Buddhism arrived in Southeast Asia hand-in-hand with Hinduism. Two branches of Buddhism prospered: the older Theravada (or Hinayana) Buddhism, known as the 'Way of the Elders' or 'Lesser Vehicle'; and Mahayana Buddhism, or 'Great Vehicle'. Mahayana Buddhism, which regarded trade more favorably than did Theravada Buddhism, was the first to reach Southeast Asia, brought by the Indian merchants who practiced it. The older Theravada school, however, became the predominate faith, coming later by way of Sri Lanka. Except for Malaysia and southern peninsular Thailand, which are predominantly Muslim, Buddhism is still followed by the overwhelming majority of people in mainland Southeast Asia. Al-Idrisi, a twelfth-century Sicilian geographer, gave an impression of religious life in Indonesia based on the reports of earlier travelers which had reached him:
The prince is called Jaba, he wears a chlamys and a tiara of gold, enriched with pearls and precious stones. The money is stamped with his portrait. He shows much respect to the Buddha. [The king's temple] is very beautiful and is covered externally with marble. Inside and all around Buddha, can be seen idols made of white marble, the head of each adorned with golden crowns. The prayers in these temples are accompanied by songs, which take place with much pomp and order. Young and beautiful girls execute dances and other pleasing games, before the people who pray or are in the temple.18
Islam took root in Southeast Asia through a combination of patience and adaptation. Though extensive Arab contact with Southeast Asia predated Islam itself, and though the Chams of Vietnam adopted Islam in the tenth century, it was not until the end of the thirteenth century−about the time Marco Polo skirted Southeast Asia en route back to Venice−that the faith came to be a major influence in Southeast Asia's coastal regions. It was at first Indian Sufi intermediaries, rather than the Arabs resident in Java and Sumatra, who initiated the acceptance of islam in the region, which occurred only after certain adjustments had been made in relation to existing cultural orientations. Once established, the spread of islam accelerated through marriages between the daughters of wealthy Indonesian merchants and Islamic Indian traders, combined with commercial policies which favored Muslims. Like Hinduism and Buddhism before it, Islam accommodated itself to indigenous Southeast Asian values rather than dictating them, and many aspects of indonesia's pre-Islamic culture, have survived intact to this day.
Christianity, the most recent arrival in Southeast Asia, has had little success on the mainland, even by the Church's own figures, which include token 'converts' in the faith's excellent schools. Even the French failed to convert Indochina to Christianity, or to displace indigenous language and culture, despite their profound and extended presence in the region.
Christianity's unique successes are found in the islands. The Portuguese established Catholicism in East Timor, just as the Spanish did in the central and northern Philippines. Many of the Filipinos combined their former beliefs with the new creed of the Europeans, a practice which the Spanish, who exacted a tax from the islanders to pay for the Church's proselytizing, tolerated.19 The animism of pre-Spanish central and northern Philippines, involving a deity called Bathala and spirits such as anitos and ninos, was eventually overshadowed, but not lost.
Conversions were possible in these regions because the indigenous societies had less centralized control, in contrast to those communities which had already embraced Islam. The Spanish, from the beginning, were aware of the distinction: in 152 1, Antonio Pigafetta, an observer on the Magellan expedition, wrote that they had burned down a 'pagan' Philippine village whose people had refused conversion, and that they had planted a wooden cross on its site, but that if these Filipinos had been 'Moors', Magellan would have "set up a column of stone... for the Moors are much harder to convert than the pagans."
While the failure of Christianity to dominate the map of insular Southeast Asia may be a result of the resolve of the Islamic faith, the tenacity of Buddhism on the mainland appears to have come from its unusual attitude toward religion. The faiths of conquerors and colonizers have after many centuries made only token inroads into these countries, yet these were the very societies that generally did not maintain their beliefs through force. Early European visitors to Southeast Asia frequently commented on the Buddhists' freedom from proselytizing, Mendes Pinto poetically observing that the king of Siam considered himself "master of men's bodies, not their souls." Rather than these people having been the easiest converts, it seems that freedom of choice and non-coercion have kept the religious map of mainland Southeast Asia in this respect unchanged since pre-modern times. Jacques de Bourges, a French missionary in Siam in 1662-63, already understood this paradox, noting that "it is this pernicious indifference [to religious value judgements] which stands as the greatest obstacle to their conversion." When a Siamese man was beaten by a Portuguese for laughing during a Christian ceremony, the king refused any sympathy to his subject, noting only that "he should not another time be so intolerant. " Our French observer wrote that he
sometimes enquired why the King of Siam made himself so lenient in permitting... so many religions, since it is a received maxim of the most esteemed politics [i.e., the French Court] that only one be permitted, for fear that, should they multiply, the diversity of beliefs would cause spiritual friction, and so lead to conflict.20
Fig. 7 Quintessential features of the Southeast Asian landscape: the village of Pilar, on the road from Balanga to the Marivelles Mountains, Philippines. After a drawing by M.E.B. de la Touanne, from the voyage of Baron de Bougainville. Published in Paris, 1828. [From The Philippines in the 19th Century, Rudolf J.H. Lietz, Manila 1998. Courtesy of Elizabeth and Rudolf Lietz]
He was told that, to the contrary, Siam derives great benefit from the diversity of beliefs, both for the arts and commerce. Further, the Frenchman reported that
there is another reason for this conduct; this is the view which is held by the Siamese that all religions are good, which is why they show themselves hostile to none.
In Burma in 1710 Alexander Hamilton, a Scottish sea captain who passed much of his life in Southeast Asia, observed that the (Buddhist) monks of Pegu (Burma)
are so benevolent to mankind that they cherish all alike without distinction for the sake of religion. They hold all religions to be good that teach men to be good, and that the deities are pleased with variety of worship, but with none that is hurtful to men, because cruelty must be disagreeable to the nature of a deity: so being all agreed in that fundamental, they have but few polemics, and no persecutions, for they say that our minds are free agents, and ought neither to be forced nor fettered.
Until Siam expelled most foreigners in 1688, the freedom given Christian missionaries to roam the kingdom and preach to the people was in fact misinterpreted as meaning that the king himself was ready to embrace the new faith. The exception was Vietnam, which though officially tolerant did endure infamous incidents of anti-Christian violence in the seventeenth century. Later violence against missionaries in Vietnam contributed directly to France's pretext for intervention.
That Christian missionaries, having left behind a Europe which was tearing itself apart with petty religious rivalries, were routinely perplexed by intractable Buddhist patience is particularly salient in seventeenth-century Cambodia and Laos. The missionaries' message was received with a mixture of tolerance and indifference which was even more impenetrable than the forests they had braved to reach their intended converts. Such an attitude, as modern historians have often observed, afforded the West neither conversion nor martyrdom. The "zeal of the pious and learned missionaries," the French emissary Nicolas Gervaise lamented in Thailand in the late seventeenth century, had failed to negate "the errors that have tainted this people for so many centuries." In our own day, the pressures of totalitarian rule have happily likewise failed to substantially change the metaphysical map of Burma, Laos, and and other parts of Indochina.
Colonialism
Unlike the religious map of Southeast Asia, the political map of the region was most certainly shaped by foreign powers. Even Thailand, the sole country in all