What Does Democracy Have To Do With Buddhadharma?
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot over the past year as I have watched political developments in my native country of the United States and my adopted home of Thailand. In the transmission of Dharma to the West, Thailand has served as a very important source of Buddhist wisdom for Westerners who later went on to teach.
While the Dharma is relatively new to the United States, democratic values have long been rooted in American political culture. In the last five years, in particular, there’s been a new generation of American Dharma teachers and students who are merging political activism with the practice of Dharma.
In the US, the most explicit mixing of political activism at Dharma centers seems to be happening at meditation centers that are in Theravada Buddhist lineages, such as Spirit Rock and IMS.
From a historical and cultural perspective, it’s quite interesting that the strongest political activism is happening among Theravadins, for Theravada is the most explicitly renunciate form of Buddhism. The early Buddhists were a wandering group of ascetics who had renounced any interest in worldly affairs. Indeed, The Buddha himself gave up the opportunity to rule a kingdom in order to be a wandering yogi and then, after his enlightenment, to found and lead a monastic order until his death.
But for a variety of reasons that are particular to the context of how Theravada Buddhism has developed in the US, the most politically activist Buddhists seem to be overrepresented at Theravada meditation centers in the US.
In Thailand, over the past two years, as I have watched a mass youth-driven political movement pushing for democratic reforms in this Buddhist kingdom, I wonder about the intersection of the religious and the political: how might embracing Dharmic values, practices and language support the struggle for democracy in Thailand? Or would it potentially hinder these efforts?
I genuinely don’t know, but this seems like potentially rich terrain to explore. I’ve only just begun to think about this topic but I’ll share a few thoughts here and I would very much welcome feedback from those who have given some thought to the matter.
Given that Buddhism is so central to the collective sense of Thai identity, it seems like there is a potential opportunity for the framing of political agendas through a Dharmic lens to have a positive impact.
If the central goal of Dharma is to reduce human suffering, then isn’t it advancing Dharma for citizens of a Buddhist country to demand that the government respect and protect basic human rights?
What if the protestors demanded that the government live up to its proclaimed reputation of Buddhist values or look like a bunch of hypocrites? Traditionally, such demands would be a rather confrontational approach by conventional Thai norms; however, this younger generation of activists has made clear that they perceive a distinction between respect for tradition and blind obedience that perpetuates systemic injustices.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, the civil rights movement in the US adopted a similar strategy: the activists were simply demanding that America live up to its supposed values that “all men were created equal” (by this point, there were already previous movements by women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds to demand that women, and not just men, should have equal rights).
Of course, adopting a similar strategy in Thailand would also require that the protestors themselves embody these Buddhist values, such as non violence, non harming, loving kindness, compassion, and equanimity. Doing so is always a great challenge when orchestrating any kind of broad based social movement; however, it also seems critical for winning broad popular support.
When the general public perceives political activism descending into violence and chaos, their perceptions can easily shift, even if they are initially sympathetic to the cause of the protestors.
In the wake of yet another brutal police crackdown, could the activists call for the police to embody the foundational qualities of the heart-mind, including loving kindness, compassion, and equanimity? Of course, to do so, these Dharmic values actually have to inform the values of the student activists.
Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists in the US carefully drew upon values, images, and symbols from American history to reach across racial lines, break into the hearts of white Americans and reshape collective notions of American identity. Adopting this language of Buddhadharma and embodying these values in their actions could allow the protestors to frame their agenda in language and values that speak to a collective sense of Thai identity as a Buddhist Kingdom. Such an approach could potentially amplify their appeal with a broader swatch of the Thai population.
Yellow shirt antagonists will undoubtedly point out that it is the monarchy that is the protector of Dharma in the kingdom, so democratic activists would have to use that very same language to explain why their demands for reform of the monarchy, and of the lese majeste law, is actually consistent with basic Thai values and norms around the role of the monarchy.
As the globalization of Buddhadharma further unfolds, even traditionally Buddhist countries that are strongly affiliated with a particular lineage are increasingly in dialogue with other turnings of the Dharma. One valuable idea to draw upon from Mahayana Buddhism could be the idea that all beings have buddha nature. There’s a potentially interesting parallel between the idea of buddha nature and democratic values, particularly for Thailand.
Democratic political institutions require a culture in which there are particular values and norms that favor democracy over more authoritarian modes of government. In the West, the evolution from monarchy to more representative forms of government occurred in a context in which the idea of human rights emerged.
Human rights was an ideal of the Enlightenment that was in contrast to the aristocratic period that preceded it.
