country for centuries and people of those two religions including the became Thai because they accepted all kinds of Taoists from China Thai values, ideas and customs even though their religious beliefs remain n the beginning (Vilas and Van Beek feds.] 1983:203-2
Official Core of Thai Ethnicity "Thainess" preoc configuration which symbolizes Part of the cultural cupies the Thai school system, which is charged with homogenizing emphasizes three symbols: the King, the the country. The curriculum nation, and the Buddhist religion. It uniformly uses the Standard Thai language to do so. These focal symbols, which lie deep in Thai h and policies tory and culture, were made overt in the pronouncements century, and were Chulalongkorn in the nineteenth of King (Murashima 1988). A huge incorporated into the Thai constitution majority of the population agrees with the formulations, and in the idealized perception of many the three are virtually inseparable them, you are not really Thai unless you are loyal to of these, the King is the symbol most universally acceptable to less fully assimilated peoples in Thailand. He and most other mem bers of the royal family are loved and revered even among some people whose knowledge of any Tai language is minimal, and where few or none carry cards identifying them as Thai citizens. The monar bolsters the legitimacy of the other components in chy, furthermore, Thai ness The requirement of adopting Buddhist religion, on the other hand is clearly the most divisive of the major symbols, especially for the majority population in the southernmost pro- Muslim Malay-speaking vinces, but also at times for the small Christian and Muslim minori- ties elsewhere. The King is by law the guardian of all religions, and the country grants religious freedom, but in the i gut perception of the ordinary Buddhist Thai person. including the typical Thai go- vernment official, not to be Buddhist is un-Thai. Buddhism is not monolithic or unitary in Thailand, however, any Reform more than Christianity and Islam are there or elsewhere. movements seek to "purify" it or adapt it to the perspective of people now part of the rapidly growing urban middle-class culture (Zehner Buddhism is known well and followed 1990). A core of theoretical closely by only a minority who have especially studied it, with grada tions from it in one direction to animistic folk belief, and in another o materialism and secularism. Both animism and secularism, how-