===
Ch15
Interfaith Connections
I had been educated
in a Catholic secondary school, and although I
was never tempted to
convert to Christianity, I was very much influ-
enced by the good
teachers at the school. At Lampeter, I was interested in the Christian way of
thinking. I read St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and all the church fathers
in philosophy courses. I was also fascinated by the intellectual endeavors of
Anglican theologians like Richard Hooker and John Henry Newman.
Later, I became
interested in the ideas of some leading Catholics such as Paulo Freire of
Brazil. I was deeply affected by his idea of consciousness raising through a
literacy campaign empowering the poor. Ivan Illich was another. Eventually, I
got to know him personally. He came to see me at my bookshop in Bangkok, and I
visited him twice in Mexico. I was instrumental in getting his book translated
into Thai, and he became popular in my country. I like Thomas Merton's books
and ideas on contemplation and action—that religious people should take a
social stand on issues of war and peace and on social justice. I came to admire
Dorothy Day and felt that she was working not only for social welfare, but for
social revolution. I also admired the Berrigan brothers, two leading American
Jesuits. I came to feel close to Hans Kung because of our similar
predicaments—accusations against me oflèse-majesté and against him of lese
popery. My Singhalese friend Tissa Bulsuriya was also outspoken against the
Vatican.
These are the people
I feel close to. Though we come from different religious traditions, we take a
similar stand on social issues and our work for peace. We are committed to our
own tradition, but we are on the fringe and want to radicalize the tradition.
Projects
with Catholics
After Pope John =I's
Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church in Asia became more open,
particularly the Jesuits, with their headquarters in the Philippines. The
church wanted to change people through education, so they held a big workshop
called the Educators' Social Action Workshop (ESAW) in Kyoto, Japan, in 1971.
About fifteen educators were invited from each country in Asia and the Pacific,
both Catholics and non-Catholics. These included officials in the Ministry of
Education and people from Catholic and government schools. They happened to select
me. I was not really in the schools, but I suppose they thought of me as
somebody useful.
I went to Kyoto for
three weeks. In the workshops, it was the first time I came across so-called
group dynamics and group process to change people's outlooks. It was
fascinating. I learned a lot about Asia and the Catholic way of thinking. One
of the organizers, Father Bulatao, a Filipino Jesuit, said, "We apologize
to all you non-Catholics. We have been haughty, on our high horse all these
years, and we must now ask for forgiveness from our brothers and sisters."
That had a profound effect on me. It helped me to see the Catholics in a much
better light. When I had been a student, Catholics were not allowed to attend
Buddhist ceremonies. All their rites were in Latin, and the priests and nuns
always wore their habits. Now, Mass was being said in the vernacular, and many
priests and nuns dressed like everyone else. I felt that the Catholics had
become more broad-minded and were willing to listen to people of other
religions.
At this meeting I got
to know the Thai Catholics and educators. When we came back, we wanted to
change things at home, so I formed a sort of Thai ESAW group. I got to know the
Thai priest Father Boonluan Mansap, who was very active with credit unions in
Catholic circles. I had never heard about credit unions—a kind of savings
scheme empowering the poor to run their own affairs. I helped him try to move
the credit union movement beyond the Catholic pale to include the Buddhists.
Through my
development work in Siam, I was involved with quite a number of Catholic
development organizations. The Asian Partnership for Human Development is a
consortium of Catholic organizations, mostly in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific.
They asked me to give one or two keynote addresses from a Buddhist perspective
to challenge them on their development. Through the Catholic Comité Contre la
Famine et pour le Développement (CcFD), from France, I came to know quite a few
French Catholics and became fairly well known in France. I became a partner of
Misserior, a Catholic development organization in Germany.
More
connections
My dealings with
Catholics and Anglicans are understandable given my early schooling and years
in Britain, but I hadn't had much connection with Protestantism. In my country,
there are only about thirty thousand Protestants out Of 56 million people, and
they have been there for only 150 years. Through the Social Science Review, I
met Dr. Kosol Srisang, who eventually became secretary-general of the Church of
Christ in Thailand. My relationship with the World Council of Churches (wcc)
began through Kosol's predecessor, Ray Downs, and he introduced me to many
leading Christians. I was invited to their interfaith meeting in Sri Lanka in
1974—in those days it was still called Ceylon. The meeting didn't inspire me,
but I met a lot of religious leaders—Protestants, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims.
Strangely enough, it
had been at this meeting that I first met the Vietnamese Buddhist leader Thich
Nhat Hanh. He has since become a good friend. His work and thought have
influenced me a great deal and expanded my outlook on engaged Buddhism. My
concern about the suffering in Vietnam became more real and intense when I met
him. Vietnam was then in turmoil, and Thich Nhat Hanh wanted the Singhalese
bhikkhus to issue a statement supporting peace in his country. He was from the
Mahayana tradition, and he hoped to get all the Buddhist traditions to join
together. But they refused. They were awful, very insular. Thich Nhat Hanh was
very disappointed, since he was desperately in need of international support. I
have had all his works translated into Thai. Some appeared in Thai first,
notably The Miracle of Mindfulness. The first English edition was also
published in Bangkok.
