Narai

You are Christian; if you adopted my religion I would think you a scoundrel.

King Narai the Great (Thai: สมเด็จพระนารายณ์มหาราช listen  ) or Ramathibodi III (Thai: รามาธิบดีที่ ๓ listen  ) was the 27th monarch of Kingdom of Ayutthaya (present-day Thailand), the 4th and last monarch of the Prasat Thong dynasty.

Quotes

Date Unknown

• You are Christian; if you adopted my religion I would think you a scoundrel.
  • Supposedly to Constantine Phaulkon, his chief minister. As quoted in Choisy's Mémoire pour server à l’histoire de Louis XIV (1995), p. 392

1685

• I am extremely vexed that the King of France, my good friend, is proposing something so difficult, and of which I had not the least knowledge. I refer myself to the wisdom of the Most Christian King to judge the importance and difficulty one faces in such a delicate matter as changing a Religion received and followed throughout my whole Kingdom without break for 2,229 years. Besides, I am surprised that the King of France my good friend, is so strongly interested in a matter which concerns God, in which it seems that God himself takes no interest, and which he leaves entirely to our own discretion… That order among men and that unity of Religion depend absolutely on divine providence, who could as easily introduce it into the world as the diversity of sects that have in all times been established in it. Ought one not to think that the true God takes as much pleasure in being honoured by different cults and ceremonies as being glorified by a prodigious number of creatures that praise him each in their own way?
  • Reply to Alexandre, Chevalier de Chaumont French ambassador, when he was ask to convert to Catholicism. As quoted in Guy Tachard's A relation of the voyage to Siam: performed by six Jesuits sent by the French king, to the Indies and China in the year 1685 (1688), p. 309-10

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Narai on Wikipedia