Monarchy and the State in South-East Asia

Abstract

In the earliest political communities in South-East Asia of which we have any knowledge there was no such thing as absolute kingship. The king was the head of the community, and as such was bound by adat, the immemorial custom which protected it from magical misfortune, and he held his position because of his knowledge of these usages, not as administrator or power-wielder. When small communities were united to form larger ones the restraints of adat upon the leader’s authority, not least in resolving conflicts between local custom, led him to seek a higher sanction for it, and it is thought that this was a potent reason prompting rulers to invite Indian Brahmans to introduce more exalted concepts of monarchy to their courts and the appropriate ceremonial for their practical application. The most striking of these, the concept of the ‘king of the mountain’, was emphasized by the Chinese in their earliest accounts of Funan thalassocracy dominating the region around the Gulf of Siam in the third and succeeding centuries. At that time it was a Brahmanic concept, but it overlaid an indigenous cult of great antiquity. It could have been connected with ancestor-worship, and, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, one scholar has invoked it to explain the Great Śailendra dynastic monument known as the Borobudur. In Cambodia it was the most powerful ingredient in the devaraja cult.