed in Prachum phratamra boromarachuthit phiia kanlapana samai ayutthaya [Collected royal religious donation texts from the Ayudhya period] (Bangkok, 1967). Pages in Prachum phratamra corresponding to each National Library MS will be cited when that MS is discussed. ^ I had returned to Thailand in the bleak period after the bloody right-wing coup of October 14, 1976 ended three years of full democracy in Thailand. Those three years, part of which I had witnessed during my first visit to Thailand, had been an intellectually exciting time. The works of previously banned Thai Marxist writers were dusted off and reread, sparking a

8

In the Land of Lady White Blood

During my first two sojourns in Thailand I visited the south, lured perhaps by the stories I had read. My first visit, lasting only a few days, included a trip to Wat Phra Kho halfway up the Sathing Phra Peninsula. Nowadays one can reach Wat Phra Kho in air-conditioned comfort on a paved road, but in 1974 it was still a long and dusty journey into a little-known hinterland. I remember an elderly woman from Ban Chumphon—who seemed to take a proprietary interest in the temple and everything to do with it—conducting us to see the abbot, telling us on the way that all the ricefields thereabouts had once been temple ricefields (na wat, iHTfl). I remember the abbot telling us the story of Somdet Chao Phra Kho and showing us the crystal jewel given the infant Somdet Chao Phra Kho by a supernatural cobra. We were also shown the remains of an ancient Shaivite site of worship nearby, as well as being taken to see the sacred tree under which Somdet Chao Phra Kho's umbilical cord was buried. I also remember the wonderfully sweet watermelons the elderly lady (whose name unfortunately I have forgotten) refreshed us with before our drive back to Songkhla. Impressions I picked up during this and subsequent trips, reexamined later in the light of Prince Naris's journal, would point the way in my new quest when I first conceived of writing this book.10 Modern Phatthalung is a small provincial town, capital of the province of the same name, located a few kilometers inland on the western shore of the Thale Luang ("Great/Royal Lake"). The surrounding countryside, particularly the land stretching fifty kilometers or so along the lake shore and twenty-five or so kilometers inland, is flat alluvial plain punctuated with occasional limestone hills that rise dramatically out of the surrounding landscape. A few kilometers farther to the west and southwest rises a rugged chain of mountains belonging to the spine that runs along the Malay Peninsula. Eastward across the Thale Luang lies the Sathing Phra Peninsula, a long, thin barrier—about sixty kilometers from north to south and from three to ten kilometers wide—between the lake and the Gulf of Siam. Formed over many millennia by the pounding of waves off the Gulf during the northeast monsoons, the Sathing Phra Peninsula is flat and sandy, marked by rocky hills only at its southern tip and near its narrow waist. Wat Phra Kho sits on top of one of these hills. Though the Sathing Phra Peninsula is today administered as part of Songkhla province—Songkhla town lies across the strait at the southern tip of the peninsula—it appears that historically the peninsula was identified with Phatthalung. The Phatthalung of the texts emlively debate on "Thai feudalism" and on Thai history. I hoped by doing a study of seventeenth-century economic and social history in south Thailand to contribute to this debate. The Phatthalung manuscripts are all concerned with tax-exempt land and labor endowments of Buddhist monasteries, so they seemed to be promising sources of "raw material." For an excellent overview of this period and of the historiographical debates that animated it, see Craig J. Reynolds and Hong Lysa, "Marxism in Thai Historical Studies," Journal of Asian Studies 53, 1 (November, 1983): 70-104. See also Reynolds, Thai Radical Discourse, especially chapter three, pp. 149-69. 10 Photographs taken by a Thai friend on this trip, together with impressions from this and subsequent visits to Wat Phra Kho, were the germ of my article "Reading the Landscape," cited previously. I mention the watermelons because much of my reading and thinking for this book was done in 1987 in a small bamboo hut in the middle of a watermelon patch near the beach at Kradangga village in the Sathing Phra Peninsula. Because the patch was an isolated one, my host's father-in-law had built the hut to guard against thieves in the night while the watermelons ripened. As a cool, quiet place to work during the day it was admirable. The little watermelons grown in the sandy soil of the Sathing Phra Peninsula are still among the sweetest I've ever tasted.

Phatthalung and the Problem of History

9

braces both the peninsula and the plain on the western shore of the lake. In the days before modern metaled roads, communication by water knit together the two sides of the lake more so than it does today. Overshadowed in the historical record by Nakhon Sithammarat, Phatthalung's more prosperous neighbor to the north, and, in the last couple of centuries, by the growth of Songkhla—and, more recently, by the bustling commercial city of Had Yai—to the south, Phatthalung and Sathing Phra have long been regarded as backwaters, places to pass through. The stereotype of the inhabitants of Phatthalung as people not to be trifled with—pugnacious, impatient of authority, given to lawlessness—has perhaps contributed to keeping inquisitive outsiders at bay. Nevertheless, Phatthalung in its larger sense has strong credentials to be considered a center and fount of southern Thai culture. Two of the most characteristic southern Thai cultural forms, the Manora dance-drama and the southern Thai shadow-puppet theatre, have their legendary origins in "Phatthalung." The human landscape on both sides of the lake evokes a sense of an ancient, halfforgotten civilization. Clusters of houses, nestled in groves of fruit trees, are scattered along old man-made waterways, some now dry. Everywhere there are temples. Few of them are less than a couple of hundred years old, and many, crumbling away, are much older than that. Here and there one encounters a khok, or tumulus, of some ruined temple or settlement, covered with brush, littered with potsherds—places villagers will assure you are haunted. On the peninsula there are also the ubiquitous phang, or remnants of ancient square man-made tanks, also sometimes believed to be haunted; the phang in the temple grounds near the village where I stayed in 1987 was supposed to be haunted by the sound of a gong in the night. Farmers plowing their fields regularly turn up sherds, and occasionally whole pots or small bronze images.11 The caves in the limestone hills yield deposits of Buddhist votive tablets that go back a millennium or so, and the museums of the region and adjacent provinces house some of the oldest "Indie" statuary found anywhere in Southeast Asia.12 Not least among the visitors to carry away impressions such as these was Prince Naris, who remarked on sherd-strewn khoks, and caves filled with votive tablets, and Buddhist stupas of strange and "truly ancient" design. With this landscape in mind in which the manuscripts were found and which, as we shall see, figures in the historical sensibility of the communities that preserved them, let us turn to begin unraveling their story. A first question that springs to mind is: were the manuscripts Prince Naris saw the same ones I read in Bangkok? The answer is a qualified "no." Neither the particular opening passage Prince Naris copied into his journal nor the designation "Manuscripts [nUcH, phlao ] of the Khuha 11

The Phatrasi Museum in Wat Machimawat in Songhla is filled with such finds from Sathing Phra. Villagers also showed me large ancient "four-eared jars/' hai si hu, that they were still using to store sugar-palm sap in. In one household I was shown a lovely Chinese celadon dish with cracked green glaze and raised design. 12 On caves, see Stanley J. O'Connor, "Buddhist Votive Tablets and Caves in Peninsular Thailand," in Art and Archaeology in Thailand (Bangkok, 1974), esp. p. 83. On the region's ancient sculpture, see Stanley J. O'Connor, Hindu Gods of Peninsular Siam (Ascona, 1972). Archaeologist Janice Stargardt describes a sophisticated hydraulic system supporting a civilization in this region in the centuries around A.D. 1000. Janice Stargardt, Satingpra I: The Environmental and Economic Archaeology of South Thailand (Oxford,1983) and Janice Stargardt, "Hydraulic Works and Southeast Asian Polities," in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, ed. David G. Marr and A. C. Milner (Singapore, 1986), pp. 23-48.

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In the Land of Lady White Blood

Ricefields" appears in any of the Phatthalung manuscripts that I saw. Those phlao manuscripts I saw were all concerned with Wat Khian and Wat Sathang at Bang Kaeo, a community about fifteen kilometers south of Khuha Sawan. Nevertheless, given the close correspondences in appearance and content between the Khuha Sawan manuscripts described by Prince Naris and the Bang Kaeo manuscripts I examined, I felt it reasonable to assume the latter might also have been preserved in a context similar to that at Khuha Sawan. Perhaps, I thought, somewhere in Bang Kaeo at the beginning of this century there had also been an old woman who had owned the manuscripts and perhaps she, too, had worshipped them. A reader might ask at this point: why an old woman? Prince Naris speaks explicitly of the "old grandmother" being the owner, not her husband. Land ownership in the villages in this region of south Thailand tends to pass down through the female line, mothers to daughters, and marriages tend to be uxorilocal. Villages therefore tend to center on kin-groups related consanguinally through female lines, with men marrying into a village from outside. This is the predominant pattern in villages of the region today, and it also appears, from a seventeenth-century manuscript from Wat Phra Kho in the Sathing Phra Peninsula, to have been the pattern in the seventeenth century.13 Since the manuscripts had to do with tax-exempt lands dedicated to the monasteries, the custodians of the manuscripts as prominent village landowners might very well be women. Many of the "work leaders" named in the manuscripts, apparently a position of honor and responsibility, also were women.14 As I worked my way through the implications of the entry in Prince Naris's diary, another exciting possibility sprang to mind. If there had been two collections of manuscripts preserved in monastery-centered village communities in the Phatthalung area alone, perhaps there had been more such collections elsewhere in the region, still extant but unsuspected. I did not find any such previously unknown collections, although I keep hoping. I was already aware of other manuscripts in the National Library of similar age and content from Wat Phra Kho, just across the lake from Phatthalung and Bang Kaeo.15 Texts of similar character and purported age, though from manuscripts inscribed slightly later, also occur in chronicles from the neighboring province of Nakhon Sithammarat. Were there here beginning to unfold glimpses of a local world that evolved in this region of south Thailand over several centuries, marked by a nexus of monasteries—manuscripts—villages? If so, how were components articulated together in a system of meaning? Could we begin to speak of this nexus as a "local cultural statement?"16 At this point these manuscripts began to emerge not as isolated artifacts, fortuitously preserved and obscure in their 13

Thailand National Library MS phongsawadan muang nakhon sithammarat, 36/F). Printed in Prachum phratamra, pp. 71-84. See esp. pp. 83-84 for mother-daughter patterns of land inheritance. A microfilm of this manuscript is in the Cornell University Library, on Wason Film 4309.1 discuss the text of this manuscript in chapter 4. 14 See, for example, Prachum phratamra, pp. 31-32 (from Thailand National Library MS, phongsawadan muang phatthalung, #001.4.24) where, in a decree of 1610 quoted in a decree of 1698, twenty-five work leaders attached to Wat Sathang at Bang Kaeo are listed by name, all of them women. I discuss the text of this manuscript in the next chapter. 15 These are printed (minus the pictorial map that comprises most of one) in Prachum phratamra, pp. 63-84. ^The phrase is that of O. W. Wolters, from his book History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Singapore, 1982).

Phatthalung and the Problem of History 11

11

meaning, but as parts of a cultural sequence that, taken as a whole, was, so to speak, a "text" in itself. There was also the question, worth pursuing for its own sake, of how the manuscripts found their way from the context in which Prince Naris encountered them, where they were sacred, magically charged objects, to the context in which I encountered them, as "documentary sources" in a library, desacralized, effectively dead. To begin to answer this question, let us return to the manuscript reading room of the National Library. Pasted on each manuscript is a label that gives its title and classification. On the label there is also a line for provenance. The Thai term, originally a Sanskrit-derived Khmer loanword, is prawat, "narration," used here to mean the story of how the library acquired the manuscript. On all the Phatthalung [Bang Kaeo] manuscripts, on one of the two Sathing Phra [Phra Kho] manuscripts, as well as on several Nakhon Sithammarat manuscripts this line says simply, "gift of Prince Damrong Rachanuphap." Some add the year of the prince's gift (in the case of most of the Bang Kaeo manuscripts this is 1909). The other Sathing Phra [Phra Kho] manuscript says simply, "original endowment of the library." What sort of provenance, or prawat, is this? Prince Damrong's name is familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in Thai history. He was the younger half-brother, close collaborator, and confidant of King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910). He also had many intellectual interests in common with his half-brother Prince Naris, with whom he maintained a long correspondence on matters historical and cultural.17 As minister of the interior from 1892 to 1915 he presided over the administrative reorganization of the kingdom on modern, functional lines.18 Before that, at the behest of his brother the king, he began the creation of a modern educational system in Siam.19 In 1885, on active duty as a military officer, he created the Royal Survey Department, charged with drawing up a modern map of Siam.20 After his retirement from the Ministry of the Interior, he became head of the Vajirayana National Library, created in 1905, and he presided over its growth as a modern institution until he went into exile in 1932. He was also a prolific writer on Thai history and a master of Thai prose.21 After the coup d'etat of 1932, he lived in self-chosen exile in Penang, returning to Bangkok only a year before his death in 1943.22 In his brilliant thesis on the evolution of the "geo-body" of Siam, Thongchai Winichakul has argued that the modernization of Siam pursued so vigorously by 17

This correspondence, which runs to many volumes, has been printed in a number of editions under the title San somdet [The princes' correspondence]. It was featured as a running series for many years in the journal Sinlapakon, published by the Thailand Fine Arts Department. ^ Tej Bunnag, The Provincial Administration of Siam, 1892-1915: The Ministry of the Interior under Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (Kuala Lumpur and London, 1977). 19 David K. Wyatt, The Politics of Reform in Thailand: Education in the Reign of King Chulalongkorn (New Haven, 1969), pp. 102-44. 2 ^ Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of A Nation (Honolulu, 1994), pp. 119. 21 Kennon Breazeale, "A Transition in Historical Writing: The Works of Prince Damrong Rachanuphap/' Journal of the Siam Society 59, 2 (1971): 25-49 gives a summary of Damrong's career as head of the library and as writer and publicist on Thai history. 22 See Benjamin A. Batson, The End of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam (Singapore, 1984), pp. 25658.

12

In the Land of Lady White Blood

Chulalongkorn and his circle signaled a discursive shift, the displacement of one discourse or set of discourses by another or others.23 He argues, for example, that in the serious territorial disputes between Siam and France in the latter part of Chulalongkorn's reign, both the Siamese elite and the French colonialists were on the same side discursively, that is, both sides subscribed to the [modern] discourse of absolute national sovereignty within clearly delineated boundaries, backed up by modern armies and the modern technology of mapping. In Thongchai's narrative, instead of the usual "hero" Siam being deprived of its territory by the "greedy villain" France, there intrudes the possibility of an equally greedy Siam, checked in its ambitions only by lack of the necessary military strength to enforce its hopeful claims. The true winner in the dispute was the discourse of absolute national sovereignty and modern mapping to which the Siamese modernizers had already enthusiastically subscribed. The loser was the older Southeast Asian discourse of multiple, overlapping sovereignties in which borders were not the concern of the center—and certainly not of the "nation," a concept that did not exist in this older discourse—but rather of the border people themselves. When this discourse lost, so also did those smaller, intermediate polities, such as Xiang Thong or Champassak, that had relied on this discourse for their very existence. As the geo-bodies of "Siam" and "French Indochina" were being mapped into place, these small states were literally being mapped out of existence.24 I bring up Thongchai's argument because his story of discursive displacement could be applied with equal force to what happened in the treatment of history.25 Just as, in the modernizers' view, a modern nation, or, more aptly, in the discourse of the time a "progressive, civilized" nation—both words can be found liberally sprinkled in Thai writing around the turn of the century—required clearly delineated borders within which an absolute national sovereignty could be uniformly administered by a functional bureaucracy, so a progressive, civilized nation required a "national history." And, as with mapping, education, or bureaucracy, so with history: a national history was "rational, scientific" history.26 23

Thongchai Winichakul, "Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of Siam" (Ph.D. dissertation, Sydney University, 1988), since published with extensive revision as Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, previously cited. 24 Thongchai, Siam Mapped, see especially pp. 95-112,141-50. In Cambodia's case the opposite happened, a disappearing state was mapped back into existence. I am indebted to David Chandler, personal communication, for this observation. 2 ^ In fact, Thongchai here has anticipated me; see his dissertation, pp. 335-37: "In light of the previous section in which we have seen the geo-body of Siam be inscribed by the displacements of the indigenous spatial discourses by the new one of mapping, we may raise similar questions about the history of Siam. How was the pre-modern discourse of the past, the 'prehistorical' past, displaced by the liistoricar one? How has the domain of history of Siam been inscribed?" p. 335. 26 Somkiat Wanthana brilliantly describes this development in chapter 3 of his dissertation, 'The Politics of Modern Thai Historiography" (Ph.D. dissertation, Monash University, 1986). See especially pages 216-21 for his account of the development of the "critical attitude" in the historiography of the modernizing dynasts. The emerging view of history among the princes, that it should be a discipline based on rational, scientific principles, is well illustrated in the royal reaction to K. S. R. Kulap, a non-royal nineteenth-century publicist who "tampered" with historical sources. See Craig J. Reynolds, 'The Case of K. S. R. Kulap: A Challenge to Royal Historical Writing in Late Nineteenth Century Thailand," Journal of the Siam Society 61, 2 (July 1973): 63-90.

Phatthalung and the Problem of History 13

13

Both Chulalongkorn and Damrong, the two men of this era who most concerned themselves with the creation of a "Thai history" appropriate to the modern nation they were working to create, had traveled widely by the turn of the century both in Europe and in the European colonial possessions in India and Southeast Asia. They were aware both of European notions of national history and of the work of colonial savants in areas of archaeology and historical reconstruction, and they modeled their efforts on these examples.27 Since "rational, scientific" history, requires "documentary sources," the king, Prince Damrong, and their circle let it be known that they were interested in collecting old manuscripts, first for the Vajirayana Library, created in 1884 largely for the use of the royal family, and then for its successor, the Vajirayana National Library, forerunner of the present-day National Library.28 In a penetrating dissertation on the politics of modern Thai historiography, Somkiat Wanthana has drawn attention to the relationship between the form of the state in a given era and the social organization for the production of knowledge about the past accompanying it.29 The latter in turn governs both what kinds of texts and testimony will be accounted "historical sources" and what the criteria for the writing of history will be. From Chulalongkorn's reign until the Revolution of 1932, the state took the form of a modernizing, absolutist regime with a concern for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and with a need to deny or minimize social discontent or ethnic and political plurality within its borders.30 New, royally sponsored institutions such as the Vajirayana National Library, the Archaeological Society, and the Royal Academy or Rachabandit Sapha ("Council of Royal Pundits"), in all of which prince-savants predominated, in turn governed how knowledge of the past would be produced. Not surprisingly, the historiography of this era, according to Somkiat, stressed the themes of social harmony and national independence under the rule of benevolent monarchs, and the historical sources so assiduously collected were interpreted in this light.31 During his tours of inspection as minister of the interior, Prince Damrong actively promoted the collection of historical sources, and we can surmise that it was during such tours of the south that he and his officials collected the Phatthalung manuscripts. We may question whether the local owners of such manuscripts were willing to give them up. A passage in a report from a monk-official, inspector of monastic schools in the region, to Prince Damrong suggests they were not. On a visit 27

Breazeale, "A Transition in Historical Writing/' p. 44. Ibid., pp. 33, 42-43. The collecting activity for the National Library and the ideas driving it are best described by Prince Damrong himself in Tamnan h0 phrasamut [History of the library], Bangkok, 1915, esp. pp. 47-48, 55-60. See also G. Ccedes, The Vajiranana National Library of Siam (Bangkok: 1924), pp. 3-8. 2 ^ Somkiat, "Politics of Modern Thai Historiography," cited previously. Somkiat's argument in his dissertation was foreshadowed in his important Thai essay, Prawatsatniphon thai samai mai [Thai historiography in the new eral, Bangkok, Thai Studies Institute, Thammasat University, paper no. 49,1984. 3 " Somkiat quotes Prince Damrong to show how terminology was used in the reorganization of the kingdom to deny local particularity. Prince Damrong had recounted how the old Lao tributary states to the north and northeast of Bangkok were reorganized into circles and Phatthalung and the Problem of History 13 were no longer called Lao but were collectively called Thai." Somkiat, Prawatsatniphon, p. 150, quoting from Nithan borannakhadi [Tales of archaeology], Bangkok, Fifteenth Edition, 1972, p. 375. 31 Somkiat, "Politics," chapter 3 and Prawatsatniphon, pp. 149-53. 28

14

In the Land of Lady White Blood

to Wat Khian at Bang Kaeo in 1899 he noted the existence there of several old manuscripts written in archaic Thai and Khmer letters on phlao paper. He said, "I asked to borrow them to send them to you for your perusal, but the custodians of them were unwilling."32 Some time during the next few years the custodians must have been persuaded to change their minds, because, as we have seen, by 1909 the Bang Kaeo manuscripts are to be found in the Vajirayana National Library as a "gift of Prince Damrong." The modernizers' view that manuscripts such as those at Bang Kaeo ought to be housed in the modern urban center where they might be of use to historians rather than being allowed to molder away in distant monasteries, revered by rural abbots and old women, had prevailed. Just as small, border polities were mapped out of existence when the modern discourse of absolute sovereignty and modern mapping displaced an older discourse based on other assumptions, so the elite's espousal of the discourse of national history written in the rational, scientific mode was the death knell of an older discourse of history in the Tai world. This older discourse, like that of multiple, overlapping sovereignties described by Thongchai, was multi-vocal, implying histories rather than a history. In this older discourse, although the chronicles of the deeds of kings (phongsawadan) written at the royal center were no doubt regarded by the traditional elite of the center as the only history that mattered, such central history, from the perspective of outlying regions, was just another "local history."33 Distant provinces and tributaries had their own histories. They might even invoke those histories when they petitioned the center, and the center might be willing to recognize such histories when so invoked.34 Nevertheless, such local histories, like borders, remained the business of the people who inhabited those localities. Over and above all these local histories there was Buddhist history with its claims to universality. Upon examination, however, Buddhist history was also multivocal. In repeated local retellings of this "universal" history, claims to this or that particular relic or sacred image jostle one another in amiable competition. 32

Phra Ratanathatmuni, Raingan chat kan suksa lae kan phrasasana kap kawiniphon [Report on educational and religious reform; and poetical writings], cremation volume for the Reverend Ratanathatmuni, 20 June 2478 B.E. [1935], pp. 26-27. 33 I am here implying that the narrative about traditional Thai historiography widely espoused in the last twenty or so years by Thai historians to challenge centrist history is itself unconsciously centrist. This narrative sees tamnan history (the history of muang, or localities) being displaced in the seventeenth century or thereabout by centrist phongsawadan of the krung (imperial capital). This centrist imperial history was in turn used by the royal and nationalist historians of the early to mid twentieth century to construct narratives of 'Thai national history." This narrative of displacement, though true, is true only from the point of view of the center. In the muang, tamnan history never died, and from the perspective of the muang the phonsawadan of the center was just another tamnan. For the best accounts of this narrative, see Charnvit Kasetsiri, 'Thai Historiography from Ancient Times to the Modern Period," in Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, ed. A. Reid and D. Marr (Singapore, 1979), pp. 156-70 and Dhida Saraya, 'The Development of the Northern Tai States from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries" (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Sydney, 1982), esp. pp. 7-26. 3 ^ See, for example, The Crystal Sands: The Chronicles of Nagara Sri Dharrmaraja (Ithaca, 1975), edited and translated by David K. Wyatt, pp. 161-69, where a group from Nakhon invoked its own local history in asking a favor of the Ayudhyan king. The Ayudhyan king acknowledged the validity of this history, and granted the favor. I discuss this incident and the text it generated in chapter 3.

Phatthalung and the Problem of History 15

15

Obviously, multi-vocal histories cannot give rise to "national history/' which, in the minds of the turn-of-the-century modernizing dynasts as well as of later nationalists, must speak with a single voice, telling the story of the nation.35 Local histories were not ruled out in this modernizing discourse; in fact, King Chulalongkorn even called for them, but he saw such local histories as building blocks toward a unified national history.36 Thus, the older multi-vocal kind of discourse had to be reworked and its many voices, in their embodiments as manuscripts, brought together to be acted upon by practitioners of modern, "scientific" history until they all spoke together of a single linear "Thai history." In this process anomalies and contradictions, naturally, would be suppressed as "unhistorical."37 The urgent need Damrong and others felt for a "Thai history" centered on the Bangkok dynasty explains the cavalier appropriation of sources such as the Phatthalung manuscripts, with little regard for local sensibilities and less for preserving a record of local provenance. The manuscripts, significantly, are "gift of Prince Damrong," not "gift of Mrs. So-and-So of Bang Kaeo, whose family held the manuscripts for 200 years." The act of taking the manuscripts to Bangkok, demoting them from sacred heirlooms in a local landscape to historical documents in an archive signals the triumph of Thai "national history" as well as the discourse of rational, "scientific" history. It also is a clear assertion by the center of its "ownership" of the past. The demystifying of manuscripts that only shortly before had been objects of reverence in the communities where they had been preserved for so long is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in Prince Damrong's own remarks, written in 1917, about these southern manuscripts. Luang Siworawat, a native of Phatthalung and a descendant of that province's old ruling family, who was also one of Prince Damrong's library officials, had written, at Prince Damrong's suggestion, his Phongsawadan Muang Phatthalung, using these manuscripts as sources.38 He sent a draft of his history to Prince Damrong for comment and received in return a letter containing the following remarks: As for your account of the Ayudhya period, [I agree] that the old manuscripts still in existence, such as those of Wat Khian, must be used [as sources], but I suspect many of these manuscripts are forgeries. When I travelled in the South, I found many old manuscripts in Nakhon and 35 Cf. Somkiat, Prawatsatniphon, pp. 144-54. See also Craig J. Reynolds, 'The Plot of Thai History," in Patterns and Illusions: Thai History and Thought, in Memory of Richard B. Davis, ed. Gehan Wijeyewardene and E.G. Chapman (Canberra, 1992), esp. pp. 318-25. ^ Thongchai, Siam Mapped, pp. 162-63. 3 ^ Cf. Thongchai, dissertation, p. 337. "Also around [the turn of the century], a shift in the conception of 'historical' writings took place. Traditional genres were selectively discarded as nithan or myth, i.e. unreliable, while some, such as the royal chronicles, were still held in high regard. What constituted the notion of reliability and accuracy? .. . Ironically, some historical studies which sprang up were created by interpreting or emplotting many local nithan or tamnan in new ways to make them lustoricar stories. Some of these 'historicizations' of myth have been praised by modern historians." 38 The choice of the term phongsawadan rather than tamnan for the title of his chronicle is itself significant. Phongsawadan was the term used for the dynastic history of the center, as distinct from the term tamnan used for the history of muang (local polities on a less grand scale than krung, "capital"). See Dhida Saraya, The Development of the 'Northern Thai States, pp. 7-45.

16

In the Land of Lady White Blood Phatthalung, and, indeed, they truly were old manuscripts, but the reason I suspect some are forgeries is that all these manuscripts have the same matter. They all begin with a date when "some abbot " petitioned the head of his order to tell the king that the monasteries were in bad shape, and then [the manuscripts continue] the king ordered the chief of the royal scribes to write a decree giving people to the monasteries for the monasteries' support. Governors and officials were forbidden to use these people. The manuscripts always end with an oath cursing whoever disobeys the royal command to burn in hell, and so forth and so on. All the Ayudhya-period manuscripts from Nakhon and Phatthalung say this. Therefore, I suspect that originally there were only one or two true royal decree manuscripts, but later the monastery people or monks [mn\im] asked to make copies to keep "to cover themselves" [Fjucft] [proving their exemption from taxes and corvee]. Gradually dates got changed in them and there arose many, many such manuscripts.39

So here in a span of less than twenty years we see these manuscripts, once regarded as talismans so potent no one dared read them, transformed into "historical documents," and, in Prince Damrong's eyes, suspect ones at that. Indeed, he dismisses most of them offhand as forgeries—very old manuscripts it is true, he says, but forgeries nonetheless and hence of doubtful utility to the historian. What might be called the "paradigm" interpretation of Thai modernization in this era, subscribed to by mainstream historians, both Thai and non-Thai, holds that the modernizing elite were able to modernize successfully while yet preserving Thai identity—that is, to "modernize" but not to "Westernize"—by selectively choosing elements of modernity, as opposed to European culture as a whole, that were congruent with Thai culture.401 should like to suggest, invoking once more the notion of modernization as a discourse, that it might be more accurate to say that the Thai modernizing elite selectively reinterpreted "Thai tradition" to emphasize those elements that were most congruent with the discourse of modernity, thus enabling themselves to feel both modern and Thai. Of course, this formulation entails the corollary that elements of Thai tradition that were less amenable to this discourse had to be scrapped or suppressed, as we have seen was the case with multi-vocal histories. King Chulalongkorn, in a speech to the nation after his return in 1898 from a European tour, says as much.41 This selective reinterpretation of what is "truly Thai" (and, hence, congruent with "the modern Thai nation") continues today in such activities as those sponsored by the National Identity Board and Subcommittee for the Propagation of Thai Identity.42 39 Prince Damrong, letter dated April 16,1917, appended to Phongsawadan Muang Phatthalung, pp. 131-32. 40 One of the best statements of this interpretation is to be found in Wyatt, Politics of Reform, especially pp. 378-80. Cf. Clark Neher's invocation of this standard interpretation in his recent Southeast Asia in the International Era (2nd ed., Boulder, Co., 1994), p. 25. 'The Thai people's capacity to shape their nation into an increasingly developed society, both politically and economically, stems from a history of astute adaptation of those aspects of modernization and development that were appropriate to traditional Thai ways." 41 42

Bangkok Times Weekly Mail January 3,1898.

