ABSTRACT
One of the most immediate ways of grasping the Tai kingship—Tai referring to an ethnolinguistic group including Siamese, Lao, Shan, Zhuang (Guangxi) and many others—might be to look at the terminology concerning the King, if one had a historiography of a scale comparable to that of the European kingship. Kingship can be interpreted thus as a symbolic device. In opening communication between the heavenly and the lower worlds through the initiation of the King to Shaivite-tantric potency. The Siamese royal device being double-faced, as a Buddhist king, the King bows in front of Buddhist monks; most of royal brahmans are themselves Buddhist; and ascending to Buddhist kingship is the retribution for having accumulated enough bun (merits).
