Holy Things: The Genealogy of the Sacred in Thai Religion is an ambitious composite of inter secting analyses.Nathan McGovern critiques the notion of syncretism in Thai religious studies, presents a history of rituals seeking boons from sing saksit or "holy things," and locates Thai religious discourses in a deep history of developments across India and Europe.A central argu ment across these themes is that key concepts in Thai Buddhism and spirit rituals changed dra matically with the impact of Western discourses of religion, rationality, and science.The starting point of McGovern's explorations is the question of how Thai Buddha images came to be regarded as sing saksit alongside Brahmanical and other deities deemed capable of granting boons.McGovern observes that while most Thais view sing saksit as a unified cate gory, scholars have often seen the worship of magical spiritual personalities as a syncretic mix of traditions.In contrast, the author contends that the worship of deities and Buddha images to obtain boons for worldly objectives is not a syncretic accretion but rather emerges from the his tory of Buddhism itself.Holy Things is the first extended study of sing saksit as a central element of Thai magical knowledge, or saiyasat, and McGovern examines the discourses surrounding the seeking of boons and the rituals to honor deities when boons are granted.While showing that ideas of syn cretism as the supposed pollution of an original pure Buddhism are fundamentally misguided, the author states that Thai religion nonetheless presents situations "for which syncretism is a seductively attractive explanation" (p.8).In addressing this paradox, he takes readers on an odyssey through the religious histories of Europe, India, and China as well as an exegesis of early Thai texts relating to religious belief and ritual.Developing from studies of scripture-based traditions-Christianity, Judaism, and Islamreligious studies has had difficulty developing concepts for religions based more on ritual than
Peter A. Jackson (Thu,) studied this question.