Rethinking
Buddhism and Development: In 1991, the Thai Buddhist monk Phrakhru Pitak Nanthakhun sponsored a tree ordination in Nan Province. The ritual—conducted by twenty northern Thai monks and attended by close to 200 villagers, district officials, and journalists—formally established and sanctified a protected community forest for ten adjoining villages. The hour-long ceremony included chanting, sanctification of water, and wrapping a monk’s orange robes around the largest remaining tree in the forest. The ten village headmen drank the holy water to seal their pledge to protect the forest. This ritual was one of numerous tree ordinations conducted by Buddhist monks in the 1990s in an effort to preserve the nation’s rapidly depleting forest and protect people’s livelihoods within it. “Environmentalist monks” (phra nak anuraksa in Thai) form a small percentage of the total number of monks in Thailand. Nevertheless, their actions are visible in Thai society. They tackle urgent and controversial issues, such as deforestation and the construction of large dams, using modified Buddhist rituals and an ecological interpretation of Buddhist teachings. The effectiveness of environmentalist monks’ projects remains unclear. Because these monks have only been active in Thailand over the past decade, not enough time has passed to assess projects aimed at stopping deforestation or cleaning polluted rivers. Their projects do not have sufficient scope to change what most environmentalists perceive as the destructive patterns of deforestation and growth-oriented economic and industrial development that have been dominant in Thailand since the 1960s. Despite their small numbers and limited effectiveness, this group represents a case of people within a specific cultural setting who are implementing their own environmental concepts. They reinvent human relationships with nature in the face of what Arturo Escobar (1996) criticizes as the capitalization of nature worldwide. Their environmental seminars and their relations with local people illustrate the processes through which this small group of monks challenges the dominant trend of “ecological capital” (Escobar 1996). Despite a historical link between the Buddhist Sangha (the community of monks) and the Siamese state, these monks reject the state’s definition of development and how it is implemented. A high degree of environmental degradation has accompanied the government’s growth and export-oriented development policies. The Thai forest has been cut down at one of the fastest rates in Asia. (According to official figures, forest cover in Thailand decreased from 72 percent of the total land in 1938 to 53 percent in 1961 and 29 percent in 1985 [England 1996:60]. Most environmental non-government organizations [NGOs] estimate that less than 15 percent of the country’s total land area can be considered forest today.) Activist monks join a growing, popular environmental movement that questions the government’s priorities and policies. The contemporary development concept was first formulated in the mid-1800s when King Mongkut brought his kingdom into the global economy and restructured the Buddhist Sangha to legitimize the central government. Changing Thai governments have continued to use Buddhism to support their development agendas, especially since the 1960s. This process resulted in the rise of independent “development monks” in the 1970s and “environmental monks” in the late 1980s who challenged the government’s concept of development, Buddhism’s legitimation of it, and the suffering that they believed it caused the Thai people. Ironically, engaged Buddhism in Thailand emerged out of the same political-economic situation and close relationship with the state that it seeks to change. Engaged Buddhism and Buddhist environmentalism are significant less because of their use of Buddhist principles than because they incorporate people’s culture, values, and concerns for their livelihood and an understanding of historical, social, and political context into a creative approach to dealing with social problems. Development in Thailand Siam, as Thailand was formerly known, remained a small, relatively isolated kingdom until 1855 when the Bowring Treaty with Great Britain formally brought it into the emerging global economy. Even as the Siamese attempted to limit foreign access to their markets, the colonial economies being developed in neighboring countries forced them to rethink their relations with the international community and begin to modernize. Initiated by King Mongkut (Rama IV, reigned 1851–1868), Siam introduced modern scientific concepts, economic practices, and education. Mongkut also instituted religious reform in the 1830s and 1840s, and established the Thammayut Order of the Sangha. Similar to the modernization of other aspects of Thai society that Mongkut initiated, he rationalized the religion, aiming to eliminate practices that he felt were too ritualistic, metaphysical, or overly influenced by local or regional culture.
