Royal Spirits, Chinese Gods, and Magic Monks: Thailand's Boom-Time Religions of Prosperity

Abstract

During the economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s, Thailand saw the emergence of a diverse range of ‘prosperity religions’, popular movements that emphasize the acquisition of wealth as much as salvation. This paper considers three Thai prosperity religions — the worship of the spirit of King Chulalongkorn, and more generally the Thai monarchy; devotion to the Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva Kuan Im; and movements surrounding auspiciously named Theravada Buddhist monks, both living and dead, reputed to possess supernatural powers. After a consideration of recent approaches to the study of Thai religion, the paper describes the form and separate histories of these movements, and then examines the ways in which they began to merge symbolically at the height of the economic boom. The paper concludes with a consideration of the critiques of the prosperity movements from Thai Buddhist doctrinalists, critiques which were fairly faint during the boom itself but which have grown in intensity since the onset of the economic crisis in 1997.

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