The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand
2013 George McT. Kahin Book Prize on Southeast Asia, Association for Asian Studies
Focusing on representations of the ghost and monk from the late
eighteenth century to the present, Justin Thomas McDaniel builds a case
for interpreting modern Thai Buddhist practice through the movements of
these transformative figures. He follows embodiments of the ghost and
monk in a variety of genres and media, including biography, film,
television, drama, ritual, art, liturgy, and the Internet. Sourcing
nuns, monks, laypeople, and royalty, he shows how relations with these
figures have been instrumental in crafting histories and modernities.
McDaniel is especially interested in local conceptions of being
“Buddhist” and the formation and transmission of such identities across
different venues and technologies.
Establishing an individual’s
“religious repertoire” as a valid category of study, McDaniel explores
the performance of Buddhist thought and ritual through practices of
magic, prognostication, image production, sacred protection, and deity
and ghost worship, and clarifies the meaning of multiple cultural
configurations. Listening to popular Thai Buddhist ghost stories,
visiting crowded shrines and temples, he finds concepts of attachment,
love, wealth, beauty, entertainment, graciousness, security, and
nationalism all spring from engagement with the ghost and the monk and
are as vital to the making of Thai Buddhism as venerating the Buddha
himself.