ANCESTORS AND BUDDHISM
Transfer of merit by the living to the dead does not stop with mortuary
rites but goes on long after death. Parents and elders become ancestral
spirits and are generally talked of as a category; there is no firm genealogical
structuring or individual remembrance of persons beyond the parental
generation.
Transfer of merit to the dead takes place on many occasions with the
aid of monks and under the rubric of Buddhist ritual. In the majority
of cases, the ashes of parents lie buried in the cemetery, where monks are
invited to chant in order to transfer merit. We have seen in the previous
account of calendrical wat rites that at the rituals of Songkran, Bun Khaw
Saak (merit-making with puffed rice) and Org Phansa (end of Lent), merit is
transferred to the dead and offerings are made to them collectively. In the
course of every wat ceremony, yaadnam, the pouring of water to transfer
merit to the dead, is performed; the living, having given gifts to the
monks, transfer some part of the merit while the monks chant their
blessings. In the course of some rites the monks themselves pour water
from one vessel to another, and transfer merit to the living, the dead,
and all non-human living creatures.
While it can be said that villagers commemorate the dead, it cannot be
said that they practise `ancestor worship' in the sense of a systematized
cult of propitiation of the dead and a formalized relationship by which
the dead interact with the living. The possibility of occasional punitive
acts by the `normally' dead is a far cry from a developed theory of morality
of benevolence/punitiveness by which the dead live in the present and
sanction the social order. Rather the accent is that the living should
succour the dead and remember them when merit is made. Or a man on
whom fortune has smiled may celebrate his status by honouring his
parents long dead. De la Loubère made an observation about the great
which is also true in a lower key of the villager: `It sometimes also happens
that a Person of Great Quality causes the body of his Father to be digged
up again, maybe a long time dead, to make him a pompous funeral; if
when he died, they made him not such a one, as was worthy of the present
Elevation of the Son' (1693, p. 124). During the course of my field
work, the headman of the village honoured his father and mother in this
manner.