The National Identity Board, in the Office of the Prime Minister, publishes a monthly journal entitled Thai Identity [Ekkalak Thai]. See Craig J. Reynolds's treatment of the "national

Phatthalung and the Problem of History 17

17

Although Clifford Geertz has never written an essay on "History as a Cultural System," I believe he would not find such a formulation outrageous. He has persistently and cogently argued that, although it is nearly impossible to formulate definitions of "religion," "science," "art," "common sense," and so forth that are valid cross-culturally, we can detect in different cultures attitudes toward the world or modes of interacting with the world that we recognize as being somehow more or less religious or aesthetic or commonsensical in contradistinction to any other category in which we might place this or that attitude.43 Surely, one such recognizable category of attitudes or sensibilities toward the world are those attitudes or sensibilities we might label "historical." Implicated in such attitudes would be notions of time, of the past, of time passing, and of one's relation to, or one's society's relation to, or the world's relation to the passage of time. Such sensibilities ("historical," "legal," "religious," and so forth) and the discourses through which they are expressed, debated, and refined can be detected, as Geertz emphasizes, only in culture. Thus, the cultural system History (for which I use a capital H to distinguish it from other histories) as it is practiced and taught in modern institutions, with its notions about "documentary sources" or the nature of cause and effect, is a product of a particular historical and cultural experience, and, as such, it should be recognized as but one historical sensibility among many. The success on a world scale of the particular discourse History has been due as much, one might argue, to the world balance of power over the last century as to its own inner persuasiveness (although I do not wish to deny the force of latter). From the perspective of History, the products of historical sensibilities from times and places other than our own, if recognized at all, have often been seen as mere museum pieces. This, for example, was how the modernizing Thai historians and their Western colleagues earlier in this century treated "multi-vocal" histories. Such products might be ranked by how closely they conform to our notions of History (and thus by whether or not their authors had a "true sense of History") and, hence, by how reliable they are as documentary sources for our mode of History. More often than not these products have been dismissed by historians as belonging to the realms of myth or poetry, and hence to the domains of anthropology or comparative literature, but not to history. Recently, as the strong poetic element in History itself has come to be more clearly recognized, and as feminist historians and others have stressed the need to hear the historical voices of those previously suppressed in Historical narratives, there has emerged a greater willingness, at least in some circles, to entertain the claims made by other historical sensibilities as well as to experiment with new ways of telling History's own stories.44 Historians dealing with non-Western areas of the identity7' question in his introduction to National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939-1989 (Clayton, Victoria, 1991). 43 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983) and The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). 44 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), stated the strongest case for History's resemblance to fiction. White refined this thesis in Tropics of Discourse, (Baltimore, 1978), and more recently in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: 1987). For an informed critique of White's earlier work, see Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca, 1983), pp. 72-83. For a lively description of the consternation White's thesis provoked in some professional historical circles in America when it first came out, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), pp.

18IntheLandofLadyWhiteBlo d

world should be among the first to welcome this trend. Daily they experience the

world should be among the first to welcome this trend. Daily they experience the phenomenon of cultural plurality as they shift from their own world to the one they write about; daily they confront the dual problem of cultural translation and the indeterminacy of meaning as they shift from their own language to languages unrelated to it.4* The story of the Phatthalung manuscripts is an exemplary tale of the meeting, clashing, and melding of different historical sensibilities. Although History triumphed when Prince Damrong had the Phatthalung manuscripts taken to Bangkok, it was due to another historical sensibility that they were preserved so long in south Thailand, that in times past they were copied and recopied, that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, histories, embodying this other historical sensibility, were written about them. When Prince Naris passed through the region, this still-living historical sensibility accounted for the import of the manuscripts being known even though no one dared read them, and it informed the stories still being told that Prince Naris heard. The end of the story cannot be told because it is still going on. With the spread in the twentieth century of modern public education, which in Thailand has a strong positivist bias, including fairly rigid ideas of History,46 there has grown up in south Thailand, as indeed in other areas of Thailand with a strongly regional character, a hybrid local historiography, wedding modern notions of History with more traditional sensibilities. Basing itself in large part on published editions of rediscovered local texts and such "definitive" works as Luang Siworawat's chronicle of Phatthalung, it finds publication in pamphlets for temple festivals or other local commemorative occasions. On a more sophisticated level, historians affiliated with local colleges and universities or with government-mandated provincial cultural centers recently have begun publishing heavily on local history, also using such sources. To what extent this local historiography, on all levels, has been informed by a living oral tradition is a difficult question to answer, compounded by the undoubted possibility that this historiographical activity in its turn has informed and shaped the stories about the past now being told in the villages and monasteries of the region. This local historiography and the stories that spin off from it and feed back into it suggest that the Phatthalung manuscripts have taken on a new life as "heirlooms" of a different sort, the meaning of which inevitably escapes and challenges a definition of them merely as documentary sources. 598-607. A classic call for a History in which women's voices are heard is Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford, 1986), see especially pp. 1-7 and 212-29. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), as well as Davis's Fiction in the Archives stand out as examples in European history of new ways of telling History's stories. See also Davis's eloquent defense of her practice, "On the Lame/' American Historical Review 93, 3 (June 1988): 572-603. 4 ^ In his preface to Thai Radical Discourse, Craig Reynolds argues for experimentation and for Western historians writing on Thailand to become more self-reflective about how they construct knowledge about Thailand. 46 This positivist tendency even among sophisticated Thai historians who otherwise challenge orthodox interpretations is also noted by Craig Reynolds, 'The Plot of Thai History," p. 329. One might remark that this is not a peculiarity of modern Thai historians but is a fairly widespread frame of mind among many practitioners of History, see LaCapra, History and Criticism, pp. 135^2. See also Novick, That Noble Dream, especially the last chapter.

Plate 2. Tamra dated B.E. 2242 (1698). Inner front leaves with scribe's statement. Seals are visible in upper left corner and at center of MS.

3 ROYAL TEXTS AND LOCAL MEANINGS

n Bang Kaeo village to this day descendants of the family who once had custody of the manuscripts hold a "manuscript merit making ceremony" Oaiutvix^uiuicn, ngan tham bun phlao) in the sixth lunar month of every year. I first learned of this ceremony from a brief mention of it in the Phatthalung Cultural Center's publication of the Lady White Blood manuscript.1 I was so curious that in May 1987 I went to Bang Kaeo to track down the family that held this ceremony to ask them about it. Two elderly sisters, who at ages seventy-eight and eighty in 1987 could have been no more than toddlers when the manuscripts were taken away, recounted to me their family's stories of the ceremony that had been required to read the manuscripts.^ Reading the manuscripts, they said, was extremely dangerous and was rarely if ever done, and then only with ceremonial precautions. The manuscripts, they agreed, could only be read—the clear implication is "read aloud"—from the back of a white elephant. Otherwise, whoever attempted to read the manuscripts would cough blood from the larynx and die. Upon questioning, they explained that the "white elephant" was a symbolic white elephant constructed out of cloth over a bamboo frame.3 They also said the "royal servants" (kha ratchakan) who took away the manuscripts took them on a white elephant. Without the white elephant, the manuscripts "refused to go." Phra Ratanathatmuni, the monk-official who in 1899 had written to Prince Damrong about the unwillingness of the custodians of the manuscripts to relinquish them, also described the ceremony required when the manuscripts were brought out for him to see:

I

When they brought the manuscripts [crm tamra] for me to look at, the custodians had to light candles and pay homage to them. Then they invited [ittal] the manuscripts to be carried on a tray on the head, while an attendant 1

Chaiwut Piyakul, Chamra phraplao nang luat khao [Critical edition of the Lady White Blood Manuscript] Phatthalung, B.E. 2525 [1982], p. 10.1 am grateful to Phitaya Butsararat, who in January 1987 welcomed me to the Phatthalung Cultural Center and gave me many of the center's publications, including Chamra phraphlao nang luat khao. I am also grateful to Chaiwut Piyakul for generously discussing his research on Lady White Blood with me. The phrase ngan tham bun refers generally to any Buddhist merit-making ceremony. 2 They were Mrs. Roi Khochapaksi and Mrs. Nukhao Chanthamuni of Chong Thanon village in Bang Kaeo. 3 In Buddhist myth an albino elephant is the incarnation of a future Buddha or future king and is, therefore, also a symbol of royalty.

Royal Texts and Local Meanings

21

held a [ceremonial] umbrella over it. Before opening the box [which held the manuscripts] they again made obeisance to it.4 These vignettes lead us to the question of how these manuscripts—even, apparently, locally made copies—came to be so revered that "no one dared read them/' or dared read them only when first protected with ceremonial precautions. Was it merely the effect of the passage of time—even Prince Damrong acknowledged they were "truly old"—or were they seen as potent objects even when they were new? To answer these questions let us turn to look at the manuscripts themselves. In 2242 of the Buddhist era (A.D. 1698) the abbot of Wat Khian, head of the Pa Kaeo ordination chapter of Phatthalung, sent to Ayudhya, the royal capital of Siam, a deputation carrying the original manuscript (or manuscripts) of a decree granted by the Ayudhyan king nearly a century earlier to the Pa Kaeo monasteries of Phatthalung. The deputation's mission was to petition the king to grant that their manuscripts) be recopied and affixed with new seals, and, by implication, that the manuscripts' provisions be reconfirmed. Through the good offices of high-ranking monks of the Pa Kaew order in Ayudhya, the petition of the Phatthalung monks was brought to the king's attention. The king granted the request, the recopying was carried out, and the new copies, one in Thai and one in Khmer,^ were taken back to Phatthalung, where they were preserved for another two centuries. This incident (with the exception of the return to Phatthalung and the preserving of the manuscripts, which can be deduced from the discovery of the manuscripts there two centuries later) is recounted in the prologue to the decree that resulted from the Phatthalung monks' petition. The actual original official manuscripts of this decree were among those found in Bang Kaeo and now in the National Library.6 As the only official copies of a royal decree in the Phra Kho-Bang Kaeo corpus, they take on a special importance for this study, not only because they escape Prince Damrong's charge of forgery, but also because, as manuscripts the copying date of which we need not question, they provide a fixed point from which to approach all the other manuscripts in the collection. They are also important in that they explicitly state that their purpose was to give an accurate copy of an older text. ^ Phra Ratanathatmuni, Raingan chat kan suksa, p. 27. Phra Ratanathatmuni uses the term tamra "authoritative document" rather than phlao "bark-paper manuscript." 5 Khmer was used in Ayudhyan times as a language of superior magical efficacy. Rachasap, the special vocabulary used to and about royal personages (and gods), was almost entirely Khmer (or Sanskrit via Khmer). Khmer script was, and sometimes still is, used to inscribe Pali sacred texts, and is still widely used to inscribe magical mantras on yantra cloths. Cf. S. J. Tambiah, "Literacy in a Buddhist Village in North-East Thailand/' in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, U.K, 1968), pp. 90-91, note 1. 6 National Library MSS, phongsawadan mtiang phatthalung, numbers 001.4.24 (Thai version) and 001.4.25 (Khmer version). Printed side by side in Prachum phratamra, pp. 1-45. I mentioned earlier that many of the Bang Kaeo manuscripts bore the date 1909 as the year they were given to the National Library by Prince Damrong. The Thai manuscript of this particular decree seems to have been collected by Prince Damrong himself slightly later than the others. A rough transcription of this manuscript, together with its Khmer companion, was published in 1912 in Thesaphiban, the Ministry of the Interior magazine. In the introduction to that publication, it was stated that Prince Damrong himself in July of that year had collected this manuscript from Wat Khian at Bang Kaeo. The introduction also mentioned that the Khmer companion had been collected and given to Prince Damrong "a long time ago." Introduction reprinted in Prachum phratamra, pp. 4-3 (iv-vi).

22

In the Land of Lady White Blood

Since much of my argument will take the form of textual explication, it will be helpful to define terms. Manuscript will be used always to refer to the physical artifact—"something with writing upon it." Text, most simply, will refer to any portion of writing in the manuscripts that taken as a whole makes sense. A manuscript may contain one text or several texts, or it may contain several texts and, at the same time, be itself one text. More pointedly, text may be defined provisionally as a piece of writing (or speaking) that articulates meaning through a set of conventions. Since I am arguing that paying attention to the textual conventions of a document can be as rewarding to an historian as to a literary critic, I should also clarify what I mean by "textual conventions."'7 Textual conventions necessarily include conventions of the language (or languages) used in the text; that is, grammar, and, for written texts, conventions of the writing system used; for example, rules of spelling and punctuation. Also included are conventions of the genre, or kind, of text it is—story, poem, laundry list—that constrain a text's structure (how its parts relate to one another and to the whole) and style (how the text creates its effect). As with all rules, textual conventions can be violated, accidentally or deliberately. (In both cases we can learn something about the author or transmitter by these violations.) Also, as we shall see, conventions of one genre can "spill over" into another for striking rhetorical effect. In the textual discussion that follows, consideration of all these conventions will come into play. The manuscripts discussed in these two chapters will be referred to by the places, Bang Kaeo and Phra Kho, where they were preserved before Prince Damrong or his agents collected them. Because the chief monasteries at Bang Kaeo and Phra Kho respectively were centers of separate Buddhist monastic ordination chapters and the manuscripts of each place are exclusively concerned with monasteries of that ordination chapter, the manuscripts also occasionally will be referred to by ordination chapter name, that is, Pa Kaeo (Bang Kaeo) and Langkachat (Phra Kho).° The two place names, "Bang Kaeo" and "Phra Kho," it should be noted, are not just "anyplace" but resonate with mythic overtones in local and regional parlance. Wat Phra Kho in the Sathing Phra Peninsula is associated with the legendary abbot of this monastery, mentioned earlier, Somdet Chao Phra Kho. Throughout the region, he is also known more simply as "Luang Pho Thuat" ("Great Ancestor Spirit"), a sobriquet used for revered, and spiritually potent, deceased monks. The antiquity and persistence of local associations of this site with concentrations of sacred power I have discussed elsewhere. For at least a millenium the hills around Phra Kho have been perceived by local inhabitants as gateways to the supernatural "Power" that pervades everything.^ 7

1 am indebted to O. W. Wolters for encouraging me to think about "textual conventions," and for the example he set in his "Possibilities for a Reading of the 1293-1357 Period in the Vietnamese Annals," in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, ed. David G. Marr and A.C. Milner (Singapore, 1986). There is, of course, a large and growing body of literary and critical theory relevant to the subject of textual conventions, in which I have tried to read widely but cannot claim to have mastered. I found Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley, 1977), Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven, 1982), and John Sturrock, Structuralism (London, 1984) to be the most lucid guides into the arcana of this field. ^ "Ordination chapters" are discussed in Chapter Four.

helpful to define terms. Manuscript will be used always to refer to the physical artifrom the Sanskrit words shakti and siddhi. See also Shelly Errington's lucid discussion of "Power" as it inheres in the landscape, as well as in objects or persons, in her 'The Place of Regalia in Luwu," in Centers, Symbols, and Hierarchies: Essays on the Classical States of Southeast

Royal Texts and Local Meanings

23

The village and district of Bang Kaeo lies on the western shore of the Great Lake directly across the water from Phra Kho. It is locally renowned for the presence there of Wat Khian and Wat Sathang, which were founded by none other than Lady White Blood (\TNiaafl\m, nang luat khao) and her twin brother/husband Phraya Kuman (Skt. kumara, "male child"). White blood, it should be noted, is perceived in many Southeast Asian societies as a mark of divine descent.1 ^ Thus both of the places where these two sets of manuscripts were preserved had long figured in local imaginings as "extraordinary" places.11 Turning from the manuscripts to the texts within them, these might also be classified and referred to by place name or ordination chapter, since each concerns itself with the monasteries of its own locale, but this is a much less useful distinction than classifying the texts stylistically by genres. Overall, the various individual texts found in this corpus of manuscripts can be sorted into two genres. Each set of manuscripts identified by locale contains texts falling into both genres, sometimes in a single manuscript. The first of the two genres, to be discussed shortly, I will call the "decree-genre," that is, texts of royal decrees confirming the status of the tax-exempt communities centered on and supporting certain monasteries. The second genre, to be discussed later on, is "historical narrative," that is, locally composed narrative histories about these monasteries and communities. The two can be distinguished from one another by style, vocabulary, and dialect usages, as well as by who composed them or where they were originally inscribed. These distinctions, though valid and useful, however, should not be allowed to obscure the close association between the genres that makes them all parts of a single "local cultural statement." For example, although the decrees (if authentic) were composed by royal scribes in the Ayudhyan court by order of the king and the histories were written in the south by speakers of southern Thai dialect, we shall find that the king caused the decrees to be written (and rewritten) in response to petitions from persons associated with the southern monasteries, i.e. persons from the same milieu as the hi story-writers. The histories, in turn, at certain significant points in their narratives, fall into decree-like language. Finally, all the histories in the Phra Kho and Bang Kaeo manuscripts, as well as at least one of the Nakhon histories, are found in intentional association— either in the same manuscript or in companion manuscripts—with one or more locally made copies of decree-texts. The interpenetration of these two genres of texts as part of a single cultural sequence is important. Also worth noting is that, from the point of view of the southern histories, the king and his courtiers, though important, are peripheral: they enter the story only to issue such decrees. The dates given in the decrees for their time of promulgation range from A.D. 1599 to 1698, and none of the local copies, as far as I can tell, was made later than about 1730. Thus, the time elapsed from the earliest purported date of an extant decree text to the latest (assumed) date of local copying is about the same as that from the latter date to the time of Prince Naris's visit. The extant versions of the Asia, ed. Lorraine Gesick (Yale, 1984), esp. pp. 198-200. The classic discussion of Power is, of course, Benedict Anderson's essay, 'The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture," in Culture and Politics in Indonesia, ed. Claire Holt et al. (Cornell, 1972), reprinted in Benedict R. O'G Anderson, Language and Power (Cornell, 1992). 10 See Errington, 'The Place of Regalia in Luwu," pp. 202-205. 11 Recent archaeological work done by Dr. Janice Stargardt suggests such local imaginings are rooted in a certain amount of Historical truth. See Stargardt, Satingpra I and Stargardt, "Hydraulic Works and Southeast Asian Polities," previously cited.

24

In the Land of Lady White Blood

Phatthalung histories were written at the same time as the local copies of the decreetexts were inscribed, though earlier versions of these histories, either oral or written, may have preceded them. The histories themselves, of course, push local history, including stories about even earlier decrees, well back past the seventeenth century. I mention these dates and elapsed times here to evoke a sense of time passing in relation to these manuscripts and the texts within them. Earlier I suggested that a sense of time passing, together with notions about one's own or the world's relation to the passage of time, would be part of any historical sensibility. These texts, both histories and decrees, seem to me to be pregnant with a particularly poignant sense of time passing, expressed not only in their overt content but also in their style and in the context(s) in which they were inscribed and preserved. To illustrate this theme, let us turn to a close examination of one of the decrees. Since at least half of the texts in these manuscripts are of royal decrees, I should like to begin by describing the Thai text of the official decree given by the king in 1698 to the Pa Kaeo monks of Bang Kaeo in Phatthalung. This description is intended both to give a general idea of the conventions of what I have called the "decreegenre'7 of texts and also to begin to bring out the particular sense of time passing that I find permeating these texts. At this point I must introduce the important Thai (actually Khmer) term, tamra (cnn), by which these texts refer to themselves. In the case of royal decrees it is tamra phraratcha'ongkan (G?'iTlU) l JtTltAo>jrn?) / or "tamra of the royal pronouncement" The word tamra is used to refer to written texts, more precisely, to written texts embodying or connoting an underlying authority.12 Dictionaries, written law codes, rule books, manuals, textbooks, and works of scholarship, for example, are all tamra. The term tamra unequivocally connotes "writtenness"; hence, the self-referential use of the term in any text calls the reader's—or hearer's—attention to its property of being written. The Thai manuscript of the 1698 Pa Kaew decree-tarara has on its outer front leaf a date (day of the week, phase of the moon, animal year, year of the decade, year of the Buddhist era—all in Sanskrit terminology) indicating when the manuscript was completed. On the inner front leaf is a brief preface, written by the royal scribe responsible for drawing up the tamra, saying he had inspected the completed document and affixed the appropriate seals (which, of course, make it a tarara).13 After this preliminary matter, which frames the matter that follows, there is the tamra or text of the royal decree proper. Any royal decree tamra can be divided into a prologue, or preamble, which sets the stage, so to speak, for the matter to be ruled on, and a "royal pronouncement/7 which rules on the matter introduced in the prologue. The prologue always begins with a date and with a description of the king holding audience. The king's full title, the names of the throne, throne room, and palace in which the audience was being held, as well as the persons in attendance, may also be given. The image evoked, like 12 In its etymology tamra is closely related to tra [fflTI], or "seal," referring to the official seals which guaranteed the authenticity of the document. In referring to official documents, the two terms frequently were used interchangeably. Both words are Khmer, and the original meaning may have been something like tra = "seal" and tamra = "that which is sealed." I am indebted to David Chandler for this suggestion. ^ Nat. Lib. MS phongsawadan phatthalung, no. 001.4.24. Also Prachum phratamra, p. 1. Photographs of several leaves of both the Thai and Khmer manuscripts clearly showing their seals are also printed in this book.

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25

that in the prologue to classical Thai drama, is a visual one. The prologue of the 1698 decree begins, for example: On Friday the fifteenth day of the waning moon of the sixth month in the Year of the Tiger, tenth of the decade, at midmorning, the Glorious, Omniscient, Supreme Lord, Rama the Great, Lord of the Wheel, Shiva, King of Kings, the Righteous King, Radiant, Victorious, the Lord Brahma of the Three Worlds, Preeminent in the World, Pure-Crowned, Destined for Enlightenment, Most Excellent Lord of the Wheel Who Rules by the Dharma, held audience in the Pavilion of the Jewelled Throne. Present were the Venerable Phimontham, Preeminent in the Sangha, Most Learned in the Tripitaka, [etc.], the Venerable Nikrompahu... [and so on naming ten prominent monks, each with his full titles]. These ten monks came to pay their greetings [to the king].^ The prologue then continues by narrating how the matter that is to be the subject of the decree was brought to the king's attention, and the matter itself—the case requiring the king's pronouncement—is described. I quote the 1698 decree again: After Phra Thepkarawi, abbot of Wat Phra Ram, preached a sermon on the Dhamma, Phra Nikorot Thera spoke to the king the following words: "Phra Khru In, head of the Pa Kaeo chapter of Phatthalung asks to present his greetings to Your Majesty and to raise the matter of the royal donation tamra given by kings in the past to the Pa Kaeo monasteries of Nakhon and Phatthalung under the jurisdiction of the head of the Pa Kaeo chapter of Phatthalung at Wat Khian and Wat Sathang. That royal donation tamra is worn out. He asks therefore that Your Majesty cause it to be written anew exactly following the royal donation tamra given by the former king(s)."^ This leads up to the royal pronouncement, which is introduced by a conventional formula in the standard phrasing and vocabulary used to refer to the king. Once again I quote: Thus, the Royal Pronouncement went forth onto the head of Luang Siprichyathirat of the Royal Scribes, ordering him to write a royal religious donation tamra exactly following the tamra given by the king(s) of old, and to affix to it the seals guaranteeing it from this time forth.16 The translation of the Thai term (actually, Sanskrit and Khmer) phraratcha'ongkan man phra banthun as "the royal pronouncement went forth" unfortunately leaves out all the overtones evoking the awesomeness and mystery of the royal utterance. Every utterance of the king is the equivalent of the sacred syllable OM, the 14

Ibid., pp. 2-4. ^ Ibid., pp. 4-5. Thai has no forms for singular or plural except context) hence my use of the awkward "king(s)." ^ Prachum phratamra, p. 5-6.

26

In the Land of Lady White Blood

pronouncement of which, by recapitulating all possible utterances, leads to Enlightenment.17 Both prologue and pronouncement employ a conventionally ornate style, full of reduplicated sound patterns, repetitions, and the coupling or stringing together of words or phrases with the same meaning. Sometimes whole sections, or provisions, are repeated together with repetitions or variations in their inner phrasing. To a modern reader, this seems elaborate and tedious. Tamra of royal decrees, however, as we shall see, were not meant to be read silently or consulted privately. Rather, after being carried in procession with appropriate regalia, they were to be intoned by an official whose special duty it was. The audience was to listen as if it were the king himself speaking. Indeed, the respect shown the tamra suggests that they were regarded as receptacles of the king's voice, and hence, when their being read aloud reactivated that "voice," it was the king the auditors were hearing. Let us return to the pronouncement of the 1698 Pa Kaew royal tamra, examination of which we have only just begun. After the order to the royal scribe quoted above, it continues: The words and letters of the endowment tamra given by the former king(s) are: "On Thursday, the tenth day of the waxing moon of the tenth lunar month, Year of the Dog, Second of the Decade, the Most Glorious, Omniscient One, Supreme Lord, ascended the Heavenly Mondop Throne in the south of the Dusit Throne Room in the Phra Bangtra Palace ... ."^ So here within the tamra of 1698 we have a literal "prior text," that is, the complete text of the "tamra of the former king(s)" of the Year of the Dog, Second of the Decade (A.D. 1610). Making up the remainder of the 1698 tamra, it runs to thirty-nine pages in the printed version.19 Mirroring the tamra that frames it, the 1610 tamra also begins, as we have just seen, with a date and with the king holding audience. It continues with the presentation to the king of a petition, this time in the form of a letter: And Phra Siprichathirat of the Royal Scribes presented a Buddhist letter of petition together with a Thai translation. [The letter says]: 'Greeting to Your Most Excellent Majesty Who Rules by the Dhamma! The two hundred ninety Pa Kaeo monasteries of Nakhon and Phatthalung under the jurisdiction of the head of the Pa Kaeo chapter of Phatthalung at Wat Khian and Wat Sathang are commended to you. Phra Phanarat, on behalf of the monks of Nakhon, petitions you to grant a Royal Pronouncement tra exempting from civil jurisdiction the people and lands given to the monasteries in accordance 17

George Bradley MacFarland, Thai-English Dictionary (Stanford, 1944), p. 1015, defines ongkan as "the mystic symbol 'OM/" from Pali and Sanskrit. He goes on to say that "[f]rom the sanctity of the formula it has come to be used for utterances or pronouncements of His Majesty the King." ^ Prachum phratamm, pp. 6-7. 19 Ibid., pp. 6-45.