When my own society
was facing a lot of violence between the right wing and left wing in 1976, I
proposed to the general secretary of the Church of Christ in Thailand that we
of different religions
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come together to
appeal for nonviolence. Women's foundations got together and put up posters
everywhere: "In the name of mothers, wives, and daughters, we ask you not
to use violence." It was very effective. I called a meeting in Bangkok at
the women's department of the Church of Christ in Thailand. The Buddhist
abbots, Catholics, Muslims, and Protestants all got together. I said that
students and women were leading, and we religious people were far behind. We
should come together and issue a statement. This was my commitment. Eventually,
it became the Coordinating Group for Religion and Society (CGRS). This became
the only viable group actively doing reconciliation work. After the '76 coup,
they were the only ones brave enough to visit the students in jail. Even the
students' own parents were afraid to visit them, because all the students were
supposed to be traitors. They also gave flowers to the soldiers who killed the
students.
Buddhist-Christian
dialogue
After the World
Assembly of the wcc that I attended in Vancouver, we felt we needed more
Buddhist-Christian dialogue. I was often involved with this at Bad Boll Academy
in Germany. I was invited by an organization called Diakonia, "dealing
with neighbors," to attend meetings in Crete and Cyprus. I traveled to
Spain to prepare catechism for youth in the postmodern age. The first
American-organized Buddhist-Christian dialogue that I attended was at the
University of Hawaii in 1980. These meetings brought me many friends, friends
who call themselves both Buddhist and Christian. They were genuine and very
concerned about social justice. We treated each other as equals and had a
lively intellectual exchange, challenging one another like friends. In our
Buddhist-Christian dialogue, the idea that one religion is better than the
other simply doesn't exist, at least among these groups.
One of the most
significant events for me took place in 1989. I was at a meeting of the
Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter at Hsi Lai Temple near Los Angeles.
This group is known as the "Cobb-Abe" because it was started byJohn
Cobb, a leading Christian theologian from Claremont College, and Masao Abe, a
leading Zen scholar and chief disciple of D.T. Suzuki. It is a group of only
about twenty-five "hard-core" people. One has to be invited. I must
have been the first to join from the Theravada tradition in Southeast Asia. On
Palm Sunday, during our meeting, Hans Kung celebrated Mass for us. He made it
so informal and welcoming. He invited all of us to take the bread and wine with
him if we wanted to be Christ's friends and remember Christ. This was the first
time that I ever took Holy Communion. When I was at the Catholic school and
Anglican college, if you were not baptized and confirmed, you could not take
the bread and wine. There was a sense of separation. But when Hans Kung invited
us to take the bread and wine, we were so pleased. For me, it was wonderful.
Among the Christians
closest to the Buddhists are the Quakers. We both regard friendship as very
important. They call themselves the Religious Society of Friends. Similarly,
the Buddha said the most important element outside each of us is a good friend,
kalayanamitra, a voice of conscience to develop critical awareness. We
Buddhists can learn from the Quakers' social awareness, commitment to change,
and nonviolence. My encounter with them has helped me to reexamine my own
Buddhist upbringing. They don't make their beliefs compulsory, not even for
their own children. A person must himself be convinced. For me, this is great.
The simplicity of their worship—no ceremony, very Zen—also appeals to me.
Two people who stand
out are George and Lillian Willoughby. George is a real pacifist. During the
Vietnam War, anyone who wanted to resist the draft would go to George, and he
helped them with all the technical details. He challenges his country by
refusing to pay taxes. He was once arrested for taking a boat out into the
Pacific where they were going to test a bomb. He walked all the way from New
Delhi to the Chinese border on a peace march. (He wanted to march to Beijing,
but the Chinese would not allow him.) George and Lillian were helpful in
creating ACFOD. We have become good friends. They are instrumental even today
in helping our young people with training in nonviolence. Their lifestyle is so
simple. They don't live for money or fame, but for peace, for principles. They
have a rebellious spirit similar to mine.
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World
Conference on Religion and Peace
In 1989, I attended
the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP) at Monash University outside
Melbourne, Australia. John Taylor, then Secretary of the WCRP, invited me as
one of the keynote speakers. A lot of people suggested His Holiness the Dalai
Lama also be invited, but the Chinese said no Of course, if the Chinese say no,
the Japanese usually say no, and the WCRP funding came mostly from the Japanese
religious organization, Rissho Koseikai.