Mongkut linked the Sangha hierarchy with the absolute monarchy based in Bangkok, using it to legitimize the central government and weaken the influence of regional forms of religion and the power of regional political leaders. The legitimizing role that the Sangha played toward the state was strengthened as Bangkok expanded its control to the peripheral regions, using wandering forest monks to forge relations with remote rural peoples (see Jackson 1989, Kamala 1997, Tambiah 1976, 1984, Taylor 1993a). During the modernization period, Siam—renamed Thailand in 1932—established the three-fold concept of religion, monarchy, and nation, formalizing the connection between religion and state even further. Three Sangha Acts enacted by the Thai government in 1902, 1941 and 1962 brought the Sangha formally under the government’s control (see Jackson 1989, Tambiah 1976). Each of these Acts created a state-imposed organizational structure for the Sangha that paralleled the current forms of government: in 1902, Siam was still a monarchy, and the hierarchical, centralized Sangha was headed by a Supreme Patriarch; in 1941, a decentralized Sangha structure was established that paralleled the democratic, constitutional monarchy in place at the time; in 1962, a top-down structure was reintroduced to match the autocratic government of Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat. Underlying the Acts, especially that of 1962, was an effort to garner support not only for the current government, but to legitimize its development policies as well. The 1962 Act, in particular, aimed to use the Sangha to foster Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat’s development agenda. After coming to power through a coup in 1958, Sarit aggressively pushed Thailand into an intensive development policy. Based on a Western model, Sarit promoted agricultural intensification and expansion toward an export-oriented, industrial economy. He encouraged a shift toward cash-cropping, bringing more forest land under cultivation, thus “civilizing” the wild forest (Stott 1991) and making it useful for humans. He also drew on traditional cultural values to promote his development agenda. Yoneo Ishii comments that
Using the concept of a single, absolute truth and a centralized Sangha organization, Sarit incorporated Buddhism into his development campaign through community development and missionary programs involving monks (see Tambiah 1976:434–471). These programs included thammathud, which sent monks to missionize in politically sensitive and economically poor border provinces, thammacarik, through which monks worked with the Department of Public Welfare among minority hill peoples to convert them from animism and to develop them, as well as community development programs sponsored by the two national Buddhist universities. Their aim was to strengthen the sense of national identity of peripheral peoples through Buddhism. These programs were—and are still today—supported and overseen by the government rather than the Sangha (see Somboon 1977, 1981, 1982). Governments following Sarit’s have continued his aggressive industrial and export-oriented development and agricultural intensification policies. The results have been mixed: Thailand’s growth until the economic crisis of 1997 was phenomenal, but the rate of environmental degradation, especially forest loss and pollution levels, was among the highest in Asia. The gap between rich and poor widened, and consumerism spread, symbolized by the growth of malls and McDonald’s restaurants. Rural people’s quality of life deteriorated as they moved from subsistence to market farming or left the countryside to seek work in urban factories. Through the use of a national, centralized concept of Buddhism, local culture and regional diversity were devalued. “Development Monks” Not all members of the Sangha agreed with either the government’s development agenda or the involvement of monks in it. Beginning in the early 1970s, a handful of monks began independent rural development projects based on their interpretations of Buddhist teachings and in opposition to the capitalism promoted by the government. Of particular concern was the impact of the government’s rapid development program on rural people’s lives, and because of the government’s emphasis on Buddhism as a form of nationalism, the erosion of traditional local Buddhist values. These monks feared the effects of growing consumerism and the dependence of farmers on outside markets. Working in specific villages and addressing localized concerns and problems, these self-proclaimed “development monks” (phra nak phatthana) began conducting alternative development projects (see Darlington 1990; Somboon 1987, 1988). One of the first development monks, Phra Dhammadilok, (formerly Phra Thepkavi) formed his own NGO, the Foundation for Education and Development of Rural Areas (FEDRA), in 1974 just outside of Chiang Mai city in Northern Thailand (Darlington 1990). He realized that if people are hungry, cold, and sick, they will not and cannot devote their energy toward religious ends. Similarly, without spiritual development and commitment, they cannot overcome material suffering. FEDRA was established with the goal of developing