Paul Wheatley's Cities of the Mon

The original idea of the Mon Paradigm came from the work of the late Paul Wheatley whose work is extracted below.

Wheatley, however, never turned his theory into an opportunistic weapon, the Mon paradigm, to attack and bully other scholars with. You will not find the name Wheatley in the index of Aung-thwin's book. You will find him mentioned in passing in the actual text, but with nowhere near the amount of credit due to him being given. This of course, raises the question: "Could the idea of the Mon paradigm exist independently of Aung-thwin himself?" I think the answer is obviously: "no".

Take, for instance, the 2006 Burma Studies Conference at the National University of Singapore, there is a whole panel devoted to the discussion of his book: "Considering the Mon Paradigm: Roundtable on Michael Aung-Thwin's Mists of Ramanna."

Some of the ideas that he unifies under this umbrella notion of a Mon Paradigm, if taken separately, as hypotheses, could thrive without him.

Pre-modern Burmese history is a very small field with essentially one person publicly active, namely Michael Aung-Thwin. Should young people beginning work in Burmese history be answerable to one man, whose reasoning is often very shaky, and is as self-serving and opportunistic as one could imagine, on all questions regarding the Mon? I think it is simply ridiculous that a theory becomes inseparable from the person who creates it, or in this case, revives it. Without further ado here is the beginning of what Wheatley has to say about the Mon:

"Both traditions are unfortunately involved in an historical paradox which in the present state of knowledge cannot be resolved. According to later traditions, both written and oral, of the Burmese and Thai -- indeed of the Mon themselves -- the hearth of Mon culture situated in Lower Burma, particularly in the neighborhods of the cities of Thaton and Pegu, which might have been expected as a consequence to yield a rich harvest of Mon remains. The opposite is the case. Even allowing for a pucity of excavations, it is safe to say that archeology and epigraphy allow only exiguous glimpses of the settlement hierarchy of in Lower Burma prior to the 9th or 10th century A.D. Moreover, whereas Mon, Burmese and Thai chronicles all depict a strongly Theravadan state in that area in early times, such meagre archeological vestiges that have come to light are uncompromisingly Hindu. In central Thailand, by contrast, the elements of the paradox are reversed. The fairly abundant archeological remains available for investigation, and which bear witness to the existence of temple-cities of considerable cultural sophistication during the period from the 6th to the 11th century, have left no discernable impress on the written and oral traditions of any ethnic group (Paul Wheatley (1983) Nagara and Commandery , Chicago: University of Chicago)