Democratic societies require broad based consensus around the idea of human rights: not that all beings are necessarily born “equal” in all senses of that term, but that every person is equally entitled to a basic set of rights, including the right to vote, regardless of an individual’s religion, race, gender, educational attainment, socioeconomic level or various other metrics of social status. The criteria for access to these privileges expand over time as more groups demand and achieve acceptance in the eyes of the law. Though individual intelligence and educational attainment inevitably vary, democracy is premised on the idea that each individual knows what is best for his or her own self-interest.
It is not hard to understand why such democratic ideals would inevitably encounter resistance among the broader public in Thailand, as these directly clash with traditional Thai values and conceptions of identity. There is an oft spoken notion of “Thainess” that supposedly serves as a unifying and coherent set of values that unite all Thais. Chulalongkorn University Professor William J. Klausner offers this explanation in his analysis of “Thainess:”
“Another crucial element of Thai identity is status consciousness and acceptance of social hierarchy by all, whether on the lower or upper rungs of the socio-political ladder, with the Buddhist notion of Karma being interpreted as a justification for continued uncountable control by those in power and acceptance by the disadvantage of their exploitation.”
Rather than a set of bourgeois values amenable to a market-orientated liberal democracy, Thailand’s social structure and values are decidedly more aristocratic and feudal. If you are born with a particular last name, into a particular family, you are inherently above others. While in practice this is undoubtedly true to some extent in the United States (think of the Bushes and the Kennedys), Americans are very averse to the suggestion that birth and family predicts one’s lot in life; such resistance reflects a collective commitment to a set of bourgeois democratic values rather than to aristocratic, feudal ideals.
As Bangkok Post columnist Atiya Achakulwisut recently pointed out in her op-ed “Thai Path to Modernity Likely Long and Fraught,” this fundamental tension between traditional aristocratic values on the one hand and democratic aspirations on the other derives from the Kingdom’s overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932. Thai politics has been a tug of war between these two camps ever since. This tension lies at the heart of the current debate between conservative forces and democratic activists.
In Thailand, it’s not exactly clear: to what extent do people want democracy? How much can the government distort the meaning of “democracy” While military dictatorships and widespread corruption are certainly not popular, there also seems to be mixed feelings about more democratic forms of government. Such unease among the more educated, middle class concentrated in Bangkok constituted the heart of the yellow shirt protests that cheered on the military coup in 2014 and bequeathed this current political crisis.
To what extent do people in Thailand actually subscribe to this essential underlying belief that all beings are entitled to an equal set of rights, including the chance to vote for their representative in government, regardless of their level of income, education or other metrics of social status?
While the notion of Karma has traditionally been used to justify existing social hierarchies, there are other Dharmic values that could offer justification for democratic reforms and good governance.
In the second turning of The Dharma, the Mahayana, the goal of the path is no longer on the individual liberation of the practitioner, but rather on collective awakening. Compassion is elevated to a place of equal importance as wisdom, as the archetype of the bodhisattva supplants that of the arhat. As a person increasingly internalizes the truth of Nagarjuna’s insight into interdependence, such a realization pierces through the illusion that awakening is a solitary, isolated affair. While such an individualistic view can be appealing, particularly for those of us with privilege, it also strikes me as ultimately untenable in light of the meta crises of which any modern person is now aware, thanks to the democratization of digital media.
In an age where the climate crisis is drawing ever nearer, and the rise of totalitarian forces in the US reverberates in a Southeast Asia lying in Communist China’s shadow, it seems that the only reasonable position is to embrace this reality that our individual awakening is inseparable from the collective awakening of all sentient beings and the planet.
As Dharma practitioners from other cultures, perhaps we might hold up not simply a mirror but also a prism to one another, allowing us to not merely reflect but to refract the images that we have of ourselves. Through doing so, we might shatter the fixed and limited images we have of ourselves, rooted in the collective shadows of our past. Perhaps through greater self awareness and cross cultural dialogue, we can find a way to construct a more hopeful future.
Isn’t this the law of karma: not a doctrine of predestination but the law of cause and effect? Little by little, brick by brick, people build the future they wish to see, in the here and now.
Karma is what US Senator Robert Kennedy was pointing towards when he said:
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice.”
What does democracy have to do with Buddhadharma? Historically, nothing. The Buddha and his followers wanted nothing to do with politics. Like many religious traditions, other iterations of Buddhism received tacit approval from the state precisely because these religious movements did not pose a threat to the existing political order.
But this is changing in the fourth turning of the Dharma, for the Western Dharma practitioner, political engagement is a natural consequence of working to alleviate the suffering of others. Democracies are dynamic. For a traditional Thai society that highly values stability and order, perhaps revisiting fundamental Dharmic values around the truth of impermanence, kindness, and compassion can inform calls for democratic reforms and a gentler, more civil public discourse.
As Thailand attempts to reconcile these conflicting values at the heart of Thai identity, perhaps Buddhism can be the unifying force that allows reformers to reimagine the future in a way that’s a progression, rather than a break, from the past.