Trading in merit

re: "Policeman who killed doctor enters monkhood" (BP, January 24, 2022)

Dear editor,

Though such an opinion might be deemed heretical, the young police officer who killed a pedestrian with his large motorbike appears sincerely remorseful, and his decision to enter the monkhood seems genuinely selfless and in accord with that Thai tradition. He has not denied the facts or his guilt, nor sought to excuse them with amazing tales of pure benevolence or righteousness leading to an honest mistake in the Joe Ferrari mould that is more the prevailing social more among the poster boys of the Royal Thai Police and like institutions when confronted with public proof that could not be suppressed of inconvenient reality. His acts following the awful accident appear, in short, a welcome deviation from the traditional social mores obtaining.

There are, however, some points that could usefully be clarified regarding the creation and disposal of merit in Buddhist monasteries, which merit is plainly a valuable good that can be created and transferred. First, how does entering the monkhood "make merit for his victim"? Is merit a tradeable product like pork or gold, both of which can be transferred to others? Further questions inevitably arise: How is merit measured? What is the actual mechanism for transferring ownership of created merit? And more fundamentally, what is the unit of measure for merit being transferred? Is there a karmic bureaucracy diligently keeping records of created merit and the legal transfers thereof?

But the merit business is now starting to sound not dissimilar to Bitcoin, another esoteric method of allegedly creating value that can be stored up and later transferred to create, out of literally nothing, that most basic human measure of ultimate value of them all, US$, or perhaps Euros, or more traditionally, florins.

A similar historical sacred trade that comes to mind is that of indulgences. The Christian church traditionally found the creation and sale of indulgences to wipe away the lingering taint of sin a most lucrative business until that radical monk Martin Luther set off serious reforms in his cunningly named Reformation that began with the peaceful expression of petitions for reform in 1517, his famous 95 Theses. Luther's modest proposals for reform were legally condemned by that high-level committee the Diet of Worms in 1521, and the rest is history, characterized by all the vicious intolerance, torture, and legalized murder in its name that are traditionally wed to reverence of the sacred.

Perhaps Thailand's Buddhist experts could publish some elucidation of these matters, citing the most up to date research on the business of creating, quantifying and trading in merit, and clarifying in particular how the merit business differs significantly from the indulgence business run by Mediaeval Christian monks and prelates.

 Felix Qui

 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on January 30, 2022, under the title "Trading in merit" at URL