Human Rights in Thailand. Don F. Selby
stresses insight into immanent reality, here and now (Jackson 1989, 203). As part of a secularizing movement in Thailand, human rights first avoid recourse to the supernatural and second maintain an ethical focus on the here-and-now, rather than on a transcendental realm, which lends itself to the justification of social inequality as an expression of kamma.
There are, however, other aspects of Dhammakaya that make it prohibitive to human rights advocates. While it is critical of the sangha’s ecclesiastical hierarchy (partly over its bureaucratization), Wat Dhammakaya resists the secularization of (what it sees as) besieged personal, community, and national identities by promoting a fundamentalistic, authoritarian ethos, built around its two charismatic leaders (Keyes 1989, 135; Swearer 1991, 661, 665, 667). This, on its own, would be anathema for human rights advocates promoting an egalitarian vision of humanity, but there are issues of political toxicity, as well. Dhammakaya is a conservative movement prone to accusations of elitism in part because of connections to the military, which became highly visible as early as 1982, with the “conspicuous” support of the commander-in-chief of the army, General Arthit Kamlengek (Keyes 1989, 135; see also Jackson 1989, 205–213). Perhaps the most noxious association, however, is with Kittiwuttho (Swearer 1991, 666). In promoting a distinctive Thai Buddhist identity designed to enforce a religio-nationalistic ethos in alliance with influential members of the military and militant monks like Kittiwuttho, Wat Thammakaya embraces the sort of normalizing Buddhism that an egalitarian human rights vision opposes.27
By contrast, Santi Asoke embodies a form of “dhammic socialism”28 (Keyes 1989, 13) that would seem, on the face of it, congruent with Buddhadasa’s egalitarianism. Further, for some time it has been inextricably linked to Chamlong Srimuang, the popular former governor of Bangkok and retired major-general, who became especially visible in popular uprisings against the coup government of General Suchinda Kraprayoon from 1991 to 1992 and has been a key figure in the Yellow Shirt protests over the past decade. In the first instance, he is the picture of incorruptible Santi Asoke asceticism: a vegetarian taking only one meal per day; abstaining from alcohol and sex (though married); abjuring materialism and living in an old garment factory, where he sleeps on a mat on the floor; and dressing in the traditional, indigo mohom clothing of the peasantry (Swearer 1991, 674).
Santi Asoke also seems closer than Wat Dhammakaya to Buddhadasa’s reformist Buddhism in its rejection of magic and superstition in traditional Thai Buddhism, as it seeks to restore national, community, and individual integrity through the ascetic practices to which Chamlong adheres (Swearer 1991, 668). In fact, it is this very asceticism, folded as it is into critiques of the sangha, that has generated ecclesiastical challenges for Santi Asoke. Phra Bodhirak,29 who founded Santi Asoke on the strength of a revelatory experience in 1970, has been harshly critical of monks within the sangha on a number of counts. In the early 1970s, he took his sermons to lay Buddhists as an opportunity to denounce other monks at the monastery (Wat Asokaram in Samut Prakan province) for a variety of transgressions, including eating meat and consuming stimulants like cigarettes and betel nut, and later for engaging in supernatural rituals (Jackson 1989, 160–161). Perhaps his greatest offense to the sangha, though, was his renunciation of membership in it and his denial, upon establishing his own center in Nakorn Pathom, that it was necessary or desirable to register it officially (Jackson 1989, 161). Bodhirak, compared to “the vegetarian turncoat from the Buddha’s time, Devadhatta” (Klima 2002, 98), was forced, along with Santi Asoke monks he had ordained, to defrock (Swearer 1991, 676–677).
