Monks and Magic: Revisiting a Classic Study of Religious Ceremonies in Thailand.

• Author: McDaniel, Justin
• Position: Book review

Monks and Magic: Revisiting a Classic Study of Religious Ceremonies in Thailand. 2nd rev. ed. By BAREND JAN TERWIEL. NIAS Classics, vol. 2. Copenhagen: NORDIC INSTITUTE OF ASIAN STUDIES, 2012. Pp. xiii + 312. [pounds sterling]30.

"The most mysterious aspect of consciousness concerns qualia--the redness of red, or the painfulness of pain." (Francis Crick and Christoph Koch, "The Neural Correlates of Consciousness," in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. Richard Gregory [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 20041: 221-22.)

Trying to offer a summation of modern Thai Buddhism is like attempting to measure the redness of red. Any analysis is subjective, any interpretation contingent. The qualia of daily religiosity are too subtle. Various methods, models, tools, and approaches applied to this subject, if it is even "a subject," have proved inadequate. Trying to fit the diversity and creativity of Thai Buddhists into one study is fruitless.

In some ways I started abandoning attempts to understand and explain the wide variety of Thai Buddhist teachings and practices while reflecting on the writing of Barend Jan Terwiel, one of the most influential scholars of Thai religion and history. In 1975 Terwiel first published the seminal Monks and Magic. My well-worn copy of his book was a useful companion while trying to write a book on Thai Buddhism myself. His book was a groundbreaking achievement which has not been matched until, well, the new edition (fourth total) of that book released earlier this year by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS). I have found that Terwiel's is a book that needs revisiting, because it is the qualia of Thai Buddhist culture that he was trying to get at and that are so hard to articulate. In many ways his book reads as freshly as it did when I first read it in 1996. I had been living in Thailand for nearly three years before I encountered it, and, although it was not the first book! read that tried to provide a comprehensive picture of Central Thai religion, it was the first that made sense in relation to what I was seeing on the ground in Central Thailand (in similar ways to the work of Donald Swearer on Northern Thailand and Charles Keyes on Northeastern Thailand). Terwiel approached the "subject" from close investigations of ritual moments and intimate conversations. He rarely compared what he saw to vague notions of the "Theravada" or to "Indic Buddhism" or a "Southeast Asian worldview." He listened and observed. He even ordained as a monk for a few months to live among and practice with Thai Buddhists. It is this intimacy that makes this book so rich. He describes in detail nearly every ritual of lay and monastic life from birth to building a house, from becoming a monk to conducting a funeral in a Central Thai village. It is still an ideal introduction to Central Thai religion. The new edition also includes a fine glossary, Thai script instead of Roman transliteration for many terms, Thai books in the bibliography, and an evocative postscript describing how a chance encounter changed the course of his personal and scholarly life (a postscript to which we will return). The chance encounters are the most telling in this wonderful study. They reveal a comfort with the inconsistency seen among Thai Buddhists that I would like to reflect upon in this review.

The facts that Terwiel noticed "on the ground" in...