Editing Laos (section)

== Buddhism in Laos ==

Theravada Buddhism reached the middle Mekong basin well before the founding of the first unified Lao kingdom, but it was under Fa Ngum, the semi-legendary founder of Lan Xang in the mid-fourteenth century, that Buddhism became formally established as state religion and the basis of royal legitimacy.<ref>Stuart-Fox, Martin (1983). "Marxism and Theravada Buddhism: The Legitimation of Political Authority in Laos". ''Pacific Affairs'' 56.3: 428–454, p. 431.</ref> The Lao-Buddhist world view fused indigenous creation mythology with Indian Buddhist conceptions of kingship, merit (''bun''), and ''karma'': the king's right to rule rested both on descent from the guardian deities of the capital and on the merit accumulated across previous existences, while the ''Sangha'', as guardian of the ''Dhamma'', occupied an ecclesiastical hierarchy formally independent of, yet reciprocally supportive of, the throne.<ref>Stuart-Fox (1983), "Marxism and Theravada Buddhism", pp. 429–433.</ref> The sacred Buddha image known as the Phra Bang, housed at the royal capital of Luang Prabang, functioned as both dynastic palladium and symbol of the Sangha's authority, and the annual New Year ceremonies re-enacted the king's ritual submission to the ''Dhamma'' as the ultimate warrant of his temporal power.

This "galactic polity" model, in which royal authority radiated outward from a ritually charged center over a loosely structured hierarchy of dependent territories, was structurally unstable and further weakened by the division of Lan Xang after 1707 into the rival principalities of Luang Prabang, Vientiane, and Champasak. French colonial administration (from 1893) preserved the royal courts as institutions but divorced them from effective political authority, favored secular French-language education for the Lao elite over the Sangha's traditional monopoly on schooling (delivered through inexpensive, poorly resourced "pagoda schools"), and thereby corroded the reciprocal relationship between throne and monkhood.<ref>Stuart-Fox, Martin (1999). "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State". In: Harris, Ian (Ed.), ''Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia'': 153–172. Continuum, pp. 153–154.</ref> Sectarian division between the reformist Thammayut order and the majority Mahanikay persisted in Laos in a way it did not in neighboring Thailand, and monks of poor rural background found that monastic education offered little access to the secular employment monopolized by the French-educated elite, leaving a large body of underemployed, politically available monks by the mid-twentieth century. A modest Buddhist "renaissance" in the 1920s and 1930s—driven by the École Française d'Extrême-Orient's archaeological work, the reconstruction of the That Luang stupa, and the establishment of a College of Pali in Vientiane in 1937—allowed monks to take some part in the nationalist cultural revival of the early 1940s, even as the Sangha's numbers swelled from roughly 4,000 monks and novices in 1940 to some 13,500 by the time of full independence in 1953.<ref>Stuart-Fox (1999), "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State", pp. 154–155.</ref>

After 1975, the LPRP undertook a systematic reorganization of Lao Buddhism rather than its abolition. The traditional bifurcation of the Sangha into Mahanikay and Thammayut orders was dissolved in 1976 into a single, party-supervised Union of Lao Buddhists (later the Lao United Buddhist Organization), its leadership vetted by the party and the large ivory-handled ceremonial fans that senior monks carried as emblems of rank symbolically broken.<ref>Stuart-Fox, Martin, & Rod Bucknell (1982). "Politicization of the Buddhist Sangha in Laos". ''Journal of Southeast Asian Studies'' 13.1: 60–80, pp. 60, 75; Stuart-Fox (1999), "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State", p. 163.</ref> Monastic almsgiving and festival expenditure were discouraged as economically wasteful and doctrinally tied to "feudal" merit-making, and monks were pressed into productive labor, literacy teaching, and the propagation of party policy in exchange for a state rice ration.<ref>Holt, John Clifford (2009). ''Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture''. University of Hawaii Press, pp. 143–147.</ref> This program provoked considerable rural resistance—most visibly the failed 1977 ban on the ''boun bang fay'' rocket festival, blamed by peasants for a subsequent drought—and by the Seventh Resolution of December 1979 the party had substantially relaxed both its economic and its religious policies.<ref>Stuart-Fox (1983), "Marxism and Theravada Buddhism", pp. 450–451.</ref> Estimates of the Sangha's size in these years diverged sharply: official figures put the number of monks and novices at some 17,000 by the late 1970s, actually higher than before the revolution, while monks who had fled to Thailand put the true figure at closer to one-tenth of that.<ref>Stuart-Fox (1999), "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State", pp. 165–166.</ref> From the 1980s onward, Buddhism steadily reasserted itself in public life: traditional dress and festivals were rehabilitated, the guerrilla memorial in Vientiane was built in Buddhist style, and in 1992 the socialist red star and hammer-and-sickle on the national emblem were replaced by an image of the That Luang stupa, the country's preeminent Buddhist monument.<ref>Evans, Grant (1998). ''The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos Since 1975''. University of Hawaii Press, p. 67; Liu, Yumeng (2025). "Lao Socialism with Buddhist Characteristics". ''Monthly Review'' 76.11.</ref> A tertiary Buddhist College was established at Vat Ong Teu in Vientiane, offering a three-year degree combining Buddhist doctrine with either pedagogy or Pali and English linguistics, to address a severe decline in monastic education standards since 1975.<ref>Stuart-Fox (1999), "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State", pp. 167–168.</ref> Monastic education was formally reincorporated into the national school system by decree in 2017, and Buddhist temples, festivals, and diplomacy remain central to Lao national identity and to the LPRP's own claims to cultural legitimacy today.