spirituality and economics simultaneously. The organization has four major objectives: 1) to support agriculture; 2) to encourage education (specifically that which is appropriate for the rural occupation of the farmers); 3) to promote religion; and 4) to develop local areas (Phra Thepkavi 1987, n.d.; FEDRA 1985; Vanpen 1989:81–82). “Local areas” means the people, land, institutions, traditions, and cultures of the rural Northern Thai. FEDRA’s projects, located in over thirty-five villages today, include rice banks, buffalo banks (which provide buffaloes for poor farmers to plow their fields), credit unions, small revolving funds for agricultural development initiatives, integrated agriculture projects, and training for rural women in traditional handicrafts and sewing to enable them to supplement their agricultural incomes. Unlike most government programs, the projects of Phra Dhammadilok and other development monks are aimed at local, rather than national or regional, development. They respond to immediate needs identified by the rural peoples themselves. Most of the development monks are from the areas in which they work, making them aware of the problems that rapid economic change has brought to rural people. They initiate projects designed for a specific location and problem using local cultural concepts and beliefs rather than pulling people into a national agenda that often ignores their needs and wants. The emergence and growth of development monks paralleled and accompanied the rise of NGOs engaged in alternative development. NGOs since the 1970s have become a major social opposition movement within Thai society. Both secular NGOs and development monks emerged because of concern over the negative impacts of government development policies toward Thai society, culture, and environment. Together they have fostered the rise of a national environmental movement. Rise of the Environmental Movement While development monks worked on a local level, the environmental movement grew on a national level in response to the government’s economic development agenda. Many of the NGOs that were engaged in a search for alternative forms of development moved into environmental activism because of their concerns about the rate of environmental destruction and degradation caused by the policies of the central government. The causes for environmental degradation in Thailand are numerous, multifaceted, and virtually impossible to verify, but the coincidence of the nation’s rapid economic growth from the 1960s until the mid-1990s and its high rate of forest loss and environmental problems during the same period (see Hirsch 1996:17; Rigg 1995b) fuel fierce debate. The government, supported by international organizations such as the World Bank, argues that environmental destruction is primarily due to poverty, making economic growth imperative to solving environmental problems. Environmentalists, on the other hand, point to the inequalities underlying the government’s development agenda as the root of much of the country’s poverty. The government’s policies, they argue, further promote destruction of the forest by encouraging agricultural intensification and capital growth through the exploitation of natural resources. The arguments are complex and beyond the scope of this paper, but it is critical to note the range of positions surrounding environmental issues, even within the environmental movement. The case of forest reserves and national parks illustrates the complexity of environmentalism in Thailand. Forests represent a major natural resource for the nation. Thailand invested heavily in logging until a ban was passed in 1989 after 300 people died in floods caused by deforestation and erosion (Pinkaew and Rajesh 1991). Debates still rage concerning the best way to manage the country’s forests and the role of local people. The creation of national parks and forest reserves points to an environmental sensitivity on the part of the government. Few of the parks have been well managed, however. No one agrees, even within the environmental movement, on the best way to manage the forest reserves and parks. On one side, local peoples living within the forests are blamed for destructive agricultural practices such as the slash-and-burn method. Advocates of this perspective argue that to preserve the remaining forest land these people should be moved out of the forest and trained in more environmentally-friendly methods. Others argue that it is the local people who can best look after the forest because their livelihoods depend on the natural resources that they contain. Therefore, rather than moving them out and allowing illegal loggers, hunters, and developers to take advantage of the changes, forest dwellers should be granted titles to the land that they have used for generations. Environmentalist monks are also caught up in this debate. The majority takes the position that local forest dwellers will best protect the forest. A few others argue strongly that people must be removed from forests, especially watersheds, if there is to be any chance of protecting the remaining forested land. Thai environmentalism cannot be simplified into a two-sided debate. It entails multiple perspectives that