of kamma), and a conceptual ground for monarchical legitimacy (the king attaining his position via accumulated merit), “even apparently theoretical debates on Buddhist doctrine may have political implications” (Jackson 1987, 123). We may then approach the relationship between Buddhism, politics, and Buddhist alternatives by recalling the normalizing role Buddhism plays. Contests over interpretations are unavoidably contests over legitimate forms of authority, sociality, and morality. This relationship naturally works in reverse, too. The political use of religious symbols (say, during demonstrations) shows how Buddhism becomes not just a political resource available for diverse agendas but also a stake in political struggles.
While egalitarian Buddhism of the sort modeled on Buddhadasa’s teaching provides a sort of ethical and philosophical grammar for emergent human rights, in doing so, it turns back to ethical visions that resist the normalizing role of Buddhism. That such a model of Buddhism participates in the secularization of Buddhism and politics in Thailand makes it part of the story of distinct Buddhist movements like Santi Asoke and Wat Dhammakaya25 that arose as contemporaries of Buddhadasa (Swearer 1991, 654–655) and show how an insistence on egalitarianism can slide into an insistence on conformity. As influential Buddhist movements that have stood, at times, in dramatic tension with the Thai sangha, in what relation would they stand to human rights? For reasons that I explore below, the first cohort of the NHRC proposed a relationship of Buddhism and human rights that not only diverged from Wat Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke’s models of Buddhism but also placed them in revealing ways on the opposing side of a push toward a more secular state and religion.
Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke
Late in 1988, as part of a youth exchange in Thailand, I went to a spacious and distinctive temple near Bangkok. Rather than the ornate gold, red, and blue typical of Thai wat, with layered roof tiers and intricate carving on the tympana, this temple was minimally adorned, with white soaring columns and walls supporting a simple, dark roof of two steep, concave arches that met in the middle. We were brought into a comparably spare interior, where we were seated facing a monk who instructed us in meditation and fielded our questions. In this chapel at Wat Dhammakaya, he had us visualize an orb moving through seven points in or near our bodies (corresponding to chakras), finishing near the navel, where we were to visualize progressively refined images of ourselves. This stress on meditation, especially through visualization, rather than on doctrine and concepts, is central to the Dhammakaya movement.
Initiated by the former abbot of Thonburi’s Wat Paak-naam, who is known popularly as Luang Por Sot, the Wat Dhammakaya movement has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity and influence since the consecration, in 1980, of its ordination hall in Phathum Thani province (Jackson 1989, 199–200; Swearer 1991, 656–657).26 This growth in popularity coincided with a wave of religious intolerance in Thailand (Jerryson 2011, 63–64), and one reading sees both Santi Asoke and Dhammakaya as fundamentalistic reactions to the secularization of Buddhism (in which reformist Buddhists like Buddhadasa participated), albeit in distinct ways (Swearer 1991). The Dhammakaya movement was institutionalized by two of Luang Por Sot’s disciples (Phra Dhammajayo and Phra Dattajivo), who maintained the emphasis on meditation technique, principally organized around concentration on a crystal ball (as I described from my own experience, above), a method of meditation characterized in Buddhist tradition as samadhi, concentration meditation (Keyes 1989, 135; Jackson 1989, 203). In this respect, Wat Dhammakaya offers a view of Buddhism that differs from Buddhadasa’s in a way that makes it incompatible with human rights, as the NHRC was conceiving them. Where samadhi meditation allows for the supernatural and posits nibbana as a transcendental reality, reformists like Buddhadasa emphasize vipassana (or insight) meditation that 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
