Human Rights in Thailand. Don F. Selby
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law of kamma. In contrast to what tends to be popularly mistaken as a matter of simply individual affairs and salvation … Buddhism stresses as a matter of principle the individual’s responsibility for all his deeds and actions” (Saneh 2002, 79). I draw attention to three things at this point. First, Saneh pits his claims against a popular, mistaken emphasis on individualization of salvation. Second, in the passage Saneh cites, learning is a matter of overhearing—overhearing the highest truth, which one realizes through dispositions of the body, which is to say conduct. Third, the emphasis on conduct is simultaneously an emphasis on the social, both in learning and in deeds. Khunying Amphorn, we saw above, made similar arguments—that the popular emphasis on individual merit is a misguided understanding of Buddhism, that there is a matter of overhearing the truth in Buddhism (also the truth of human rights), and that the path to salvation is social insofar as conduct and the learning of conduct are social. These points are important here in that they show the binding of Buddhism and human rights to be more than a maneuver within the politics of human rights but also a move in the politics of Buddhism; they show the emergence of human-rights-as-Buddhist to be a matter of a certain kind of overhearing that finds them not to be named as such in Buddhism but available latently, or obliquely, yet nonetheless available for discovery as one among the truths of Buddhism; and finally, that conduct, the realm of the social, is constitutively part of Buddhist teaching and practice, as Buddhadasa’s followers maintain.
Human Rights Politics, Buddhist Politics
At the beginning of her contribution to Human Rights in Thai Society, Khunying Amphorn argues that human rights are deeply sedimented in Thai history, within Thai beliefs and Buddhist teachings of compassion and mutual helpfulness.16 “Truly, there have been ideas and promotion of human rights in Thai society that go far back, even if they did not use the words, in line with our traditional customs, and based fundamentally in beliefs and religion, especially Buddhism, which taught people to live together with kindness, to sympathize, to help one another. We see here the ancestry of human rights” (Khunying Amphorn and Saneh 2000, 1 [my translation]).17
She also reiterates the pride Thai should feel in the progress their ancestors made in the direction of human rights by following the middle path and the five precepts of lay Buddhists. She cautions, however, that modern life, particularly as manifest in materialism and consumerism, has undermined the spiritual development of the past (in Khunying Amphorn and Saneh 2000, 10). It is difficult here, as with Saneh’s contrasting of freedom in Buddhism and Western liberalism, to find a simple way to map their positions with respect to the poles of progressivism and conservatism.18 This has something to do with the emergent quality of human rights.
The formulation of human rights within Buddhism (Buddhism, here, in a heritage vanishing under consumerism) simultaneously presents human rights as emergent, conditioned by an age-old Buddhism that did not name its work “human rights.” Two things stand out here. The notions of freedom and liberation that Saneh depicts find their ground in Buddhist ethics rather than a liberal lineage. Second, Saneh and Khunying Amphorn propose a model of human rights protection that follows the practice of the Buddha in that it does not seek to confront violators with their guilt but rather to help awaken would-be violators to the moral implications of their actions.
Given this starting point, what are the implications of thinking of human rights through emergence?19 In one direction, we find human rights latent in Buddhism and in Thai customs and traditions dating to King Ramkhamhaeng in Sukothai (in the 1200s), and yet, in another direction, they only take the name “human rights” in the present.20 They are conditioned by this past (hence the orientations of liberty, freedom, and awakening). Finding human rights latent in the past, in Buddhism, only takes place, however, in a time and place of manifest human rights, and reading them back into their latent state alters the traditions in which we find them. That is to say, finding human rights within Buddhism and proposing a novel end for it (in human rights) alters the picture of Buddhism as well as of human rights.
One way we can characterize the discovery of human rights in ancient Thai traditions and beliefs, perhaps Buddhism above all, is the unfamiliar appearing familiar or the familiar appearing as unfamiliar. Such a discovery is not neutral with respect to these traditions and beliefs, and emergence, here, is invasive, as the claims that Saneh and Khunying Amphorn make are not only moves made on the terrain of human rights (bringing them home by linking them to a familiar ethos). They are also intrusions into debates about the politics of Buddhism, which is to say, Saneh and Khunying Amphorn make claims about morally sustainable action and teaching within Buddhism. In the environment of the NHRC, then, we may also see the memorial for Phra Supoj (hosted, recall, by fellow follower of Buddhadasa, Phra Kittisak) as similarly maneuvering in debates both about human rights and about the politics of Buddhism.
Buddhadasa, as I have indicated, is an important figure in these debates, less because he was overtly political than for the distinctiveness of his Buddhist teachings and the influence they have had on Thailand’s growing, professional middle class—an influence visible in the way members of the NHRC brought Buddhism and human rights together. His teaching and practice became especially important in the early 1970s, at the height of the Communist Party of Thailand and antileftist reactionary movements, and at just the time that Saneh was a lecturer in Political Science at Thammasat University, placing him at the center of the tumultuous politics of the 1970s. If he eschewed political participation, Bhuddadasa was nonetheless an important interpreter of Buddhism and exerted political influence in the ways that antiauthoritarian political critics picked up his teachings (Jackson 1989, 132). Other influential monks were, by contrast, much more politically active, both in their public pronouncements and in an organizing capacity. Most prominent among these monks was Phra Kittiwuttho.
Reactionary and Progressive Buddhisms: Kittiwuttho and Buddhadasa
In the 1970s, during the “communist scare” against which Phra Kittiwuttho directed his energies, many of the first commissioners and workers at the ONHRC (the bureaucracy supporting the commission) were professors or students forming their political dispositions. Following large demonstrations at and around Thammasat University in Bangkok in 1973, the authoritarian government of Thanom Kittakachorn and Praphat Charusatien fell, and Thanom and Praphat went into exile. From 1973 to 1976, there was a progressive, elected government, but during that time, right-wing forces organized on several fronts, forming a variety of more and less militant organizations. A pivotal figure on the right, Kittiwuttho played such an exceptional role. I contend that when members of the NHRC formulate human rights through Buddhism, they in part respond to Buddhist politics stemming from Kittiwuttho’s expanding influence and to the results of his initiatives. In brief, Kittiwuttho claimed that it was meritorious within Buddhist morality to kill any and all leftists, and in 1976, members of right-wing organizations among whom he had influence participated in the mass murder at Thammasat University of students protesting Thanom and Praphat’s return from exile (Baker and Pasuk 2005, 188–195). This context, the use of Buddhism to silence or kill one’s political adversaries, informs the NHRC’s Buddhist claims for human rights.
Kittiwuttho publicized his view that killing communists was on balance a merit-making practice in speeches and in print and defended his view against criticism on a number of occasions. The initial line of his argument was that anyone who poses a threat to the Thai nation, Buddhism, and monarchy personifies Mara (the Evil One),21 and so it is the duty of Thai Buddhists to kill that partially human being. Killing leftists, in this view, brings merit to the killer, as killing a fish for a monk’s alms bowl is a merit-making act, though it involves killing. He said, of killing leftists, in an interview with the magazine Jaturat,22 “Jaturat: Does killing leftists or communists result in demerit or not? Kittiwuttho: It is my view that we ought to do it. Thai, even though we are Buddhist, should do it, but it should not be regarded as killing persons, because whoever harms the nation, religion, and monarchy is not a whole person. That means we do not intend to kill persons but rather Mara. That is the duty of all Thai. Killing people for (the sake of) the nation, religion and monarchy is meritorious, like killing a fish to make curry to put in a monk’s bowl” (my translation).
Such a picture of the human and nonhuman is not unique to Kittiwuttho but has