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with the donation(s) of the former king(s) and with the lists of Nai Sam Chom/20 Matters now are becoming complex. The letter of Phra Phanarat is a further "prior text" embedded in the first "prior text" (the 1610 tamra within the 1698 tamra). It refers to yet further prior texts ("the donations of the kings of old" and "the lists of Nai Sam Chom"). The letter asks that the monastery people, many of whom had been scattered among the civil officials as a result, apparently, of war and pirate raids, be returned to the monastery domains to serve and restore the monasteries. The letter explains that the work of restoration undertaken by the leaders of the Pa Kaew Order was not yet complete, but that the abbot of Wat Khian and Wat Sathang, head of the Pa Kaeo order in Phatthalung, had succeeded in restoring twenty-six temples and asked to commend them to the king's favor. The letter then repeats at length the provisions of the "original tamra" (tamra doem), citing both general and specific grievances against officials who were contravening those provisions. Again and again such phrases as, "Let it be according to the original tamra and lists," or, "according to the lists and tamra of the royal decree of old," recur. One such "prior tamra " is specified several times by date: "the tamra of the royal decree of the Year of the Pig, First of the Decade."21 The royal pronouncement of the tamra-within-the-tamra then says, in effect, "Let it be according to Phra Phanarat's letter," repeating in turn the provisions of the letter and hence of the "original tamra" embedded in the letter. Ornate, formalized, repetitive, the royal pronouncement of the tamra-within-the-tarara is difficult to disentangle from the letter of petition embedded in the same text (and, perhaps, as the pronouncement itself declares the two to be coterminous, it was not intended to be so disentangled), just as the petition in its turn was steeped in the words and phrases of the "old tamra" The tamra-within-the-tawra was thus itself deliberately saturated with prior texts, each relying for its authority on its own replication, in turn, of a text or texts that came before itself. At one point, the tarara-within-the-tarara names the texts that preceded it. They were: the complete letter/petition [of Phra Phanarat] and the list(s) of Nai Sam Chom together with the tamra [of old] and a copy/copies of the tamra and lists given by the king(s) in former times.22 Again mirroring the 1698 tamra in which it itself is embedded, the tamra-within-thetamra records a royal order to the chief of the royal scribes to make a new tamra— remember, we are now speaking of 1610—to replace the old tamra, and this tamra "shall be preserved so that the Religion will last five thousand years."23 Finally, the embedded tamra records a royal order to affix the appropriate seals, which were: 20

Ibid., pp. 6-8. The monk who held the title Phra Phanarat, or Phra Wannarat, signifying that he was the head of the Pa Kaeo ["Jewelled forest"] order in Ayudhya, apparently also served as head and spokesman for all Buddhist monasteries in the southern part of the kingdom; see Craig J. Reynolds, 'The Buddhist Monkhood in 19th Century Siam" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University), 1972, pp. 14-15. "Nai Sam Chom" is discussed in chapter 4. 21 Prachum phratamra, pp. 13,14,17, 23. 22 Ibid., pp. 41-42. 23 Ibid., p. 39. "Five thousand years" refers to the popular tradition in Theravada Buddhism that the Buddha, in accordance with his doctrine that everything is mutable, predicted that

28

In the Land of Lady White Blood the thewada [devata, heavenly being] holding a wheel, seal of the Minister of Royal Scribes, is to be affixed to the front of the document, and the thewada in the lotus flower, seal of the Minister of the Royal Treasury, is to be affixed to the back of this document, [which is] the royal donation tamra given in place of the old tamra according to the royal order. ^4

Thus, the tamra of 1698 with which we began this discussion emerges as an extremely complex document—a text within which is a text (the "tamra of the former king" of 1610), within which is a text (the letter of Phra Phanarat), within which is a text (another "tamra of the former king" of the Year of the Pig, First of the Decade), within which are further texts (the "original" tamra and lists). This is as far back as we can unravel its lineage, but, judging by the deliberate saturation with "prior texts" that seems to characterize this genre of texts, we might reasonably assume that the "tamra of the former king(s)" were saturated in their turn with earlier texts. From the list of documents given in the 1610 tamra, we know that the expression "tamra of the former king(s)" was not only a metaphor for past royal favor but referred to real documents as well. Among the manuscripts from Phatthalung, there is, in fact, a tamra in Khmer that, in the National Library's Thai translation, begins, "On Thursday, the sixth day of the waning moon of the fifth month, Year of the Pig, First of the Decade, the original list was brought and read to His Majesty, who confirmed the provisions of the original tamra."^And this "original list" does, in fact, seem to correspond to the lists of monasteries, their lands, and "work leaders" given in the 1610 tamra. The existence of concrete "prior texts" might be taken as an indicator that Ayudhya had an archive where these tamra were kept, but, judging from the story of the composition of the 1698 tamra recounted in that tamra itself, including the recopying into it of the 1610 tamra, I do not believe this was the case. Each time a recopying or reconfirmation was desired, these precious documents had to be brought to Ayudhya from the southern monasteries where they were kept. Although scribal drafts of such texts were undoubtedly made before final copying and were perhaps kept for a while in Ayudhya, I suspect they were written in the ubiquitous "black books" (samut dam) that scribes used rather in the manner we use scratch tablets.26 They could be, and frequently were, erased and reused, and, hence, were in no sense official archival copies. even his teaching would decline and disappear after five thousand years. I say more about this later. 24 Prachum phratamra, pp. 44-45. The Ayudhyan law code had a special section on seals, see Ruang kotmai tra sum duang [The laws of the three seals], (Bangkok, 1978), pp. 81-91. According to that law (pp. 86-87), the seal of the minister of royal scribes was to be used exclusively for royal donation tamra. 25 The manuscript is National Library MS, phongsawadan miiang phatthalung, 37/N. I believe it was a copy made in 1729/30. National Library MS, phongsawadan miiang phatthalung, 37/TI (001.4.15 in the new catalogue numbering) is a Thai translation of this manuscript. A slightly variant translation, made in Phatthalung by Phra Khru Ariyasangwon in 1901, before the MS was taken to Bangkok, is printed in Tamra phraphlao wat bang kaeo (Phatthalung, 1970), pp. 923. This MS has not been published. 26 Samut dam, or "black books," are made of khoi or bark paper stiffened with charcoal to the consistency of thin cardboard. Laid out flat they are about 15" wide and of varying lenths, usually several feet. They are folded up like accordions and, when opened to be read or written on, have two folios, each about 5" by 15", exposed. Black books intended to be

Royal Texts and Local Meanings

29

In a sense, the Ayudhyan scribes had other prior texts to consult. Part of their scribal lore included mental models of what tamra should look like. The scribe knew what formulae were prescribed to make a prologue and a pronouncement sound as they should sound. An example of one formula, essential to all tamra pronouncements, was the oath or curse. It invoked heavenly bliss after death and an eventual meeting with the Maitreya Buddha for the king's faithful servants and, for the disobedient, endless torment in a series of Buddhist hells. Such a curse might be inserted anywhere in the pronouncement of a tamra, and might be inserted more than once, in abbreviated or full form, according to the dictates of ornamentation and reduplication discussed earlier. Let me quote the 1610 tamra (or, perhaps, a text embedded in it) one last time: If anyone collects ricefield taxes or suay taxes in the territories granted by the former kings to Wat Khian and Wat Sathang of the Pa Kaew chapter of Phatthalung and puts [the revenue] in the royal treasury or to his own private use, or if anyone takes the monastery folk to use for the civil corvee, or to use for war, or to cut leather for elephant ropes, or to send messages, or to build houses, let that person fall into the Great Avici Hell to endure perpetual torments, let him not meet the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, ever throughout all his rebirths.27 The fact that the custodians of the precious prior tamra—the actual physical artifacts—were the monasteries themselves or the communities that supported them is highly suggestive. First, the apparent lack of archival copies and the need to bring these documents to the capital each time a reconfirmation was desired suggest that only the copies given to the monasteries, duly stamped with the royal seals, were charged with authority. This further suggests the notion, touched upon earlier, that once the words of the royal pronouncement, together with all the precedents incorporated in it, had been inscribed in a tamra and affixed with the appropriate seals, the authority with which these words were charged now inhered in the tamra itself, the inscribed artifact. This explains, in part, the obsession on the part of the custodians of the tamra with preserving these artifacts and with insuring that each successive tamra was saturated with the words, hence with the authority, of all the texts that had preceded it. In his stimulating essay on text building in Javanese shadow theatre, A. L. Becker suggests that all language activity falls somewhere on a continuum between "speaking the past," characterized by repetition, and "speaking the present," characterized by spontaneity. He points out, however, that no speech act or text, no matter how repetitious or spontaneous, can ever wholly speak the past or wholly speak the present. On the one hand, a completely spontaneous speech act, unconstrained by any conventions, would be unrecognizable as language, while on the other, even the most exact repetition has in it "always something of the present, some variable of the communicative act which is free to express the now. . . . permanent, such as literary works, were written on in permanent ink, usually yellow gambodge, but others were written on in white chalk, which could be erased with water. See Coedes, The Vajiranana National Library, p. 27. 27 Prachum phratamra, pp. 35-36.

30

In the Land of Lady White Blood

Furthermore, each repetition of a text (or bit of a text) is in a new context and takes new meaning from its context."28 Becker's ideas are particularly apt when applied to these tamra and their multiple recopyings. These tamra in their many repetitions "speak the past" to an almost excessive degree, not only in being built to a formula but in deliberately piling "prior text" upon "prior text" within themselves. Most importantly, they explicitly state ("speaking the present") that this is what they are doing. I suggested earlier that a particular "sense of time passing," reflecting the historical sensibility that informed these texts, was strongly marked not only in the texts' content but in their style and in the context in which they were inscribed, received, and preserved. The rhetorical device in the tamra of deliberately calling present attention to the texts' "speaking the past" made the audience for these texts aware of several things. One was the passage of time itself, from the time of "the kings of old" to the present; another was the authority residing in the past, in the "decrees of the kings of old"; and a third, knitting the other two together, was the possibility of bridging time through writing, specifically through re-writing ancient writings and thereby reactivating the authority of the past in the present. By the same token, writing could bridge time between the present and the future. The ultimate audience for these texts, one might argue, was posterity, specifically, the posterity to whom the petitioners, reinscribers, and so forth, would in turn be ancestors. Just as the petitioners and reinscribers were aware that it was only through their action that the ancestors' wishes, as inscribed in the tamra, were preserved once more from crumbling away and being forgotten, so they were aware that it was only through the actions of posterity that their own wishes, as expressed in their present actions, could be fulfilled. The acts of re-inscribing the tamra, as well as writing the histories, not only reminded contemporaries of the ancestors' wishes but also "reminded" posterity of its duty. The example of old woman of Khuha Sawan at the beginning of the twentieth century still worshipping the manuscripts her ancestors had so carefully preserved suggests that these "reminders to posterity" had indeed been efficacious. As we have seen, even today, when their manuscripts have been gone for nearly a century, the descendants of the families who were.once custodians of the tamra at Bang Kaeo every year hold a "manuscript merit-making ceremony" in which both the absent manuscripts and the ancestors (called in this ceremony ta phlao, "manuscript ancestors") are paid homage. This brings us back to the question with which we started: how did the manuscripts come to be regarded as sacred? Our discussion so far has hinted at an answer. We have seen the care the seventeenth-century holders of the tamra took to preserve them, requesting the king to grant that they be recopied when they became too fragile, for example. The emphasis on verbatim repetition in making such copies, of replicating the words of prior tamra, is particularly suggestive. Earlier I proposed that royal decree tamra were seen as literal receptacles of the king's voice (literal doubly in the sense that the voice was held in the letters in the tamra) and, hence, that the words inscribed therein were charged with the power inherent in that voice. As for contemporary notions about the effectiveness of the spoken word, we get a hint 28

A.L. Becker, 'Textbuilding, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre," in The Imagination of Reality, ed. A. L. Becker and Aram Yengoyan (Norwood, N.J., 1979), pp. 21315, quote from p. 213 (Emphasis Becker's).

Royal Texts and Local Meanings

31

from the remarks of an astute seventeenth-century French visitor, Simon de la Loubere, concerning Thai ceremonial speaking: . . . as for their Compliments, they are all after one Model, which is indeed very good; but which is the reason that in the same Ceremonies they do always speak almost the same things. The King of Siam himself has his words almost counted in his Audiences of Ceremony.29 Precedent ("speaking the past"), then, seems to have been an important element contributing to the power of ceremonial utterances, which always must be measured and exact. The spiritual "power" of the speaker also appears to have been an element: the more "powerful" the speaker, the more exact the utterance. When a king granted an exact recopying of a tamra embodying such utterances of former kings, he added his "voice" to theirs, compounding the effectiveness of the words and sounds. How, then, were these powerful artifacts handled and read? The manuscript colophon to one of the Bang Kaeo tamra manuscripts, not previously discussed, is invaluable here.3^ It tells how in A.D. 1668 a royal tamra belonging to the Phatthalung Pa Kaeo monasteries was recopied in Nakhon Sithammarat, in connection with a lawsuit over illegal tax collecting in the monasteries' domain. The monastic plaintiffs appealed to "the sacred tamra and seal of the royal order given by the former king(s) to Wat Khian and Wat Sathang" as evidence proving their case. The minister of the treasury, who was visiting Nakhon Sithammarat, and the governor of Nakhon conferred with their council but announced that they could not consult the original tamra because the regalia necessary to carry it in ceremonial procession (lfl?S^xu\J?t(^\JUttmtGn'ri) were not available. No doubt these regalia included the "white elephant" and the ceremonial trays and umbrellas described by Phra Ratanathatmuni and the ladies at Bang Kaeo. The minister and governor then ordered a scribe to make a copy that could be read aloud in the hall of Wat Mahathat.31 The extant manuscript may in fact be that copy. The most curious feature of this episode is that, although the seals of the original tamra were those of the minister of the treasury and the minister of the royal scribes, the current holder of the treasury seal—that is, the visiting minister—felt himself prohibited from allowing the tamra bearing the seals to be read without full ceremony. This suggests that the royal utterance inscribed in the tamra took precedence over the seals, which were merely the guarantees of the authenticity of that utterance. La Loubere, once again, catches something of this in his discussion of seals and royal orders. Every Officer that has the Power of giving the Sentences, or Orders in Writing, which they call Tara in general, has a Seal which the King gives him, 29 Simon de la Loubere, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam, (London/1690/ facsimile reprint, Kuala Lumpur, 1969), p. 61. 3 ^ Thailand National Library MS, Category: phongsawadan miiang phatthalung, number 001.4.18. This manuscript is unpublished. National Library MS phongsawadan miiang phatthalung, number 001.4.10 is a handwritten modern copy of MS 001.4.18. 31 The question of scribes and their handling of manuscripts deserves investigation.

32

In the Land of Lady White Blood

but, ... it seems to me, that whatever is done in the King of Siam's Name has no Power, if it is not done at the place where this king actually resides.32 In other words, the "Sentences, or Orders in Writing, which they call Tara " (i.e., tra, tamra) had to be received in actual audience with the king by the minister under whose seal they were to appear. The minister's seal was a guarantee of the authenticity of the utterance upon which it was set, but not a mark of authority in itself. Finally, La Loubere noted, "there is an Officer in every Tribunal to read the Tara or Orders from the King to the Governor, and an House in an eminent place for to keep them/'33 Clearly, these were more than mere administrative documents: they were "charged" objects requiring scrupulous ceremonial treatment. If the sealed tamra literally held the king's voice, copies, such as that made in 1668 in Nakhon Sithammarat, held the king's voice at one remove. Though they did admit of reading without full regalia, reading them still required ceremony. The 1668 copy was read aloud in the hall of Wat Mahathat (Temple of the Great Relic), Nakhon's most sacred site. Copies still participated in the power of the king's voice to the extent that they were believed to be true copies of an authentic royal utterance. Hence the necessity of royal regalia—umbrellas, white elephants—to accompany the reading of the manuscripts. The story told by the ladies of Bang Kaeo of how reading (aloud) the tamra unprotected by regalia could cause death through rupturing of the larynx seems to clinch the point. Thus, the phenomenon observed by Prince Naris two centuries after the tamra had been written was not merely the awe of illiterate folk before mysterious writings of great age but was an outgrowth and an expression of an intellectual tradition that ascribed supernatural efficacy to certain types of texts, that is, those wherein powerful utterances were inscribed.3^ In the Theravada Buddhist world the archetypical utterances preserved in the medium of writing are the spoken words of the Buddha preserved in the Pali scriptures; unlike a king's utterances, they are not seen as potentially dangerous to ordinary folk. Writing's preservational function has been explicit in Theravada tradition for millennia. According to a well-known story, the Buddha predicted, in conformity with his doctrine of the mutability of all things, that even his own teachings would eventually disappear. This disappearance would be gradual, he said, proceeding by stages, during which one after another of the elements of his teaching and the rule he had instituted would decay. According to popular tradition, the duration of each of 32

La Loubere, A New Historical Relation, p. 95. One is reminded here of Brian Stock's description of the relation between the spoken and written word in Carolingian Europe, a culture in which literacy was present and respected but that remained for the most part highly oral. There also it was the spoken words of the king given in face-to-face communication that had authority, but, unlike the Ayudhyan Thai case, written records of the king's decrees seem to have been treated as mere memoranda without the force of the authority of the king's spoken word; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983), pp. 16-17. 33 La Loubere, A New Historical Relation, p. 83. 34 Cf. Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, "Reading, Reciting, and Knowing: Interpreting a Rural Javanese Text Tradition," in Writing on the Tongue, ed. A.L. Becker (Ann Arbor, 1989). See especially her discussion on p. 202 of villagers' attitudes toward reading texts in which "spiritually powerful knowledge" is thought to be inscribed.

Royal Texts and Local Meanings 33

33

these stages would be 1,000 years until, at the end of 5,000 years, all trace of the religion would have disappeared.^ According to the Mahavamsa, the oldest Sinhalese Buddhist chronicle, the followers of the Buddha's way were able to preserve his teachings orally for many generations, but as the age declined, it was feared human memory might also decline, leading to faulty transmission of the Dhamma and hence to its corruption and premature disappearance. Therefore, according to this tradition, as the 500-year mark after the Buddha's death approached, the Dhamma was written down in Sri Lanka and henceforth preserved in written form.3** The anxiety then shifted to accurate copying and understanding of the Pali scriptures, as can be seen in the accounts of numerous Buddhist councils called to "cleanse" corrupt texts. Everywhere in the Theravada world, copying the scriptures or causing them to be copied has been considered an act of merit, because such acts help to stave off the evil day of the disappearance of the Dhamma.37 Indeed, one might characterize the historical consciousness of traditional Theravada Buddhism as a preoccupation with the heroic task of preserving the religion in the face of its inevitable decline. The importance to Buddhists of preservation of the Dhamma goes beyond simple recognition of the philosophical excellence of the Buddha's message and a wish to preserve it for the world. It is also crucial for the practical devotional reason that the Buddha's utterances, when spoken aloud, have a merit-generating potency for both hearer and speaker. In Theravada practice, the emphasis is always on the spoken word, on hearing the words of the Buddha. The loyal official's prayer in the Oath of the Water of Allegiance, for example, is to be reborn in the age of Maitreya, the future Buddha, when hearing him deliver his sermon on the Dhamma will lead to immediate release from rebirth and suffering.3** The Mahavamsa tells the story of the dying King Dutthagamani telling the gods who have come in their chariots to take him to heaven to wait while he listens to the assembled bhikkus chant the Dhamma.39 A popular story from fourteenth-century Sri Lanka tells how a rat snake and 500 bats were reborn in a higher state as a result merely of hearing the sound of the chanting 35

This is summarized by Richard Gombrich in his Theravada Buddhism (London, 1988), pp. 152-53. In the earliest Buddhist histories the prediction was 500 years. The Mahavamsa, for example, after recounting story of the first recitation of the Dhamma by the 500 bhikkus, says, 'The earth, rejoicing in the thought that the Buddha's message had been made to endure 500 years, trembled six times." (p. 18) When the vigilance of the Sinhalese monks prevented this prediction from coming true, later texts extended the prediction to 5,000 years, see, for example, Culavamsa Part I, p. 1 and p. 146; and Jinakalamali [N.A. Jayawickrama, Sheaf of Garlands of the Epochs of the Conqueror] p. 57. The great fifth-century scholar-monk Buddhaghosa apparently was responsible for this revision. 36 Mahavamsa, p. 237; Jinakalamali, pp. 82-83. 37 See, for example, Chulavamsa Part II, pp. 1,139, 203, 204, 217, 221. 38 The Water of Allegiance, in which the oath was infused by incantation while powerful regalia, including a sword, were dipped in it, was drunk twice yearly by all officials in the Ayudhya and Bangkok kingdoms. The earliest text of the Ayudhyan oath, printed in Pluang Na Nakhon, Prawat wannakhadi thai [History of Thai literature] (Bangkok, 1984), pp. 44-46, seems to be based on Khmer models and to be Hindu rather than Buddhist in its imagery, but texts from the later Ayudhya and early Bangkok period, several manuscripts of which are in the National Library, have a strong Buddhist cast, including the prayer to be reborn to hear the Maitreya Buddha. 39 Mahavamsa, pp. 25-26.

34

In the Land of Lady White Blood

of a fairly abstruse commentary on the Dhamma.^ In the past, when monastic disputes arose over the validity of a particular ordination tradition, and the dissident monks traveled to a site where the ordination tradition was believed to be pure, the dispute was frequently over the correct pronunciation of letters in the Pali ordination texts.^1 Improperly pronounced words did not have the efficacy of the original utterance. In this context, then, writing was magic: it captured the spoken word, not only so it could be read and understood later, but so that it could be re-spoken, reactivating the efficacy of the original utterance. Walter Ong's observations on speech, time, and writing are apt here. Ong notes that speech as sound "rides in time/' vanishing without a trace even as the utterance leaves the mouth. Writing, specifically alphabetic writing, neutralizes the irreversible flow of time "by substituting for sound immobile letters."^ in Theravada societies, this power of the spoken word lies latent in the written text and produces the respect accorded written texts, but it is only when the words are spoken, chanted, or recited that their meritorious potency is fully activated for speakers and hearers alike.^ it is this understanding that underlies the practice of Pali chanting on every possible occasion, as well as the recitation in vernacular languages of Jakata stories or of histories of Buddhist relics at special festivals. In Nakhon Sithammarat, for example, it used to be the practice on auspicious occasions to recite the verse chronicle of the Great Reliquary in the temple of that name.44 In this wider context, then, the Phatthalung tamra are examples of efficacious writing on two accounts. They were, first of all, the receptacles of the powerful utterances of kings; they also preserved utterances the effect of which was to "preserve the Religion" by preserving the monasteries where the Scriptures were preserved and chanted, and where people could make merit. Again and again the reason given for petitioning the king to reconfirm the endowments and to recopy the tamra was "so that the Religion may last five thousand years." It is a formula, to be sure, but none the less meaningful for that. By extension, preserving the manuscripts in which were inscribed the tamra, the purpose of which was to preserve the religion in these 40

Walpola Rahula, A History of Buddhism in Ceylon (Colombo, 1956), p. 253. A Thai version of this story told is in SJ. Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults of Northeast Thailand (Cambridge, 1968), p.196. 41 See for example Sao Saimong Mangrai, trans, and ed., The Padaeng Chronicle and thefengtung State Chronicle Translated (Ann Arbor, 1981), pp.109-10. 42 Walter J. Ong, S.J., The Presence of the Word (Yale, 1967), pp. 40-45. 43 Cf. Ong, Interfaces of the Word (Cornell, 1977), p. 259, where he notes that, in literate cultures that are also highly oral, books "do not 'contain' something called 'material.' They speak or say words. The written words had to be mouthed aloud, in their full being, restored to and made to live in the oral cavities in which they came into existence/' 44 Preecha Noonsuk, "Introduction," Phraniphansot, part 3, (Center for Cultural Studies of Southern Thailand, Nakhon Sithammarat Teachers College, 1985). Cf. Tambiah's discussion of the Vessantara jataka merit-making festival in Northeast Thailand. Buddhism and the Spirit Cults pp. 160-68. The chapter "Liberation Through Hearing: The Sacred Words of the Monks," pp. 195-222 in this work, is a brilliant discussion of Thai beliefs about the efficacy of hearing Pali texts chanted. Tambiah emphasizes that in Thai belief the efficacy of the sound of Pali chanting not only serves otherworldly ends but is believed to have a protective and beneficial effect in this world. A tradition in medieval Sri Lanka was the reciting of the Mahavamsa and the Dipavamsa, histories of Buddhism in Ceylon, at the annual Mahinda festival, see Chulavamsa, Part I, pp. 4-7, 35, and p. 35 n. 2.

Royal Texts and Local Meanings

35

communities, was also an act of merit. The fragility of these tamra in the face of the ravages of time and their custodians' attempts to preserve them might be seen as a metaphor for all of Theravada Buddhist history as seen from the inside.

Plate 3. Phra Kho Hill, Wat Phra Kho

Plate 4. Wat Phra Kho, Reliquary Stupa

4 THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOUTHERN THAILAND

e have seen that the tamra were recopied on the initiative of their custodians in a world where historical discourse was "multi-vocal/' where localities were responsible for their own history. To preserve the manuscripts of tamra that harkened back to and confirmed that history was to take action to preserve that history. If a community allowed its tamra to crumble away, it was in danger of losing its history together with the prestige and privileges that having such a history conferred. In this chapter we shall discover these southern Thai communities not only preserved their tamra, but members of those communities wrote supplementary histories to accompany the tamra, histories in which the "ancestry" of the tamra was remembered and recorded. The history implicit in the royal tamra is thus made explicit in local historical narratives. All the histories, we find, are structured around a "first granting" of a tamra or a "first writing" of an authoritative text about the monasteries sometime in the distant past. To quote A. L. Becker again, "a text always—but to varying degrees—contextualizes the present in the past."* These histories explicitly do just that. The histories in the Wat Phra Kho, or Langkachat, manuscripts are transparent in this respect. There are two of these manuscripts, both including more than one text.2 The bulk of one is a pictorial map, about ten meters long, depicting all the wat in the Sathing Phra Peninsula, noting which ones were under the supervision of Wat Phra Kho and what their endowed lands were. Following the map are the text of a tamra issued to the Langkachat monasteries on a date that corresponds to A.D. 1610 and a history of Wat Phra Kho from its foundation to the inscriber's present.3 The map, the tamra, and the history, all in the same handwriting, were, respectively, drawn, copied, and perhaps composed in this manuscript at the same time as part of a single enterprise to illuminate each other—a historiographical exercise, in fact.

W

1

Becker, "Textbuilding, Epistemology, and Aesthetics," p. 213. Both are accordion-style "white books" made of stiffened, but unblackened khoi paper, written on in black ink. The map in one manuscript is also illuminated in color. 3 A black and white foldout photocopy of the map (minus a couple of damaged leaves that were still intact when I saw the map in 1977) has been published by Sutthiwong Phongphaibun, Phutthasasana thaep lum thaksap songkhlafang tawan ok samai krung si ayutthaya [Buddhism on the Eastern Shore of the Songkhla Lake in the Ayutthaya period 1 (Songkhla, 1980). A transcription of the texts in the map MS were published in Prachum phratamra, pp. 63-70. The original manuscript in Thailand National Library was catalogued under the category Tamra and entitled "Map of Nakhon Sithammarat." Sutthiwong, Phutthasasana, p. 64, remarks it would be more suitably labeled "Map of Phatthalung." A microfilm of the map, made by David Wyatt, is available in the Cornell University Library, Wason Film 4309. 2

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The other Phra Kho manuscript, which I shall call the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript, also has copies of decree tamra alternating with texts of histories.4 The Luang Pho Thuat manuscript has five texts, in the following order: a copy of the 1610 tamra that appears in the map manuscript, with minor copyist's variations; the history of Somdet Chao Phra Kho (who is popularly known as "Luang Pho Thuat," hence my name for the manuscript); another tamra with a date that converts to 1603; a short text with a date that corresponds to 1613 listing caretakers of the images at Wat Phra Kho; and, finally, a history that echoes but does not copy the history in the map manuscript. Again, this manuscript clearly was written all-of-a-piece at one time; each of the texts informs the others. Although the theme of both manuscripts is the antiquity and importance of Wat Phra Kho and and the legitimacy and inviolability of the Langkachat endowments as proven by the documents—the incorporated tamra—each manuscript pursues this theme differently. The Luang Pho Thuat manuscript emphasizes the ability of the monastery folk to remember, generation after generation, who their ancestors were (that is, who the persons in the original grant of exemption were), as proven by the histories. Pursuing this theme, the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript gradually narrows its focus from all the Langkachat monasteries having Wat Phra Kho as their center to a specific extended kin group around Wat Kuti Luang, a nearby subsidiary of Wat Phra Kho. The map manuscript takes a wider view, encompassing the whole Sathing Phra Peninsula and occasionally glancing across the lake, to drive home the theme of tamra granting. Some examples from the histories themselves should illuminate my meaning. The histories in both the map manuscript and the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript begin (after a short passage in both noting the amount of Sathing Phra's "original" tribute) with the story of the enshrining of a Buddhist relic at Wat Phra Kho.5 The account, drawn from both manuscripts, is as follows (bold typeface indicates the map manuscript, italics indicates the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript, regular typeface indicates where both are identical, and square brackets indicate my interpolations): 4

National Library MS, phongsawadan muang nakhon sithammarat 36/\J. A transcription of this manuscript is also printed in Prachum phratamra, pp. 71-84. Unfortunately, rather than consulting the original MS, the publishers of Prachum phratamra chose to follow a poor transcription published in 1907 in Thesaphiban, the publication of the Ministry of the Interior. Wason Film 4309 contains this manuscript complete. Judging by the handwriting and spelling of both Phra Kho manuscripts, by the cutoff points in the histories, and by the evidence of the map, which does not depict the mid-eighteenth century predecessor of Songkhla town at Bo Yang on the tip of the Sathing Phra Peninsula but does depict the seventeenth-century forts of Sultan Suleiman (Datu Marahum) at Khao Daeng, I believe these manuscripts were inscribed near the end of the seventeenth century, with the Luang Pho Thuat MS. being perhaps slightly older. Sutthiwong, following a slightly different line of reasoning, reaches the same conclusion, Phutthasasana, p. 64. ^ Some readers have assumed this account refers to the building of the reliquary at Wat Sathing Phra, but the context clearly seems to refer to the construction of the reliquary at Wat Phra Kho. The latter reading is further strengthened when we remember that Wat Sathing Phra was a Pa Kaeo monastery and the theme of these particular manuscripts was the claims of the Langkachat monasteries, centered on Wat Phra Kho. Chaiwut, Chamra phlao nang liiat khao, p. 92, mentions, without indicating that he agrees, that "many scholars" have read the passage as referring to the Sathing Phra reliquary. Luang Siworawat, Phongsawadan Phatthalung, p. 67, read it as referring to Phra Kho, as does Sutthiwong, in his entry on Wat Phra Kho in Saranukrom watthanatham phak tai [Encyclopedia of Southern Thai Culture] (Songkhla, 1986), p. 2431.