are grounded, according to Philip Hirsch (1996), in a variety of material and ideological bases. As seen in the debate over forests, “environmentalism in Thailand needs to be seen as a multi-faceted discourse that deals with key social, economic[,] and political issues, including questions of control over resources by empowered and disempowered groups” (1996:15–16). The environmental movement is composed of both a growing middle class with the time, resources, and influence to engage in environmental debates and rural farmers whose livelihoods depend on a healthy environment. Many middle-class Thais were educated abroad and therefore tend to approach these issues informed by a Northern concept of environmentalism. They see the need to protect and preserve nature from human impact. Most farmers see themselves as caretakers intimately familiar with and dependent upon a natural environment that includes people as part of a whole ecological system (see Rigg 1995a:8). Activist monks often use the latter argument as an example of the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, showing the interdependence of all things. Even within the environmental movement, with its diverse interpretations supporting a wide range of economic and ideological interests, the influence of the concept of environmentalism in Thai society cannot be denied. NGOs carry significant weight within environmental discourse and influence government policy. Crucial environmental legislation was enacted due to NGO activism and its popular support. For example, environmentalists won a major case in 1988 when the government decided to shelve the Nam Choen Dam in Kanchanaburi Province in response to protests by a diverse “coalition of local groups, farmers, journalists, Buddhist monks, students[,] and foreign environmentalists” (Rigg 1995a:13). This event, early in the environmental movement, demonstrated its potential, even though several other controversial dams have since been built. Emergence of Environmentalist Monks It is within the context of debates over development and the rise of a diverse yet influential environmental movement that the self-proclaimed environmentalist monks emerged. Just as the environmental movement in Thailand grew out of the concerns of the NGOs about the ecological impact of government development policies and global ecological capitalism, the work of environmentalist monks evolved from that of independent development monks with concerns about local people’s lives and spirituality. The first case in which Buddhist monks took an environmental position as monks involved the 1985 proposal to build a cable car up Doi Suthep mountain and through Doi Suthep-Pui National Park in Chiang Mai to promote tourism and economic development (see Chayant 1998). Chayant describes the importance of the site for Northern Thai Buddhists:
Reflecting the emerging environmental movement as a whole, opposition to the cable car project included students, people’s organizations, social action groups, local media, and the general public of the city. Buddhist monks joined the protests as the cause gained publicity, and the full ecological and cultural impacts of building the cable car became apparent. Concerns were raised over the deforestation of the mountainside, especially in a national park that contained diverse plant, bird, and animal species. Arguments focused on environmental conservation versus economic development, but the motivation of the monks involved was mostly framed in terms of concepts of sanctity and the threat to a sacred Buddhist heritage site. One monk in particular, Phra Phothirangsi, district head of the Sangha for the city of Chiang Mai, took a leading role in the fight against the cable car. He articulated a link between Buddhism and preserving trees and the forest beyond the immediate religious concern for a pilgrimage site (personal interview, September 5, 1992). He argued that Buddhism and the forest cannot be separated. The cable-car case was the first time that Buddhist monks concerned about development incorporated environmental concerns in their actions. It is not typical of the kinds of actions in which environmentalist monks engage, however, because their fears involved the threat to a sacred Buddhist site as much as to Doi Suthep’s ecosystem. Nevertheless, it was the first time that Thai monks articulated the relationship between Buddhism and the natural environment as a motivation for social and political activism. They responded to a local social and historical situation as much as to an ecological issue; the threat to the sacred sites of Doi Suthep and Wat Pra That should not be underestimated as a powerful motivation for monks to move into political activism. As a result of this initial action, the Thai public was less surprised by other monks’ more explicit environmental actions that followed. Environmentalist monks cannot be described as forming a coherent social movement, although the potential for effecting social change clearly exists within their actions. Many of the monks engaged in environmental projects participate in an informal network that periodically brings them together to share their activities, concerns, obstacles, and successes and generate new