第216页 Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, 1851-1910

 The reform Thammayutika sect of Siamese Buddhism founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Mongkut had, by the early twentieth, a profound effect on Siamese Buddhism. It was more rigorously intellectual and scholarly, and less ritualistic, and it lay heavy stress upon the education not only of its monks but also of the lay population. Under the vigorous leadership of Prince Wachirayanwarorot (1860-1921), who headed the sect in the last years of the nineteenth century and then became supreme patriarch of all Siamese Buddhism, it reached out effectively into the countryside. Thammayutika monasteries became especially, and disproportionately, popular in the most impoverished regions of the kingdom, particularly in monthon Ubon in the northeast and Nakhon Si Thammarat in the south. Their influences, however, was even greater than their numbers would indicate. With strong royal support, Prince Wachirayan undertook a thoroughgoing reorganization and reform of Siamese Buddhism at the turn of the century, posting ecclesiastical commissioners to all regions of the country, surveying rural monasteries and schools, and reconstituting the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Channels of communication thereby were opened through which religious practices, texts, rituals, and ideas could flow, and encouraged the rapid development of something approaching a uniform and common Buddhism for the kingdom. Institutionalized Buddhism thus reached down into all the villages and became a major vehicle for the integration of the kingdom.
 At the same time Prince Wachirayan was reaching into village monasteries, he also was promoting the founding of village schools from 1898. For hundreds of years, basic education for literacy and the rudiments of religious ideas had been a primary function of village monasteries. This education, however, was very much ad hoc, centered exclusively on monk-pupil relations that suited educational content to the abilities and desires of individual students and teachers and had no systemic and little secular quality. The new schools at[217] the turn of the century used standardized syllabi and textbooks developed by the Ministry of Public Instruction in Bangkok. They introduced rural youth, not only to basic literacy in a standardized script and language (what has come to be called “Bangkok Thai”) in place of local scripts and dialects, but also to modern Western-style mathematics and science. (It is worth nothing that the Buddhist monkhood in British Burma doggedly resisted such a syllabus. The difference must be that the Siamese efforts had all the prestige and power of the indigenous ruling family and government behind them, sufficiently so even to change the script in which most religious texts were written from a sort of Khmer [Khom] to Siamese.) As a generation of village youths, including both boys and girls, began to attend such schools in their local monasteries, so their integration into a unified Siamese society began. During the last decade of the compulsory primary education, though the implementation of this revolutionary decision was to take some decades.