A number of things, though, set the NHRC and human rights advocates along a diverging path as they formulated human rights in Buddhist terms. In the 1970s, when the NHRC commissioners were cutting their political teeth, Photirak was occupied with criticizing other monks and the sangha, rather than politics, leaving him somewhat marginal to the political debates around Buddhist morality that would later inform the reception of human rights. Further, Photirak deviated from Buddhadasa, pointing out that the latter privileged doctrinal scholarship (to which, however, Photirak finds Buddhadasa’s contributions important) over practice (Jackson 1989, 161–165). On doctrinal issues, further, Bodhirak maintains a less radical rationalism than Buddhadasa and continues to “regard traditional notions such as rebirth and kamma—notions which Phutthathat de-emphasizes to the point of rendering them irrelevant—as denoting real conditions as in the traditional interpretations of Thai Buddhist doctrine” (Jackson 1989, 167). This varies directly with the notions of rebirth that Buddhadasa rejects in favor of the immanentism that contributes to his egalitarian Buddhist formulations, which in turn allow for a Buddhist articulation of human rights (Buddhadasa 1992; Tambiah 1976).
Having noted these serious obstacles to drawing on a body of practice that bears at least a superficial comparison to Buddhadasa’s teachings, which are serious enough in themselves, Chamlong remains an insurmountable problem. At the time of the 6 October 1976 massacre of Thammasat students protestors—the moment when Kittiwuttho was at the height of his influence—Chamlong was associated with the Young Turk faction of the military. There is a persistent haze around Chamlong’s role in the massacre but a widely held conviction that the Young Turks were behind (though not active on the streets with) the violent, reactionary groups that participated in the massacre at Thammasat University (Klima 2002, 96; McCargo 1993, 34). While Chamlong denied participation in rather equivocal terms, a candidate in Chamlong’s Palang Dhamma Party (Dhamma Power Party) publicly attested to his participation in antistudent (and antidemocratic) maneuvers:
One of Chamlong’s PDP candidates, a Mrs Chongkol Srikancha, told a July 1988 election rally that she had worked with Chamlong in a right-wing movement during the period immediately preceding the massacre. She also claimed that Chamlong had gone in disguise to rallies of this movement, the Klum Maeban, or housewives’ group, and had shared the platform with her, even handing her the microphone. Mrs Chongkol insisted that both she and Chamlong had been actively working for the overthrow of the (democratically elected) government, which they had held responsible for the prevailing political turmoil. Mrs Chongkol seems to have believed that her claims would increase support for Chamlong and the Palang Dhamma Party…. Although Chamlong’s religious precepts forbid him from lying, many of his attempts to explain his role in 1976 “honestly” begged more questions than they answered. (McCargo 1993, 35)
While Chamlong, like Bodhirak, cites Buddhadasa favorably (Jackson 1989, 184), his murky connection to 6 October 1976 refracts his religious asceticism in ways that raise suspicions rather than accolades, leading some to wonder if he would rather be more a “Buddhist Ayatollah Khomeini,” favoring authoritarian theocracy over secular democracy (Gooi 1988, 118, cited in Jackson 1989, 189; Swearer 1991, 676). Because of his virtual identity with Santi Asoke, it should be clear that, in fact, the Buddhist vision for society that it holds aligns it with conformist authoritarianism and in conflict with a Buddhism that resists normalization.
The NHRC, as the product of a secularizing constitution (which is to say, a constitution that both arose from and sought to extend a secularist ethos), marshaled reformist Buddhism to articulate human rights as already intrinsically Buddhist.30 The particularity of the commissioners’ election of egalitarian Buddhism to frame human rights as Buddhist dates, as I have tried to show, to the political and religious ferment of the 1970s. The gravity of debates around Buddhist morality in that moment and their relation to political movements has continued to exert its force to the present. While fundamentalistic and highly conformist Buddhist movements like Wat Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke have arisen as a response to modernization and secularization, trying to invigorate conservative Buddhist morality, reformist Buddhism has struggled to promote an egalitarian, secularizing, and nonconformist moral vision. What I have tried to show here is that, in the uniquely progressive, democratic moment of the turn-of-the-millennium, the emergence of human rights both benefited from the availability of reformist Buddhism and in turn provided secularist reformism a platform from which to push against not only conventional Buddhist rationalizations of social stratification but also fundamentalistic movements with roots in the reactionary, right-wing politics of the 1970s. In a sense, then, human rights have been an occasion to revisit the disputes of that time and reignite the democratic secularism that flickered to life from 1973 to 1976, only to be (incompletely) suppressed until Bloody May 1992.
Overhearing
Near