Religious meddling

re: "Monk treated too harshly" (BP, Editorial, August 1, 2023) 

Dear editor,

The Post is to be thanked for its timely editorial on the shameful treatment by the political managers of Thai Buddhism of a genuinely Buddhist Thai Buddhist monk, Phra Rajadhamnithet, better known as Phra Phayom, a well-known abbot of the Nonthaburi-based Suan Kaew temple.

If the Buddhist clergy cared for the Post's concluding ideal that "They must make parliamentarians realise their duty and restore morality to the prestigious Buddhist institution," they would be praising more of Move Forward's flagship policies as being those that best comport with the Buddha's wisdom. But morality, or decent personal and public morals, was never the reason the religion of Thai Buddhism was founded to serve a political agenda rooted in something very different to democracy, to justice, to benevolence, to compassion, to righteousness, to understanding, to tolerance and acceptance, to informed opinion of worth, or any other such moral principle.

As a political body itself, it is a bit rich for the National Office of Buddhism to be telling monks of the religion known as Thai Buddhism not to be political. The reality, as demonstrated in such things as a controlling government agency called the National Office of Buddhism (NoB), is that Thai Buddhism is and always has been a useful tool for political players, who did not want a religion of clerics speaking truth to power. Those power-driven actors wanted and want a religion and monks who tell them they can order as many animals killed as they like to sate their taste for yummy animal flesh, and every other desired indulgence of the body and ego. They want a religion that blesses every act by appointment, with never a word of complaint, unless perhaps to chastise upstarts and say it's OK to kill those deemed communists or the like whose radically moral notions threaten the established conservative order.  

Official Thai Buddhism is run by political players, from the day to day management by the NoB to the appointment of senior monks in the hierarchy legally managed by the state. It is set up that way for those purposes. The richly gilded temples, jade statues, and rich living quarters are not gifted to those who say what is displeasing merely because its true, moral, or in accord with the Buddha's wisdom. There is not now and likely never was anything apolitical about this pillar of Thainess, certainly not in its officially sanctioned forms.

What Thai Buddhism needs is more monks like Phra Phayom and less of the legalistic political interference from the National Office of Buddhism and other political bodies of the Thai state. 

 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 August 3, 2023, under the title "Religious meddling" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2622649/on-your-bike