Chapter Four - Thailand’s Cults of Wealth: Royal Spirits, Magic Monks, Chinese and Indian Deities

Summary

Introduction

Thailand’s modern cults of wealth emerge from diverse cultural, historical and religious origins, reflecting the deep history and the more recent intensification of the society’s polycultural complexity as detailed in the previous chapter. Each cult has a distinct history, has developed around a particular divine or magical figure, has its own forms of ritual expression and often also possesses its own shrines and sites of worship and pilgrimage. While having precedents in the religious valuing of prosperity in Thai Buddhism, all of the cults of wealth considered in this study are recent religious phenomena that only took their current forms in the later decades of the twentieth century. Four main categories of cults of wealth can be distinguished based on the type of deity or spiritual figure that is the focus of ritual devotion: cults of Thai kings and other royal personalities; cults of Chinese deities; cults of Hindu gods; and cults of magic monks, both living and dead, from Thailand’s Theravada tradition. In this chapter I describe the most prominent Thai cults of wealth in each of these four categories, pointing out their recentness, their differences from earlier Thai magical cults, their intimate associations with the market and their popularity among middle class and elite Thais. I begin by detailing older cults of prosperity that formed the religious setting from which new movements have emerged and diverged.

“Buddha Never Said Profit is a Dirty Word”: Precedents for the Modern Cults of Wealth

An emphasis on improving luck and acquiring wealth is not a wholly novel feature of vernacular Thai religiosity. The diverse cults of wealth represent a contemporary, commodified expression of long-standing patterns of Theravada devotionalism. Christine Gray emphasizes that there is “an elective affinity between Buddhism and capitalist expansion” (Gray 1986, p. 100) and that “Theravada Buddhism does not preclude a positive valuation of the pursuit of wealth, nor does it rule out a positive connection between the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of salvation” (p. 43). Rather, Gray observes,

[T]his-worldly and supra-worldly activities complementary, because monastic and economic are inherently activity are seen as having a mutually beneficial effect on each other. Success in one domain guarantees success in the other, and vigorous market activity is potentially an expression, albeit indirect, of religious duty.