Calamity Cosmologies: Buddhist Ethics and the Creation of a Moral Community

The topic of an age of the decline in the Buddha's teachings was variously elaborated in the moral story-literature of northern Thai, Lao, and Cambodian Theravadin Buddhists from the nineteenth to early twentieth century. Northern Thai narratives about the age of the decline in the Buddha's teaching portray contemporary society as morally fragmented by its oppressive structures. Through this picture of a dual decline in the Buddha's teachings and society's morality, these northern Thai narratives which I refer to as "calamity-cosmology narratives" suggests that northern Thai monks used the religious idea of age of decline to question whether or not the societies of theirs constituted a moral community. I argue that calamity-cosmology narratives from northern Thailand envisioned a morality community made up of politically disenfranchised Buddhist serfs. These literary accounts of a moral community for the socially oppressed are built upon the representations of the social suffering experienced by serfs. To give voice to a morality of and for the oppressed, these narratives conveys a rich concept of the moral community as 1) capable of existing in the context of an age of religious decline and social disorder, 2) as a group constituted by a dialogue of moral reproof (ovada) society's conventional morality, and 3) as characterized by moral emotions that arise from the context of a morally-fragmented society such as ethical existential anxiety, (samvega) and moral resentment. Durkheim's theory that a society's moral community depends upon tacitly agreed-upon moral ideals leads to the question of how subalterns can form an attachment to moral ideals that vindicate an oppressively structured society. I suggest that northern Thai Buddhist society was characterized by an ethics of tradition based in moral ideals and an ethics of rethinking tradition's moral ideals in which calamity-cosmology narratives served as a site for the latter by re-envisioning a moral community not based upon religious ideals, as Durkheim suggests, but instead a notion of social suffering.