ideas. It is through these Buddhist environmental seminars, sponsored by NGOs from five to ten times a year and involving from twenty to two hundred monk participants at a time, that a new concept of human relations with nature and human responsibility toward nature is being constructed. Despite the importance of the dialogue and exchange of ideas that take place at these seminars, the real construction of knowledge occurs through the interaction between monks and villagers as they implement their ecological projects within local environments and informed by local histories. The new social relations forged between monks and villagers, local officials and businessmen are as important as the localized ecological conservation efforts enacted. The work of two monks in Nan Province, northern Thailand, illustrates the process and the potential of the knowledge created by environmentalist monks. The first monk is Phrakhru Pitak Nanthakhun. He was born and raised in the village of Giew Muang, deep in the mountainous forest north of Nan City. His introduction to both environmental concerns and Buddhism arose out of an incident that occurred when he was a child. Phrakhru Pitak witnessed his father shoot a mother monkey while hunting. Its baby clung to the mother’s body, allowing itself to be captured. For three days, it cried from its cage, and when the boy finally released it, it went, still crying, straight to the skin of its mother hanging out to dry. This experience contributed not only to Phrakhru Pitak’s later conservation work, but also was part of the reason that he ordained as a novice and has remained in the Sangha for almost 30 years. He realized that the teachings of the Buddha could help prevent such human-induced suffering (see Arawan 1993, Darlington 1997b). Growing out of his childhood experience with the baby monkey, Phrakhru Pitak incorporated a message of the environmental responsibility of humans into his teachings. The urgency of preaching an environmental ethic became clearer to him as he witnessed the continual deforestation of the mountainous province. This was caused by logging concessions, illegal logging, slash-and-burn agriculture, overuse of the land by villagers, and the introduction of cash cropping. In the late 1980s, Phrakhru Pitak realized that preaching alone was not enough, that he needed to become actively engaged in conservation work. He visited Phrakhru Manas of Phayao Province, the monk generally credited with first performing tree ordinations to raise awareness of the value of the forests (Darlington 1998). Symbolically ordaining large trees in an endangered forest by wrapping monks’ orange robes around them serves several purposes. First, the action draws attention to the threat of deforestation. Second, the ritual provides the opportunity for the ecology monks and the laity who work with them (predominantly non-government environmentalists and development agents) to teach about the impact of environmental destruction and the value and means of conserving nature. Finally, the monks use the ritual to teach the Dhamma and to stress its relevance in a rapidly changing world. After visiting Phrakhru Manas, Phrakhru Pitak returned to Nan and began actively teaching villagers about environmental conservation, presenting slide shows, and holding discussions with people about the problems that they face due to deforestation. In 1990, he helped his home village formally establish a community forest encompassing about 400 acres of land. The community forest was officially consecrated, and the villagers’ commitment to preserving it was marked by the ordination of the largest remaining tree. Letters were sent to the surrounding villages announcing the creation of the protected area and making clear that it was forbidden to cut trees or hunt within it. The villagers also performed a ceremony requesting the local tutelary spirit to help them protect the forest and its wildlife. Phrakhru Pitak’s work is not limited to his home village, but instead is constantly being expanded. Since 1990, he has sponsored several tree ordinations and phā pā ceremonies, which are traditionally used to give “forest robes” to monks, but in these cases they include giving seedlings for reforestation. Lay people make religious merit through their donations and participation. In May 1993, an adapted traditional ceremony was held to preserve and lengthen the life of the Nan River in conjunction with a seminar to highlight the problems of desiccation and pollution that the province faces. A fish sanctuary was established at the site of the ceremony as well. By 1999, over thirty-nine community forests and 100 fish sanctuaries had been established by Phrakhru Pitak’s NGO, the We Love Nan Province Foundation. Phrakhru Pitak emphasizes basic Buddhist principles such as dependent origination and an interpretation of the Buddha’s life that highlights a close relationship with the forest. His work is significant less because it incorporates Buddhism with ecological conservation principles than because he works closely with local villagers to identify and develop ways of dealing with the problems that they face. Phrakhru Pitak also encourages sustainable development practices such as integrated