Place · urban Ganesha shrines · Thailand
Phra Phikanet shrines, Bangkok
Also known as Bangkok — Phra Phikanet shrines
Thailand's capital carries a dense public cult of Ganesha as Phra Phikanet — shrines outside shopping centres, the emblem of the Fine Arts Department, and a following among artists and performers that has grown rather than shrunk in a Buddhist country.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 13.756, 100.502
Worth knowing
Thai royal ceremonial has kept a functioning Brahmin priesthood, the Phram, for centuries, and the ploughing ceremony and coronation rites are Hindu in form. Ganesha's popularity in Bangkok is not a survival from that court religion so much as a modern urban devotion that grew alongside it.
Connections (1)
- Institutional successionAngkor Wat, Cambodia
The Thai court Brahmins, the Phram, who perform the coronation and the ploughing ceremony in Bangkok, descend from a priestly establishment the Siamese kings took over from the Khmer along with much of the rest of their royal apparatus — the regalia, the titles, the devaraja idea. Angkor is where that apparatus was assembled. A Buddhist monarchy has been crowned by Hindu priests in Thailand for seven centuries and still is.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bangkok”. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Hermann Kulke et al., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa.
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