event in Thailand to see how their articulation with and through Buddhist morality provided resources for the transfiguration of that very morality.
Human Rights and Worldly Buddhism
On 25 September 2005, the NHRC hosted a memorial service for Phra Supoj, a monk assassinated while promoting conservation in Chiang Mai province. It was 100 days after his murder, and the banner announcing the memorial at the NHRC’s original Phyathai Road location6 counted him among human rights defenders. In the lobby, outside the hall where the memorial would take place, were tables with coffee and food, as well as CDs and books for sale recounting Phra Supoj’s work and life. A little after 10:20 a.m., a dozen monks and around fifty laypersons entered the hall, which held a small shrine with a statue of the Buddha, lotuses, candles, burning incense, the Thai flag, a photo of the king, and a photo of Phra Supoj. The monks sat shoulder-to-shoulder, facing the seated attendees, and just before 10:30 a.m. began chanting. Forty minutes later, the religious ceremony concluded with individuals offering alms to the monks. They then extended a string from the Buddha statue around the monks and the photo of Phra Supoj, along which merit would travel to the deceased.
Following the religious ceremony and a break for lunch, there were sessions by NHRC commissioners, monks, human rights activists, and government officials on topics ranging from the security of human rights defenders, the stagnation of Phra Supoj’s case, and the problem of “influential persons” in areas where threats to human rights defenders arise. The ostensive reason for convening this event was to sustain attention on the case. What interests me in particular, though, is how this effort—and, indeed, the work of Phra Supoj and his colleagues—brings together religious and secular activity, each bleeding into the other.
The head monk, Phra Kittisak Kittisophon, who chaired the proceedings, was a controversial figure, in part for his previous campaigning for the Democrat Party in the South and in part because he had remained openly and publicly critical of Prime Minister Thaksin (of the rival Thai Rak Thai party). Of interest to me here is both that these monks participated, as monks, in this-worldly activity, and that the NHRC hosted the religious ceremony for Phra Supoj. I take the crossing of human rights and Buddhism not to be coincidental but to reflect positions within political and religious debates.
Both monks were active in the Buddhadasa Study Group, which follows the teaching of the late monk Buddhadasa. Although Phra Kittisak has been criticized for the attention he has drawn to his own voice as a critic of Prime Minister Thaksin, Phra Supoj has won accolades for his work through the group, especially for the project in Chiang Mai province to extend Buddhadasa’s work by founding the Metthadhamma Forest Dhamma Center. The Thai news outlet Prachathai covered Phra Supoj’s murder extensively, describing increasingly violent efforts by local business interests to usurp land from the center in order to plant an orange orchard.7 The center’s land was around 600 acres (240 ha)—too much to monitor—and so, when developers started to clear, plow, and plant it, Phra Kittisak sought police assistance. Once the police overcame their reticence to visit the scenes, they told the workers who were clearing land that henceforth they had to request Phra Supoj’s permission to enter the fields. Several weeks later, Phra Supoj was hacked to death on the center’s grounds.
These accounts and a report by the Thai Civil Action Network8 (in which the NHRC participates) conclude that it was Phra Supoj’s sustained efforts to protect this land from development over several years of escalating threats and developers’ brash disregard for the center’s land title, as well as his efforts to protect forests in Chiang Mai province from logging, that irritated local power brokers and business interests to the point of murder. Ultimately, the few protections offered by Thai law, human rights, and his monk’s robes were enough to facilitate Phra Supoj’s activism but not to deter his killers.
Phra Supoj is by no means the only monk attached to the forest monk lineage to suffer persecution.9 Arguably, powerful state, economic, religious, and monarchical interests have dogged forest monks from the outset (Jackson 1997; Kamala 1997; Tambiah 1984).10 Forest monks may be defined roughly by their observance of thirteen ascetic practices described in the Visuddhimagga, or discourses of the Buddha (Kamala 1997, 1; Tambiah 1984, 33–34),11 and the importance they place on retreat from towns and cities, dwelling in the forest, in open air, and so on (practices eight through twelve). They are, thus, removed from easy observation and control by the sangha. It is, therefore, not entirely surprising that the “wandering monks” have often had a tenuous relationship with the sangha (Kamala 1997, 172–186). All the same, their emphasis on helping villagers through their acts (like healing, assistance cultivating new crops, as community leaders and advocates), as well as their religious teachings—in short, their mobilization of Buddhism to help others in both spiritual and practical matters—generated trust among villagers, even as the sangha regarded them as lazy and doctrinally dubious (Kamala 1997, chaps. 7–8).
Tension with the sangha shifted from coercive persecution (including, in the 1920s, incarceration of forest monks and villagers who gave them alms) to grudging tolerance and later a degree of acceptance (Kamala 1997, 174–175, 187–197). One can see how a figure like Buddhadasa, whose scholarship and practice were so securely tethered to the principles laid out in the Visuddhimagga, may simultaneously challenge the conservative bent of the sangha and yet remain unimpeachable. That the sangha should reach a level of equanimity with forest monks, however, clearly does not imply that other sectors of Thai society would, especially where the monks’ practices to preserve their forest domains or promote the rights of poor Thai interfere with the economic projects or social privileges of powerful individuals. The activism of followers of Buddhadasa, then, raises the question of what relationships there might be between Buddhist morality and this-worldly action.
Such questions are especially pointed with respect to human rights, imbued as they are with ethics and this-worldly action. Indeed, Buddhadasa’s teaching, influential as it was in the monkhood, is central to the lay movement of socially engaged Buddhism, perhaps most prominently and influentially embodied in Thailand by Sulak Sivaraksa (see Sulak 1988). I will return to Sulak’s contribution to Buddhist scholarship and this-worldly action below, but for the moment, I will note that Sulak has had a lengthy and profound impact on Thai society. On one hand, he has been politically nonconformist and publicly critical of authoritarian regimes since the 1970s and threatening enough to the reactionary right wing that he has been subject to lèse-majesté charges several times (Sulak 1998). A rough contemporary of commissioners like Saneh Chamarik and Khunying Amphorn Meesuk, Sulak was also preoccupied with the application of Buddhism (and, especially, Buddhadasa’s vision of Buddhism and social action) to the pursuit of a just society. Also like Saneh and Khunying Amphorn, his appeal to Buddhism had both progressive and conservative qualities to it. His antiauthoritarianism combined with a longing to restore the virtues of a particularly Siamese Buddhism, and in this light, he saw Buddhadasa extending the Siamese king Mongkut’s scholarship and vision of Buddhism as a means of confronting social ills (Sulak 1988, 37–38).
Ideas of Buddhadasa as a Buddhist source for responses to social injustices through social action were then circulating widely among influential Thai figures. It is, therefore, unsurprising that commissioners in the NHRC took up these sorts of questions. In particular, the chair of the commission, Saneh, and Khunying Amphorn12 addressed the relationship between human rights and Buddhism, each claiming that human rights are available in Buddhism. Khunying Amphorn, for example, told me13 that the international debate between universalism and cultural relativism, especially its Asian Values14 variant, is misplaced in Thailand. Buddhism provides a domestic sort of human rights, she said, such that human rights are Asian values. Significantly, she placed the emphasis less on a Buddhist conception of rights than on a Buddhist picture of the human. The five precepts that all Buddhists ought to pursue in their daily lives (abstaining from taking life, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from intoxicants), combined with an emphasis on collective harmony, she said, frame human rights practices, not that she foresaw any direct line between the availability of these precepts