The Historiography of Southern Thailand 39

39

When Phya Thammarangkhan [Dharmaranggala] "ate"/When Phraya Thamrongkasat [Damrongksatriya] founded Miiang Sathing Phra, he invited Phra Mahathera Anomadassi to bring the Great Relic from Miiang Langka [Ceylon] and to build for it the Jewelled Reliquary, one sen [about 40 meters] in height, and also to build a preaching hall [vihara], a chapter hall [sala], an ordination hall [uposatha], and a surrounding wall six sok [three meters] high. And he [Phra Mahathera Anomadassi] took the procession [descriptive list?] of the Jewelled Reliquary and vihara to the Great Capital of Ayuddhaya. And His Majesty the King graciously exempted the kinsfolk and the lands, both dry fields and paddy fields, sugar palms and fruit trees, from the royal tribute. And there was a tamra of the Royal Pronouncement exempting them from the royal tribute for as long as the moon and sun should last.6 The Luang Pho Thuat manuscript continues, as does the map manuscript after an intervening passage recording another early foundation on Phra Kho Hill, with an account of the restoration of the reliquary and reconfirmation of the endowment at Wat Phra Kho at the time of Somdet Chao Phra Kho's discovery of the Buddha's footprint on Phra Kho Hill. The "kinsfolk" (natyom, ttHflltW) again were declared exempt from the royal tribute by order of the king. "And there was a tamra exempting them from the royal tribute for as long as the moon and sun should last" (map manuscript). The Luang Pho Thuat manuscript adds, "And Mahathera Sri, the younger brother [of Somdet Chao Phra Kho], was charged with writing [a record] to be kept so that the ancestors [tayai cntntJ, "maternal grandparents"] would be remembered from that time onward."7 After a long intervening passage describing local events at the time of the pirate raids from Johore around the beginning of the seventeenth century, the history in the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript continues with just such a "remembering" of a maternally related kin group and its members' lands, all dedicated to Wat Kuti Luang. Thus, for example, after a long list of mothers and their children and their daughters' children and the lands the children inherited from their mothers, the manuscript states "all these women [the term used is nang, "ladies"] were/are of one kin group, 'slaves' of Wat Kuti Luang together."8 The history in the map manuscript, as I have indicated, takes a more global view to emphasize the theme of tamra-granting. It mentions, for example, the involvement of Somdet Chao Phra Kho in a restoration and endowment across the lake at Khuha Sawan. This is followed by stories not only of the pirate raids from Johore, but of raids earlier in the sixteenth century from Acheh and Aru (Haru) in northern Sumatra that seem to have been most destructive on the Phatthalung shore of the lake. The stories of the pirate raids are followed, of course, by stories of petitions to renew the endowments so the ravaged monasteries could be restored. The whole middle section of this history consists of the repetition of this theme. Nine separate short passages, using almost identical wording from one to another, recount how this or that monk built or restored structures at this or that monastery in the Sathing Phra Peninsula, petitioned the king, and was granted a tamra bearing the Royal Treasury seal 6

Prachum phratamra, pp. 66, 81.

7

Ibid., pp. 66-67,81.

° Ibid., pp. 82-84. "Slaves" in the context of these grants apparently meant something other than chattel slavery.

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In the Land of Lady White Blood

exempting "the kinsfolk, the land, both dry fields and rice paddies, sugar palms and fruit orchards'' from royal taxation and corvee. Then follows a shorter list of restorations and endowments on the western shore of the lake.9 One last example reflecting the Langkachat histories' preoccupation with the origin of tamra is the structure of the story of Somdet Chao Phra Kho in the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript. This classic "local boy makes good" story begins with the miracle that occurred soon after his birth near Wat Kuti Luang. His mother, while working in the ricefields, had put him in a hammock in the shade of a tree. When she came to the tree to get a drink of water, she saw a cobra coiled on top of her infant, and she cried out, "A cobra has killed my baby!" As it turned out, the cobra was no ordinary snake, but a deity, and it left a crystal jewel with the infant to mark his extraordinary merit from past lives. Somdet Chao Phra Kho's ordination as a novice at young age, and his rapid rise up the ladder of learning are the natural sequel to his auspicious birth. The story continues with his eventual journey to Ayudhya in search of further instruction. On the way he performed another miracle by turning salt water to fresh by dipping his foot in it.10 In Ayudhya he gained the favor of the king by confounding some Indian ambassadors at riddles on the Abhidhamma, after all the most learned monks in the kingdom had had to admit defeat. When the king asked him what reward he would take, Somdet Chao Phra Kho asked that poverty-stricken commoners be granted to him to serve and restore Wat Phra Kho, and that they never again be subject to royal taxes or corvee. The king assented, and sent out the officials Nai Sam Chom and Khun Inthapanna to draw up lists of the people to be granted to Somdet Chao Phra Kho. At this point the biography's narrative, which had been using ordinary language, lively dialogue, and occasional southern Thai expressions, falls into the ornate phraseology of a tamra, including its stylized provisions and curses against disobedient officials. It is as if the author, "knowing" that Somdet Chao Phra Kho had been granted a tamra and knowing also that each tamra reflected all its predecessors, was able, drawing on his own mental prior text of what Somdet Chao Phra Kho's tamra must have looked like, to include a facsimile of that tamra in his history at the appropriate point.11 Turning from the Phra Kho to the Bang Kaeo manuscripts, we find that of these only the text found in the Lady White Blood manuscript is a history rather than a royal tamra or copy of a tamra. Like the Langkachat histories, the text in the Lady White Blood manuscript also is preoccupied, at least in part, with the origin of tamra, more precisely, with the written legitimation of the privileged status and ancient 9

Ibid., pp. 67-69. Sutthiwong discusses these grants and their probable dates in detail in Phutthasasana, pp. 51-64. The pirate raids are mentioned in all the early seventeenth-century tamra. For the wider Thai-Malay and inter-Malay context in which these raids occurred, see A. Teeuw and O.K. Wyatt, Hikayat Patani: The Story of Patani (The Hague, 1970), vol. 1, chap. 1, esp. pp. 9-14. The chronicles of Nakhon Sithammarat, Crystal Sands, pp. 144-45 also mention both the Aru raids and the Johore raids, but Wyatt's reading of the dates given for these events needs to be reconsidered. 10 Many villagers around Wat Phra Kho believe the Buddha's footprint there is actually that of Somdet Chao Phra Kho, who is also locally believed to be the future Maitreya Buddha; see Suthiwong, Phutthasasana, p. 81. 11 Prachum phratamra, pp. 74-77.

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lineage of the Pa Kaeo monasteries, especially Wat Khian and Wat Sathang. I should like to demonstrate this suggestion by, once again, teasing away at the text itself.12 First I must mention the physical difference between the Phra Kho and the Bang Kaeo manuscripts, perhaps reflecting local preferences. The Phra Kho manuscripts, as noted earlier, are samut khao, "white books," that could contain several texts in one manuscript. In contrast, the Bang Kaew manuscripts, like the Kuha Sawan manuscripts described by Prince Naris, are all on softer phlao paper sewn together along the top "in the manner of Chinese books." This kind of manuscript contains only one text per manuscript, at least in all those I have seen. Both kinds of manuscript are equally antique, but official Ayudhyan tamra were always inscribed on phlao paper, so perhaps the local preference on the western shore of the lake for phlao paper shows a greater regard for "authenticity." Unlike the Langkachat histories, therefore, which are found in the same manuscripts as tamra (thereby creating a prima facie case for supposed tamra-preoccupation), the Lady White Blood manuscript contains only a history. On the otherwise blank inner front leaf of the Lady White Blood manuscript there is written a date in Khmer letters that is identical, both as to the date itself and the handwriting in which it is written, with a date written on the similarly blank inner front leaf of a Bang Kaeo tamra manuscript. This date, I believe, corresponds to a day in A.D. 1729.13 The tamra manuscript containing this date is also the tamra with the colophon, discussed earlier, telling how it was recopied in 1668 in Nakhon Sithammarat in conjunction with a lawsuit. Whether the 1729 date was meant to indicate that this was when the two manuscripts were inscribed (this would make the tamra manuscript, at least, a copy of a copy), or whether the date was inserted in both manuscripts to mark some occasion associated with the two manuscripts, such as, for example, a ceremonial reading, is immaterial to my argument. 14 What is important is that the two manuscripts were linked together on that date in the mind of the person who inscribed it in both. What does this linking indicate? A letter of A.D. 1700 from the deputy governor of Nakhon Sithammarat to the abbot of Wat Khian alluded to the 1668 case and seemed to suggest that the monastic plaintiffs won.15 The subsequent recopying or ceremonial reading in 1729 of the decree successfully appealed to and copied in the 1668 case was perhaps a response to renewed encroachments on the monasteries' 12

National Library MS, phongsawadan muang phatthalung, number 001.4.26. Published in Chaiwut, Chamra phlao nang luat khao, pp. 11-17. 13 Unfortunately, I cannot be more precise. Only the year numerals are clearly legible. In fact, I have found no one who can read the Khmer script in which these two dates are written. The noted Thai scholar of Khmer, Professor Cham Thongkhamwan, has read it as (1)651 Mahasakarat (Greater Shaka Era), Year of the Cock, First of the Decade, that is, 1729 A.D. His identification is noted in Singwaedlom sinlapakam changwat phatthalung [The environment and art in Phatthalung], published by the Local Committee for the Preservation of the Arts and Environment of Phatthalung, 2574 [1991], p. 56. For those who may be Khmer readers, see the plate facing the appendix for the original MS. transcription of this date. 14 Chaiwut, Chamra phlao nang luat khao, p. 27, suggests this was the date both were written. I do not disagree, I merely add another possibility. 15 I was unable to find the original manuscript, or even a copy, of this letter in the National Library's collection. It exists now only in a version printed in Phatthalung in 1970, Tamra phraphlao Wat Bang Kaew, pp. 24-47. The reference to the 1668 lawsuit and its outcome is on p. 30. No date for the lawsuit is given in the letter, but the names and titles of the plaintiff, defendant, and judges correspond with those in the 1668 colophon.

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autonomy. The simultaneous appearance and linking to that tamra of a text of the Lady White Blood story, cast so as to push the monasteries' written patents back into a myth-enshrouded antiquity, cannot have been fortuitous. The Lady White Blood story itself is, of course, far older than the eighteenth century, its currency in the isthmian region of Malay Peninsula probably antedating both Islam and Sinhalese Buddhism in this locale. Variants or elements of this myth crop up elsewhere in the Malay Peninsula, as well as in texts from as far afield as Acheh in northern Sumatra to Kutei and Banjarmasin in Borneo.16 For the moment, however, I am less interested in this myth's distribution or in the structural features common to all its versions than I am in a particular feature of the early eighteenthcentury text of the specific Bang Kaew localization of this myth. This feature is, of course, its preoccupation with written texts, charters, patents (a preoccupation that appears in none of the other versions, I might add). An exploration of this facet by no means exhausts the possibilities of the myth, or even of this text, but it does cast some light on the intellectual world of the circle in which this particular text was written and to whom it made sense. According to the Bang Kaeo manuscript version of the story,17 Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman (with the help of their female and male elephants) were the founders of the twin temples of Wat Sathang and Wat Khian. As divine beings, they needed no written patent to legitimize their foundations. Nevertheless, the theme of written records is insinuated into our eighteenth-century Bang Kaeo version of the story. Immediately after a passage telling how, as chiefs of a band of elephanttamers, Lady White Blood and her husband sent tribute elephants to "Si The Historiography of Southern Thailand 41 made and kept from the origins of Phatthalung onward." Later, in the account of the founding of Wat Khian, Phraya Kuman is said to have inscribed a "history" (tamnan) on a golden plate, giving the temple its name, Wat Khian Bang Kaeo, "Temple of the Inscription (iwu, khian) at Bang Kaeo."18 Besides these outright mentions of record keeping or history writing, the author/copyist's preoccupation with tamra is revealed through a significant set of dates he gives for events of importance in local history. Linked to the foundation of Wat Khian and Wat Sathang in the Lady White Blood story is the simultaneous founding by the ruler of Sathing Phra of the reliquary there, "on Thursday, fifth day of the waxing moon of the eighth month, Year of the Pig, First of the Decade." Immediately following this passage, Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman are described as traveling to Trang, "in the Year of the Dog, Second of the Decade," where they built a temple to receive the Sihing Buddha when it came from Sri Lanka.19 16

See J. Ras, Hikayat Bandjar: A Study in Malay Historiography (The Hague, 1968), pp. 81-99, for a comparative study of Malay versions of this myth. See also Teeuw and Wyatt, Hikayat Patani, vol. 2, pp.197, 261-61, and W.E. Maxwell, "A History of Perak from Native Sources," Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 9 (June 1882): 84-106. ^ See Appendix, 'The Story of Lady White Blood." ^ Chaiwut Piyakul, Prawat wat khian bang kaeo [History of Wat Khian Bang Kaeo] (Phatthalung, 1986). In his discussion of the temple's name he curiously does not mention this interpretation. 19 The Sihing Buddha, one of the most revered images in Thailand, figures largely in the multi-vocal discourse about "Buddhist history" I have alluded to here and there. See, for example, Yiamyong Sangayut [Yiamyong S. Surakitbanhan], "Phra Phutthasihing," in Thiao

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These dates, so suspiciously precise, immediately call to mind (to one familiar with the Pa Kaeo tamra content, as our eighteenth-century author/copyist and his audience certainly were) the Pa Kaeo tamra of A.D. 1610. These tamra, themselves dated Year of the Dog, Second of the Decade, repeatedly refer, as we have seen, to earlier tamra of Year of the Pig, First of the Decade that had warned officials against illegally collecting taxes from the monastery folk. The following injunction, accompanied by oaths against disobedient officials, recurs several times: "Let the taxes that the civil officials have collected from the monastery folk in disobedience to the royal tamra of the Year of the Pig, First of Decade up to Year of the Dog, Second of the Decade, be given to the abbots and officials of the Pa Kaeo monasteries for the benefit of the Religion."20 By the early eighteenth century, the particular historical years referred to might have become blurred in memory or even forgotten, but, as generation after generation of custodians of the tamra recalled their provisions, this specific combination of animalcycle years and decade-cycle years came to be associated with powerful prohibitions against infringement of the monasteries' autonomy. The insertion of these dates, with their special local meaning, into the Lady White Blood story cast about them the added sanction of antiquity and myth. The author/copyist responsible for the insertion no doubt viewed it not as a falsification of the "historical record" but as a selfevident reflection of a deeper truth. This particular combination of animal years, with their local connotation of auspiciousness, appears again in an early twentieth-century recasting of the Lady White Blood story by a local Bang Kaeo poet. In that poem Lady White Blood's foster parents dreamed that in these years a phumibun [person of miraculous merit] would appear, and all the poor villagers would be rich, "there would be plenty of rice, gold and silver, betel and areca, and honey."21 The text of the Lady White Blood manuscript does not end with the conclusion of the Lady White Blood story, but continues with a second story presented as a sequel to that one, the link between the two being made stylistically thus: "After this [the deaths of Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman], the three monasteries were deserted for a thousand years. Then . . ." The sequel story is the story of Phra Khru Intharamoli. (Phra Khru = "Revered Guru," title of learned monks.) According to the story, Phra Khru In was born at Bang Kaeo, and when he grew up he traveled far and wide in a Chinese junk, dispersing enemies by magic. After many years he returned to his elderly parents at Bang Kaeo and restored the monasteries. Then he took a list of the restored monasteries to Ayudhya to ask the king to endow them, but he found the capital besieged and in danger of falling. When the king asked for volunteers to break the seige, Phra Khru In said, "Give me one horse and five hundred white-robed ascetics and I will do it." Thus equipped, he chalSongkhla [Touring Songkhla] (Songkhla, 1963), for a discussion of the many Sihing Buddhas and the places that claim them. 20 Prachum phratamra, pp. 13,14,17, 23, 35-36. 2 * Chob Chamroenkan, mun, Prawat nang liiat khao lae tamnan muang phatthalung [Story of Lady White Blood and history of Phatthalung], printed in Phatthalung in B.E. 2516 [1973] for the cremation of Phra Athikan Niiang Suphachado, abbot of Wat Phothiyaram, p. 11. (I am grateful to the Mrs. Khling Makcuy, Aphat Hamlet, Chong Thanon Village, for allowing me to photocopy her copy of this text.)

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lenged the enemies to battle, and they fled in confusion. The grateful king asked Phra Khru In what he would take as a reward; in reply, he brought out and read to the king his list of monasteries to be endowed. At this point, as in the story of Somdet Chao Phra Kho in the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript, the story of Phra Khru In in the Lady White Blood manuscript falls into the phraseology of a tamra as it "quotes" the tamra given to Phra Khru In.22 When we look at analogous texts from neighboring Nakhon Sithammarat, we find similar preoccupations and similar stylistic devices for expressing those preoccupations. The manuscript called Manuscript C in David Wyatt's study of the chronicles of Nakhon Sithammarat is striking in this respect.23 Like the Bang Kaeo and Phra Kho texts, it is concerned with the rights and privileges of monasteries of a specific ordination chapter—the Langkaram chapter in this case—of Nakhon Sithammarat. Also like them, it is concerned with the privileged hereditary status of a certain kin group associated with these monasteries, and, particularly, with written patents having a "lineage" of their own extending into the past that affirm and confirm this hereditary status. The manuscript itself, like the Phra Kho manuscripts, is a white book into which several related texts—in this case three—were copied (or composed) at the same time to complement one another. Wyatt translates the manuscript as a single "chronicle," but the manuscript's punctuational devices compel us to remember that the manuscript's constituent parts were separate texts brought together deliberately.24 Whether this juxtaposition occurred first in this particular manuscript, which Wyatt tentatively dates to the late eighteenth century, or whether this manuscript is a copy of an earlier one in which this juxtaposition already appeared, is impossible to say. The punctuational devices separate the manuscript's text into five blocks. Two of these are simply short explanatory passages referring to the preceding or following sections, leaving three longer texts, namely, two narratives and a list. The relation of the two narratives in Manuscript C is structurally the same as that between the two stories in the Lady White Blood manuscript. The first narrative is the story of how the temples were founded in ancient times by Phraya Sithammasokarat [Sri Dharmasokaraja], the legendary founding king of Nakhon, and a wealthy merchant from Pegu, in Burma. The structural high point of the story is reached when, after completing the temples, the founders composed written documents (tamra) guaranteeing the authenticity of the monasteries' endowments and the privileges of the founding kin group. The narrative adds verisimilitude here with the detail that the founders caused two copies of the tamra to be made, one in Khmer script and one, presumably in Thai, on phlao paper, to which seals (tra) were then 22

Phra Khru In and his parents are mentioned in the "original lists" that were read and reconfirmed in Year of the Pig, First of the Decade as living persons, Tamra phra phlao, pp. 910. The text of the Year of the Pig document also mentions the Acheh-Aru raids as within living memory (p. 11), so I believe this Year of the Pig can be converted to A.D. 1599. That would place Phra Khru In (the historical figure) sometime earlier in the sixteenth century, before the pirate raids. 23 David K. Wyatt, The Crystal Sands: The Chronicles of Nagara Sri Dharrmaraja (Ithaca: 1975). Appendix IV, pages 227-43, is a meticulous transcription of the Thai text of this manuscript. On pages 56-59 and 149 Wyatt discusses the manuscript. His translation is on pages 150-77. 24 By "punctuational devices" I mean the signs that were used in Thai manuscripts to separate

audience certainly were) the Pa Kaeo tamra of A.D. 1610. These tamra, themselves

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affixed on the first and last leaves.25 The second narrative is the story of a hero—an elephant-tamer who belonged to the tawra-possessing kin-group—who won favor with the king in Ayudhya by presenting him with a fine white elephant. He then petitioned the king to restore and reconfirm the privileges of these monasteries and of his kin group "according to the tamra [of the founders]" and to grant a new tamra setting this forth. Both narratives contain complex "quotes" of their respective tamra, the second making copious reference to the "prior tamra" of the founding ancestors as well. We might note also that the emphasis on kin group—on remembering the ancestors—and on having a written record to assist in such remembrance bears structural similarities to the Langkachat [Phra Kho] texts as well. The third text in Manuscript C purports to be an excerpt from the "lists of Nai Sam Chom" of lands dedicated to the Great Reliquary and to the upkeep of certain Buddhist edifices or offices in Nakhon. We have encountered the lists of Nai Sam Chom before, both in the 1610 tarara-within-the-1698 tamra and in the history of Somdet Chao Phra Kho. Reference to them also appears repeatedly in the Nakhon chronicles, where several contradictory dates for their compilation are given.26 My surmise is that sometime in Nakhon's history, perhaps after it came into a tributary relationship with Ayudhya in the fifteenth century, an official with the title Nai Sam Chom, acting for the Ayudhyan king or the Nakhon ruler or both, made a survey and drew up lists of lands and people dedicated to the service of various religious edifices or having special tributary duties and privileges.271 doubt that these lists were consulted routinely; rather, each hereditary grouping "remembered" its inclusion in the list together with its duties and privileges. As time elapsed and memories blurred and the inevitable conflicts arose, the resulting appeals to authority no doubt led, as in the case of tamra, to resurveys and recopyings of the lists of Nai Sam Chom; hence, the proliferation of dates for these lists. Again, as in the case of tamra recopyings, each new list would have been saturated with all the previous lists. Such resurveys, recopyings, and appeals to the "lists of Nai Sam Chom" no doubt were events of note in their time; consequently, when local history-writers recounted temple foundings or notable reconfirmations granted to local heroes, their narratives to be "true" had to include reference to a survey by Nai Sam Chom or to the authoritative lists. The ability of the southern historians to compose lists and tamra-like texts to include in their narratives raises the question of whether Prince Damrong's characterization of the southern-made copies of decree-texts as forgeries might not have been true in a stricter sense than he perhaps meant. Evidence hinting that these were "honest copies" and not, in the strictest sense, forgeries can be found in an examination once more of that quintessentially textual aspect of these manuscripts: their punctuation. The texts of "tamra-that-once-must-have-existed," created by the southern historians for their narratives, are always found embedded in the narratives as part of the story, not set apart from it by any punctuational device. In contrast, tamra 25

Cf. the 1698 Bang Kaeo tamra manuscripts, discussed earlier, that were issued at the Ayudhyan court in parallel Khmer and Thai versions, each duly stamped with the appropriate seals. 26 See, for example, Wyatt, Crystal Sands, pp. 34-35 (including note 34), 135, and 169. 2 ^ "Nai Sam Chom" is a title, not a name. It means "master of the three chom." The "three chom" are mentioned in Ayudhyan law codes, and it has been suggested that they were all departments with record-keeping functions; see Sutthiwong's entry on "Nai Sam Chom" in Saranukrom ... phak tai, p. 118. Thus there could have been many Nai Sam Chom.

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texts that present themselves as honest copies of actual tamra are always set apart in these manuscripts by a series of punctuational devices that place these tamra outside the narratives. In other words, the tamra within the histories were exercises of the authors' historical imagination, and, though their authors believed them to be "true" by a logic of history proper to their particular historical sensibility, they distinguished between these tamra, which they had re-created by the exercise of that logic, and tamra the existence of which was proven to them by another logic, that is, because a tamra—a physical artifact—still existed from which they had made their copy. The "tamm " of Phra Khru Intharamoli embedded in the Phra Khru In story in the Lady White Blood manuscript is especially instructive on this point. Here was a case where we can be sure that the local hi story-writer knew of an extant copy of a tamra granted to a particular Phra Khru In, since he himself either made a copy of that text from an authorized manuscript or, at least, wrote a superscript date in that manuscript, possibly on the occasion of a ceremonial reading of the text. In the case of his history of Phra Khru In, however, he did not copy that tamra word for word into his history; rather, he "copied" it by memory from what he "knew" the provisions of such a tamra should be and from his mental image of the stylistic conventions of such a text.28 Throughout the discussion so far I have concentrated on the textual properties of the Bang Kaeo and Pra Kho manuscripts to show that trje attitude of southern Thai villagers toward these manuscripts at the beginning of the twentieth century was compounded of more than fossilized respect, amounting to superstitious worship, for ancient documents guaranteeing tax exemption. I argue that the attitudes witnessed by Prince Naris at Khuha Sawan and Phra Ratanathatmuni at Bang Kaeo were, in fact, a coherent outgrowth of earlier Thai attitudes toward certain kinds of written texts. This is not to deny the importance of the content of the texts to the southern Thai communities that preserved them. All through this discussion, the value these communities placed on these documents because of what they said has been clear. The petitioners for tamra did not petition the king merely to have powerful royal utterances inscribed to keep as talismans in their villages. They petitioned in order to have powerful royal utterances inscribed with the particular words that would insure the continuance of their communities' autonomy. I do not wish to generalize from the southern Thai communities to communities created by royal religious endowments elsewhere, because the southern Thai case, due to its distance from the royal capital, may have been unique. Nevertheless, the picture we can get from the documents of the southern Thai communities is suggestive for several reasons. First of all, the donations were not outright land grants to the monasteries; rather, the king relinquished his right to collect taxes and labor service from the people living within the boundaries of the grant and gave those rights in perpetuity to the monasteries. Moreover, the people on the grant appear mostly to have been farmers owning their own modest parcels of land who continued to own and work them in the grant. Land could, in fact, be donated outright by individuals to the monasteries. If the donor was a local landowner, it 28

He makes some revealing "mistakes," both in use of royal vocabulary and in relating that Phra Khru In was given jurisdiction over 298 monasteries. The real tamra consistently gives the number as 290, of which only about thirty or so were were under the oversight of the abbot of Wat Khian Bang Kaeo; the larger number refers to all the Pa Kaeo monasteries of the Nakhon-Phatthalung region under the supervision of a Nakhon prelate.

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appears that he or she and his or her descendants then became hereditary caretakers of the land so donated. There may have been advantages in this arrangement, as the following story from the history in the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript suggests. After the Ujong Tanah (Johore) pirates raided the region, the ruler of Nakhon Sithammarat was sent to pursue them. During his triumphal return journey, he built stupas on Khao Daeng (Red Mountain) and surrounding islands at the southern tip of the Sathing Phra Peninsula. His wife, Princess Krishna (sic), hearing of his meritorious deeds and wishing to emulate them, proceeded south through the peninsula, restoring viharas and setting up Buddha images along the way. When she reached Wat Kuti Luang, she built a vihara, erected an image, and built some monks' dwellings. Then Princess Krishna asked the people, "Who owns the ricefields to the front and the back of the monastery?" And the old people all said, "These ricefields belong to Mrs. Chak." Princess Krishna then sent for Mrs. Chak. When Mrs. Chak came, Princess Krishna said, "The ricefields before and behind the monastery, I ask to buy them so that I can donate them to support the monks." Mrs. Chak replied, "I will not sell. I ask to donate the ricefields myself to support the monks of Wat Kuti Luang." . . . Princess Krishna said, "Good! I will join with you in making merit."2^ That Mrs. Chak preferred to donate the land herself rather than accept payment for it suggests she derived a benefit from the arrangement that she felt was the equivalent or better than the price of the land. It may have been pure spiritual satisfaction, but it may have been that and more. We know the monasteries benefited materially from the royal endowments. Did the people living within the grants benefit as well? The answer here must be more tentative. The stories recorded in the texts reflect a strongly positive attitude toward the grants, but we must remember that they were written from the point of view of the monks and community leaders, the "work leaders" (hua ngan), who held high status within the grants. Indeed, the chief monks and work leaders shared kinship ties with one another, so we might see them as constituting a local elite. On the other hand, in spite of possible intra-community tensions arising from inequalities of wealth, status, or local power, they may also, as local people with strong local ties, have shared with other members of the community an attitude of solidarity toward outsiders, especially potentially rapacious royal officials. The passage in the story of Somdet Chao Phra Kho in which he specifically asked that poor people be granted tax-exemption in perpetuity to care for Wat Phra Kho suggests that the monastic grants might have been havens from official exactions. Twentieth-century retellings of the story of Somdet Chao Phra Kho continue to stress his humble origins and his compassion for the poor. Indeed, a character not found in the seventeenth-century written version, Setthi Pan ("Rich Man Pan"), is given prominent play to emphasize this. According to one twentieth-century version, the reason Somdet Chao Phra Kho's mother was working in the fields in the hot sun, even though she had a small infant, was because Setthi Pan forced her to 29

Prachum phratamm, p. 82. (From the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript.)

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harvest rice for him to pay a debt.30 Setthi Pan tried to claim the magic jewel as payment for the debt, but sickness visited his whole household as long as he kept the jewel. Only when he gave it back and forgave all the debts everyone owed him did the sickness leave.31 It was clearly preferable for most people within the grant to pay taxes and labor service to one's local temple than to owe such obligations to a distant and indifferent royal administration. We must not dismiss the importance of the sense of spiritual well-being that people in the grants may have felt at having their labors directed toward a meritorious end—meritorious in the Buddhist sense of "making merit"— but we can also look for more tangible benefits. In the grant, one need never leave home to do one's service, unlike the royal corvee where one could be gone for months; in the grant the monastic authorities, being aware that their well-being depended on that of the community, must have been more flexible in times of hardship or poor harvests than royal officials coming from outside. Not least in consideration must have been that people in the grant were not subject to military service, although in times of pirate raids they were to send contingents of men under their own leaders to assist the royal forces. All law cases, except capital crimes, were to be settled within the grant. These provisions taken together, in an area as far from the capital as Phatthalung, add up to these communities' virtual autonomy outside the civil domain. In his study of monastic endowments in medieval Sri Lanka, Gunawardana suggests that the institution of endowments was a check on the growth of royal absolutism in the early medieval period.3^ Something similar seems to be the case with the southern Thai endowments. Relying on the ideology of royal religious generosity, the southern communities used the authority of the king to remove themselves from the day-to-day interference of the king's officials. This autonomy in turn perhaps fostered a strong sense of local identity. With their tamra and contextualizing histories and supporting lay communities, the Pa Kaeo monasteries of Phatthalung centered on Bang Kaeo and the Langkachat monasteries of the Sathing Phra region centered on Phra Kho were the focal points of two such autonomous domains. The two communities seem both to mirror each other and to preserve local differences, just as the two complexes seem both to mirror and to set themselves apart from similar monastery-manuscript-community complexes in neighboring Nakhon Sithammarat. All of these communities might be seen as being engaged historically in a conversation with one another, in which each monastery-manuscript-community configuration was a restatement of or a reply to statements made by the others. This image of a conversation that allows for differences within a larger discursive community is another way of stating the model 30

Cf. Peter Vandergeest's discussion of the twentieth-century style "debt-slavery" in southern Thailand after formal slavery was abolished. Poor villagers, forced to borrow rice in hard times from their "rich" neighbors, now worked off their debt by laboring in their creditors' fields. Peter Vandergeest, "Siam Into Thailand: Constituting Progress, Resistance, and Citizenship" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1990), chapter 10. 31 A revered elderly monk at Wat Lek, where there is a sacred Bodhi tree associated with Somdet Chao Phra Kho, told me this story. Around the walls of the vihara at Wat Lek, as well as in many other wats up and down the Sathing Phra Peninsula, there are murals depicting the story of Somdet Chao Phra Kho's life, including scenes with Setthi Pan. 3 ^ R.A.L.H. Gunawardana, Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka (Tucson, 1979), p. 350.

