CHAIRPERSON
Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
In 1897 the Siamese king began the long ocean trip from Bangkok to Europe. On his way to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Chulalongkorn stopped at Colombo where he was greeted as a Buddhist king capable– his “foreign” status notwithstanding–of imposing order on Sri Lankan monastic affairs. The following day he visited the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy to venerate the most sacred object in the Buddhist world, the Tooth Relic. For reasons that have never been understood Chulalongkorn was grievously insulted by Kandyan monks on that occasion, and he stormed off, all hopes of exerting royal authority over the monkhood in all three Theravada countries, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand now gone. I want to consider four explanations for the forces that might have motivated the insult, and weigh out the importance of each in the Buddhist struggle to create larger forms of community and eventually a united Buddhist world.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Steven Kemper is Charles Anderson Dana Professor of Anthropology at Bates College. His most recent book is Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press: 2015), a title that resonates with Prasenajit Duara’s work disentangling history from the nation state. At the Asia Research Institute, he is working on the emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century of two contradictory forms of Buddhist modernity – a cosmopolitan, transnational, universal Buddhism and a local Buddhism, nationalist in both its reach and political aspirations. Dharmapala embodied and propagated both.
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