Temple servitors of Thailand

Abstract

Before the turn of the century the temple servitor practice was common in Thailand. It was part of the ancient religious education conducted in the temples. Temples were the only places of formal education, an exclusively male preserve. This situation changed with the advent of government secular schools resulting from Thailand's educational reform policies after the second part of the nineteenth century. Secularization of education caused the decline of the servitor practice. The latter no longer forms an essential part of religious training. However, the reality is that this practice has survived in present-day Thailand although with a rather different objective. Servitors still constitute part of temple life and community. It is the aim of this thesis to analyze the servitor practice, its role and its persistence in contemporary Thailand. My assumption is that the enduring role of temple-boys should be traced back to the educational policies carried out during King Chulalongkorn's reign in the last century. This ancient custom was intentionally preserved by the Thai state as one of the means to implement the secular primary education policy. I divide my discussion into four parts. As point of departure, Chapter 2 examines the servitor's role and life in the temple. I take my data from scattered ethnographic and some other sources in order to gain the image of the temple servitor, both in the past and present. Chapter 3 focuses on the family and family education in rural areas. My reason for discussing this is based on the fact that temple servitor practice was maintained because of several considerations. One of them was that during the educational reforms, the government regarded the idea of having children living in the temple of great importance on the grounds that the family environment was unfavourable to education. Another assumption concerning 11 frustrating 11 family conditions, which support the universality of servitor practice, challenge me to look and examine the family as an educational institution. base my discussion on contemporary sources with the aim of demonstrating that present-day features of the family and family education may help to reconstruct family conditions in the last century, especially during the beginning of the educational reforms in the provinces. Chapter 4 concerns the old temple educational system, i.e. before the turn of the century. I regard a description of the old temple education as important because it represents the system that was transformed by the government. It had to be modified because it could no longer serve the needs of society efficiently. I confine my discussion to the general picture of temple education and am only peripherally concerned with the specialized training of the religious personnel, novices and monks. This will help us to have a better understanding of the temple-boys who are usually regarded, by ethnographers, merely as servants of the monks. I first treat the temple as a community centre with its religious and social functions. In addition, I present a description of Popular Religion serving as background to the temple educational system. Chapter 5 analyzes the factors that caused changes in the educational system. External factors especially the advent of Christian missionaris will be treated as one of the initiators of the founding of western-type schools in Thailand. But internal factors, i.e. government policies manifested in the pre-1900 royal decrees, serve as my source of discussion on secularization of education and its impact on the temple educational system and the preservation of the servitor practice. This thesis is based on library research. The data on the temple servitor are compiled from the bits and pieces of various ethnographic and some other sources. Therefore, my discussion concerns the temple servitor in general rather than in a particular temple or place. For this we need field research. address my thesis to a specialized audience, i.e. those who are already familiar with Thailand, its people and culture. This explains the absence of details about the location of provinces, rainfall, demographic statistics etc. Because of familiarity, I use here the Mary R. Haas system of transl iteration which is largely taken from her Thai-English Student's Dictionary. For names of places and provinces I rely on L. Sternstein's (1976) usage. But I leave unchanged Thai terms used by others as titles of books and the like (e.g. Ban Ping instead of Bâan Piŋ). The terms dègwád, sìdwád, temple-boy and servitor, are used interchangeably. Show more