State Law and the Law of Sacred Centers, David M. Engel and Jaruwan Engel

In this reading, David and Jaruwan Engel discuss Buddhism in northern Thailand and its relationship to the law of injuries. The injury practices discussed by their interviewees deviate radically from Buddhist doctrine enshrined in classical religious texts and draw extensively on animism, astrol­ogy, and spirit worship.

Law of Sacred Centers in the Village

[T]he law of sacred centers radiates outward from a locus having supernatural potency. This system of unwritten customary norms and procedures is strongest at locations closest to the center and becomes weaker and more uncertain at more distant locations.

The household was historically the sacred center that shaped the identity of Thai villagers from the beginning of their lives. In the past, according to the recollections of many interviewees, individuals in northern Thailand were literally born into houses; this was before hospital birthing became common. The houses were themselves geographical locations constructed around a sacred center, the “auspicious post” that served as “the ritual center of the dwelling.”^[4] [...]

The identity of each villager was connected from birth to a specific location and a geographically based community of humans and spirits. [...] Injuries, illnesses, and other mishaps were located in relation to the sacred centers and the supernatural beings who presided over them. For example, if a baby cried all night or if a child was sick or injured, the family prayed for the intercession of the ancestral spirits of the rice pot, pu dam ya dam. The clay rice pot blackened by smoke from burning wood was a prominent feature of the house's kitchen - a “place” in the geography of the home. [...] Other household spirits required regular propitiation and notification of the family's comings and goings. In exchange, they offered protection against harm: “If you wanted to do anything, you had to consider the household spirits first. They were always watching. People respected them” (interview with Bancha). [...]

Spirits were involved in many aspects of injury practices. Injuries inflicted on a villager could offend the spirits and require propitiatory ceremonies. If individuals behaved disrespectfully, the spirits themselves could cause injuries as a form of punishment.

Territorial guardian spirits (jao tbi jao thang) watched over the household, and villagers built shrines to them within each compound. The so-called spirit house is still a familiar feature of most Thai residences - a miniature dwelling, often elevated on a post and positioned outside the house itself. Most

interviewees recalled childhood practices associated with these spirits. Each day, their parents would light incense sticks and candles and would offer sweet and savory foods. The household guardian spirits could reveal the cause of an accident or illness and point the household members toward a solution:

If someone in the house was ill or injured and didn't get better after seeing a doctor, the elders would make an offering at the shrine of the guardian spirits. They would ask the spirits to enter their dreams and explain why the person was suffering and what needed to be done to get better. They would enter the dreams of someone in the house. It might be anyone. And when we dream, they may come and talk with us, “Oh, you went out and a ghost got you, this ghost or that ghost. A ghost of some dead person. (laughs) A ghost of someone with no relatives [i.e., no one to perform the rituals that would allow the ghost to leave the spot where he had died].”... If you encountered this type of ghost or failed to show proper respect, if you walked on it or stepped on its head, then you must perform a ceremony to feed it a duck or chicken.

(interview with Bancha)

The intimate relationships of the household were enlarged and replicated at the village level. The word for village, mu ban, means literally “a group of households.” The village chief in northern Thailand is the pho luang, or “big father,” suggesting a collective familial relationship within the village. Guardian spirits watched over the entire village, just as they watched over each household. These locality spirits were known by many names, such as pho ban (“village father”) or jao ban (“lord of the village”). In one village we visited, the sua ban (“village ancestral spirits”) resided in large, houselike shrines, where the villagers made merit during the Thai New Year or when they got married, built a new house, or had a funeral. To invoke the spirits' protection, villagers offered flowers, whiskey, and food, both sweet and savory, and they prayed: “Today we are having a wedding. Please, help and take care of this couple. Keep them from danger” (interview with Bancha). Failure of a villager or a household to propitiate the village guardian spirit could cause misfortune.

Even Buddhist temples had their own (non-Buddhist) guardian spirits, or sua wat, which were propitiated by monks and villagers. [Michael R.] Rhum refers to them as “wat-protecting spirits.”^[5] One commentator [Shalardchai Ramitanon] has used the term villagers' Buddhism to describe this amalgam of Buddhist and non-Buddhist elements in rural Thai communities.^[6] Locality spirits were positioned at the center of village cosmologies that also included Buddhist shrines, temples, monks, and saints.

In short, households and villages were nodes of social and spiritual inter­connection. Residence in these communities conferred identity on humans and spirits and gave a place and a meaning to important events, including injuries. [...]

To understand how injuries were conceptualized and handled within communities established around sacred centers, it is necessary to mention some of the key attributes of identity that were familiar to those who resided there.

