"Th ere is an abundance of scholarly material on the relation between the temporal and the spiritual power in Southeast Asian Buddhist kingdoms some of which I discuss in the notes or refer to in the bibliography. Th e latest contribution to the field is Ian Harris, ed. Buddhism, Power and Political Order (London: Routledge, 2007). 2) Steven Collins’s discussion of “kingship and its discontents” in his land-mark Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) contributed to a “new vision of Buddhist history” because his analysis leads beyond earlier approaches such as Melford Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967), Melford Spiro, Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and its Burmese Vicissitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), and Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Th ailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Collins argues that “most ethnographies and histories do not make [. . .] a separation” between “Buddhism as constructed by scholars” and the “socio-cultural life . . . lived historically, first in the conditions of pre-modern agrarian states, and then in the context of modernization, nation-building, colonialism and capitalism”: Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: 568..."