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 and an end to human rights violations: “I quote, a lot, the Lord Buddha: We must practice compassion, starting from the family, and go on to the community, then national and also international [levels]. If we practice compassion, then things will be much easier. The problems won’t go away, but it will be much easier.” In this way, she thought it a misconception that human rights must be imposed on a society. “We are all born with certain basic rights, we are all human,” she said, adding that what she takes from Buddhism is a search for the middle path as a human rights model but admitting that “it is difficult to determine which is the middle path, especially because societies tend to be in the extremes, including Thailand, like a pendulum, from one extreme to the other. Which is the middle one?”
Khunying Amphorn and Saneh have published their thinking along these lines under the title Human Rights in Thai Society, and Saneh has also published Buddhism and Human Rights. He, too, insists that human rights are available in Buddhism, so that they are not an import, not grafted on to Buddhism, but arise, as it were, naturally and harmoniously with Buddhism.
Buddhism and the National Human Rights Commission
Saneh, like Khunying Amphorn, argues that the guidance Buddhism offers human rights is to direct them toward the cultivation of good and that “there is no need to search for a place for human rights in the Buddhist tradition. Freedom is the essence of Buddhism” (Saneh 2002, 57). He notes, however, a conservative potential in the popular understanding of Buddhism that emphasizes personal salvation and supports the status quo (Saneh 2002, 60). In a broadside against patron-client relations (which are typically understood through the prism of persons’ relative kamma), he criticizes the claim that it is necessary—either as a matter of nature or of history—to submit oneself to one’s “superior group ‘who knows better’” (Saneh 2002, 74). Rather, he takes freedom in Buddhism to contrast with liberal notions insofar as Buddhism looks inward for freedom, and liberalism looks for freedom from external constraints.15 The obstruction, in Saneh’s view of Buddhism, is “one’s own ego and the three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion” (Saneh 2002, 68; see also 77). The grounding of human rights in Buddhism, in this view, begins with the idea that individuals are neither a means (as in patronage) nor an end (as in the pursuit of individual merit) but rather that “although men may not be born ‘free’ [because born into an ephemeral world of suffering], they are equal in dignity and rights, that is to say, dignity and rights to their own salvation or freedom” (Saneh 2002, 76).
In Saneh’s view, the route to this salvation, the Noble Eightfold Path (right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentrations) essentially concerns conduct and, therefore, training (in higher morality, mentality, and wisdom). In this connection, he cites the Buddha instructing his disciples, “I, monks, do not say that attainment of profound knowledge comes straightaway; nevertheless it comes by gradual (doing of) what is to be done, a gradual course. In this connection, one having faith draws near, he comes close, he lends ears, he hears Dhamma and learns it by heart … being self-resolute, by means of body he realizes the highest truth itself” (Saneh 2002, 77, cited from Humphreys 1987, 89).
Saneh summarizes the ethical weight of conduct as follows: “It is this principle of human conduct