The Ordination of a Tree: The Thai Buddhist Environmental Movement

4. The Precedents

4 The Precedents Economic and spiritual development must work together to solve problems. —Phra Phuttapoj Waraporn (Chan Kusalo)1 In July 1987, excited members of a Northern Thai village gathered in the hot sun along the main road into town. Beneath constantly blaring loudspeakers , a woman collected donations while a group of older men banged drums and gongs. The high-toned sound of a Thai flute drifted through the restless crowd. Women chatted despite the noise, and teenagers put the final touches on a model tree hung with paper money, notebooks, soap, a set of orange robes, and other offerings for the village monk. As the crowd grew, the tree was placed in the back of a pickup truck and the people formed a long line behind it. Final announcements were made over the loudspeaker marking the beginning of the parade. Led by the makeshift band and the pickup, the crowd danced its way through the village to the main gate of the temple compound. There, older women, dressed in the white robes of the devout, threw confetti over the paraders as the music, laughter, and cheering filled the grounds and the people entered the temple to present their offerings. This festive occasion, a thot pha pa (“giving of the forest robes”) ceremony (commonly known as a pha pa ritual), was not typical although it followed the standard structure of the popular merit-making ritual (Wells 1975, 111–12).2 The tree was paraded, donations and robes presented to the monk, refuge taken in the Buddha, the dhamma, and the sangha, the five basic precepts of Buddhism reaffirmed by the participants, and religious 93 94 The Ordination of a Tree merit made. But the purpose of the ceremony and the motivations of the participants were not simply to make merit or give money to the temple. People conducted the ritual to raise funds for a new development program in the village—the Dhamma Agricultural Project for Self-Reliance. Initiated by the Foundation for Education and Development of Rural Areas (FEDRA), a nongovernmental organization founded by a senior monk, Phra Phuttapoj, better known as Luang Pu, or “Revered Grandfather,” the project proposed to integrate small-scale approaches to economic change with Northern Thai religious and cultural practices. It drew on the moral authority of Buddhism, especially as embodied by Phuttapoj (Plate 18). Following the monk’s philosophy , the program stressed both economic and spiritual development (Thepkavi n.d.). Luang Pu Phuttapoj was one of the first independent “development monks” (phra nak phatthana) in Thailand, monks who initiated rural development projects aimed at alleviating the suffering they believed the government ’s capitalist-oriented development policies produced.3 The cases of development monks such as Luang Pu Phuttapoj illustrate how elements of the Thai sangha responded to the state as it pushed its version of development , and how they established their own definitions of development. They show how individual monks, often in cooperation and dialogue with each other and with other social activists, experimented with the cultural meanings and religious definitions underlying development. The precedents of development monks redefining the terms and goals of “development” in the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for environmental monks such as Phrakhru Pitak Nanthakhun not only to challenge state-led development, but also its effects on both the environment and the people whose lives depend on it. They laid the foundation for environmental monks to create and promote alternative forms of knowledge of development and the relationship of Buddhism to them. Environmental monks built on the cultural experiments of development monks who had gone before them. The key is a cultural history, as defined by Fox, that traces how human actors originate ideas about their society out of cultural meanings already constituted, and then how they experiment with these ideas. Such experiments may contest the present and may conceive a revolutionized future, or they may fail to do so and confirm the present. That is, once made into public answers, a set of cultural meanings compels but also enables future cultural experimentation . It stipulates the form that new utopian experiments, attacking The Precedents 95 present conditions—or that ideologies, defending them—will take. (Fox 1991, 108) The interactions of development monks with the state, rural people, and NGOs involved a series of negotiations and cultural experiments upon which environmental monks built. Three main aspects of the work of development monks established the precedent of...