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 the beginning of this chapter, while I opened the discussion of Buddhism at the NHRC, I raised overhearing as an aspect of how human rights have emerged in Thailand. A way that “overhearing” may elucidate the emergence of human rights is how it suggests catching a fragment of conversation, possibly addressed elsewhere, that holds interest or implications for oneself, while leaving one to do the work of finding one’s way about with respect to the overheard. A human rights activist and professor at the Office of Human Rights Studies and Social Development at Mahidol University told me a story of her political activism with the nascent Democracy Campaign Program when she was in high school that demonstrates this aspect of overhearing. In the early 1970s, she was inspired to join a movement pushing for increased freedoms and democracy. She went to Surat Thani province with a student group seeking to educate villagers about democracy, even though they, the students, as yet lacked a clear concept of democracy. The implications of this conceptual murkiness, tied as it was to a compulsion to explain something, became clear during one particular meeting. The meeting had just started, with the students saying that they were there to talk about democracy, prachaathipatai (ประชาธิปไตย), which has the ring of a personal name. One of the villagers then spoke up, asking, “Who is this Prachaatipatai?” Human rights, she continued, faced the same sort of problem: 80 to 90 percent of Thai do not know of human rights. This is a different sort of claim than saying they do not understand what human rights are, as she did not understand what democracy was when she was a teenager. Rather, it says that, like the man who asked, “Who is this Prachaathipatai?” they do not yet have a place for human rights, in contrast to the way that she had a place for democracy, just not an explanation of it.
Here, the inability of the teenage student to explain democracy is not congruent with the villagers who, so to speak, had no place prepared for it, in the way that someone who has no familiarity with board games will have no place prepared for a piece called the king in chess. Those, like the professor when younger, who had heard of democracy but could not explain what it meant, received it like something overheard.31 Crucially, to make something audible is not to make it intelligible. Making sense of something overheard is a work of transfiguration of the sort we saw with Saneh’s understanding of human rights through a Buddhist grammar of freedom and liberation.
This is a second aspect of the trope of overhearing that is important for our understanding of human rights’ emergence: it is not a matter of passive reception but is rather an active engagement—a making-familiar (or making-one’s-own). Pim had worked in the Bureau of Human Rights Promotion in the ONHRC, where she worked closely with the director, Dr. Chuchai. While she had a graduate degree from an American university in women’s studies, Pim had no special training in human rights and initially was unsure how to promote or teach them or even what they meant. Her problem resembled what the professor faced when she went to disseminate democratic ideas in Surat Thani. Pim tried to educate herself, but the challenge was that commissioners had differing views of human rights, leaving her unsure whom to consult. She began work on public education campaigns uncertain if the message she was delivering was right, and she had difficulty securing enabling recommendations from commissioners for her projects. The trouble Pim faced was twofold. First, she ran up against her own uncertainties about what to teach and how to teach it because human rights were unfamiliar. Second, she found that the NHRC was beset by the “culture of bureaucratic ranks” that left commissioners somewhat inaccessible to her. This system of ranks had a divisive influence on the director of the ONHRC, too, who found, despite his position, that his proposals for pursuing human rights fell on deaf ears.
Buddhism and Social Action
Dr. Chuchai came to the ONHRC from the Ministry of Public Health, which had become home to many leftist student activists of the 1970s. In a way, his model for human rights appeared entirely congruent with the Buddhist ethic, promoted by Saneh and Khunying Amphorn, to awaken potential human rights violators to the possibilities of abuse. Dr. Chuchai was pivotal in drafting the master plan of the NHRC’s inaugural strategic plan. The plans were proactive in conception, modeled on the Ministry of Public Health system of surveillance for disease, and called for the establishment of mechanisms to work on focus groups or subcommissions. The idea, Dr. Chuchai explained in his office, was to identify