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of multi-vocal historical discourse that we have suggested characterized the historical sensibility of southern Thailand before the advent of Thai "national history." What were the voices in this conversation saying? The antiquity and authenticity of their patents, as we have seen, would have been a major theme. Another might have been claims of precedence based on the purity of each monastic tradition's ordination. As we have noted, the monasteries centered on Wat Phra Kho that were the subject of the texts in the Wat Phra Kho manuscripts were all of the Langkachat chapter. The monasteries in the Phatthalung region centered on Wat Khian at Bang Kaeo were all of the Pa Kaeo, sometimes called Langkakaeo, chapter. The monasteries that figure in the Nakhon Si Thammarat Version C history are all of the Langkaram chapter. The "Langka" in the names of all these ordination chapters (more precisely, "ordination lineages") points to the ancient name Sri Lanka, revived in the modern name of the nation on that island, and signifies that each of these ordination lineages or chapters claimed to originate in a "pure" ordination of its founding monks performed there. The history of Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia has seen repeated movements of renewal pulsing back and forth between the Buddhist areas of mainland Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. Sometimes the primary direction of this movement of renewal was from Southeast Asia to Sri Lanka, as in the missions from Burma in the eleventh century to renew proper ordination in that isle, or in the introduction of the "Siamese ordination" to Sri Lanka in the mid-eighteenth century.33 At other times the movement pulsed the other way, flowing most strongly, perhaps, from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. In these centuries, when serious disputes arose in Southeast Asian Buddhist monastic communities over the order's purity, a common solution was for the "protestant" faction to go to Sri Lanka to be re-ordained, bringing back this purer ordination to found a new ordination chapter.34 "Purity" of ordination did not refer to the moral qualities of the monks performing it so much as to the use of "uncorrupt" ordination texts and rituals, including the proper pronunciation of the Pali chants. The most recent, and, therefore, ipso facto the purest ordination chapter was always regarded as the most prestigious, but older ordination chapters continued to exist side by side with the new. South Thailand, because of its geographic location, seems to have been especially involved in this movement, and it shows traces of four such ordination chapters, the three Langka chapters mentioned above plus a fourth, the Langka Doem ("original Langka"), presumably the oldest.35 Tensions among and contradictory claims of these ordination chapters would have been part of the conversation suggested above. It is noteworthy that the the articulation of manuscripts-monasteries-communities is not limited to any single ordination chapter but is common to all of them in this region, lending weight to the notion that each articulation is a restatement of or reply to all the others in this conversation. 33

Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism, p. 168. The northern Thai and Shan chronicles are most illustrative of this phenomenon. Fo examples in English translation, see Sao Saimong Mangrai, The Padaeng Chronicle or the sixteenth century Jinakalamali, translated in the Pali Text Society series as A Sheaf of Garlands of the Epochs of the Conquerer. 35 The most extended discussion of the four Langka chapters is in Sutthiwong, Phutthsasana, pp. 33-38. 34

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In the Land of Lady White Blood

This tension is reflected and resolved in the punning story of the four guardian crows of the Great Reliquary of Nakhon, or, alternatively— depending on where one hears the story—the four guardian crows of the reliquary stupa of Wat Khian at Bang Kaeo. According to the story, four supernatural guardian crows (to), named Ka Kaeo ("Jewel"), Ka Ram ("Ashram"), Ka Chat ("Rebirth"), and Ka Doem ("First"), whose colors are white, yellow, red, and black,36 guard the four cardinal directions of the reliquary. The crows stand for the four Langka chapters, and the story signifies, I presume, that just as each crow has a necessary role in guarding the relic, so each chapter is an indispensable part of southern Thai Buddhism. The pun is made possible by southern-Thai speakers' practice of cutting multi-syllabled words down to their last syllable (e.g. Lang/ca = ka = "crow"), but its beauty and truth lie in the fact that Buddhist relics guarded by supernatural crows are not a strange anomaly but figure in stories of relics elsewhere in the Theravada world.37 Claims about the presence of relics themselves at each center also would have been a theme of the conversation. According to the Lady White Blood story, the history of "Phatthalung" begins when Phraya Krong Thong enshrined the relic at Sathing Phra at the same time as Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman built the temples at Bang Kaeo. As we have seen, the history of Wat Phra Kho also begins with the enshrinment of a relic. And of course the enshrinement and re-enshrinment of the Tooth Relic at the Great Reliquary in Nakhon Sithammarat are central events in that town's history.38 Characteristic of the multi-vocal nature of this conversation about sacred relics, ancient patents, or pure ordination lineages is that, although each community privileged its own tradition, it let the other communities' claims stand as well. As with the story of the crows, each community's claim, by mirroring all the others while yet being unique, seems to have authenticated the others even as it asserted itself. Perhaps this was because each community recognized itself as part of a larger community and saw its history as part of a larger history. More particularly, each community saw itself as part of the Buddhist world and its history as part of Buddhist history. Although written historical traditions from elsewhere in the Theravada Buddhist world—Sri Lanka or Burma or northern Thailand, for example—may have been known to only a few literate, well-traveled monks, knowledge of the themes of Buddhist history, particularly as it developed in Tai-speaking areas, was well enough diffused to reassure local communities that the themes of their particular histories were not merely congruent with, but were an integral part of, the larger 36

The four colors of the crows also figure elsewhere in Bang Kaeo myth. They are the colors of Phraya Kuman's blood. They are also, of course, the symbolic colors of the four Vedic varna. What is the significance of this in the local context, one wonders? 37 See, for example, the ]inakalamalini, pp. 106-108 and Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon, p. xxxviii. 38 Wyatt, Crystal Sands, passim. Stewart Wavell, The Naga King's Daughter (London, 1964), pp. 199-200, records a story told him in 1962 by the abbot of Wat Machimawat in Songkhla telling how the Tooth Relic was divided and enshrined in the reliquaries of Wat Sathing Phra and Wat Mahathat at Chaiya as well as being enshrined at Wat Mahathat in Nakhon. In the context of stories about the Tooth Relic in southern Thailand, it is worth noting that Chinese histories written during the Tang Dynasty (618-905) record that a Tooth Relic was among the items of tribute sent to the Chinese ruler in the mid-first millennium from P'an P'an, a state somewhere in the isthmus of the Malay Peninsula; Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese (Kuala Lumpur, 1961), pp. 48-49.

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tradition. Thus when a community asserted its uniqueness, it was also asserting its confidence that it was an exemplar of Buddhist life everywhere.

Plate 5. Ladies of Bang Kaeo, descendants of phlao custodians

5 LANDSCAPE AND HISTORY

rince Naris, during his 1902 tour of inspection, spent a morning in Bang Kaeo, being shown around Wat Khian. This included a stroll over a tumulus, which he was told was the site of an ancient city, a few hundred meters from the wat grounds. He remarked that, although there was no proof of this story, the quantity of ancient potsherds scattered over the surface suggested its plausibility.1 He also remarked on the unusual style—"a bit Indian, a bit Javanese, a bit Chinese"—and "truly ancient" design of the reliquary stupa at Wat Khian.2 He was told that there was a tamnan ("historical account") that told how the temple had been built by "Lord White Blood." A day or so earlier, in Phatthalung, he had been taken to the spiritually potent Khuha Sawan Cave and had also been shown locally revered manuscripts. A week or so later in his journey, as he was traveling northward up the Sathing Phra Peninsula, he stopped at Wat Phra Kho, where he again noted stylistic peculiarities of the reliquary stupa there that hinted at its antiquity. He also was told a story of the monastery's history, the details of which he forgot. ("A magical crystal jewel figured in it" was all he could remember.)3 Clearly, it seems, the local people were bent on showing off that which they most prized to the prince. This especially seems to have included sacred sites and potent objects, together with the histories of those sites and objects. This brings us back to the question of "historical sensibilities." How was "history" perceived by the local village people intent on impressing the prince? To the old woman of Khuha Sawan and to others of her world, what would "history" have been, what would its texture and flavor have been? I have already suggested that these local communities saw their own history as part of larger Buddhist history, but I also implied that very few people in these communities would have had direct knowledge, either through reading or hearing, of specific traditions from elsewhere in the Buddhist world. Rather, their confidence would have stemmed from a general diffusion of knowledge, largely communicated orally, from a few highly literate, well-traveled members of the community. Clearly, then, "history" for the old woman would not have been anything like "Thai national history." At the turn of the century, indeed, "Thai national history" was still being invented by the elite in Bangkok, and the reforms that would lead to

P

1 Prince Naris, Chotmai rayathang, pp. 42-43. Recently, the Thai Fine Arts Department has established a small museum at Wat Khian in which one can see Song Dynasty porcelain found at the site. 2 Ibid. 3

Ibid., p. 53. The crystal jewel was of course that given by the magical snake to the infant Luang Pho Thuat (Somdet Chao Phra Kho).

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the extension of primary education to disseminate that history were in their infancy. So just what do I mean by "history" for the old woman? What would have been relevant to her? By "history" I mean something like "the meaningful past," the past that a community believes is important, that must be remembered, that is bound up with the community's sense of its identity and its obligations to other generations. In other words, I am talking about the ingredients that make up any historical sensibility. As we saw in the discussion of tamra and tamnan, the texts themselves and the process by which they were produced and reproduced explicitly presupposed the importance of remembering "the significant past" and keeping that remembrance alive. In other words, the manuscripts themselves simultaneously embodied, and were the product of, a clear historical sensibility. This historical sensibility informed the construction of the texts themselves, and also permeated all the stories told about the manuscripts. The villagers' preservation of the manuscripts and their knowledge of their contents, even though no one dared read them, suggest that this same kind of historical sensibility still informed the historical discourse of southern Thai villagers at the beginning of this century. The history that would have been meaningful for the old woman of Khuha Sawan, I suggest, would have been a ramifying network of stories about a meaningful past. Localized stories would come first. Even now, nearly all such stories are attached to places. Places without stories are unimportant, new, and without history. The most important story to the people of any given community would be the story of that very place, although they might also know and tell the stories of neighboring places. An important feature of these stories is that they often locate themselves in a wider historical context. That is, at some point in the story a connection may be made between the local story and events in the "royal capital" or events in Buddhist history elsewhere. We saw this in the case of written histories, but such features also figure in oral stories. These connections contribute to the "historical-ness" of the stories. Although I cannot claim to find in the historical discourse of rural southern Thailand early in this century a distinction such as exists in History between myth and "true stories about the meaningful past," I hope to show that this historical discourse made a distinction between stories about the meaningful past that, by the internal logic of that discourse, were "true" and stories that were "mere stories." In other words, there was a "sense of history," just not our sense of history. When we turn to terminology for "stories about the meaningful past," the woman of Khuha Sawan would have had a choice of several locutions—a term I use deliberately, because she was probably illiterate. We can easily dispose of a term she would not have had available, that is, prawatsat (xJltlfflFhcto'J). This term was coined by King Vajiravudh, son and successor of Chulalongkorn, only in this century as an intentional equivalent of History, and in Thai thinking today carries all the meanings History does, from the arcane to the popular.4 It is a compound of the Sanskrit/Pali term pravati, which in Thai prawat carries meanings rather like the older European use of the term "history" (narrative, history, biography), and the Sanskrit term shastra, the meaning of which is close to the older European use of the term "science," (branch of learning). Taken together they mean History, the modern academic discipline and all its offshoots. The term prawat has long been used alone in 4

Somkiat, "Politics of Thai Historiography/' p. 114.

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Thai in the sense of "narrative" and certainly would have been understood by moderately learned monks or male villagers who had received some monastic education, but its use in common parlance was fairly rare, for the term is seen, even today, as bookish and stilted.5 The formal term for "historical account" before the modern term prawatsat was coined was tamnan (onuiu).6 This term, originally Khmer, was used in common parlance and would have been familiar to the old woman of Khuha Sawan. Although tamnan could be oral or written, my tentative impression is that the term tamnan was used especially if one "knew" that somewhere there was a written version, and moreover, a written version with a respectable antiquity. Tamnan may have been told and even handed down orally, but their authority resided in the fact that somewhere there was a written account that someone who could read at some time had read. In other words, the term tamnan, if my understanding is correct, carried the connotation of "[written] historical narrative." The most readily available locution the old woman would have used, that both appears in old manuscripts and is used in common parlance today, would have been the simple "stories told from the past," (rtiang lao tae kon, l?3>Hcmu»inau). The word riiang, "stories," might equally well be translated "narratives" or "accounts." Even more simply expressed and more commonly heard is the locution "from the past, it was told ..." (tae kon ko lao wa, Uflnount i«mi). If one today asks an elderly person— sitting in the coolest, breeziest room in whatever monastery one is visiting, while the doves coo drowsily and incessantly in the trees outside—whether the monastery or village (or chedi, or pond, or image) has a prawat, and it does, the answer one gets nearly always begins, "tae kon ko lao wa ...." This leads to the question of methodology. How can I hope to reconstruct a thought-world for which few contemporary written sources exist, and those mostly by outsiders such as Prince Naris? During several months in 1987 I did a lot of listening to old people, women and men, tell stories. My method, if something so unsystematic can be called a method, was to make my base in a village in the Sathing Phra Peninsula where I had friends and acquaintances of long standing, and from there to travel around visiting temples. I would introduce myself as someone interested in southern Thai history and culture, and the stories usually emerged in the course of chatting with whoever was present in the temple when I visited. Occasionally, I might be directed to a person not present "who knows the history." Some storytellers, women in particular, claimed that they had learned the stories from their grandmothers (yai, H1U), and some added further that their grandmothers had learned the stories from their grandmothers. Male storytellers, many of whom were elderly monks, were more likely to say more generally that they had heard the story from "the old people" when they were children, although several also said they "had read it" somewhere. 5

Incidentally, the term shastra would also have been understood by the old woman, but its meaning to her would have been an undifferentiated blend of what in modern discourse is separated into "science" and "magic." 6 Much has been written in modern Thai scholarship about tamnan as a genre of traditional historical writing. For treatments in English see, for example, Charnvit Kasetsiri, "Thai Historiography from Ancient Times to the Modern Period/' in Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, ed. Reid and Marr, pp. 156-59, and Dhida Saraya, Tamnan and Tamnan History (Bangkok, n.d.), pp. 93-121.

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In the Land of Lady White Blood

In spite of all this listening, I cannot claim to have reached the "pure" world of turn-of-the-century rural southern Thai historical discourse. Much has happened in the past sixty or seventy years to change Thai ways of thinking about almost everything, including history, and even formerly remote rural communities like those of this study have never been immune. Most important perhaps has been the spread, beginning roughly in the 1920s, of primary education into the countryside and of printing presses to provincial towns. The appearance of local printing presses made possible the printing of local texts and stories in pamphlet form for distribution at the cremation of important monks, in emulation of a practice inaugurated earlier in the capital, or on other ceremonial occasions such as temple festivals.7 Possibly pamphlets such as these were what the male storytellers had read. Print gave these stories new currency, with the added authority of a modern medium, but this reproduction in a modern medium of stories that were the products of an older historical sensibility was inevitably transformative. Oral stories vary from teller to teller, but print tends to sanction only one version, and, in a literate print culture, which rural southern Thailand increasingly has become over the past half century, the print versions tend to be privileged over the oral ones. Not only are some versions of stories now privileged over others, making the latter "less true," even "inaccurate," but disseminators of stories who have access to print become privileged over oral storytellers. The relationship of stories and disseminators to audiences is also, by the same coin, radically altered. On the other hand, one might argue that the impulse moving many of those who have caused the printing of the stories proceeded itself from that older historical sensibility and was not intended to be transformative. It is perhaps one of the ironies of history in general that print, the transformative medium, has often been seized upon out of traditionalist impulses.8 The spread of primary education, of course, helped to create a readership for these printed works (secondary education in the provincial towns was perhaps even more important in this respect), but modern education also, by promulgating "Thai national history" in which the local stories appear nowhere (and therefore are not "history" but something else), has no doubt had a dampening effect on the "truth value" accorded these stories by younger persons who have received modern education. Such skepticism, in turn, might be creating a climate where even the more conservative members of the community might be coming to see the stories as "mere stories" rather than "stories about the real past." Increasing access to the mass media, especially television—in which, again, the myths of the center predominate—for instruction and entertainment has also led younger generations to lose interest in older forms of entertainment and instruction. 7

Coedes, The Vajiranana National Library, pp. 10-11, says the practice of distributing books as souvenirs at cremations was begun by King Chulalongkorn in 1904. 8 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press As an Agent of Change (Cambridge, U.K., 1979) vol. 1, p 179, notes that the success of the printing press in Europe ought to be looked for as much in "medieval Christian concerns" as in the "Renaissance spirit." Eisenstein also notes both how printing standardized texts and how it contributed to "fixing" some vernaculars (those taken up by printing) while causing others to be marginalized, pp. 80-81, 117-18. Benedict Anderson also points out how print capitalism elevated some vernaculars to the status of "national languages" while it marginalized others. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), pp. 46-48.1 am making a similar point on the smaller scale of local oral stories.

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No doubt being "partially forgotten" has always been a characteristic of oral traditions, accounting for their flexibility, but arguably the intrusion of the modern world transforms this characteristic to the point of killing the phenomenon altogether. One middle-aged village man remarked, while chatting with me one evening about my interest in old stories, that "no one really knows the stories anymore. All the old people who know the stories are dying, and soon they [both stories and tellers] will all disappear." This man, incidentally, was illiterate—fairly uncommon in males his age—so he only knew the stories from being told them, and his remark had an air of sadness. Nowadays, in fact, if one asks the history of a place, one is just as likely to be referred to a printed text written by someone in the provincial teachers7 college as sent to a local storyteller who "knows the history." The reconstruction I attempt here, then, is only a tentative and partial one, aimed at eliciting glimpses of an earlier historical sensibility now in retreat, but still occasionally perceptible when illiterate old women tell their grandmothers' stories, or when monks recount stories of "the old people," or even in the phenomenon of local printing and distribution of pamphlets of this local history. Although I recognize that storytellers today, even those who cannot read, have inevitably been affected by the pervasiveness of print versions of their stories, I still felt I had to listen to the stories being told in order to get the feel of the world I am now trying to describe. That world was neither wholly oral nor wholly literate but a blend of both, each folding back into and informing the other. Since there is no time machine to carry me back to the world of the old woman of Khuha Sawan, the best I could do was to visit the villages where her contemporaries' granddaughters were still telling their grandmothers' stories. At the beginning of the twentieth century rural southern Thailand was a society in which literacy though not widespread was also not rare. The effects of a tradition of literacy, from full literacy in probably no more than a handful of cases in every generation to partial on a more widespread level, were profound and ramifying. The connection of local stories to events or places in the "Great Tradition," mentioned earlier, is one example.9 There were always a few literate monks in every monastery, and, in the major rural monasteries, some elderly monks who could be called learned. Most males spent at least one rainy season in a monastery as novices or monks, and some monks also acted as teachers to village boys. Those village men or boys who spent only a single season in the monkhood or pursuing learning perhaps did not acquire much literacy, possibly only enough to spell out the alphabet, but those who stayed for longer periods often acquired enough learning to set up as astrologers or ritual specialists after they left the monkhood. Those who stayed for a longer period might achieve considerable recognition on account of their learning. Village women, unable to become monks, had less opportunity to acquire literacy, 9

I use the term Great Tradition, because it is a convenient shorthand, but I put it in quotation marks to indicate I agree with Tambiah that the analytical separation of culture into two layers is "profoundly a-historical," see Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults, p. 370. In text-based societies such as those of the Theravada Buddhist world, even though a majority of villagers may be illiterate, the literary culture permeates village thought. The villager participates in a unitary world, see Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults, pp. 369-77. For a critique, see Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, U.K., 1986), pp. 22-26.

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but there was no cultural bar to female literacy and a few may have learned to read, perhaps in order to learn the necessary formulae to be ritual specialists themselves.10 In the nineteenth century, as probably in earlier centuries, most villages had at least one household that possessed books of the "farmer's almanac" sort—books on astrology, auspicious days, or curing, for example.11 Books were highly valued and treated with respect, not so much because they were hand-copied and therefore rare, but because the words inscribed in them often conveyed Powerful (saksit, riflffl^ntf) knowledge. We have seen how royal tamra permeated with the king's voice were potentially fatal to an unprotected reader. This was not a unique phenomenon, but an extreme and striking example of a general notion that the Power in the inscribed words even penetrated the physical object, the book, itself. It was not uncommon, even in recent times, for old handwritten books containing curing formulae, for example, to be ground up to be put in medicine. Books, then, even those kept for practical consultation that people "dared" read, were talismanic objects. They were not read for entertainment or even for instruction. They were guarded and consulted secretly. This attitude toward books, together with the infrequency of full literacy, insured that most knowledge would be communicated orally. Paradoxically, because everybody "knew" that the authoritative formula for this or that practice or ceremony was inscribed in books, even though in practice most people of the community had derived their knowledge of these formulae orally, the books themselves were not consulted except on rare occasions. In their turn, inscribers of the books drew on this fund of oral knowledge to "correct" the new "authoritative" written versions they drew up when, for example, the old books became illegible. The strongly oral quality of these village books is pointed up by the fact that many of the words in them are spelled phonetically as southern Thai speakers would pronounce them. "Stories about the meaningful past" would have fallen into this nexus of oralwritten knowledge. Stories that were important enough ("true" enough?) sometimes got written down, as in the case of the stories in the seventeenth and eighteenthcentury manuscripts, but, before the advent of printing and modern education, the written versions, though highly respected, were rarely read. Everyone "knew" what was in an unread written text because they were familiar with an oral version. The problem of discrepancies between oral and written versions does not seem to have arisen. Even today storytellers gave me stories that varied in important details from printed versions without ever commenting on this discrepancy, suggesting either that they were not aware of it—this might especially be the case with illiterate storytellers—or that it did not bother them. Or was it, as in earlier times, that they "knew" the printed version without actually having read it? Does this suggest that the privileging of print versions that I mentioned earlier has not yet penetrated the historical sensibility of many storytellers and their listeners, that it is perhaps still a phenomenon of the more educated? 10

Cf. Tambiah, "Literacy in a Buddhist Village/' for a description of similar literacy patterns in another region of Thailand before the spread of modern education. 11 1 base this statement on the number and kind of books dating from the nineteenth century that have been collected from village households in the region by agencies such as the Institute for Southern Thai Studies at Songkhla and also on my own experience living in and visiting southern villages and being shown such books. Tambiah, "Literacy in a Buddhist Village," pp. 123-24, gives lists of books in two private collections in the northeastern Thai village of Ban Phran Muan.

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Earlier I suggested that a distinction was made between stories that were just stories and stories that were "real stories about the past." I must confess I never actually asked anyone, "Is this story true?" or "Did this story really happen?" or "Do you believe this story happened?" At first it never occurred to me to ask such a question, and later, when I had a clearer idea of what I was doing, I felt that to ask such questions would be to force the storytellers to evaluate their stories by the canons of History, thereby further obliterating any traces of a previous historical sensibility that might still be present. Nevertheless, as I witnessed more and more of the life of the communities where these stories had currency, I began to get an inkling of how to know whether a story was "true." "True" stories have consequences that are still operating in the lives of the people of those communities at the time the story is told. Two stories that concern natural features in and around Phatthalung town illustrate this thesis. The landscape of isthmian Thailand, including the area around Phatthalung, is punctuated with limestone hills that are often honeycombed with caves or eroded into weird and fantastic shapes. Among the hills on the outskirts of modern Phatthalung town itself are not only the hill containing Khuha Sawan Cave but also two hills known as Khao Hua Taek, "Broken-Headed Mountain" (its top looks broken off) and Khao Ok Thalu, "Pierced-Heart Mountain" (it has a large hole right through it). About the latter two hills is woven a story about the two wives of a local ruler whose jealousy of each other led to what amounted to a double suicidemurder. One wife was stabbed and the other's head was broken and the two women were turned into mountains, to stand forever facing each other. Although this story is told with great gusto, I never saw any evidence that it was regarded as more than a "just-so story" about how the mountains got their shapes. In contrast, Khuha Sawan Cave is involved in the "true" story of Lady White Blood. In many versions of that story, it figures as the place where Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman deposited the ashes of their foster parents, Grandfather Sammo and Grandmother Phet. Khuha Sawan Cave apparently has been for centuries a place where ashes of deceased ancestors have been deposited.12 It, like other caves in the south where such ashes have been deposited, is an extremely saksit place, and vows made there are efficacious. Villagers today still go to make vows and stick gold leaf at the exact spot in the cave where they believe the ashes of Grandfather Sammo and Grandmother Phet are buried.13 In the "pre-Historical" historical sensiblility of rural southern Thailand, then, a "true" story is one that reveals a residue of potency still affecting the life of the community when the story is told. I think we can refine this to suggest that residues of potency derive from the power of deceased ancestors to affect their descendants' lives. A "true" story is one in which the spirits of the ancestors who figure in the story are thought to be "really present." (By this token, if there are now, or ever 12

Long before there were Theravada Buddhist Thai speakers in southern Thailand, there seems to have been present among the local inhabitants an apprehension of caves as nodes of ancestral sacred power. Large numbers of Mahayana Buddhist votive tablets compounded of unfired clay and human ashes, probably of deceased ancestors or revered teachers, have been found in Khuha Sawan and other caves in the region. The tablets date from the eighth to tenth centuries. See Stanley J. O'Connor, "Buddhist Votive Tablets and Caves in Peninsular Thailand," cited earlier. 13 Chaiwut Piyakun, Chamra phlao, p. 103. The spot is a rsi (rishi) image near the entrance to the cave, believed to have been made by Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman as a memorial to their foster parents.

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were, persons in Phatthalung, though I met none, who treat or treated the spirits of the broken-headed and pierced-hearted ladies as "really present," capable of intervening in these persons' affairs, to them the story would be true.) How many such "stories about the real past" there might have been in southern Thailand at the beginning of this century, or might still be today, would be impossible to say. As we have seen, such stories frequently are attached to places; even where a story is shared over a wide area, there are usually distinct local variations marking the version as belonging to that particular place. Storytellers aware of versions from other places sometimes will remark that that is "their" story but this is "our" story. So perhaps there are, or were, as many stories as there are, or were, places that identify themselves as places. The historical discourse of rural southern Thailand before the advent of printing and modern education was thus manycentered and many-voiced. In order to give the feel of this historical discourse, I should like in the remainder of this chapter to pursue a handful of these stories and the places where I found them. The best place and story to begin with is Bang Kaeo and the story of Lady White Blood. This was the story the early eighteenth-century Bang Kaeo historian chose to record as the "true history" of the foundation of Phatthalung. No doubt it was already at that time a story of considerable antiquity. We know from Prince Naris that people in Bang Kaeo in 1902 were familiar with the story, which they referred to as a tamnan. This perhaps means they were aware the story was written down in the manuscripts "no one dared read," but their own knowledge of the story would have been through oral transmission. The story of Lady White Blood that I heard told in Bang Kaeo, by a middle-aged woman who said she had learned it from her "ancestors" (thuat, m@),14 coincided in most respects with the manuscript version, with the important exception that there was no "document" motif and no dates were mentioned. The Bang Kaeo versions might be read as a geography of spiritually potent places in the Phatthalung region, with Bang Kaeo at the center. The story starts at Ban Phra Koet ["Sacred Birth Village"] about twenty kilometers south of Bang Kaeo. Here Grandfather Sammo and Grandmother Phet, led by their elephants, discovered Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman in two large bamboo clumps. After they grew up and were married to each other and their foster parents died, Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman traveled by elephant to Khuha Sawan Cave, about fifteen kilometers north of Bang Kaeo, where they deposited the ashes of Grandfather Sammo and Grandmother Phet. Here we have a north-south axis centered on Bang Kaeo. The geographical and narrative "center" of the story comes with the story of how Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman, again led by the wise elephants, discovered treasures and sacred objects buried at Bang Kaeo and used them to build the two temples, Wat Sathang, Lady White Blood's temple, and Wat Khian, Phraya Kuman's temple. At the same time, eastward across the lake from Bang Kaeo, Phraya Krong Thong built the reliquary at Sathing Phra. This triple foundation is the climax of the story. The westward axis is then provided by Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman's journey to Trang to receive and enshrine the the Sihing Buddha. Finally, this sacred landscape centered on Bang Kaeo is tied to that wider world deemed locally important by the couple's ^ My southern Thai assistant told me that thuat applied only to ancestors three generations or more distant.

