Secularism seems out of scholarly fashion, but differently so regarding different parts of the world. Much of Western political theory now talks of the failure of secularism to deliver the promised emancipatory success of modernity, and has turned to the notion of the ‘postsecular’ instead — amongst a wide variety of meanings, the term can describe the emergence of new forms of religiosity under secular conditions, or engender a normative call to redeploy Judaeo-Christian values to rescue the Enlightenment project.Footnote ¹ By contrast, secularism is hardly ever used with reference to Buddhist Southeast Asia, where recent political developments appear to confirm the premise that the secular age has not yet arrived. Thus the increasingly violent persecution of Muslim minorities, particularly the 2017 Rohingya genocide, has sparked scholarly debate about ‘Buddhist nationalism’Footnote ² and called into question the political orders founded on ‘Buddhist constitutionalism’.Footnote ³ Implicitly, this dichotomous treatment of the postsecular West and the presecular rest reproduces ideas of secularism as a political ideology of separation between the church and the state, secularisation as the historical process of religion's privatisation and eventual decline, and, in some ways, the exceptional nature of Judaeo-Christian precepts in shaping secular philosophical values that guarantee religious freedom and tolerance.Footnote ⁴

The articles in this special section of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies follow a distinct line of inquiry that departs from a contrasting set of assumptions about secularism and religion, based on a school of thought that some have called ‘critical secular studies’.Footnote ⁵ Authors in this strand of scholarship do not regard the religious and the secular as fixed categories, but investigate them as discursive formations that undergird modern state sovereignty.Footnote ⁶ Accordingly, a key characteristic of secular state governance is less the separation from, than the power to manage, and perhaps even produce, ‘religion’.Footnote ⁷ Christianity features in this body of works not as a normative framework attesting Europe's secular success; instead, authors investigate how implicit Christian underpinnings of seemingly neutral mechanisms of secular governance continue to produce exclusions and inequalities.Footnote ⁸ Perhaps most importantly for Southeast Asian Studies, critical secular scholars have demonstrated the postcolonial genealogies of secular formations by outlining how European colonialism and imperialism operated through categorising ‘religion’, differentiating ‘religious communities’ and defining ‘religious minorities’.Footnote ⁹

From this perspective, an investigation of secular power in the Theravada Buddhist context of Southeast Asia is long overdue, and not only in light of ongoing attempts to foster religious divides. While investigations of the secular genealogies of ‘religion’ in the Buddhist context of Japan have featured prominently,Footnote ¹⁰ and the large number of studies of (post)colonial secularism in South Asia — particularly India — can fill library shelves,Footnote ¹¹ Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia have largely fallen under the radar of critical secular studies.Footnote ¹² This set of articles, originally put together as a panel at the Association of Asian Studies Conference in 2016, represents a first, and necessarily partial (for example, only covering Thailand and Myanmar), attempt at exploring the largely unchartered territory of Buddhist secular formations in Southeast Asia. It emerged out of an extended conversation, before, during and after the conference with Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and in response to Anne Hansen's comments on the panel. We are deeply grateful to both.

To be clear, neither the idea of Buddhism as a bounded ‘world religion’ nor the identification of its different strands, including Theravada, are indigenous concepts, but themselves products of a secular formation of knowledge about ‘religion’ that emerged through a long history of colonial encounters.Footnote ¹³ Already in the late sixteenth century, Spanish Christian friars travelling to Siam (Thailand) in the wake of the Iberian exploration identified Buddhism as a single religion connecting various traditions of East and Southeast Asia, and one deemed very similar to Christianity,Footnote ¹⁴ a trope readily replicated with the emergence of religious and Buddhist studies at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵ The division between the northern (Mahayana) and southern (Hinayana) school of Buddhism was widely deployed in nineteenth-century scholarship and Oriental travel accounts,Footnote ¹⁶ and used by King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868–1910) of Siam to claim a common heritage of faraway Buddhist sites like the well-known Javanese temple of Borobudur.Footnote ¹⁷ However, the replacement of ‘Hinayana’ with ‘Theravada’ was not popularised until the mid-twentieth century; Theravada Buddhism is now mostly distinguished from Mahayana through its tradition of Pali textual practices, conceived of as the words of the Buddha, which proliferated particularly in what is today Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.Footnote ¹⁸

This complex genealogy notwithstanding, we refer to Theravada in these articles to highlight the sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging histories of secular formations that emerged in the context of a shared religious tradition based on transregional networks that rapidly intensified under (semi-)colonialism. Talal Asad's notion of a conceptual grammar provides a useful theoretical bracket in this endeavour: in Asad's reading of Wittgenstein, the grammar of a concept is always embedded and embodied in a distinct form of life, ‘expressing and guiding different ways of inhabiting the world’.Footnote ¹⁹ Since certain religious traditions are shaped by specific conceptual grammars, it is impossible to reduce ‘the concept of ‘religion’ […] to a universal essence of beliefs and practices’, and instead crucial to ask ‘how, by whom, and for what purpose a definition is required’.Footnote ²⁰ In this perspective, the universalisation and abstraction of ‘religion’, globalised since the end of the eighteenth century,Footnote ²¹ can be seen as a consequence of the imperial project of European modernity and its secular governance techniques. What remains to be investigated for much of Buddhist Southeast Asia is how the introduction of such secular conceptual grammars contributed to undoing traditional ways of life while also creating new forms of inhabiting modernity — how the Buddhist tradition was reformulated in grammatical terms that enabled specific forms of modern rule based on former Buddhist empires.

One commonality that characterises both the modern Thai and Burmese context is the important role of Buddhist concepts undergirding what is deemed secular. In fact, as Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière shows, the very word for the secular used in official Burmese language — lawki hsan de — contains the Burmese translation of the Buddhist concept of lokiya (lawki), and thus strongly resonates with Buddhist ideas of an alternative religious path rather than describing a non-religious sphere.Footnote ²² Likewise, one of the ironies that Michael Edwards outlines is that the notion of ‘religion’ in contemporary Myanmar remains so overdetermined by secular ideas of Buddhism that Christian Pentecostalist evangelists choose to offer otherworldly relief through ideas of ‘belief’. I suggest in my article that one of the historical preconditions for this powerful continuity of Buddhist conceptual grammars is their secular reformulation in the nineteenth century: the Siamese elite was key in promoting ideas of Buddhism as scientific, humanist and philosophical, thus securing the power of the Buddhist king in the emerging nation-state. Alicia Turner in her article traces the material dimension of the secular grammars implemented by colonial city designers of Rangoon, and argues that the Thayettaw monastic complex offered a space where boundaries of difference could be blurred. Close attention to the ‘definitional dissonances’ (Edwards) emerging from ongoing negotiations of conceptual grammars of Buddhism and the secular characterises all the articles in this special section. Our aim is not to define new authoritative ways of reading Buddhism in the Theravada world, but rather to invite readers to take a fresh look at historical and contemporary practices of defining and contesting authoritative notions of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in Southeast Asia.