セイロン・シャム間の仏教交流と釈宗演のタマユット派比丘出家の蹉跌（1889年7月）

抄録

Shaku Sōen (1860–1919), who is famous for introducing Zen to the West along with his disciple D.T. Suzuki, arrived in Galle, Ceylon, in April 1887, where he was ordained as Samanera and learned the Pali language from Kodagoda Pannasekhara under the patronage of Edmund Rowland J. Gooneratne (1845–1914).

Disenchanted with Buddhism in the Western colonies, Sōen turned to the “genuine Buddhism” of independent Siam, where the king was a patron of Buddhism, especially the Dhammayut Order.

In July 1889, he came to Bangkok from Ceylon, almost penniless, to be ordained fully as Bhikkhu in the Dhammayut Order. However Prince Vajirananavarorasa (Wachirayana Warorot, 1860–1921), the Vice President of the Dhammayut Order dismissed Sōen coldly. He did not give Sōen the opportunity to be ordained in the Dhammayut Order.

Why did Sōen want to choose the Dhammayut Order in Siam? Where did he get the knowledge of the Dhammayut? Sōen himself did not say anything about these points.

In fact, his aspiration to the Dhammayut Order was based on his teachers, Kodagoda Pannasekhara (พระปัญญาเสขร) and Bulatgama Sumana (Bulatgama Sumanatissa, พระศิริสุมนะติสสะ).

Bulatgama Sumana, a close friend of King Mongkut (Founder of Dhammayut Order) was the central leader of the Buddhist revival movement in Ceylon in the mid-19th century. Bulatgama Sumana and Kodagoda Pannasekhara visited Siam in May–June 1886 with the far-reaching intention of reforming and reviving Buddhism in order to unify the divided Ceylonese Buddhist community by introducing the Dhammayut Order under the patronage of the King of Siam.

Bulatgama Sumana was ordained as a monk of the Dhammayut Order in a boat on the Chao Phraya River on the night of June 5, 1886.

They received a promise of support from the King Chulalongkorn, and was also authorized to be the sole contact persons for the introduction of the Dhammayut Order in Ceylon. Vajirananavarorasa, the Vice President of the the Dhammayut Order agreed that all those who wished to enter the Siamese Dhammayut Order from Ceylon must have a letter of introduction from Bulatgama Sumana or Kodagoda Pannasekhara.

In accordance with the agreement, Sōen came to Thailand with a letter of introduction of Kodagoda Pannasekhara. Therefore His visit to Siam should have been welcomed and not expected to be treated unkindly.

This paper is the first to make the agreement in 1886 between Bulatgama Sumana, Kodagoda Pannasekhara as one party and King Chulalongkorn, Vajirananavarorasa as other party reveal on the basis of Thai materials; The Journal of the Fifth King’s Royal Events, Part 21 published in 1946 and the unpublished diary of Prince Sommot.

In Anne M. Blackburn’s Locations of Buddhism: colonialism and modernity in Sri Lanka(University of Chicago Press, 2010), she examines the modern interactions between Ceylon and the Theravada Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia with the cooperation of Craig Reynolds, an expert in the history of modern Thai Buddhism, but she has completely overlooked these facts.

Bulatgama Sumana is generally believed to have been born in 1795, but according to Thai sources he was 74 years old and the period of ordination was 53 years (Buddhist Lent) in June 1886.