Religion and Resistance: Christianity and the Refashioning of Theravada Buddhism in Nineteenth-Century Siam

在泰国历史上，19世纪是一个政治、经济和思想迅速变革的时期，它从根本上改变了暹罗国家、社会和宗教机构。从大约1830年开始，关于宗教的讨论成为暹罗两种对立的知识体制之间冲突的中心舞台，面对传统的泰国佛教对自然和人类存在的看法，以及来自西方的科学和理性主义思想的理想和实践。新教传教士是重要的知识中间人，因为他们的优势之一是能够将宗教与现代科学技术结合起来。这个项目将研究在西方列强的巨大政治压力下，知识转移和基督教使命之间的相互作用。它试图解释佛教如何成为暹罗争取精神和政治权威的主要工具，并将把握殖民现代性的入侵与泰国文化和身份的持久力量在19世纪是如何协商的。这项研究计划是基于三个假设。首先，人们认为基督教教义在19世纪暹罗佛教的转变中发挥了至关重要的作用，尽管基督教使命本身在皈依方面是失败的。其次，所谓的现代佛教不仅成为暹罗人在面对欧洲殖民主义时的文化自信的重要来源，也是推动暹罗人在小乘佛教世界中主张宗教领导地位的核心意识形态。第三，这里假设暹罗佛教与19世纪和20世纪初的全球佛教话语有关，该话语连接了东南亚，斯里兰卡，欧洲和美国等不同和遥远的地区。通过重新审视这一时期出版的泰国和西方材料，并以迄今为止很少使用的传教士档案资料为基础，该项目将实现以下目标：(1)阐明在19世纪暹罗工作的新教英美传教士的个人、宗教和知识背景；(2)揭示为传教目的而制作的基督教文本和翻译，以描述该时期跨文化宗教辩论的性质；(3)更好地理解暹罗人应对基督教和殖民主义威胁的智力策略；(4)评估19世纪暹罗国王在小乘佛教世界，特别是在斯里兰卡传播其现代佛教概念的努力；(5)描述19世纪和20世纪初暹罗现代主义改革运动与西方佛教话语之间的全球联系。

The nineteenth century is remembered in Thai history as a period of rapid political, economic and intellectual change that fundamentally transformed the Siamese state, its society and religious institutions. From c. 1830 onwards, discussions on religion became a central arena of conflict between rival regimes of knowledge in Siam, confronting traditional Thai Buddhist views on nature and the existence of man with the ideals and practices of science and rationalist thought coming from the West. Protestant missionaries were important brokers of knowledge, as one of their strengths was the ability to offer religion in tandem with modern science and technology. This project will examine the interplay between knowledge transfer and the Christian mission in a period of massive political pressure from Western imperial powers. It seeks to explain how Buddhism became a major instrument in the struggle for spiritual and political authority in Siam, and will grasp how the intrusion of colonial modernity and the enduring power of Thai culture and identity were negotiated in the nineteenth century. The research proposal is based on three assumptions. First, it is presumed that Christian doctrines played a crucial role for the transformation of Buddhism in nineteenth-century Siam, even though the Christian mission itself was a failure in terms of conversions. Secondly, so-called modern Buddhism not only became an important source for Siamese cultural assertiveness in the face of European colonialism, but also a central ideology for pushing Siamese claims for religious leadership in the Theravada Buddhist world. Thirdly, it is hypothesized here that Siamese Buddhism was linked to a global discourse on Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that connected different and distant locales such as Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, Europe and the USA. By revisiting published Thai and Western material from the period and based on a range of hitherto little used sources from missionary archives, the project will pursue the following objectives: (1) to illuminate the personal, religious and intellectual backgrounds of Protestant Anglo-American missionaries operating in nineteenth-century Siam; (2) to uncover Christian texts and translations produced for missionary purposes to describe the nature of cross-cultural religious debates in the period; (3) to provide a better understanding of the intellectual strategies that informed Siamese responses to Christianity and the threat of colonialism; (4) to assess the Siamese kings efforts in the nineteenth century to disseminate their concept of modern Buddhism in the Theravada Buddhist world, especially in Sri Lanka; (5) to describe the global connections between modernist reform movements in Siam and Western discourses on Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.