The Dhammakāya Text Genre and Its Significance for Tai-Khmer Buddhism and Modern Marginalisation

Authors

  • Woramat Malasart University of Otago, New Zealand

Abstract

The Dhammakāya text genre is a corpus of documents, such as manuscripts, inscriptions and printed books, that shares the same core Pāli passages called “Dhammakāya.” The core Pāli Dhammakāya identifies the knowledge and qualities/virtues of the Buddha with physical attributes of his body. The Dhammakāya text genre can be found in Central Thailand, Northern Thailand and Cambodia, and played a significant role in a range of core Theravada practices, including meditation, Buddha-image consecration (buddhābhiṣeka) and individual recitation on the part of intellectuals and ordinary Buddhists in those regions. The earliest extant version of the Dhammakāya text genre can be dated back to the Ayutthaya period (1350-1767). Today, the Dhammakāya text genre is not well known in Central Thailand, but is still used in Northern Thailand and Cambodia during buddhābhiṣeka, as well as the ritual of installing the Buddha’s heart into a Buddha statue or a chedī. The Dhammakāya text genre disappeared from Central Thai practice during the Fifth Reign of the Rattanakosin Era when the royal chanting curriculum was reformed under Supreme Patriarch Sā in 1880. Around this time, Siam’s Tipiṭaka was also revised in 1893. In this article, I examine a corpus of documents belonging to the Dhammakāya text genre and its different functions, revealing how a single genre can, in fact, fulfil functions that we may have thought would be at opposite ends of the practice spectrum: from meditation, on the one hand, to consecrations and protective chanting on the other. I then conclude that the disappearance of the Dhammakāya text genre from Central Thai practice is further evidence for the suppression of Siam’s “boran”, or pre-reform, Buddhism in response to modernist concerns about canonicity and textual authenticity.

Author Biography

Woramat Malasart, University of Otago, New Zealand

Woramat Malasart received a BSc from the Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Chulalongkorn University, in 2015 and a MA in Buddhist Studies from the University of Otago in 2019. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Religion Programme, School of Social Sciences, University of Otago, New Zealand, holding a University of Otago Doctoral Scholarship (2020-2023). He is interested in many aspects of Buddhism, but his particular passion is the study of Buddhist manuscripts from Southeast Asia, especially those written in Khom and Tham/Dhamma scripts. The provisional title of his Ph.D. thesis is “The Dhammakāya Genre and Its Historical and Practical Significance for Traditional Tai-Khmer Buddhism,” under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Guthrie, Dr. Trent Walker, and Professor Will Sweetman.

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2021-12-01

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