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pious activities in Nakhon Sithammarat and Lady White Blood's journey to the royal capital. A local Ban Phra Koet tradition, not known to the Bang Kaeo woman storyteller I heard, adds that Lady White Blood's burial place is in the neighboring village of Ban Bang Muang. The villagers revere the site, and every year on the full moon of the sixth lunar month hold a "merit-making" ceremony there.15 These villagers are Muslim, so their "merit making" does not include Buddhist monks, but otherwise all the usual offerings at ancestor ceremonies are made.16 Variants of the Lady White Blood story can be found not only in the Phatthalung area but all over the isthmian region from Chumporn southwards into Malaysia. Indeed, as we noted earlier, clear resonances of this story can be found in foundation myths from Sumatra to Borneo.17 It would be easy to be seduced into taking a structural approach, looking at all the variants of these stories to find an underlying unity that points to an ancient proto-story, but this would be to devalue the multi-vocal historical discourse in which these stories flourished. Following the multi-vocal model, I suspect that there never was a proto-story, but rather always a multiplicity of stories being exchanged back and forth from place to place over time, elements of one place's story being blended into another's and then elements of that modified story being blended into a further story. Meanwhile other story elements, including modified ones now returning "home," were traveling the other way. Hence, the family resemblance of stories so far-flung. Because the exchange was subtle and slow, each place could continue to see its (evolving) version(s) as its own unmodified original story. And, of course, always the story would be invested with particular local significance, tying it to important local objects, sites, personages. I am here suggesting, then, a reversal of the usual structuralist narrative of how stories are generated. That narrative assumes that once upon a time there was an wr-story which, through innumerable retellings in different times and places, gradually became many stories. I suggest that rather, or perhaps also, once upon a time there were as many stories as there were places, but that through interaction and communication and the human willingness to recognize and borrow good story-elements, everybody's story over time came to resemble everybody else's story, while yet each retained its own particularity. Stories about Lady White Blood from the Sathing Phra region also see her as centered at Bang Kaeo and tell roughly the same story as the Bang Kaeo version, showing perhaps the long and close relationship between the two regions in former times, but these stories add details that slightly shift the focus to Lady White Blood's activity in the Sathing Phra region. For example, according to a story recorded in Khlong Ri in 1988, Lady White Blood was present in Sathing Phra at the founding of the reliquary there. What is more, she also was the original discoverer of the relic enshrined at Wat Phra Kho, as well as being the founder of several other temples in the central Sathing Phra Peninsula. According to the same storyteller, an elderly ma well-respected as a knowledgeable professional "spirit doctor," Khlong Ri gets its name from the passage through the canal [khlong] there of two racing barges, the "Riia Ri," belonging to Lady White Blood. Apparently, a large dugout was excavated by villagers near Bang Kaeo several decades ago, which they called the "Riia Ri." 15

Chaiwut, Chamra phlao, p. 61, footnote.

16

Chaiwut, conversation with author, June 1987. See note 16, Chapter Four.

17

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The villagers, believing its wood to be saksit, enshrined it at Wat Bang Kaeo. Gradually, as villagers took away slivers as talismans, it almost entirely disappeared.18 The Khlong Ri storyteller said people who took the wood died because they could not withstand its supernatural power. He cited the fate of a couple of his relatives as evidence. As we go farther north, into Nakhon Sithammarat province, the explicit connection of the Lady White Blood story with Bang Kaeo fades, and, as we might expect, local concerns come into focus. I heard the following story at Wat Mae Chao Yu Hua in Chian Yai district in southern Nakhon Sithammarat province. It corresponds closely to a story of the wat's history recorded about a dozen years earlier by students from Srinakharinwirot University in Songkhla.19 According to the version I heard, Lady White Blood, known here as Mae Chao Yu Hua Liiat Khao ("Royal Mother White Blood"), was born nearby and became the wife of a king after it was discovered that she had white blood. (Her white blood was discovered when she cut herself preparing vegetables.) When she died, her elder brother, whose name was Khrua, asked that her body be sent home. The royal junk on which the body was sent could not come up the Karaket River, so the body proceeded by wagon until the wagon wheel broke off and fell into a deep well at Bo Lo ("Wheel Well"). This well exists today and is extremely saksit. Recently, the Health Department "improved" it. Before the improvement the well apparently had been an unfailing source of good, clear water, but after the improvement it periodically went dry. The clear implication here was that the Health Department had offended the ancestor spirits guarding the well. The narrator also spoke of a nearby haunted path, known to villagers as "Khrua's Path," that runs from Wat Bo Lo to the lady's burial place. The path is so saksit that no one dares build a house near it. Every year in the sixth lunar month, there is a festival at Wat Mae Chao Yu Hua with manora dancing. In the days before cars when everybody walked, manora dancers who passed Wat Mae Chao Yu Hua were "struck" with an uncontrollable dancing urge by the saksit aura of the place. After hearing the Mae Chao Yu Hua story in Nakhon Sithammarat province, I remembered that I had read or been told that, in the village of Tha Khura on the lakeshore of the Sathing Phra Peninsula, a couple of kilometers as the crow flies from Wat Phra Kho, there was a was a very saksit Buddha image called Chao Mae Yu Hua. Eager to pursue another local version of the Lady White Blood story I went to Tha Khura to hear villagers tell their story. The story turned out to be a different one, about a prince or princess who floated miraculously to the shore of the Sathing Phra Peninsula and was adopted by local villagers, bringing them good fortune. The abbots of both Wat Khian and Wat Phra Kho, who also each told me a version of the Chao Mae Yu Hua story, said there was no connection between Chao Mae Yu Hua and Lady White Blood. No such connection was made by either of the Tha Khura narrators I heard, nor does such a connection appear in recently published versions 18

Chaiwut, Chamra phlao, pp. 81-82. Chaiwut surmises that the boat dug up was one of those ordered built by Rama III in the early nineteenth century. The story of the Rua Ri recorded by Chaiwut, curiously, is not linked to Lady White Blood. Whether the stories about the Rua Ri antedated the digging up of the boat or whether they were floating stories that became attached to the boat after its discovery one cannot say. ^ I am grateful to Sutthiwong Phongphaibun, director of the Institute for Southern Thai Studies, Songkhla, for giving me access to these students' unpublished notes.

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of the Tha Khura Chao Mae Yu Hua story.20 On the other hand, a southern Thai scholar who has made a special study of the Lady White Blood legends says it was Lady White Blood herself who made the Chao Mae Yu Hua image at Tha Khura.21 In 1962 Stewart Wavell asked an elderly villager near Wat Phra Kho what he knew about Lady White Blood, and in reply the villager told him about Tha Khura's annual Chao Mae Yu Hua festival.22 Before the recent printed versions of the story appeared, including a version that seems destined to become the "definitive version," written by the current deputy abbot of Wat Tha Khura and published by the temple committee in 1984, the transmission of this story seems to have been completely oral. Because of this, there seems, even within the same village, to be a separate version for each teller, illustrating well the "multi-vocal" nature of such stories. Each of the printed versions differs more or less from each of the others, just as all of them differ from the oral versions I heard, each of which also differed from each of the others. The story, as previously noted, concerns a royal child or, in one version, a pregnant royal wife, who floated up miraculously to the beach of the Sathing Phra Peninsula near Tha Khura and was discovered and adopted by an old couple who lived in a village nearby. In some versions the child fetched up on the saltwater (i.e., Gulf of Siam) shore of the peninsula, having floated away from Nakhon Sithammarat, or Ayudhya, or even Sukhothai, and in other versions the child was discovered near the shore on the freshwater side of the peninsula, having floated from Phatthalung or Bang Kaeo across the lake. (The peninsula at Tha Khura is at its narrowest, being here only about three kilometers from seashore to lakeshore.) In one version the child's parents were the rulers of Sathing Phra, so it could have floated away on either side of the peninsula. In some versions, the floating child was a boy (most, but not all, the printed versions say this) and in some (all the oral versions I heard) the floating child was a girl.23 The abbots of Wat Khian and Wat Phra Kho both said she was the daughter of the ruler of Phatthalung at Bang Kaeo. She was set afloat by her father, according to the abbot of Wat Khian, because she liked watching manora performances too much and it annoyed him. According to the abbot of Wat Phra Kho she floated away accidentally while being bathed as a baby, and she was taught manora dancing by the old couple who adopted her. According to a (printed) version 20

Recent published versions include those in Khati chao ban ampkoe sathing phra amphoe ranot [Folklore of Sathing Phra and Ranot districts] (Songkhla, [n.d.]) pp. 49-51; "tamnan chao mae yu hua" in Saranukrom . .. phaktai, pp. 855-56; and "phraprawat chao mae yu hua" [History of Chao Mae Yu Hua] in Phra puttha rub chao mae yu hua [The Chao Mae Yu Hua Buddha image] (Tha Khura, Thailand, B.E. 2527 [1984]), pp. 2-15. 21 Chaiwut Piyakun, "tamnan nang luat khao" Saranukrom, p. 1281. 22 Wavell, The Naga King's Daughter, pp. 206-207. Although, for the theoretical reasons sketched earlier, I have tried to avoid structural analysis of these stories, I must give in to temptation and mention here that an explicit connection is made in at least one Malay version of the Lady White Blood story between that personage and a "floating" or "foam princess." See especially W. E. Maxwell, "A History of Perak from Native Sources," pp. 88-91. Ras also discusses this connection extensively, Hikayat Band jar, pp. 81-99. Of course, these elements— floating princesses come from the sea, white-blooded princesses born of bamboo—generally separate in the isthmian stories, might just as well have drifted together in the Malay stories in the manner I suggest, as have drifted apart in the isthmus from an wr-story. 23 Does this point to a divergence and a tension between female oral traditions and a male written tradition that "corrected" the women's versions for "authoritative" written/printed versions?

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in which she was the pregnant wife of a king, she was set adrift because she annoyed her husband by being addicted to manora performances.24 She and her child, who was born after she landed, were given refuge by the old couple, and she taught her son manora dancing. All other stories make a manora connection, too; for example, one of the old women storytellers I heard at Tha Khura said Chao Mae Yu Hua was the elder sister of the original manora ancestress. We shall return to the manora theme shortly. Eventually, according to all the stories, the bereft parents or repentant husband found their missing daughter/son/wife and begged him/her to return. In order to show gratitude to the adoptive parents, as well as to leave them a memorial of their adopted child, the royal mother ("Chao Mae Yu Hua") gave the old couple a gift of gold. In some stories the gold was in the form of a tray with the likeness of the foster child stamped on it, in others it was in the form of a Buddha image. The image, in which the spirit of the old couple's adopted daughter/son stayed while his/her body went with its royal parents/husband, was known as "Chao Mae Yu Hua/' In the stories in which the gold was not initially given in Buddha-image form, there are various accounts of how the gold got divided among all the villagers, thereby making them all "extended kin" of Chao Mae Yu Hua. In the latter stories, when it was realized that the memorial was disappearing, the Royal Mother caused all the gold to be returned to the village temple and cast in the form of a Buddha image. All the stories specify that the consecration of the Buddha image, whether it was the original gold gift or was made later from that gold, took place on the second day of the waning moon of the sixth lunar month. All stories conclude with the statement that ever since, anyone who is a descendant of the extended kin of Chao Mae Yu Hua must make ancestral offerings to Chao Mae Yu Hua on that day. The Chao Mae Yu Hua festival transforms the sleepy village of Tha Khura for the three days of its duration. Every year "ten thousand people come," I was told, and, after having witnessed the festival myself in May 1987,1 am inclined to believe it. The Chao Mae Yu Hua image is housed in a special pavilion at Wat Tha Khura, the outer area of which normally is used as a large, breezy reception area for wat visitors. (It was here I first heard the story of Chao Mae Yu Hua.) On the first day of the festival, however, it is packed to overflowing with expectant worshippers, the inner area is cluttered with offerings of popped rice and ripe rice sheaves, and the heat of so many spectators is stifling. About midday, to the sound of a crescendo of manora music, the image is brought out by the chief lay attendant from the locked room where it is kept the rest of the year. (The door to this room is covered with gold leaf that worshippers have pressed on it when they come to make vows to Chao Mae Yu Hua. The presence of lots of gold leaf on any object is a sure sign of its saksitness.) Then, in intense silence and heightened expectation, the tiny image—barely an inch high—is unwrapped by the abbot and, to the accompaniment of another burst of music, is set up on a pedestal to be lustrated by the worshippers. The water thus sacralized is collected in a large vessel below the image and everybody takes home a little bottle of it. After the unveiling, in a pavilion outside and facing that presided over by the unveiled Chao Mae Yu Hua, a manora performance begins that lasts for the duration of the festival. One prominent feature of this performance is the extraordinary number of people—in the hundreds—who don manora costumes or masks, and, 24

Saranukrom, pp. 855-56.

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under the guidance of the professional manora performers, dance before Chao Mae Yu Hua to redeem vows made to her. This manora, in fact, has a special name

manora ta yai yan chao mae yu hua (lAiwyiGmntJtnil l^niUJatjift), "the manora of the

extended kin of Chao Mae Yu Hua." The Chao Mae Yu Hua image itself has a manora bracelet on its arm. My quest for the historical sensibility of the old woman of Khuha Sawan led me down unexpected paths, and manora was one of them. Everywhere I went in pursuit of stories about the past, the manora motif cropped up. Besides the manora ceremonies held in the sixth lunar month at Wat Mae Chao Yu Hua and at Wat Tha Khura, there is in the same month a manora ceremony in Ban Phra Koet. It is in honor of—"presented as an offering to"—a saksit Buddha image called the Phra Koet that, like Lady White Blood, was "born," i.e. naturally occurred, in a bamboo clump and that, also like Lady White Blood, was discovered by Grandfather Sammo and Grandmother Phet/5 Both Wat Khian and Wat Phra Kho have their own saksit Chao Mae Yu Hua images, both with manora connections. The image at Bang Kaeo may also, not surprisingly, have a Lady White Blood connection,26 though the abbot denies it. Investigation of manora, therefore, seemed imperative in my quest for the historical sensibility of rural southern Thailand. Manora is a form of dance-drama that is held to be uniquely southern Thai. In cultural shows for tourists and Bangkok Thai, "southern Thai culture" is often represented by a manora troupe. Appreciation of manora and scholarly studies of it by outsiders, whether Thai or foreign, tend to concentrate on its "performing arts" aspect, including its literary side,^ and even those studies that emphasize the "folk drama" character of manora tend to concentrate on its performative and entertainment aspects, mentioning its "ritualistic aspects" only in passing.28 2

^ Chaiwut, chamra phlao, p. 94. Ibid., p. 76. The "brahmin" officiant at the tham bun phlao ceremony in Bang Kaeo in May 1990 also said that Lady White Blood was of "manora lineage" (trakun nora) (personal communication from Anthony Diller, who attended the ceremony; see below, Chapter 6). "Brahmins" are so called because they have command of certain magically efficacious Sanskrit-derived formulae for summoning and sending away the gods, ancestors, and other spirits, much like Manora masters. 27 See, for example, Rene Nicolas, "Le Lakhon Nora ou Lakhon Chatri et les origines du theatre classique siamois," Journal of the Siam Society 28 (1924): 84-110; Henry Ginsberg, "The Sudhana-Manohra Tale in Thai: A Comparative Study Based on Two Texts from the National Library, Bangkok and Wat Machimawat, Songkhla," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1971). The term manora comes from the Jataka story of Prince Sudhana and Manora, a story with a sort of "Swan Lake" motif in which Manora, a heavenly bird-woman, was loved, lost, and found by Prince Sudhana. This particular plot apparently has long since passed out of the repertoire of southern Thai manora troupes, but the name remains, together with a costume with a bird's tail and a clown-character drawn from the hunter in the Jataka story who captured Manora in a noose. Ginsberg, "Sudhana-Manohra," pp. 12-14, 26-27. See also Henry Ginsberg, 'The Manora Dance Drama: An Introduction," Journal of the Siam Society 60 (1972): 169-81 reprinted in Mattani Rutnin, The Siamese Theatre: A Collection of Reprints from the Journals of the Siam Society, (Bangkok, 1975), pp. 63-73. 2 ^ See, for example, Ginsberg, 'The Manora Dance Drama," in Siamese Theatre, ed. Rutnin, pp. 69-70, 72-73. Stewart Wavell, alone among writers I examined, notes that it is precisely because of Manora's role as magic that is has survived so long, The Naga King's Daughter, p. 160. 26

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Southern Thai villagers would find such an emphasis misplaced. I was told repeatedly that there are three kinds of manora. There is ngan wat ("temple festival'7) manora; there is manora ta yai yan; and there is manora longkhru (jjliwricNfl?, "manora when the teachers descend"). The first kind of manora is mere "entertainment manora" and not important, I was told. Important manora includes only manora ta yai yan and manora longkhru, and, of the two, the latter is more important. (Sometimes manora ta yai yan is described as being a lesser form of manora long khru.) We have already looked at manora ta yai yan in connection with Chao Mae Yu Hua. What, then, is manora longkhru? How can it help us understand southern Thai villagers' historical sensibilities? Manora long khru is a ceremony in which the manora ancestors, plus all other ambient spirits or deities capable of bringing good fortune or who might cause trouble if left out, are invited to a feast and an exhibition of manora dancing.29 Unlike "entertainment manora/' there is no plot danced in manora longkhru; rather, the dancers show their skill in the "twelve attitudes" (sip song tha), the dance modes prescribed by the "first teachers," that is, the ancestors. After three days the ancestors and spirits depart, satisfied and benevolent, or so the sponsor hopes. To put on a manora long khru it is necessary to engage a fully initiated Master Manora (nai nora, Ullllu'n) who knows the formulae necessary to "invite" (choen khru) the spirits to come and, just as important, to "send" (song khru) them away.30 During the three days of the ritual, the spirits remain present in and around the pavilion built for the performance; and, as some of them may not be benevolent, it is felt to be a "dangerous" time. The most exciting part of the ceremony, judging by the crowding around and intentness of the spectators, is when the ancestral manora spirits actually descend into the body of a medium, speaking to and dancing for their descendants. Manora long khru is often pronounced, and even written manora rong khru (ulwnl^Fij). The "r" and "1" sounds in some southern Thai dialects frequently are interchanged. But in this case, the uncertainty about pronunciation also seems to reflect a deliberate semantic ambiguity. Long seems to refer to the "descending" of the khru (guru, teacher) ancestor spirits that occurs during the performance. Rong, 29 Among the spirits "invited" to the manora long khru I witnessed were the Muslim Datu Marahum of Khao Daeng (Red Mountain), which is on the southern end of the Sathing Phra Peninsula, and the Buddhist Somdet Chao Phra Kho of Wat Phra Kho, a few kilometers to the north of the village. 30 An aspiring nai nora must spend a long apprenticeship with a teacher, also a nai nora, from whom he learns the dances and the ritual songs and formulae. He must remain a virgin until after his initiation and his ordination as a Buddhist monk, and he must not cut his forelock until his head is shaved for his ordination. When his teacher deems him ready, the teacher "gives" his pupil his khatha (FlltH), the secret, magical formula that enables the nai nora to control the spirits. The apprentice nai nora is then ready for initiation, which occurs on the eve of his ordination as a Buddhist monk, also a requirement of nai nora. The initiation includes dancing the prescribed dances in three temples and three villages; being invested, in the presence of seven nai nora, with the complete costume and regalia (until that point, crucial elements of this costume have been withheld); and, finally, dancing with the seven nai nora the "Stabbing the Crocodile" dance (a dance done only at manora long khru and done fully only at such initiations). When the apprentice nai nora's head is shaved for his Buddhist ordination, his teacher must cut the first three locks from his uncut forelock. After a season in the monk hood, the new nai nora is "finished" (cfll?^). (All this information I had from Nora Naem of Ban Kradangnga, Songkhla province.)

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meaning "structure" or "hall," seems to refer to the pavilion, called the rong nora, built specially for the performance and ritually destroyed at its end to prevent dangerous spirits from returning. (The good ancestor spirits are invited up to a special ancestor pavilion in the corner of the roof of the sponsor's house.) Thus the rong/long conflation reflects the performance itself.31 In June 1990 I was staying in Ban Kradangga village near Sathing Phra when a full manora long khru was held there. A woman, Mrs. Khiat, who was of "Manora lineage," had been told by her ancestors through a medium that, in return for the ancestors curing her of illness, she must put on a manora rong khru. She invited me to attend the ceremony, urging me to take notes, tapes, and photographs. In return I became a sponsor, helping to defray the cost of the ceremony. Mrs. Khiat was said to be of "Manora lineage" (trakun nora). What does this mean? As far as I can tell, people like her just know they are trakun nora because their ancestors were. It is almost a genetic trait. Manora lineage is passed down bilaterally, I was told, so if either parent is trakun nora so are all their children. People of manora lineage need not be manora performers themselves, and manora performers, including fully initiated nai nora, need not be of manora lineage. For example, the nai nora who performed the manora long khru I witnessed told me he was not trakun nora. As a child he had suffered a severe illness and had been given up for dead, until a medium, after dancing for two hours in trance, told his parents that the manora spirits wanted him and if he were dedicated to them he would live.32 There are trakun nora families in nearly every village in southern Thailand. My unsystematic impression, which might be worth following up by someone interested in historical demographics, is that the longer there has been continuous habitation in a given locality, the denser the incidence of trakun nora. Villages that people say have been settled only since 1850 or so seem to have fewer families that are trakun nora than villages that that are perceived to be many hundreds of years old; sometimes an entire village may be trakun nora. The chief characteristic of families who are trakun nora is that they are periodically required by their ancestors to hold a manora long khru or some family member will fall mentally or physically ill. In the case of the manora long khru I witnessed, it seems the illness of Mrs. Khiat, the sponsor, was brought on by the transgressions of her nephew, who had built a house facing a "ghost path" (thang phi) traversed by the ancestors and other spirits. By inconveniencing the spirits in their accustomed passage, he had aroused the manora ancestors' wrath, and his aunt's illness and his own mental disorientation had been the result.33 In order to placate the ancestors and spirits and to restore health and sanity to the living, therefore, the ceremony was felt by all the village to be absolutely necessary. We shall return to ghost paths in a moment, but first we need to turn our attention to the question of just who the manora ancestors are who have such power over the living. 31

Phittaya Butsararat has recently written an excellent master's thesis (in Thai) on manora long khru in which he makes a similar observation; Pitaya Butsararat, Manora rong khru tambon tha khae, amphoe muang phatthalung, changwat phatthalung [Manora Rong Khru of Tha Khae, Phattalung Municipal district, Phatthalung Province! (M.A. thesis, Srinakharinwirot University, Songkhla, 2535 [1992]), p. 3. 32 Ginsberg, 'The Manora Dance Drama/' p. 71, mentions the subject of "nora blood" but seems to miss its wider implications, seeing it as limited to actual performing family groups. 33 Cf. Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults, pp. 263-69 on the role of ancestral guardian spirits in a northeastern Thai village.

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Although, technically, all the deceased persons of a village are that village's ancestors, only a handful of them are deemed worthy of being named as "ancestors" in manora long khru ceremonies. One is here reminded of O. W. Wolters's suggestion that a characteristic feature of the religious sensibilities of many cultures in early Southeast Asia was that "ancestor" status was achieved?* So in the category of village ancestors we have unnamed run-of-the-mill ancestors and named ancestors. In the nora long khru I witnessed, only two were named, a brother and sister pair, both apparently well-known mediums of a few generations ago. Although these two had made their mark sufficiently to become named ancestors, they still were not "Great Ancestors" (ta luang), a status reserved for the original manora ancestors who figure in the "history"—prawat was the word I heard used—"hundreds of years old." According to that history, which is sung at the beginning of every nora long khru performance as part of the invitation summoning the ancestors, the Great Ancestors were the "first teachers" (khru ton), that is, the first manora troupe in southern Thailand who themselves were instructed in manora dancing by the gods. Like the Chao Mae Yu Hua story, the manora history seems until this century to have been handed down orally.35 Also like the Chao Mae Yu Hua story it concerns a floating princess. In some stories the princess alone, in some stories the princess and her brother, loved to dance and were instructed in manora dancing by a god. The princess, Nang Nuan Thong or Nang Si Khongkha, became pregnant—in some stories by divine agency and in others by her brother. Her/their angered father set her/them adrift on a raft with ladies-in-waiting who had abetted her/them. They floated ashore on an island named Ko Kachang, which narrators variously locate just off the coast of Nakhon Sithammarat or Suratthani, north of Nakhon, or somewhere in the Great Lake between Phatthalung and Sathing Phra. Several versions specify that the royal father was king in "Phatthalung." On the island Nang Si Khongka's child was born and she taught him manora. In some stories the ladies-in-waiting gave birth to future manora dancers as well. On the island the troupe also took up with a couple of hunters, Nai Pran and Ta Si, who eventually became the masked clown figures in manora. Eventually, Phra Thep Singhon, Nang Si Khongkha's son, took his troupe back to the royal capital where he won a royal pardon for his mother by the beauty of his dancing. This is the skeleton of the story of the original manora troupe, who are considered by villagers all over southern Thailand to be their ancestors.36 3

^ Welters, History, Culture, and Region, pp. 4-7. This statement should be qualified. General knowledge of the manora history seems to have been transmitted orally, and some nai nora may have transmitted their knowlege purely through oral means, but I understand some wrote the chants they needed to memorize, including the manora history, into books or onto scraps of paper. Because these texts, containing as they did "Powerful" knowledge, were jealously guarded, each troupe might preserve a slightly different version of the history. One wonders, incidentally, if female members of manora troupes, usually sisters, daughters, or wives of nai nora, ever learned their parts from such texts. If so, they may have been among the few literate women in southern Thai villages before the spread of modern education. 36 Phinfto Chittham, Nora (Songkhla, 1975, reprinted 1986) contains texts of several manora invocations from different nai nora. See also Ginsberg, 'The Manora Dance Drama," pp. 68-70, for another invocation text. See also Phitthaya Butsararat's summary of several manora stories in Sinlapa wattanatham changwat phatthalung [Art and culture of Phatthalung Province], (Phatthalung, 1983), pp. 116-21 and the entry in Saranukrom . . . phaktai, pp. 1282-88, on "tamnan nora." 35

Landscape and History 69

69

That the manora story is regarded as more than "just a story" by villagers is attested to by the belief that the ancestors in the story really come to the manora long khru performance. In the manora long khru I saw, for example, the ancestors scolded the sponsor's middle-aged brother for never having been ordained as a Buddhist monk and ordered him to be ordained or to die within the year. The day after the ceremony was over he went to the local temple to arrange for his ordination. (This man was the same one who told me that all the old people who knew the stories were dying and soon the stories would be forgotten.) The event that precipitated the manora long khru ceremony I witnessed, as I mentioned a moment ago, was the violation of a ghost path by a villager of manora lineage. This was not the first time we have encountered ghost paths. Can we, as it were, follow these paths deeper into the historical sensibility of southern Thai villagers? Ghost paths are a common feature of southern Thai villages, though an outsider might never be aware of their existence. Most people will not speak of them unless directly asked: careless talking of spirits might be seen as inviting trouble, or it may be just because ghost paths are a taken-for-granted part of village topography not needing mention. Some famous ghost paths might be widely known and freely mentioned—we have seen that Wat Mae Chao Yu Hua in Nakhon Sithammarat province has a ghost path, "Khrua's Path," associated with the story of Lady White Blood. Wat Khian at Bang Kaeo also has a ghost path. I would not be surprised if Wat Phra Kho has a ghost path associated with Somdet Chao Phra Kho (I would be more surprised if it did not). Most ghost paths, however, are known only to their own villages.37 Ghost paths, leading as they do into the past of the ancestors, are a crucial link between the village of the present and the receding past. One might see ghost paths as an invisible but still very real network of trails crisscrossing the village and its nearby ricefields. In order to maintain health and sanity in the present, it is not enough for a villager to tread the present paths of the village appropriately—avoiding snakes, roots, or unfriendly people. A villager must also be able to read the village landscape "historically," to see the village as the ancestors would have seen it—and presumably as they still, as ghosts, do see it—and to act accordingly. How are the villagers able to do this, to know that this is a (ghost) path used by the ancestors and therefore not to be obstructed, that is a mere recent track—not important to health or sanity—and therefore one where one might build a chicken coop or plant a banana orchard safely? The answer is, of course, by paying attention to the traditional stories and lore handed down from the ancestors. Cases such as that of the illness caused by the profanation of the ghost path at Ban Kradangnga or that of the drying up of the saksit well at Bo Lo because Health Department officers tampered with it, confirm to those villagers who ponder such things the importance of remembering the past.38 37

The following discussion of ghost paths owes much to correspondence with Anthony Diller, who first brought the prevalence of the phenomenon to my attention. 38 On my most recent visit to Ban Kradangnga in June 1993,1 heard the story of the villager, who, seduced by the high price offered for hardwood, cut down and sold a large, old saksit dipterocarp tree where villagers customarily made offerings and vows to village spirits. Soon after this transaction, he suffered a fatal motor accident. Villagers were not slow to draw the appropriate moral.

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Ghost paths link specific places in the present to specific stories out of the past and, by doing so, clarify a central apprehension in the historical sensibility of southern Thai villagers. In that sensibility the past, the deeds of the ancestors, inheres in places, and the "pastness" of places persists. Even if one forgets the past, the past is still immanent in the place, waiting to be reactivated.39 Stories, on the other hand, like princesses, tend to float. Villagers who are aware that their story is being retold elsewhere with a different local twist may acknowledge this by remarking that "that is their story, this is ours," but the important point is that in this multi-vocal historical discourse such variations are not a problem. Every place is both unique and yet part of a larger world, so it is only to be expected and no one is surprised that each place should have a unique story that yet resonates with all other stories. A corollary is that there can be no "definitive version" of any story. Just as in the days before modern art-historical authentication each place's Sihing Buddha image was as "real" as that of any other place, so each place's history has as much authority as that of any other place. Even the oldest manuscript versions of a story, by this token, cannot be definitive. Rather, they are merely particular versions of the "local truth" of their particular place, taken out of the world of floating oral stories at a particular time and anchored down by writing. Meanwhile, the rest of that world of stories floated on, continuing to precipitate around and rearticulate the significance of enduring places. 39 The recurring motif of the "rediscovery of the relics" in the Nakhon Si Thammarat chronicles makes explicit this apprehension; Wyatt, Crystal Sands, passim. Past power inherent in places in Cambodia is discussed by David Chandler, "Maps for the Ancestors: Sacralized Topography and the Echoes of Angkor in Two Cambodian Texts," Journal of the Siam Society 64, 2 (July 1976): 170-87. See also my "Reading the Landscape" for a discussion of the past that villagers apprehend in the landscape around Wat Phra Kho. Cf. Marina Roseman's discussion of the Temiar metaphor of the path as a link between the human and the spirit realms, Marina Roseman, Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medicine (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 6-9.1 am indebted to John Hartmann for bringing this last item to my attention.