agriculture and growing food for subsistence rather than for sale. Villagers are willing to try his approaches because of their respect for him as a monk and their awareness of his concern for their well-being. He is outspoken in his criticism of government-sponsored economic development promoting cash crops and the use of chemical fertilizers. Although Phrakhru Pitak has become famous and his NGO has grown to work in several villages and on multiple conservation projects, his work is still based in the specific environmental context of Nan Province. He has also inspired several other environmental projects, some sponsored by monks, others by lay people in their own villages. The case of Phra Somkit represents the second example of an environmentalist monk engaged in the construction of new knowledge. Phra Somkit, unlike Phrakhru Pitak, only works in his home village. Similarly concerned with deforestation around his village, Phra Somkit began in the early 1990s to protect the village’s forest. He went bindabat for forest, which is traditionally the practice of going on alms rounds providing lay people with the opportunity to make merit through giving food to monks. Phra Somkit’s innovation entailed offering villagers the opportunity to make merit by donating land to the village temple. His father was the first to make an offering, presenting approximately an acre of hilly land that had been denuded through intensive cultivation of corn as a cash crop. As a means to protect the forest, Phra Somkit began a model integrated-agriculture farm on land belonging to his temple. With the help of his younger brother, he maintains two fish ponds, raises free range chickens, and plants natural rice plots behind the temple. In the chaotic garden, pigs feed among numerous varieties of fruit trees. (Phra Somkit does not kill the fish, chickens, or pigs, raising them only to show villagers integrated agricultural methods.) He uses no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides to demonstrate the benefits of natural farming to the villagers. On the land donated by his father, Phra Somkit has allowed the forest to regenerate naturally. In the almost ten years since the original gift, the forest has again grown dense. When I visited him in October 1999, Phra Somkit told me that he had counted close to 100 separate species of plants in the area. A steady train of visitors come to see Phra Somkit’s natural farm. In 1999, he received more than 1000 people from both Thailand and abroad. In September, ten British students spent one week volunteering on the farm to learn about integrated agriculture and sustainable development. Even more important is Phra Somkit’s claim that all but about ten of the more than 100 families in the village have begun to implement some form of integrated agriculture. Phra Somkit strongly believes in the importance of education in the protection of the natural environment. Using the mountainous terrain surrounding the village, he regularly takes children on ecology meditation walks. He works with them to consider the value of the plants and wildlife with which they share their environment. His belief is that through teaching children about human responsibility toward nature, they will take their lessons home and teach their parents. Phra Somkit undertakes all this work as part of what he perceives as his own responsibility as a Buddhist monk. Conclusion Both Phra Somkit and Phrakhru Pitak illustrate ways in which environmentalist monks respond to changing national, regional, and global agendas concerning development and the environment within local contexts. Their motivation comes from witnessing environmental degradation and the suffering that it creates. Actively seeking out the causes of this suffering has led them to redefine the underlying concepts of development and progress. Their awareness has led them to reexamine Buddhist teachings to support their work rather than follow any inherent ecological principles within the scriptures. As Buddhists have done since the Buddha’s time, they adapt their interpretations and practices of the religion to fit a changing sociopolitical—and natural—environment, in this case, a result of modernization. Their work is an example of the concept of environmental imaginary formulated by Peet and Watts (1996), which they describe as follows:
While environmentalist monks do not form a united, coherent movement, the collective implication of their work illustrates the concept of liberation ecology described by Peet and Watts. Their emergence within a particular historical, political, economic, and environmental context enables them to reassess Buddhism to fit that context and engage in debates over modernity and one of its primary institutions: development. They demonstrate a willingness to confront the traditional mutual support of the Sangha hierarchy and the state—a relationship that was itself a product of modernization. The impact of their individual projects may be impossible to assess, but the potential of their activism to challenge Thai Buddhists to rethink their religion, their society, and their place in both the political and the natural world cannot be denied.
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