Cross-border journeys and minority monks: the making of Buddhist places in southwest China

Abstract

This article investigates the practice and social meanings of cross-border journeys of Dai minority monks, in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China. These journeys play a vital part in Theravada revivalism in this border region. In the early 1990s, the Dai monks left Xishuangbanna to pursue their Buddhist studies in Thailand, thereby experiencing Thai culture and society. I will show not only that transnational networks among the Tai peoples in the upper Mekong region have played a crucial role in this religious movement, but also that the transnational Theravada networks enable and are partly constituted by the cross-border journeys of Dai exiles and minority monks, which strengthen and enhance the Dai ability to persist, revive, and maintain their locality and cultural identity. It is these cultural practices which contribute to and formulate the making of Dai places within the power contexts of state displacement, regional trade and development in Southwest China.

Keywords:

• cross-border mobility
• Dai minority monks
• Theravada networks
• Xishuangbanna
• Southwest China

Notes

¹Cohen, ‘Buddhism Unshackled’; Keyes, Who are the Lue Revisited?; Lebar et al., eds., Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia, 206–13; Moerman, ‘Ethnic Identification in a Complex Civilization’; Wijeyewardene, ‘Ethnicity and Nation’.

²Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma; Turton, ed., Civility and Savagery.

³Boundary Treaties in Siam and Indo-China. The Geographical Journal 7, no. 3 (1896): 297–99. For more details on this historical moment, see: Grabowsky and Turton, The Gold and Silver Road of Trade and Friendship; Hsieh, ‘On the Dynamic Ethnicity of Sipsong Panna Tai during the Republican Period’; Winichakul, Siam Mapped, 95–112.

⁴In this article, the terms Xishuangbanna and Sipsong Panna, also Dai and Lue, will be used interchangeably. Also, where possible, all personal names and related places are disguised, to protect their privacy.

⁵Hsieh, ‘Ethnic-Political Adaptation and Ethnic Change of the Sipsong Panna Dai: An Ethnohistorical Analysis’. See also Gladney, ‘Foreword’.

⁶Li, ‘Tourism Enterprises, the State, and the Construction of Multiple Dai Cultures in Contemporary Xishuang Banna, China’.

⁷Evans, ‘Transformation of Jinghong, Xishuangbanna, PRC’, 166.

⁸Data used in this article is based on my fieldwork in Xishuangbanna and the upper Mekong region, conducted from October 2002 to September 2003, with follow-up fieldwork in May to June 2004, and several trips to Xishuangbanna from late 2005 to April 2008.

⁹Davis, ‘Premodern Flows in Postmodern China’; Hansen, Lessons in Being Chinese; McCarthy, ‘God of Wealth, Temples of Prosperity’. Davis, Hansen, and McCarthy's works, as mentioned, referred to this issue. However, most of these works cannot clearly present what happened in these religious reforming processes. Many stories are still untold, particularly from this Dai minority's point of view. This article therefore is intended to fulfil that gap, through analytic ethnographic studies of the cross-border monk's journeys.

¹⁰Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China.

¹¹Lintner, Cross-Border Drug Trade in the Golden Triangle (S.E. Asia), 19–26.

¹²The exact numbers of former Lue exiled in Thailand are still unknown until today.

¹³See also Davis, ‘Premodern Flows in Postmodern China’.

¹⁴Peters, ‘Buddhism and Ethnicity among the Tai Lue in the Sipsongpanna’, 348.

¹⁵Lemoine, ‘Ethnicity, Culture and Development Among Some Minorities of the People's Republic of China’.

¹⁶Condominas, ‘In Search of a Vat: The Dai in Internal and the Lao in External Exile’, 449.

¹⁷See also Davis, Song and Silence.

¹⁸And this was not different from Thai students who were rewarded by Thai government's scholarship to study in overseas universities. They had to undertake this kind of short orientation program as well in Bangkok.

¹⁹The re-ordination of Dai novices who went to northern Thailand was basically conducted by obtaining a Thai monk card. All Buddhist monks and novices in Thailand have to be registered, giving their preceptors and affiliated temples (we will discuss this later).

²⁰In 1986, Maha Luang first went across the borders to study Tai and Thai languages and Buddhism at Wat Sai Muang in Tachilek. He studied there for about two years, from 1987–1988. In 1989 he returned to Muang Long, leading the Dai villagers to reconstruct his home village's temple building. After the end of Buddhist Lent period in 1990, he returned to Wat Sai Muang where he met the great Yong monk from Pa Xang.

²¹Maha Khuen, with his great fellow monk, called Khruba Doi Tung in Chiang Rai province, began his visit to Muang Yong in the early 1980s.

²²Usually the exam that students have to undertake is to translate Pali texts, written in Dhamma script, which is the same as Tai script, into central Thai. For more details see Swearer, Wat Haripuñjaya.

²³As I was told, not all 10 members of the Buddhist Association delegation (and some other Dai cross-border student monks and novices) who studied at Wat Phra Bath for three years, passed this highest degree of study, partly because of their time limit and of course their central Thai competence (many of them were not able to reach a high level in the Pali school program). Therefore, after their first return to Xishuangbanna, some members in the 1991 delegation returned to northern Thailand, this time on their own journeys, overland, to pursue higher Buddhist degrees of study in the Pali school program.

²⁴For more details: Lintner, Cross-Border Drug Trade in the Golden Triangle (S.E. Asia).

²⁵The re-unification of the Shan State Army (SSA) and the Shan State National Army (SSNA), which had ceased fire for a decade, on 21 May 2005, to fight the junta government for Shan independence, is also another important factor that one needs to be aware of in order to understand current situation in this region.

²⁶See also Davis, ‘Premodern Flows in Postmodern China’; Panyagaew, ‘Moving Dai: The Stories of a Minority Band from the Upper Mekong’.

²⁷For more details: Panyagaew, ‘Re-Emplacing Homeland’.

²⁸Battersby, ‘Border Politics and the Broader Politics of Thailand's International Relations in the 1990s’; Walker, The Legend of the Golden Boat.

²⁹See also Cohen, ‘A Buddha Kingdom in the Golden Triangle’; Cohen, ‘Lue across Borders’; Keyes, ‘Buddhism and Nation Integration in Thailand’.

³⁰Keyes, ‘Buddhist Pilgrimage Centers and the Twelve-Year Cycle’; Pruess, ‘Merit-seeking in public’.