Plate 6. Wat Sathing Phra, Reliquary Stupa

6 NATIONAL HISTORY AND LOCAL HISTORY

his book is a story about stories, in particular, the intertwined stories of the Phatthalung manuscripts and my own journey in search of the "historical sensibility" of the southern Thai communities that preserved them. In my particular retelling of it, the story of the Phatthalung manuscripts began with their being "discovered" at the beginning of this century and ravished away to Bangkok. The contrast between the world in which they were found and the world to which they were taken enticed me into exploring that unfamiliar (to me) world in which they were preserved. The three chapters preceding this one are an account of that exploration. Now the demands of narrative prompt me to return briefly to the story of the fate of the manuscripts, and the contexts in which they have figured since their removal to Bangkok. When the Bang Kaeo and Phra Kho manuscripts were brought to Bangkok, they suffered the paradoxical fate of becoming simultaneously famous and forgotten. That is, although soon after their arrival their existence was called to the attention of the literate public, the manuscripts themselves disappeared into the National Library, their exact whereabouts known by few, the original manuscripts read by even fewer, until by mid-century they had become mere rumors. Almost immediately after the Phatthalung manuscripts reached Bangkok, two were published in the Ministry of the Interior's internal journal Thesaphiban.1 A few years later Luang Siworawat's Chronicle of Phatthalung was published. Luang Siworawat explicitly mentioned that he had used old manuscripts to put together the first part of his chronicle, but he identified only one, a phlao containing "the story of Lady White Blood." The Chronicle of Phatthalung went through many reprints, being a popular cremation volume choice of the widely ramified Na Phatthalung family, and for the next fifty years it would be considered the definitive account of Phatthalung and Sathing Phra history. Because of its wide distribution, it was probably through reading it that most people learned about the existence of the

T

1

They were the manuscript from Wat Phra Kho that I have called the Luong Pho Thuat manuscript and the Thai text of the 1698 tamra. The Luong Pho Thuat manuscript was printed (with a lot of copyist's errors) in Thesaphiban 3, 14 (May 1, 1907), and the 1698 tamra, with a brief introduction, possibly by Prince Damrong, in Thesaphiban 13, 74 (July 1, 1912). I was unable to find the relevant issues of this now-rare publication. My information comes from Prachum phratamra, pp. iii, vii, and 71. The 1912 introduction, reprinted in Prachum phratamra, pp. v-vii, identified the "Ujong Tanah" as Malay for "Land's End" and the Ujong Tanah pirates, therefore, as raiders from Johore. It also discussed the origin of the term Pa Kaeo and discussed the four Langka ordination chapters in southern Thailand. It dismissed the story of the four guardian crows (see Chapter Four above) as "supposition without foundation."

brief introduction, possibly by Prince Damrong, in Thesaphiban 13, 74 (July 1, 1912). I was

73233

manuscripts, but, because Luang Siworarat was so vague about his sources, this knowledge was also necessarily vague. Over forty years went by after the first Thesaphiban printings before any more of the manuscripts were published. Then in the mid-1950s a new edition of the parallel Thai and Khmer texts of the 1698 tamra were published in the Fine Arts Department's journal Sinlapakorn.^ This publication caught the eye of the Thai Marxist writer, Jit Poumisak, while he was composing his seminal work on Thai feudalism, and he cited the Phatthalung documents as evidence of how royally favored monasteries became "Big Land-Lords/'3 A dozen years later a revised version of the Sinlapakorn edition of these texts was reprinted in one volume, together with a reprint of the Thesaphiban edition of the Luong Pho Thuat manuscript and part of one previously unpublished manuscript, namely, the decree and history from the map manuscript.4 What was left out in the three episodes of publication of actual manuscript texts is as significant as what was included. The emphasis was on publishing documents of interest to central history, primarily royal decrees; the Langkachat histories made it to publication only because they were attached to decree texts. Documents of purely local interest—the Lady White Blood manuscript, the Sathing Phra map—seem to have been ignored. The 1967 edition made no mention, for example, that the additional texts had come from a much longer manuscript containing a map.5 Meanwhile, Luang Siworawat's Chronicle of Phatthalung, which readers took to be an accurate representation of the old manuscripts' content, began to have its influence. Luang Siworawat, himself of the Na Phatthalung family, might be considered the first modern southern Thai historian to write about Phatthalung history. The tension between his southern identity, on the one hand, and his identity as a modern bureaucrat and protege of Prince Damrong, on the other, shows up in his ambiguous treatment of the stories in the manuscripts. He clearly relished retelling these stories, adding to them from oral traditions wherever he could, but he also felt the need to explain supernatural elements in them by "modern" standards of reason. For example, he explained away the autochthonous divine birth of Lady White Blood and Phraya Kuman by suggesting that they were probably illegitimate children abandoned by their mother to avoid disgrace.6 Or, commenting on the local tradition that Somdet Chao Phra Kho did not die an ordinary death but miraculously disappeared, he suggested that pirates probably carried him off7 He also felt the need to make the manuscripts' stories fit into a linear chronological framework congruent with the 2

Sinlapakorn 7, 5-6 (Oct.-Nov. 1953); 8: 2-8 (July 1954-Jan. 1955). See Reynolds, Thai Radical Discourse, pp. 100-106, esp. 102 and note 84. Chapter Two of this work is Reynolds's translation of Jit's The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today. 4 This publication was Prachum phratamra, cited many times already. 5 It appears that the texts from the map manuscript were printed not from the manuscript itself but from a previous transcription. The editors of Prachum phratamra said that this text, which they identified only as a "white Thai book" with no mention of the map, was brought to their attention by Manit Vallibhotama, a scholar in the Fine Arts Department, see Prachum phratamra, p. iii. Manit apparently had in his possession handwritten copies of several of the manuscripts; see Yiamyong S. Surakitbanhan, "Nam thiao muang songkhla nai prawatsat" [A guided tour of Songkhla in history] in Pinno Chittham, ed., Thiao Songkhla (Songkhla, 1963), pp. 97-104. ^ Luang Siworawat, Phongsawadan muang phatthalung, p. 63, n. 1. 7 Ibid., p. 74, n. 2. 3

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In the Land of Lady White Blood

framework of Thai national history as it was emerging in his day. He therefore amalgamated the Langkachat and Pa Kaeo histories together into a single linear chronicle, not without a bit of forcing, overlooking or perhaps not seeing that the two histories were parallel histories, each beginning in mythic time. The need to rationalize the miraculous or to present a coherent linear chronicle did not present itself as a problem to Miin Chob Charoenkan, the Bang Kaeo poet who, sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, wrote a verse history of Phatthalung in which he drew heavily on local oral traditions.8 On the other hand, Miin Chob showed his susceptibility to modernity by giving prominent play in his poem to a rediscovered "hero" in Thai national history, King Ramkhamhaeng of thirteenthcentury Sukhothai.9 According to Miin Chob, it was Ramkhamhaeng's grandson who summoned Lady White Blood to come to his capital, thus neatly tying ancient Phatthalung myth to the emerging Thai national story. Clearly, the printing press and the railroad, which carried the printed books with the new historiography to distant Phatthalung, were having their effect. In 1987 I saw another booklet, entitled (in Thai) "History of Phatthalung and Trang," that also linked the Lady White Blood story to King Ramkhamhaeng. Unfortunately, it was missing its cover so I do not know who the author was or when or where it was published, but it had been in the possession of the same family in Phatthalung for about forty years. This pamphlet reflected the strongly nationalistic historiography of the 1940s, exemplified by the writing of historian and propagandist Luang Wichit Watthakan, that was being promulgated in the nowcompulsory primary schools of Thailand. It stressed Ramkhamhaeng's martial prowess in defending the "Thai nation" from its enemies as well as, in the figures of Phraya Kuman, Lady White Blood, and Chaophraya Nakhon Sithammarat, the friendly, fraternal submission of the southern Thai states to the single "Thai nation" under Ramkhamhaeng's rule.10 8

Chob Chamroenkan, mun, Prawat nang liiat khao, cited previously. The author also claimed to have read the Bang Kaeo manuscripts before they went to Bangkok, but, comparing his account both with the Bang Kaeo manuscripts and with the Chronicle of Phatthalung, I think it more likely that he saw them—perhaps at a tham bun phlao ceremony—before they went to Bangkok and "read" them in Luang Siworawat's chronicle. For example, Miin Chob gives the name and "nationality" (Burmese) of the "enemy" king at the time of Phra Khru In's magical victory (p. 79). This identification is not present in the MS. but can be found in Luang Siworawat's own footnotes to his chronicle, see Phongsawadan phatthalung, p. 68. ^ Chob Charoenkan, Prawat nang liiat khao, pp. 45 ff. For a good recent treatment of the historiography of the "rediscovery" of Ram Khamhaeng, see Somkiat, "Politics of Thai Historiography," pp. 221-24 and passim. On the recent controversy over the authenticity of Inscription #1, and therefore of "Ramkhamhaeng/' see James R. Chamberlain, ed., The Ram Khamhaeng Controversy: Collected Papers (Bangkok, 1991). 10 For an example of Luang Wichit's popularizing treatment of Ramkhamhaeng as "national hero" and fraternal unifier, see the text of his radio play, 'The Prowess of Pho Khun Ramkhamhaeng," printed in Thak Chaloemtiarana, ed., Thai Politics: Extracts and Documents, 1932-1957 (Bangkok, 1978.) For a good short treatment of Luang Wichit's historiography, see Craig Reynolds, 'The Plot of Thai History/' pp. 321-25. For a more detailed treatment, see Somkiat, 'The Politics of Modern Thai Historiography," Chap. 4. The recent enthusiasm among many Thai scholars for questioning the authenticity of Inscription #1 stems, I believe, from the opportunity the controversy offers to open the door to some much-needed critiquing of the use to which the Ramkhamhaeng story has been put by right-wing regimes, both nationalist and royalist, throughout this century to buttress their legitimacy.

brief introduction, possibly by Prince Damrong, in Thesaphiban 13, 74 (July 1, 1912). I was

75555

By the early 1960s printing presses were being opened in towns in the south, and this, too, had an effect on the writing and popularizing of local history. Temple festival pamphlets, for example, usually on historical themes, began to appear in greater numbers. Many writers on southern Thai history in this period were enthusiastic amateurs of history rather than academic professionals, and their methods show a fascinating blend of the modern and the traditional. Although they delved into historical sources in the modern manner with aplomb, they also were not afraid, for example, to employ traditional etymological strategies to prove their historical points. It would be incorrect to say their goal was to "prove" the historicity of local stories; rather, they proceeded on the assumption that the stories were historical (or, rather, Historical) and then proved further points from that assumption. One such effort, published in Phatthalung in 1965, subtitled "Manora Tells the History of Phatthalung," used traditional etymologizing, plus archaeology, plus reference to the Lady White Blood manuscript, plus citation from the Sinhalese chronicle Mahavamsa, to demonstrate that the characters in the manora invocation were figures in the history of ancient isthmian kingdom of Tambralinga.11 Perhaps the most notable southern Thai practitioner of this mixed historical methodology was Yiamyong Surakitbanhan, by profession a mining engineer. In his historical writing he worked closely with the Venerable Phra Phatrasinsangwon, abbot of Wat Machimawat in Songkhla.12 Abbot Phatrasin, a native of Sathing Phra, singlehandedly saved much of Sathing Phra's archaeological heritage by encouraging villagers to donate artifacts they found to the museum he started at Wat Machimawat. It was through him that Yiamyong became an enthusiast for Sathing Phra history.13 It was Yiamyong, in turn, who stirred back to life interest in the whereabouts of the Lady White Blood manuscript and other unpublished manuscripts. H Thewasaro, Thepasan bap 2 [The title is untranslatable. It is a play on the author's name, but can also mean "angelic writings, Part 2"] (Phatthalung, 1965). The reference to the Lady White Blood manuscript is on p. 6.1 do not believe Thewasaro saw the manuscript but rather saw a quotation of it in Yiamyong's popular "Guided Tour of Songkhla in History," published two years earlier, in 1963. Thewasaro quotes Yiamyong's abbreviated quotation exactly, see Yiamyong, "Guided Tour," p. 99. In turn Yiamyong's source appears not to have been the original manuscript either, but a copy in the possession of Manit, see note 5 above. (It occurs to me that the author of "Manora Tells the History of Phatthalung" was merely paralleling the practice of Western historians, who constructed their history of Tambralinga out of scattered toponymical references in Chinese histories, one inscription in the isthmus, and stories from the Mahavamsa, see, for example, O. W. Wolters, 'Tambralinga/' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 21, 3 (1958): 587-607, and H. G. Quaritch Wales, "Langkasuka and Tambralinga: Some Archaeological Notes/' Journal of the Malay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 47,1 (1974): 15-40.) 12 Information about the life and career of Yiamyong is from the biography of him by Sutthiwong Phongphaibun in the Saranukrom ... phak tai [Encyclopedia of southern Thai culture]. 13 Phra Phatrasin was also indirectly responsible for a flurry of articles in the mid-1960s by Western scholars who had been directed to the Phatrasin museum at Wat Machimawat; see, for example, Stanley]. O'Connor, "An Early Brahmanical Sculpture at Songkhla," Journal of the Siam Society 52, 2 (1964): 163-69; Alastair Lamb, "Notes on Satingphra," Journal of the Malay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 37, 1 (1964): 74-87; H. G. Quaritch Wales, "A Stone Casket from Satinpra," Journal of the Siam Society 52, 2 (1964): 217-21; Alastair Lamb, "A Stone Casket from Satinpra: Some Further Observations," Journal of the Siam Society 53, 2 (1965): 191-95; and Stanley]. O'Connor, "Satingphra: An Expanded Chronology," Journal of the Malay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 39,1 (1966): 137-44.

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In the Land of Lady White Blood

In a popular guide to Songkhla published in 1963, Yiamyong referred to two unpublished manuscripts, copies of which had been made available to him by Manit Vallibhotama, a scholar in the Fine Arts Department. One he called the "phlao nang liiat khao" (Lady White Blood Manuscript) and the other, from the passages he quoted, was clearly the text from the map manuscript, although he seems to have been unaware at the time of its association with the map.14 Having examined these texts, he questioned Luang Siworawat's reading of them and thereby opened up Sathing Phra and Phatthalung history for new interpretations. Still, no one actually bothered to go look at the original manuscripts—that would have to wait another decade or so until new institutional and intellectual frameworks had grown up in the south that made it inevitable that southern Thai scholars would seek them out and publish them. Like the United States, Thailand seems to have experienced a post-war baby boom, and this, combined with the Thai government's increasing efforts to realize its goal of compulsory primary education, swelled the enrollment in primary schools in the 1940s and 1950s, and hence led to the need for more teachers as well. This, together with the "development" programs of the late 1950s and 1960s led in turn to the growth of tertiary schools, in order to produce the teachers and technically skilled personnel necessary for "development."15 Especially striking was the growth of teacher-training colleges in the provinces and the expansion and upgrading of many of them to university status by the late 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, beginning in the late 1960s or early 1970s, centers for the study of local culture and history—at first as informal groupings, then as more formalized centers—began to grow at several of the regional higher educational institutions, including those in the south. Often such centers were led by dynamic younger scholars with modern training. In 1979 the Ministry of Education inadvertently gave a further boost to the study of local culture and history by mandating that every province have a cultural center (sun watthanatham). These centers were to be located in the provincial teacher-training colleges; failing that, in the provincial girls high school. The centers were to serve both as conduits carrying "Thai national culture" to students throughout each province and as centers for research on local culture that could then be assimilated into "Thai national culture."16 The unintended effect of the centers was in some cases to give license to local pride and to stimulate research and publishing on local history. For example, to mark "Thai Heritage Day," established in 1985, the cultural centers of Trang and Phatthalung published pamphlets on local culture and history.17 14

Yiamyong, "Guided Tour of Songkhla in History/' pp. 96-104. See Benedict Anderson's introduction to In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (Bangkok, 1985), a collection of modern Thai short stories he translated with Ruchira Mendiones. There he gives a good account of the expansion of tertiary education in this period and its effect of creating a large pool of young educated Thai impatient with the old ways of doing things. ^ I derive this information from informative diagrams and flow charts I saw in May 1987 on the walls of the Trang Provincial Cultural Center, and also from conversations I had in February of the same year with Miss Somchit Wanwilai, director of the Nan Provincial Cultural Center. 17 Anurak morodok Thai [Thai heritage], Trang Cultural Center, [1985], despite its title is entirely about Trang; Chaiwut Phiyakul, Prawat wat khian bang kaeo [History of Wat Khian Bang Kaeo], Phatthalung Cultural Center, "printed on the occasion of Thai Heritage Day, 15

Over forty years went by after the first Thesaphiban printings before any more of

77253

It was the research director of the Phatthalung Cultural Center, Chaiwut Phiyakun, who sought out and published in 1982 the Lady White Blood manuscript. As we have seen, Luang Siworawat was responsible for starting the "rumor" of this manuscript's existence. After Yiamyong revived it in the early 1960s, other writers also began to pick it up. Even foreign scholars became mildly involved in the mystery. When David Wyatt was in National Library in 1966 microfilming manuscripts of the Nakhon Sithammarat chronicles, he also asked to see the Lady White Blood chronicle, but the Library staff were unable to produce it for him.18 A decade later I was luckier, happening on the Lady White Blood manuscript by chance rather than by design, by making a general request to see all the National Library manuscripts catalogued as phongsawadan phatthalung. In 1981, by making the same omnibus request, Chaiwut also discovered the Lady White Blood manuscript. A year later the Phatthalung Cultural Center published Chamra phra phlao nang liiat khao [Critical edition of the Lady White Blood manuscript], Chaiwut's meticulous transcription of this manuscript together with his commentary and translation of it into modern standard Thai. Chaiwut was caustic about the National Library's handling of the manuscript. Although they had it for over seventy years, he said, they never bothered to publish it, or even publicize its existence; in fact, the staff at the National Library seemed not even to know they had this particular manuscript. Many people in Phatthalung were beginning to doubt whether there ever had been a "real" Lady White Blood manuscript.19 Chaiwut said he himself had become interested in tracking down the manuscript because of his work as an archaeologist. Wherever he went in Phatthalung and Trang provinces he heard villagers say of this or that site, "Lady White Blood built it." And although the stories varied from place to place, their "heart" was always the same.20 So Chaiwut's quest was to find the wr-story, symbolized to him by the manuscript. He said his reason for publishing the manuscript was not only because of its importance for southern Thai history, or to help other scholars, but "to show there really was an original Lady White Blood Manuscript."21 One is tempted to see in Chaiwut's sarcasm a parallel to what the villagers seventy years earlier might have felt for the central officials who took away their manuscripts. On the other hand, Chaiwut's search for an wr-story shows his own very modern cast of mind. Included in Chamra phra phlao, in fact, is Chaiwut's composite "Lady White Blood Story," put together from the manuscript plus as many oral traditions as he can reconcile with it. An expanded and revised version of his composite Lady White Blood story has also been published in the Institute for Southern Thai Studies' impressive Encyclopedia of Southern Thai Culture.22 Widespread literacy, together with the authority of the term "encyclopedia," will no doubt insure that this version becomes the definitive version in the future. In 1980, two years before Chaiwut's publication of the Lady White Blood manuscript, the director of the Institute for Southern Thai Studies at Songkhla, Sutthiwong April 2, 2929 [1986]"; Chaiwut Phiyakul, Prawat wat wang changwat phatthalung [History of Wat Wang, Phatthalung province], Phatthalung Cultural Center, April 2-3, 2530 [1987]." 18 Wyatt, Crystal Sands, p. 45. ^ Chaiwut, Chamra phra phlao, p. 3. 20 Ibid., p. 3-4. 21 Ibid., p. 1. 22 Saranukrom ... phak tai, pp. 1280-82.

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Phongphaibun, had sought out and published the Sathing Phra map. I believe I played a small part in that discovery. "Rumors" of the map's existence had been even rarer than those of the existence of the Lady White Blood manuscript; in fact, I found no printed mention of the map in Thai until an article by Yiamyong in 1978.23 By that time I had shown my photocopy of the map, made in late 1976, to Sutthiwong and several of his colleagues when they had lunch with me one day in early 1977 at the Samila Hotel in Songkhla. Apparently none of them had yet known of its existence, and they were greatly excited by its "discovery." (Later that year I gave Sutthiwong and the abbot of Wat Phra Kho copies of my photocopy.) I would not have known about the map, either, had I not seen the microfilm of it made by David Wyatt when he was filming Nakhon manuscripts in 1966, and he probably would not have filmed if the National Library had not mislabeled it "Map of Nakhon Sithammarat."24 Today, a gilded replica of the Sathing Phra map dominates the museum of the Institute for Southern Thai Studies' handsome new campus (built with Toyota Foundation money on a picturesque island in Songkhla lake). It is tempting to see this symbolic reclamation of the Sathing Phra map and the publication of the "rediscovered" manuscripts by southern Thai scholars under the auspices of southern institutions as the manuscripts' "coming home" and thus as a fitting denoument to my tale. Such a conclusion, although aesthetically pleasing, unfortunately allows the demands of narrative to override a more complex reality. The 1980s saw a surge of interest in local and regional history in Thailand, not only among scholars in the regional cultural centers, as we have seen, but also among historians from prestigious institutions in Bangkok and Chiangmai. The trend rapidly became institutionalized, with "Centers for the Study of" this or that region opening in universities all over the country. Even new "regions" were identified. At Silapakorn University in Nakhon Pathom, for example, there is a Center for Western Thai Studies, a regional designation hardly traditional. Already it has accumulated artefacts and texts on the model of other such centers; who is to say it does not study a reality as "real" as any other? The new genre of local historiography has quickly acquired a formal label, "prawatsat thongthin," and a growing body of methodological literature.25 This interest in local history perhaps reflects not only the growing sophistication of modern Thai historiography but also the desire of Thai historians to escape from the confines of "national history." Especially since the disjunction of the events of 1976, many Thai historians who came to intellectual maturity in the period surrounding those events have sought with increasing interpretive and methodological sophistication 23

Yiamyong S. Surakitbanhan, "Boransathan, boranwatthu, phiphritatham, watthanakan, prawatsat, boranwitthaya amphoe sathing phra, changwat songkhla," [Ancient sites, ancient objects, culture, history, archaeology of Sathing Phra] Sinlapakorn, 22, 3 (September, 2521 [1978]): 6, fig. 1. Figure 1 is a hand-drawn copy of a small portion of the manuscript Sathing Phra map. Yiamyong orients it with the "top" as north, when even a cursory examination of the original shows the map was oriented toward the east. This suggests to me that, as with the Lady White Blood manuscript, Yiamyong saw a copy, not the original. Was it one of the leaves of the photocopy of the map I presented to the abbot of Wat Phra Kho in 1977 that Yiamyong saw, I wonder? Because of the map's length (over forty leaves), I had left it unassembled but with the leaves numbered in sequence. 2 ^ Wyatt also briefly described the map in 1975 in Crystal Sands, pp. 59-60. 25 See, for example, Dhida Saraya's Prawatsat thongthin, (Bangkok, 1987).

Over forty years went by after the first Thesaphiban printings before any more of

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to challenge and displace the model of Thai history as the "national story." Local history, suggesting possibilities of plurality and difference and perhaps challenges to the "national story," has thus grown in appeal.26 The explosive growth of the seminar as a Thai academic phenomenon is perhaps symptomatic of this historiographic maturity; in the 1980s a half dozen or more seminars on southern Thai history were held in the south. If one compares the roster of participants at the first seminar on Nakhon Sithammarat's history, held at the Nakhon Teachers College in 1978, with the roster of later seminars at the same institution in the 1980s or with the seminar on Phatthalung history held at the Phatthalung Cultural Center in 1986, one also can chart the growing participation, to the point of predominance, of "big name" historians based outside the region.27 It is tempting to see in this an instance, once again, of the imperialism of the center toward the periphery. Local scholars pioneered the field only to have more sophisticated outsiders come in and tell them how they really ought to do it. This interpretation, like that of the "coming home" of the manuscripts, though it has some validity, also simplifies the story. When the manuscripts were taken to Bangkok in the early 1900s, the distance they crossed was more than the 500 miles between Bangkok and Phatthalung. They also traveled from a world informed by the historical sensibility explored in the previous chapters to a world informed by the historical sensibility of modern, Westernstyle, increasingly professional, historical scholarship. In both worlds the manuscripts were valued as "historical evidence," but the historical sensibilities that defined that valuation differed. In the communities that had preserved the manuscripts, they were self-evident symbols of the antiquity, sanctity, and autonomy of the monasteries and their supporting communities. Informing that valuation was a surrounding milieu of stories about powerful ancestors and heroes, whose actions imbued the local landscape with supernatural power and who could be communicated with through ritual. The ultimate criterion of historical validity in this world was the efficacy of ritual. When the manuscripts were taken to Bangkok, other criteria of evaluation took over, not only among modernizing central Thai historians but, as we saw earlier in this chapter, among non-professional southern Thai writers as well. The increasing professionalization of Thai historical scholarship on the Western disciplinary model over the last few decades has only reinforced the assumptions about rationality and rules of evidence underlying this historical discourse. No matter how their interpretations may challenge each other, no matter what the "plot" into which they cast their narratives, all Thai historians now subscribe to the same ground rules of historical evidence. These ground rules for historical scholarship hold as true in Songkhla or Phatthalung as in Bangkok or Sydney or either of the Cambridges. The confrontation between southern and central Thai historians over local history is thus more a struggle over turf than a confrontation of epistemes. The manuscripts can never "come home" again. Or perhaps the manuscripts, though physically absent and forgotten, have never spiritually left Phra Kho and Bang Kaeo? In 1973 a new statue of Somdet Chao Phra 26

Reynolds, 'The Plot of Thai History/' p. 328. Raingan kansammana prawatsat nakhon sithammarat [Report of the seminar on Nakhon Sithammarat history], (Nakhon, 2521 [1978]); Raingan kansammana prawatsat nakhon sithammarat khrang thi 3 [Report on the third seminar on Nakhon Sithammarat history], (Nakhon, 2526 [1983]); Raingan kansammana prawatsat lae boranakhadi phatthalung [Report of the seminar on the history and archaeology of Phatthalung], (Phatthalung, 2528 [1985]). 27

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Kho was dedicated at Wat Phra Kho. To mark the occasion, the temple committee commissioned and printed a history of Wat Phra Kho that included local oral stories about Somdet Chao Phra Kho, excerpts from the old Thesaphiban printed version of the Luang Pho Thuat manuscript, and additional commentary on Sathing Phra history by Yiamyong. The resulting History of Wat Phra Kho has gone through many more reprintings for temple festivals.28 According to the preface to a 1977 reprint, a miracle occurred at the statue's dedication ceremony. Severe rain clouds had threatened to disrupt the ritual, but when the abbot carried Somdet Chao Phra Kho's crystal jewel to the dedication site and asked its owner's permission to continue the dedication, the rain clouds disappeared. Furthermore, during the ceremony a ball of flame with a jewel-like brightness floated in the sky over the dedication site. The statue today stands on a platform at the edge of Phra Kho Hill, looking out over a vista of ricefields and sugar palms like a benevolent guardian. Judging by the amount of gold leaf that has accumulated on it since its erection, it has come to be apprehended by worshippers as one more node where the saksit power of Somdet Chao Phra Kho is concentrated. As for Bang Kaeo, when the manuscripts were first taken away, it must have caused a stir, eventually coalescing into the stories about the royal officials coming with a white elephant to remove the manuscripts. But, although the manuscripts were gone, the ancestors who had preserved them were still there, and so the tham bun phlao ceremony honoring the ancestors continued to be celebrated. Anthony Diller, a linguist interested in southern Thai dialects, attended the celebration held in May 1990 and kindly let me use his notes and tapes of the proceedings. Prompted perhaps by the unprecedented presence of a foreigner at the tham bun phlao, the abbot of Wat Khian gave a short speech introducing the ceremony. I quote it in full as a conclusion to my story: Today, once again, all of the descendants29 of this lineage have assembled to hold the ceremony of the phlao, this ceremony that has been done for many years. This is the phlao of the mtiang [city, town, kingdom], the phlao of Wat Bang Kaeo. Our ancestor kept the phlao in olden times, and we, up to this generation, have kept this ceremony. We have kept this ceremony as our heritage, paying homage to our ancestors. We have kept the ceremony correctly, and it has not disappeared. Formerly, it was a great ceremony, a big ceremony, held at [here he names some village houses, including the one where I talked to the two elderly women in 1987]. Now the ceremony has been moved to this house, where there are mostly "children" taking part. The rituals are not as precise as they were formerly, the younger generation is still practicing how to keep the ceremony. Later it will be better. People from other places, from overseas, interested in the ancient history of Asia have come to this part of the world to study. When they get news of antiquities or artifacts, they come to do research, like this Westerner sitting here, who has come to Bang Kaeo before. Last year [sic] his friend, a professor—her name is in the visitor's registry at the wat—came and she brought 28

Prawat wat pha kho; prawat somdet chao pha kho [History of Wat Phra Kho and history of Somdet Chao Phra Kho], Chumphon Village, Songkhla, 2516 [1973], revised and reprinted 2520 [1977], 2525 [1982], 2529 [1986]. 2 ^ "Persons descended from the same maternal grandmother."

