Thaksin and the monks

 2 aug 2004

When Thaksin recently chided four monks who had talked about politics on radio, he made clear this was an issue of principle. Monks should stick to religion, which is their business, and not stray into politics, which is his business. In his telling, there is a border line which members of the monkhood should not cross.

When Thaksin was campaigning for election in late 2000, the highly respected abbot, Luangta Mahabua, came out in his support. In common language, we might say that the Luangta “endorsed” Thaksin’s bid for the premiership. Strangely, Thaksin did not come out to tell the Luangta that he was straying across the boundary which should exclude monks from politics.

After Thaksin had won the election but was under pressure over his assets case in the Constitutional Court, monks speaking on radio on Sunday mornings urged their listeners to give the premier a chance. They assured us he was a good man, and that the government would do good things for the people. The station airing these comments is controlled by government. Somehow there was something rather unspontaneous about the whole thing. Strangely, the premier did not come out immediately to suppress this inappropriate venture of monks into politics. Such sermons were delivered not once, but repeatedly.

During the “war on drugs” in 2003, when Thaksin faced growing criticism for the violence and abuse of human rights, Thaksin went to visit the popular northeastern abbot, Luang Pho Khun Parisuttho. Perhaps Thaksin had temporarily forgotten that the Luang Pho likes to comment on politics. Perhaps Thaksin was a little careless in having the press corps in tow. Anyway, as is happened, the reporters could not help overhearing the Luang Pho praising Thaksin’s war on drugs: “It’s good you were born to become powerful and help the nation. If you did not exist, ya ba would never be got rid of for sure…. Since the time of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, now it’s you who has appeared as someone important to save the nation at the right moment…. Don’t bother putting drug traders in jail…. The sin from killing a ya ba trader is the same as from killing one mosquito. Nothing to be afraid of.”

When these comments were reported in the press, strangely Thaksin did not seem embarrassed, did not seem angry at the Luang Pho, and did not chide the media for exposing the Luang Pho’s terrible mistake of intruding into politics.

Just recently, Phra Khru Wichit Suthakan, the abbot of Wat Thammikaram in Lopburi talked to a leading news weekly. Apparently, the prime minister and his family have often visited the abbot and are especially impressed by his skill as an astrologer.

The abbot told the reporter there would shortly be a cabinet reshuffle but it would be only a few minor changes (this was a few weeks ago). He predicted that Sanan Kachornprasart would indeed set up a new party but it would go nowhere. He declared emphatically (“one thousand percent sure”) that the Thaksin government would continue right to the end of its four-year term. He predicted that after the next election, only three political parties would remain: Chart Thai, Tha Rak Thai, and the Democrats. He predicted the exact number of seats that TRT would win as 424 (remember this figure). However, it seems these kinds of astrological prediction are subject to the same kind of sampling error as statistical estimations, as the abbot later modified his prediction to  424 seats plus or minus 10.

The abbot added that the Democrat Party would have no chance to occupy the premier’s seat for another 20 years. In explaining why, he used exactly the same vocabulary favoured by the prime minister himself, namely that the Democrats do not practice “creative politics”.

The abbot also ventured into Ngo Heng, the Chinese craft of interpreting faces, and told us that Thaksin’s face had the perfect features for a national leader “a tiger forehead and lion nose”. Apparently this indicates the prime minister is specially knowledgeable on economics.

The abbot then moved on to talk about the economy. He said there was absolutely no chance of another bubble crisis because the stars governing the economy were all good. He predicted that the economy would be “70 percent good” this year, then rising by 10 per cent a year to become “100 percent good” by 2007, but Chang Noi confesses to finding this part a little difficult to understand.

Although the abbot appeared on the front page of the magazine on news stalls all over the country, strangely the prime minister did not rush to criticise him for overstepping the boundary keeping monks out of politics. Nor were any orders sent out to stop him talking like this again, or to prevent him appearing on radio. Perhaps that is because what this abbot was talking about does not seem to have anything at all to do with the teachings of the Buddha.

But of course, as a student of Buddhism himself, Thaksin knows that there is no such boundary. All through Thai history, one of the duties of the monks has been to keep the political authorities on a moral path. When kings in the distant past raised too much tax, seized women, grabbed others’ property, and otherwise abused their power, the monks criticised them in sermons, and described their evils in the temple chronicles. The monkhood invented the idea of the Ten Kingly Virtues to have a standard which kings could follow and by which they could be judged.

More recently, the late great philosopher-monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu argued that it was not just legitimate but imperative for the monkhood to take an interest in politics as one of the ways to bring about improvement in this world. Buddhadasa wrote whole books on the subject. Thaksin claims to have special reverence for Buddhadasa’s teachings, but strangely seems to have let this part slip from his mind.