ABSTRACT

Whereas the topic that is most prominently treated in prophetic literature of the nineteenth through twentieth centuries is not surprisingly the future, a study of its content reveals that in that future the authors are very much talking about the present, and that that present is very much given meaning by their preoccupation with the past. Prophetic literature, therefore, can serve as an important source of information in the construction of both a cultural and intellectual history of Lao-speaking people, and more generally a study of the effect of modernization on traditional Theravada Buddhist cultures in Southeast Asia. In our approach to prophetic literature, we will examine prophetic works in the context of a) the literary tradition out of which they originated, and b) the historical circumstances under which they were composed, out of which arose the specific set of concerns that literary expression was made use of to address. We will examine both prophetic literature from the nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, which anticipated modernization and its consequences, and prophetic works from the mid-twentieth century onwards, in which the consequences that were anticipated in earlier works very much dictate the concerns that a traditional style of writing is made use of to express.