Over forty years went by after the first Thesaphiban printings before any more of

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something concerning the history of Bang Kaeo that she had found in the National Library. She had taken the trouble to get into the National Library and find the phlao of Bang Kaeo, and she photocopied it and presented a copy of it to the wat. The script is an ancient script, hard to read, not like these "substitute phlao" we have here.30 She found it while doing research and made a photocopy. It's at the wat. She said if she finds anything else valuable later on she will make copies. This year we are honored to have this foreigner here joining us, conferring dignity on the host of the ceremony. Now it is 9:30 A.M., so we should begin the ceremony. This is the ceremony the old people have followed, it is the ceremony of the moh, of the brahmins.31 30

"Substitute phlao" are old village books used in the ceremony to make up for the gap left by the absence of the real phlao. Literally translated, the term used for them is "instead of phlao" 31 Recorded on May 10,1990 by Anthony Diller and Jaroon Ganjanaphen. Moh, often translated "doctor," are ritual specialists who deal with spirits. "Brahmins" are the moh who specialize in dealing with "Indic"-type spirits.

Plate 7. Lady White Blood Manuscript, inner front leaves 1 and 2

Plate 8. Lady White Blood Manuscript, leaves 3 and 4

APPENDIX THE STORY OF LADY WHITE BLOOD

Over forty years went by after the first Thesaphiban printings before any more of Manuscript #001.4.26. The translation tries to follow the text as closely as possible without sacrificing readability. Brackets indicate conjectural readings where the text is obscure or damaged. Parentheses indicate my explanatory interpolations.) In the beginning Phatthalung was founded when the three Pa Kaeo temples were built, Wat Khian, Wat Sathang, and Wat Sathing Phra. [Analom] was monastic head at Sathing Phra. In that original time when Phatthalung began, Sathing Phra was the capital city called "Sathing Pharanasi" (i.e., "Benares''). The rulers of Sathing Phra bore the title Chaophraya Krong Sathing Pharanasi one after another.1 In those days there lived Grandfather Sammo and Grandmother Phet who trained the elephant Lord Khochasan.2 The old couple's skill was so excellent that they became elephant trainers for the ruler of Sathing Phra, presenting him with elephants every year. The elephants who lived in the forest came willingly whenever the old couple called them. One day, when the couple realized how it was, they let loose the female elephant Lady Talap, who went east, and the male elephant Lord Khochawichaimonthon, who went to the south. Lady Talap went to a clump of phathong bamboo and knelt in homage to it. Lord Khochawichai went to a clump of samriang bamboo and knelt in homage to it. When the elephants did not return at their accustomed time, the old couple thought, "Every day when we call, the elephants come willingly. Why do they not come today?" The old man tracked the elephants until he found them. When he and his wife took their staffs to guide the elephants home, Lady Talap uprooted a shoot from the phathong bamboo clump in her trunk and Lord Khochawichai uprooted a shoot from the samriang clump in his. At home they set the shoots up on a balcony and continued to kneel in homage. When the old couple took betel-nut knives and slit the bamboo shoot, they were startled to see a noble girl's wounded arm welling white blood. When they slit the samriang shoot, they found a noble youth whose blood was white, yellow, black, and red.3 The old couple cared for the noble children until they attained maturity. Then their foster parents married 1 Over forty years went by after the first Thesaphiban printings before any more of is studded with such phonetic southern Thai spellings. 2 Khocha = Skt., gaja, "elephant." 3 The colors of the four Vedic varna. White blood in Southeast Asia signifies divinity.

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the noble children to each other. [From that auspicious marriage, great benefits flowed.] When the noble children were fully established, the old couple died. The noble couple cremated their parents and buried their ashes in the cave at Phatthalung. From that time on the noble couple lived at the place known as Phra Koet ("Sacred Birth"), and they presented an elephant to the ruler of Si Nusa Yuthia (sic) every year. Thus documents (phlao phratamra) were made and kept from the origins of Phatthalung onward. At that time, when the couple were living at the Phra Koet River, where their parents' ashes were buried (sic), they traveled with their entourage south of the royal capital city Pharanasi, but did not find a good spot. Then they went to the north of Phra Koet and stopped at Bang Kaeo. There they let loose the elephant Lady Talap who went to Sathang where she found five bamboo tubes filled with gold. In the morning her mahout Sithep tracked her and found her trunk caught in a ruined well. When he went up to her, she did not heed him. He reported this to Lady White Blood who came herself. When Lady White Blood approached the elephant, the elephant rose to her feet allowing the mahout to free her trunk. Lady White Blood then saw the five tubes of gold and a gong. She used the treasure to build and embellish a vihara and a Buddha image [as an act of merit for past and future generations]. Also at this time the mahout Mankhong let loose the elephant Lord Khochawichai who went to the east where he found six tubes of gold and a jewel. Lord Kuman (Skt. kumara, "noble male child") took this wealth and build a vihara and a Buddha image. He had the gold struck into a plate adorned with the jewel and inscribed with a history. The gold plate gave the temple its name, Wat Khian Bang Kaeo ("The Temple of the Inscription at Bang Kaeo"). [From that time until the Buddhist Era attained 500 years at Bang Kaeo.4] On Thursday, the fifth day of the waxing moon of the eighth month, Year of the Pig, first of the decade, Lord Krong Thong of Sathing Phra completed the Great Reliquary at Sathing Phra and established Jetavana monasteries at all three temples.5 After this, in the Year of the Dog, second of the decade Lord Kuman and Lady White Blood traveled for seven days to Trang. There they erected Buddha images and Lord Kuman erected the Phra Ngam ("Beautiful Buddha"). At Wat Kanya at the mouth of the Trang River they enshrined the sacred image Phra Phuttha Sihing 4 This passage I have translated word-for-word, because it is highly problematic. It can be taken as formulaic phrase indicating Lord Kuman and Lady White Blood's pious wishes that their foundations at Bang Kaeo last 500(0) years, i.e. until the end of the Buddhist era. This is the reading I lean to. But the punctuation can cause it to be read, "At that time when the Buddhist Era had attained 500 years, on Thursday, etc.,... Lord Krong Thong, etc." This is the reading preferred by many Thai scholars because it yields a date, B.E. (1)500, that falls conveniently in the "Srivijayan era" of southern Thai history, when archaeologists and art historians say many of the reliquary stupas of the region were built. Luang Siworawat in Phongsawadan Phatthalung was the first to read it this way. I feel this is a strained reading, especially when a few passages later, after the deaths of Lord and Lady White Blood, the text says the monasteries were abandoned for "one thousand" years, which would put their refurbishing in the late twentieth century of our era. Why should one "date" in the narrative be accepted and the other not? Luang Siworawat elides the "one thousand" to "several hundred." See my discussion in Chapter Four of the symbolic significance of dates. 5 Jetavana was a famous monastery in ancient India whose name came to be associated with "Forest" ordination chapters, such as Pa Kaeo, "Jewelled Forest."

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when it came from Langka. It was completed on Sunday, fifth day of the waning moon of the sixth month, Year of the Ox, third of the decade. Then Lady White Blood and Lord Kuman returned to Sathang Bang Kaeo. While they were looking for an appropriate site to build a settlement, the lord and lady traveled to Nakhon Sithammarat, where they erected Buddha images in many places, but did not establish a town. They also discovered the Great Relic [together with] Chaophraya Sithammasokarat, son of that [famed] Chaophraya Sithammasokarat. Lady White Blood's fame came to the ears of the ruler of the great capital city of Ayudhya, who sent the ruler of Phitsanulok and 500 ladies-in-waiting to receive Lady White Blood in Nakhon Sithammarat (to escort her to the capital). Lady White Blood was not willing to go, she would not listen, and Lord Kuman would not leave her. Then the couple [were ordered/admonished], and Phraya Kuman returned to Phra Koet of the elephants, his own place. The 500 ladies-in-waiting escorted Lady White Blood to the great capital, but the king found he could not consummate his union with her because the supernatural power of the royal child in her womb blazed forth. When her time arrived, she gave birth to a son. [To celebrate his birth] she erected a vihara and a Buddha image in the capital. The king asked to adopt her son to become his heir in the great capital of Ayudhya. Lady White Blood then asked leave of the king to return to her husband. The king and the 500 ladies-in-waiting escorted her to Nakhon Sithammarat and from Nakhon Sithammarat to Phra Koet. She was reunited with her husband, where they lived together thereafter. When they were about seventy years old, they died and were reborn in the gods' heaven. After that the three monasteries were deserted for one thousand years. (This is the end of the Lady White Blood story, but the manuscript continues for fifteen more leaves with the story of Phra Khru In.)

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Singivaedlom sinlapakam changwat phatthalung [The Environment and Art in Phatthalung]. Published by the Local Committee for the Preservation of the Arts and Environment of Phatthalung, 2574 [1991]. Siworawat, Luang. Phongsawadan Miiang Phatthalung [Chronicle of Phatthalung] in Phongsawadan Miiang Songkhla lae Phongsawadan Miiang Phatthalung. Bangkok: Published for the cremation of Khunying Khae Phetraphiban (Khae Na Songkhla), 2505 [1962]. Smith-Hefner, Nancy J. "Reading, Reciting, and Knowing: Interpreting a Rural Javanese Text Tradition." In Writing on the Tongue, edited by A.L. Becker. Ann Arbor: Michigan Papers on Southeast Asia, 1989. Somkiat Wanthana. Prawatsatniphon thai samai mai [Thai Historiography in the New Era]. Bangkok: Thai Studies Institute, Thammasat University, paper no. 49,1984. Somkiat Wanthana. 'The Politics of Modern Thai Historiography," (Ph.D. dissertation, Monash University), 1986. Stargardt, Janice. "Hydraulic Works and Southeast Asian Polities." In Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, edited by David G. Marr and A.C. Milner. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986. Stargardt, Janice. Satingpra I: The Environmental and Economic Archaeology of South Thailand, (Oxford, British Archaelogical Reports, 1983) Stock, Brian. Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Sturrock, John. Structuralism. London: Paladin, 1984. Sutthiwong Phongphaibun. Phutthasasana thaep lum thalesap songkhla fang tawan ok samai krung si ayutthaya [Buddhism on the Eastern Shore of the Songkhla Lake in the Ayutthaya period]. Songkhla: Institute for Southern Thai Studies, 2523 [1980]. Swearer, Donald K. "Myth, Legend and History in the Northern Thai Chronicles." Journal of Bibliography 91 Tambiah, S. J. "Literacy in a Buddhist Village in North-East Thailand," in Literacy in Traditional Societies, edited by Jack Goody. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Tambiah, S.J. Buddhism and the Spirit Cults of Northeast Thailand. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 1968. Teeuw, A. and Wyatt, D. K. Hikayat Patani: The Story of Patani 2 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. Tej Bunnag. The Provincial Administration of Siam, 1892-1915: The Ministry of the Interior under Prince Damrong Rajanubhab. Kuala Lumpur and London: Oxford University Press, 1977. Thailand National Library. Manuscript Division, phaenthi miiang nakhon sithammarat. Thailand National Library. Manuscript Division, phongsawadan miiang nakhon sithammarat, 36/8. Thailand National Library. Manuscript Division, phongsawadan muang phatthalung, #001.4.10, #001.4.15, #001.4.18, #001.4.24, #001.4.26. Thewasaro. Thepasan bap 2. Phatthalung: Printed on the occasion of the opening of the Wat Phuphaphimuk Branch of the National Museum and the Mahajataka Festival, 2508 [1965]. Thongchai Winichakul. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Thongchai Winichakul. "Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of Siam." (Ph.D.Dissertation, University of Sydney), 1988. Vandergeest, Peter. "Siam Into Thailand: Constituting Progress, Resistance, and Citizenship." (Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University), 1990. Veeser, H. Aram. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

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INDEX

Acheh, 39 Ancestors: and history, 2; and caves, 59,60,85; veneration of, 30; as theme in manuscript histories, 3739,45; and manora, 64,66-69; and Chao Mae Yu Hua Ayudhya (capital of Siam, 1351-1767), 21,39,43 Bamboo, birth from, 60,65,84 Ban Phra Koet, village of, in Lady White Blood story, 60; and local version of Lady White Blood story, 61; and Phra Koet Buddha image, 65 Bang Kaeo, 7,9-10,20,22-23,30,53, 60,80. See also Manuscripts, Bang Kaeo; Phatthalung, archaeology; Tham bun phlao; Wat Khian; Wat Sathang Becker, A. L., 29-30,37 Books: in southern Thai villages, 58; black, 28 n. 26; white, 37n. 2,41, 44. See also Texts, written Brahmins, 65n. 26,81n. 31 Buddha images, lustration of, 64 Buddha's footprint: on Phra Kho hill, 39,40n.lO Caves, sacred, 5,53; and ancestors, 59, 60,85 Center: and periphery, 14,23 Chaiwut Phiyakul, 77-78 Chandler, David, 24n. 12 Chao Mae Yu Hua; as Buddha image, 62,64-65; story, 62-64; and manora, 63-64; and vows, 64-65; "extended kin" of, 64-65; festival, 64-65; and Lady White Blood, 6263

Chronicle of Phatthalung. See Phongsawadan mtiang phatthalung Chulalongkorn, King (r. 1868-1910), 12-13,15 Colors, symbolic, 50,84 Communities, monastic endowment. See Monastic endowment communities Corvee, royal: monastic endowment communities' exemption from, 16, 46,48 Crows: and Buddhist relics, 50 Damrong Rajanubhab, Prince: career of, 11; and Vajirayana National Library, 11,13; and Phatthalung manuscripts, 11,13-14,15-16, 21n. 6; and Thai national history, 12-13 Dates: significance of in manuscript histories, 41-43,85n. 4 Datu Marahum, of Khao Daeng: in map, 38n. 4; as spirit invited to manora long khru, 66n. 29 Decrees: in manuscripts. See Tamra Diller, Anthony, 69n. 37,80 Documentary sources, cultural assumptions about, 6-7,15-16,1718. See also Historical sensibilities; Historiography Education. See Modern education; Literacy Elephants, 7,42,45,60,84-35; white, 20,31,32,45 Ethnographic history. See History, ethnographic Five thousand years: in Buddhist tradition, 27n. 23,33; in southern Thai texts, 27, 34

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Floating princesses. See Princesses, floating Geertz, Clifford, 2,17 Ghost paths, 62,67,69-70; and history, 69-70 Historical sensibilities, 1-3,17-18,24, 30,45-46,49,53-54,56-57,70, 7980; truth criteria in, 2,59-60, 79. See also Historiography; History; Landscape and history; Manora Histories, manuscript, 37; significance of dates in, 41-43; Tamra as theme in, 37-38,39-46; written records as theme in, 37-38,39^6; remembering ancestors as theme in, 3839,45; Phra Kho history (Luang Pho Thuat manuscript), 38-39,40; Phra Kho history (map manuscript), 37-38,39-40; biography of Somdet Chao Phra Kho (Luang Pho Thuat manuscript), 38,40; Lady White Blood history (Lady White Blood manuscript), 42-44; Phra Khru In history (Lady White Blood manuscript); Nakhon Sithammarat histories (Manuscript C), 44-45. See also Manuscripts; Texts; Tamra Historiography, 1-2, 6-7,12-15,1718, 78-79; seventeenth-century Southern Thai, 37-40,42-46; twentieth-century southern Thai, 18, 73-76. See also Historical sensibilities; Histories, manuscript; History; Modernization; National history; Thai national history History: Buddhist, 14,32-33,34-35, 49-51; ethnographic, 1, 7; local, 78-79; multi-vocal, 2,14-15,17, 37,49-51; tamnan history, 14n. 33; Thai terminology for, 11,42,5455. See also Historiography; Historical sensibilities Identity, Thai, 16 Illness: caused by spirits, 67, 69,84-85 Incest, divine, 7,60,68,84-85 Intharamoli, Phra Khru, 7,43-44 Jit Phoumisak, 73 Johore, 39,47

Khmer: use of in manuscripts, 21n. 5, 28,41,44 Khoi. See phlao

Khuha Sawan cave, 5,53; as depository of ancestors' ashes; in Lady White Blood story Kin groups: in monastic domains, 3840,44-45; women and, 10,39,80n. 29 La Loubere, Simon de, 31-32 Lady White Blood, 7,23,42-43,60-62; and Chao Mae Yu Hua, 62-63; as mythic ancestress, 2-3; and southern Thai Muslims, 61 Lady White Blood manuscript, 40-44; publication of, 77-78 Lady White Blood, story of: manuscript version, 42^3,84-86; oral versions, 60-62, 77; as foundation myth, 2-3; as sacred geography, 60-61; distribution of, 42,61 Landscape: and history, 2-3,9,53,6061, 70; and sacred power, 22,6061. See also Places and stories Langkachat manuscripts. See Manuscripts, Phra Kho Langkachat, ordination chapter. See Ordination chapters: Langkachat Langkadoem, ordination chapter. See Ordination chapters: Langkadoem Langkaram, ordination chapter. See Ordination chapters: Langkaram Literacy: in pre-modern southern Thailand, 57-58; and oral traditions, 57 Local history. See History, local Luang Pho Thuat. See Somdet Chao Phra Kho Luang Siworawat. See Siworawat, Luang Mahavamsa, 33

Manora, 65-69; story, 68-69; as entertainment, 65-66; as ritual, 65; as magic, 65n. 28; and Chao Mae Yu Hua, 63-65; and Mae Chao Yu Hua, 62; and Lady White Blood, 65; and Phra Koet Buddha image, paths, 62; and manor a; 62. See also

Index 95 Manora long khru; Manora ta yai yan; Nai nora Manora lineage. See Trakun nora Manora long khru: as ancestor worship, 66-69; spirit possession in, 66; as spirit gathering, 66 Manora masters. See Nai nora Manora rong khru, 66-67. See also Manora long khru Manora ta yai yan: as ancestor worship, 64,66; to redeem vows, 65 Manuscript, definition of, 22 Manuscript merit-making ceremony. See Tham bun phlao Manuscript texts. See Texts, southern Thai manuscript Manuscripts: as charged artifacts, 11, 29,32,34-35; collection of, by modernizers, 13-14n. 28; veneration of, 1,5,20-21,30; and women, 5-6, 20; and monastic endowment communities, 10,46,48; as parts of local cultural statements, 10,48; physical composition of, 5n. 2,28n. 26,37n. 2,41, 44; punctuation in, 44-45,46; reading, 20-21; recopying, 21, 23, 37,41; use of Khmer in, 21n. 5,41, 44. See also Manuscript texts; Histories; Tamra Manuscripts, Bang Kaeo, 20-21,22, 24-25,26-28; provenance of, 10, 11,14; veneration of, 20-21,30, 80-81; publication of, 21n. 6, 7273. See also Manuscript texts; Histories; Tamra Manuscripts, Khuha Sawan, 5, 9-10; veneration of, 5 Manuscripts, Nakhon Sithammarat, 10,16,44-45; Manuscript C, 44-45 Manuscripts, southern Thai, 5-6,2022; provenance, 9-11,14,15; description of by Prince Damrong, 15-16 Manuscripts, Phra Kho, 10,22,37-38; dating, 38n. 4; publication of, 37n. 3,38n. 4, 72-73

95

Map of Sathing Phra Peninsula, manuscript, 37; publication of, 37n. 3, 77-78 Mediums, spirit, 66,67,68 Modern education, 76; and historical sensibilities, 18,57 Modernization: as discourse, 12,16; and historiography, 12-13,15 n 37 Monastery folk, 5,38. See also Monastic endowment communities Monastery ricefields, 5,8 Monastic endowment communities, 46-48; and manuscripts, 10,46,48; autonomy of, 41-42,46-48; as parts of local cultural statements, 10; kin groups in, 38-40,44^5; landowning in, 39,47-47; tax exemption of, 5,16,39^40,46,47,48. See also Monastery folk; Women Multi-vocal history. See History, multi-vocal Na wat. See Monastery ricefields Nai nora, 66,67 Nai Sam Chom, lists of, 45; in histories, 40,45; in tamra, 27,45 Nakhon Sithammarat, 9,44-45; Great Reliquary, 50; in Lady White Blood story. See also Manuscripts, Nakhon Sithammarat Nang Ltiad Khao. See Lady White Blood Naritsaranuwattiwong, Prince (Prince Narit), 5,9-10,11,53 National history: as discourse of modernity, 12-13,14,15. See also Thai national history National identity. See Identity, Thai Oaths, 16,29 Ong, Walter, 34 Oral traditions: and historical sensibilities 54-55,57; and written texts, 18,32-33, 58, 60; and printing, 5657,58,63; in Chronicle of Phatthalung, 73; in verse history of Phatthalung, 74. See also Lady White Blood story; Chao Mae Yu Hua story; Manora story; Spoken word

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Ordination chapters, 22,48^9; Pa Kaeo (Langkakaeo), 21,22,48-50; Langkachat, 22,48-50; Langkaram, 44,49-50; Langkadoem, 4950 Pa Kaeo (Langkakaeo), ordination chapter. See Ordination chapters: Pa Kaeo Pa Kaeo manuscripts. See Bang Kaeo manuscripts Paths, haunted. See Ghost paths Phanarat, Phra, 26, 27n. 20 Phatrasinsangwon, Phra, 75 Phatthalung, 5,9; archaeology of, 9, 53; geography of, 8-9 Phatthalung manuscripts. See Manuscripts, southern Thai Phlao (manuscripts), 5n. 2, 21n. 4,41, 42,45; substitute in tarn bun phlao, 81. See also Manuscripts Phongsazvadan miiang phatthalung, 7, 15, 72,73-74 Phra Kho manuscripts. See Manuscripts, Phra Kho Phra Kho, Somdet Chao, 7,8,22,39; biography of, 40; crystal jewel of, 8,40,47,53; as champion of the poor, 40,47; as spirit invited to manora long khru, 66n. 29; statue of, 79^80 Phra Khru In. See Intharamoli, Phra Khru Phra Phanarat. See Phanarat, Phra Phraputthasihing, 42,60, 70 Phraya Kuman, 7,23,42-43 Pirates, 27,39,47 Places: and stories, 54,60, 70; in premodern southern Thai historical sensibility, 2-3,22-23,70; and multi-vocal history, 70. See also Landscape and history Power, sacred. See Saksit Prawat, 11,54-55. See also History, Thai terms for; Manuscripts, Phatthalung, provenance of Princesses, floating, 62,63-64,68, 70. See also Chao Mae Yu Hua; Manora Printing, effect of, 56-57,58,63, 74, 75

Prior texts, 28; mental models of, 29; in tamra, 26-28,29,30 Punctuation: in manuscripts, 44-45, 46. See also Textual conventions Punctuational devices, 44n. 24. See also Punctuation Ramkhamhaeng, King: in Thai national history, 74 Reading, 58; manuscripts, 20-21; tamra, 26,31,32 Regalia: for reading manuscripts, 2021,31,32 Relics, Buddhist: enshrinement of, 3839,42,50; and crows, 50 Reynolds, Craig, In. 1,18nn. 45,46 Ritual specialists. See Brahmins; Nai nora-, Spirits, control of Royal decrees: in manuscripts. See Tamra Royal Pronouncement, 24,25-26,29 See also Tamra Saksit, 22n. 9,58,61,62,65, 70n. 38; gold leaf as indicator of, 59,64,80 Samut khoi. See Books Sathing Phra manuscripts. See Manuscripts, Phra Kho Sathing Phra Peninsula, 8,10,38; archaeology of, 9, 75; geography of, 8-9; manuscript map of, 37,78; and local versions of the Lady White Blood story, 61-62 Seals, 21, 24,27-28,29,31-32. See also Tra Shaivite site: at Wat Phra Kho, 8 Sihing Buddha, 42, 60,70 Siworawat, Luang, 15, 72-73, 74. See also Phongsawadan mtiang phatthalung Slaves, 39 Somdet Chao Phra Kho. See Phra Kho, Somdet Chao Somkiat Wanthana: on politics of Thai historiography, 12n. 26,13 Songkhla, 8, 9 Spirit mediums. See Mediums, spirit Spirits, control of, 66; possession by, 66,67 See also Brahmins; Mediums; Nai nora

Manora lineage. Se Trakun nora Spoken word: Thai ceremonial speech, 30-31; primacy of, in Theravada Buddhist tradition, 3334,49; and written texts, 2,30-35. See also Oral traditions Sri Langka: and Buddhism in Southeast Asia, 49; and Sihing Buddha, 42; and Langka ordination chapters, 49 Stories: as history, 54,55,57,59-60; and places, 54,60,70; and multivocal model, 61,63, 70. See also Oral traditions Sun watthanaiham (cultural centers): and local history, 76-77 Storytellers, 55-56,57,63-64 Sutthiwong Phongphaibun, 37n. 3, 77-78 Tamnan (history), 42,43,55. See also History, Thai terms for Tamnan history. See History, tamnan Tamra: definition of, 21n. 4,24; dates in, 23-24,26, 27; textual conventions of, 24-28,29; as theme in manuscript histories, 37-38,3946; as receptacles of king's voice, 26,29,30,31; oaths in, 29; prior texts embedded in, 26-28,29,30; reading, 26,31-32; recopying, 25, 28,30,32,37; seals, 24n. 12, 26, 3132,44-45; use of Khmer in, 21,28, 44. See also Royal Pronouncement; Tra; Tamra (Royal Decrees), individual texts Tamra (Royal Decrees): dated 1698 (Pa Kaeo decree), 21,24,25,26-28; dated 1610 (Pa Kaeo decree), 2628; recopied in 1668 (Pa Kaeo decree), 31, 32; dated Year of the Pig (Pa Kaeo decree), 27,28; dated 1610 (Langkachat decree), 37,38; dated 1603 (Langkachat decree), 38 Taxes, monastic endowment communities' exemption from, 5,16,3940,46,47,48 Television, effect of, 56-57 Text, definition of, 22 Texts, prior. See Prior texts

979 895 2 2

Texts, southern Thai manuscript: genres, 23,24; textual conventions of, 23; dates of, 23-24; sense of time in, 23-24,30. See also Historical sensibilities; Histories; Tamra Texts, written, 24; and "Powerful" knowledge, 58; and spoken word, 2,26,30-31,32-35; and oral tradition, 58,60; and time, 30,34-35; in Theravada Buddhist tradition, 3235 See also Writing; Written records Textual conventions, 22-23. See also Punctuation Tha Khura, village of: and Chao Mae Yu Hua image, 62,65; and Chao Mae Yu Hua festival, 64-65 Thai national history, 1,12-13,14,15, 53; and southern Thai historiography, 74 Tham bun phlao, 20,30,80-81. See also Manuscripts, veneration of Thongchai Winichakul: on modernization as discourse, 11-12; and historiography, 12-13n. 25,15n. 37 Time, 17, 24; and speaking, 29-30,34; and writing, 30,34-35 Tooth Relic, 50n. 38 Tra (Seals), 24n. 12, 26,31-32. See also Seals; Tamra Trakun nora, 67-69; as demographic indicator, 67 Vajirayana National Library: history of, 13,14; and manuscript collecting, 13,14 Village communities. See Monastic endowment communities Vows: to spirits, 64-65, 69n. 38 Wat Khian, 15,21, 23,42, 60; origin of name, 42; reliquary stupa at, 50, 53; ghost path at, 69; and Chao Mae Yu Hua Buddha image, 65. See also Bang Kaeo; Phraya Kumah; Lady White Blood Wat Khuha Sawan. See Khuha Sawan cave; Manuscripts, Khuha Sawan Wat Kuti Luang, 39,40 Wat Mae Chao Yu Hua: and Lady White Blood story, 62; and ghost

98

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paths, 62; and manor a; 62. See also Chao Mae Yu Hua Wat Phra Kho, 7,8,22, 79-80; Buddha's footprint at, 39,40n. 10; enshrinement of relic at, 38-39,50; reliquary stupa, 53; and Chao Mae Yu Hua Buddha image, 65. See also Phra Kho manuscripts; Somdet Chao Phra Kho Wat Sathang, 23,42, 60. See also Bang Kaeo; Phraya Kuman; Lady White Blood Wat Sathing Phra: reliquary, 42,50,60 Water of Allegiance, 33n. 38 Wavell, Stewart, 63 White blood, 23,62 Wichit Watthakan, Luang, 74 Wolters, O. W., lOn. 16,22n. 7,68

Women: and manuscripts, 5-6, 20; as landowners, 10,39,47; as "work leaders" in monastic endowments, 10; and southern Thai kinship reckoning, 10,39, 80n. 29; and supernatural Power, 6n. 3; and literacy, 57-58,68n. 35; as storytellers, 55,57,64 Work leaders: in monastic endowments, 28,47; women as, 10 Writing: and time, 30,34-35; and "Powerful" knowledge, 58; and spoken word, 2, 26,30-33,34-35; in Theravada Buddhist tradition, 32-35 Written records: as theme in manuscript histories, 37-38,39-46 Wyatt, David, 44, 77, 78 Yiamyong Surakitbanhan, 75-76, 78