 | Buddhism and the spirit cults in North-east Thailand |  |
DEATH AND SPIRITS
I have discussed in Chapter 11 the concepts of normal and abnormal
death in relation to mortuary rites, which are in one sense Buddhist rites
par excellence. Persons who die normally are principally those who have
reached the status of elders (phuu thaw); their mortuary rites are conducted
by monks, whose role is to lead the winjan to heaven thereby ensuring the
transition from malevolent spirit to ancestor. Persons who die abnormal
deaths are principally those who have died in the prime of life, without
completing their life cycle and the orderly succession of statuses. The
unsuccessful childbirth. The dangers generated by such deaths are reflected
in the funerary rites: hurried, unceremonious burial so that the earth may
absorb impurity, and subsequent disinterment and cremation conducted
by monks.
Now this dichotomy reflected in Buddhist mortuary rites appears again
in respect of phii: ancestral spirits versus the malevolent spirits of those
who died violent deaths. In Buddhist ritual, merit is transferred to dead
parents and ancestral spirits (phii phau phii mae) (phii yaad phii sua); this
transfer, we have already seen, is a major theme in the activities of merit-making.
A comment is called for in respect of the social-structural underpinnings
of the notion of ancestral spirits. The concept phii yaad simply
means `spirits of dead kin': that is, it is a general category term for dead
relatives. More specifically, phii phau phii mae: `spirits of (dead) father
and mother' lumps together both parents under one compound label, thus
emphasizing the filial relationship rather than distinguishing a separate
paternal and maternal existence after death. Thus beyond dead parents,
who receive a collective specification, there is the diffuse category of
dead kin (phii yaad). All these spirits are believed to be capable of attacking
living humans.
The notion that the spirits of parents and grandparents form a kind
of pool of the dead, and the fact that there is no firm genealogical structuring
or individual remembrance of persons beyond the parents, are both
consistent with the bilateral kinship system of the village and its emphasis
on relations between generations. (This situation is far removed from
descent-based lineal societies, where the father and mother are seen in
the dogma regarding conception as contributing different spiritual and
bodily substances to children, where paternal and maternal ghosts are
differentiated, and where, if ancestor worship is institutionalized, the
particular line of ancestors emphasized not only provides a charter for
genealogically ordered social structure, but these ancestors are also commemorated
and propitiated by name (Fortes 1965, pp. 123-4).) Also
consistent is the fact that whenever in the village an affliction is diagnosed
as the act of parental or ancestral spirits, no effort is made to determine
which spirit is the agent.
Whenever ancestral spirits impinge on the lives of living descendants
by causing illness they are regarded as phii (maelvolent spirits), who are
then propitiated in a manner consistent with the theory of spirit affliction
and without recourse to the ritual services of monks. It is believed that
when descendants (luug-laan) fail to transfer merit to the dead, ancestral
spirits cause minor illnesses such as headache and fever. When children
cause difficulties in child-bearing to the women of the families of descendants.
These two reactions, we can readily see, are typical ancestor
manifestations: ancestral spirits act when they are in danger of being
forgotten, and when the unity of their children is threatened. Thus these
ancestral spirits, although malevolent, are not capricious but are moralistic
agents. While in the Buddhist context they are regularly remembered and
commemorated as a general category of the dead (and, apart from parents,
not as individually named ancestors), in the sphere of spirit propitiation
they are placated only when they make themselves felt in a malevolent
manner. Once they have been divined as the agents of affliction, the
oldest luug-laan (oldest child or grandchild) present in the village makes
the usual offerings of cooked fish, roasted or steamed rice, betel nut,
tobacco and flowers.
The victims of sudden death, as a distinct category, are generally called
phii tai hoeng. From the standpoint of comparative ethnography, the
Thai characterization of them is the same as in many other societies. They
are aptly described in Bradbury's words as the unincorporated dead as
distinct from the incorporated parents and elders (Bradbury 1966).
Sudden or violent death can of course overtake the old as well as the
young, but village fears crystallize around the young woman who has
died in childbirth, especially with a stillborn child, or the young man who,
in full possession of his physical and mental powers, has died by accident
or violence. Their unfulfilled and clinging interests in and attachment to
life in this world makes them doubly malevolent, and they assume the
existence of free-floating evil. Thus we get an interesting inversion. While
parents, when they die, are put in the path of rebirth and can act as
moral and disciplinary spiritual agents, the youthful on the other hand
become capricious and powerful phii, relatively difficult to control and
to immunize, and are removed from the channels of rebirth.
This inversion takes on a fuller sociological meaning when seen in
relation to the mortuary rites and the rites for calling the khwan (Chapter
13). The mortuary rites emphasize the duties of living descendants to
dead parents and elders, and in the khwan ceremonies the elders reciprocate
by installing the youth in statuses and charging them with morale and
morality. It is thus understandable why ancestral spirits afflict their
children if the latter neglect them. It is also evident that the spirits of
the young man who dies a victim of violent death and of the pregnant
woman who dies at childbirth are malevolent and uncontrollable, since
they are precisely the persons whom the elders have been unable to
initiate and install into the ordered sequence of community statuses. They
unborn child in the womb of a dead woman (phii prai).
Human ingenuity, however, finds a way of putting phii tai hoeng to use.
An expert in spirits (mau phii) may manage to tame and look after such
a spirit, and use its power to achieve either good or bad. This is the basis
of one kind of mediumship which benefits the living, or of sorcery which
harms them. No such agent or cult was encountered in the village of
Phraan Muan. Where it occurs in other parts of Thailand it tends to be
a peripheral cult which borders on the ecstatic and dangerous. Moreover,
while the ideas concerning abnormal death are reflected in the village
mortuary rites, no named phii tai hoeng nor any rituals addressed to them
were encountered. (The one exception, an instance of phii prai, will be
described below in this chapter.) The belief in the violent spirit is thus
a magnified and dramatized conceptualization of a free-floating malignant
force which, however, does not find expression as systematized cult
behaviour. It represents the theoretical extreme of the concept of an
unfulfilled life, the concept being transformed into the notion of uncontrollable
evil.
| Buddhism and the spirit cults in North-east Thailand | |