The first identity attribute, the khwan, is a flighty spiritual essence found in all living beings and in some natural objects such as rice fields and mountains. Even automobiles may have a khwan. When an individual suffers fright, trauma, or physical injury, it is said that the khwan flies out of the body, and a ritual - known as riak khwan or, in northern dialect, hong khwan - must then be performed to recall the khwan and bind it in the body by tying a sacred string or thread around the wrists. Loss of the khwan causes the individual to become unwell, both physically and mentally, and the confusion and alienation of the afflicted person was, at least in the past, understood to pose a risk to the entire community. Symbolically, the lost khwan was thought to escape from the physical boundaries of the village and enter a realm beyond that of human society. [...]

Recalling the khwan of an injured person was seen as essential to repair the fabric of the community. Significantly, the payment made by the injurer was - and still is - referred to as “payment for the khwan ceremony” (kha tham khwan). This term, even today, is widely used in Thai society to describe the compensation that is paid in an injury case. It is understandable that, in the closely integrated village society of humans and spirits, the entire community would insist that the injurer pay compensation. The injurer's transgression put everyone at risk, and the victim would cease to be a functional member of his family and his village until the khwan was recalled and bound firmly into the

39 victim's body. Because each injury had this collective aspect, compelling the payment of injury costs was assumed to be essential to the preservation of the village community.

The second component of human identity that is relevant to this discussion of injuries is another type of spiritual essence known as winyan. More durable than the khwan, the winyan leaves the body only at the time of death. Buddhist rituals to make merit for the winyan can ensure its progression toward a favorable future life, and ultimately the winyan should undergo reincarnation; but when death results from an injury, there is a danger that the winyan will remain at the spot of the fatality. When a violent or unnatural death (tai hong) occurs, the winyan that is allowed to linger at the location becomes the most dangerous type of ghost (phi tai hong). It waits until other humans come near to sicken or kill them so that a new winyan will take its place and it can continue its normal path in the cycle of birth and rebirth. Thus, when violent or unnatural deaths occur, it is imperative to perform a ritual aimed at preventing this type of dangerous and malevolent ghost from arising. Interviewees recalled that the cost of these merit-making ceremonies in cases of abnormal death was an obligation assumed by the injurer. The entire village had an interest in enforcing this obligation because everyone was put at risk by the dangerous and malevolent phi tai hong.

In sum, the remembered law of sacred centers began with traditions located in households and villages. In proximity to those geographical centers, indi­viduals acquired an identity and a status, and they fell under the protection of territorially based authorities - both human and supernatural - who could interpret the cause of injuries, identify the transgressions that caused them, and enforce the payment of compensation. Injuries within the community disrupted social harmony and threatened the well-being of all. The collective interest in redressing this kind of normative violation was voiced by the spirits through various means, such as the ritual to ascertain the views of household spirits and ceremonies associated with spirit mediums, traditional healers, and others. Village elders, including the village or subdistrict chief, served as agents of human authority to compel the payment of compensation. All these practices were understood to be consistent with “villagers' Buddhism,” which was actually a heterogeneous mix of Buddhist and non-Buddhist customs and beliefs. [...]

Injury and Identity Far from Home

The weakening of the law of sacred centers became more pronounced as individuals traveled farther from home, toward other villages and towns. The highways themselves could be a source of danger because the malevolent ghosts of accident victims resided along the roadside. When injuries occurred on the highway, the cause was often traced back to the depredations of these ghosts, known as phi tai hong. Such ghosts could obscure the vision of a person who came too close or could otherwise try to cause a fatal accident in order to have the victim's winyan take the place of the ghost and allow the latter to leave that location and resume its spiritual progression toward a new birth. Such explanations did not necessarily support the assumption that the injured person should receive customary compensation from another human, because the essence of the problem was the ghost rather than the injurer.

The fear of phi tai hong made it essential to perform a proper ritual, (sut thon) at the place where an abnormal death occurred. [...] Kham, for example, recalled that monks who performed the ritual placed the winyan in a bamboo fish trap to remove it from the place where it had fallen at the time of death. He remembered that the lightweight fish trap became extremely heavy once the officiants placed the added weight of the malevolent ghost inside, and it rook four men to lift it and carry it away to be buried at the foot of a sacred bo tree in the cemetery outside a temple. [...] [T]he sut thon ritual also involved the placement of miniature sand stupas at the spot where the accident occurred, along with small flags made from colored p^ap^er. ^[...]

Whatever the precise details of the sut thon ceremony, villagers believed that it had to be performed to prevent one fatality from leading to other injuries and deaths. The ceremony was associated with a customary law of injuries in that its costs were regarded as the responsibility of the injurer and provided a measure of the compensation to which the victim or the family was entitled. But injuries and fatalities far from home presented another problem: the difficulty of negotiating a remedy. When the claimant and injurer lived in the same village, the village chief or subdistrict chief (kamnan) could remind them of the norms and expectations for paying compensation after an injury took place. Because both parties worshipped the same guardian spirits, they were literally brothers and sisters who had to treat one another with respect and generosity. But when injuries occurred on the highway, the disputants were likely to have been strangers to one another and may have found themselves without a mutually acceptable mediator. In such cases, injurers who disagreed about their obligation to pay for the sut thon ceremony might discover that there was no authority figure to compel them to change their minds. In legal spaces where authority radiates outward from a sacred center, the more distant a location is from the center that holds significance for the disputants the more problematic enforcement becomes.

Injuries off the Map: Delocalized Causes of Harm

We have spoken thus far of injuries that were associated with specific loca­tions: the house, the village, the forest, and the highway. Yet even in the imagined landscape familiar to preceding generations, many causes of injury were not locality based and could not be mapped at all. For example, karmic explanations of injury, which often appeared in combination with other explanations, were not place specific. They referred to the injured person's own misdeeds, either in this life or in an earlier life. The injury was thus a consequence of actions the injury victim had previously directed at the injurer or at another person or even an animal. [...] The effects of these actions later manifested themselves in the form of an accident.

Karmic explanations placed the ultimate causal responsibility on the victim him- or herself. What then of the injurer? A different type of explanation that may be more common in the present than in the past is negligence. The concept of negligence is also “off the map” in that its causal roots are not fixed to any particular geographical location. The Thai word for “negligent” is pramat (careless, imprudent), which is also a legal term, but its colloquial meaning in Thai carries some connotations that are lacking in English. When individuals cited the injurer's negligence as one cause of their injury, they usually hastened to add that they themselves had also been negligent. Negligence on the part of both parties - injured and injurer - appear to be linked conceptually in the minds of ordinary people in Thailand.

Injuries occurred because both parties lacked sati, or mindfulness. Sati is another Buddhist concept, signifying a mind that is focused, calm, aware, and undistracted. Sati can be achieved through concentration and meditation as well as a philosophical understanding of the illusory quality of everyday life. Negligence is, in a sense, the opposite of sati: “[I]f you are negligent then you don't have sati; you are acting without sati” (interview with Suwit). The concept of negligence was thus closely connected to the concept we might call “contributory negligence,” and both in turn were tied to the Buddhist concept of an undisciplined mind and a lack of spiritual training and aware­ness. Moreover, the teachings of the Buddha would explain that negligence was a secondary cause of injury, not the root cause. The root cause, from a Buddhist perspective, is karma. The carelessness of both parties and their lack of sati have karmic origins.

Karma and negligence were two of the most important “off-the-map” causal explanations for injuries. Neither cause has specific spatial referents; neither has a geographic “place.” Interviewees also identified other nonlocalized explanations for injury. The concept of fate or destiny (khro), for example, is connected to karma yet distinguishable from it. Women “have khro” when their age is an odd number, but men have khro, and are therefore more susceptible to injury, when their age is an even number. According to Keyes, khro is a non-Buddhist concept of causation “that operates irrespective of the moral actions of people, whereas the Buddhist concept of Karma relates all causation ultimately to moral action.”^[7] Nevertheless, injury victims in northern Thailand tended to merge the two concepts in a single expression, khrokam, and they spoke of their khro as the product of bad karma they had accumulated through misdeeds in their current or previous lifetimes. [...]

Injuries sometimes arose from another nonlocalized cause, one's “stars” (duang). When a person's stars are in the ascendancy, good luck of all kinds may occur - one may win the lottery, succeed in gambling, and achieve success in all endeavors. But when one's stars are on the decline, bad fortune is likely, and injuries may occur.

Injuries could even be caused by a person's name. One interviewee, for example, complained that his parents did not give him a name that was appropriate for the day, month, and year of his birth. An inappropriate name can bring bad luck and make one susceptible to injuries. At the time of the interview, he was considering a name change to improve his luck and avoid further mishaps. A female interviewee, Saikham, changed her name after her husband was killed in a traffic accident, but this did not protect her several years later from a motorcycle collision that broke her leg. It may, however, have made her accident less serious and saved her life.

All of these delocalized causes of injury - karma, negligence, absence of sati, fate, stars, and other forms of bad luck - had one thing in common: None of them, except perhaps the injurer's negligence, was associated with a remedy of any kind, or at least a remedy that the injurer was obliged to provide. If the cause of the injury was the victim's own karma, contributory negligence, lack of sati, fate, or bad luck, then why should the injurer take responsibility? In the past, these delocalized causal explanations were familiar and widely accepted, yet they did not necessarily relieve the injurer of an obligation to pay compen­sation. When injuries occurred in villages near the watchful eyes of the guardian spirits, the delocalized explanations were rarely regarded as the exclusive cause of the injury. Causation was multiple, shifting, and overlap­ping. No single explanation trumped the others. All of them were relevant, and combinations of them were likely to be mentioned when an injury occurred. The village chief could refer to the victim's karma at the same time that he reminded the injurer that he or she had violated local norms and disturbed the well-being of the entire village. Injuries could be simultaneously localized and delocalized. In the normal course of things, injurers were in the end expected to pay compensation.