The local Australian
chapter pressed the issue, so as a compromise, His Holiness was invited to send
an observer. He sent a senior monk, Amchak Rinpoche—a very learned and humble
man. Amchak Rinpoche brought a brief written message of goodwill from His
Holiness, but the Chinese objected to his reading the message because he had
been invited simply as an observer. The Buddhists and local people were unhappy
because they wanted to hear His Holiness' message. Some of them asked my
advice. I said, "Give the message to me. I will read it before my own
speech."
Mr. Chao Pu Chao,
president of the Buddhist Association of China, was furious when I read the
statement. He walked out. When he walked out, Mr. Niwano, president of Rissho
Koseikai, walked out, too. John Taylor, the secretary of the conference,
reprimanded me. He said, "Sulak, you must know that at this kind of
international gathering, we must behave and not divert from the text." I
said, "I have been to many international gatherings, and nobody has ever
censored me. I speak my mind, and I'm willing to go to jail for what I f say.
If you don't like it, then don't invite me again." Later on, John Taylor
apologized to me. He said he had no choice but to reprimand me because he was
pressured by the Japanese and their money.
Afterwards, I tried
to talk to Mr. Chao. During an earlier visit of his to Bangkok, I had arranged
a private meeting for him with the president of the World Fellowship of
Buddhists, even though they recognized Taiwan instead of China. I said to him,
"I helped you when you came to Bangkok even though no one recognized
China. That's what Buddhists should do for each other. His Holiness may be
condemned by your government, but as a Buddhist you should not tow your
government's line." He didn't reply and walked away. I felt very sad. We
Buddhists compromise too much; we often put our national interests above
Buddhist principles.
CHAPTER
18 More Organizing
Pacjfic
Youth Forum
After my visit to
Tibet in 1984 we held the first Pacific Youth Forum in Japan. I had renewed my
relationship with the International House ofJapan. Mr. Michio Kato was director
of programs there and agreed to help me financially to create a permanent youth
ashram based on our earlier Pacific Ashram, as I had begun to do back in 1976.
It would be primarily for Japanese and Southeast Asian youth. Since Mr. Kato
felt the word "ashram" was a problem for the Japanese, we changed the
name from Pacific Ashram to Pacific Youth Forum. He wanted me to run it from
Bangkok because of all my connections in the region, but he felt it would be
easier to hold our meetings in Japan.
Our first meeting was
at Kiyosato Village, not far from Tokyo, and it was beautiful to see young
people of so many backgrounds—Japanese, American, Southeast Asian. We discussed
social and economic development in Asia and the Pacific. They liked it, so they
invited me to do it again the next year. In 1985, we went to Morioka City and
Takizawa Village and met around the theme "Participation, Development, and
Peace." During our third meeting in 1987, we gathered in Hiroshima in
connection with the fortieth anniversary of the Second World War bombing of
that city. Soedjatmoko, my old friend and the rector of U.N. University,
attended. My whole family was invited, and it was wonderful to have my wife and
two daughters join me. My son was studying in America at the time.
We organized one more
youth forum in Japan in 1991. Our theme was "Asia-Pacific Community in the
Twenty-first Century: Challenges and Opportunities for Youth." In the end,
the Japanese changed the name to Asian Cultural Forum so they could include
people beside youth. They wanted to invite young entrepreneurs to encourage
them
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to develop a more
holistic view of life. They asked Soedjatmoko to become chairman of this group.
Wang Kang Wu, the vice chancellor of the University of Hong Kong and Frankie
Jose' from the Philippines also got involved, together with Yeneo Ishii from
Kyoto University. They planned to meet in Japan every year or two. They thought
a week was enough for the young people, and for more senior people one long
weekend would be enough. I did not think it would work, and I stayed with the
idea of starting an ashram.
Wongsanit
Ashram
This idea of
establishing a permanent ashram had been with me since beginning the Pacific
Youth Forum in 1973. My vision was to provide a place for social activists to
take time to read, think, write, and reflect on their work for as long as they
wanted—a place for people to synchronize their head with their heart and
develop themselves in a serious, spiritual way. It would be a new kind of temple
run by laypeople.
I'm sure my ideas
were influenced by my own life. With my many activities taking so much time and
energy, I needed to go on retreats every now and again. I would go to temples.
Unfortunately, these traditional Thai spiritual centers were disappearing.
Those still remaining taught traditional meditation concerned only with the
heart, not the head. They had so many rules and regulations and preserved only
the Buddhist tradition. Many have not adapted to the modern world and don't
serve the people who use them. Religions have to adapt their wonderful
teachings to the modern world.
I wanted a place
where people could opt to live an alternative lifestyle, grow their own food,
weave their own clothes. The idea was to live in community, both for personal
growth and social commitment. "Work locally, think globally," because
we are all interconnected. The ashram would contribute meaningfully to society.
It would offer training and meditation for social activists to help them gain
skills and understand the structural problems in society. It would be a kind of
international, alternative training center to empower people through practical
and spiritual training. I wanted to get scholarships to support people to come,
particularly people from our neighboring countries of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
and Burma.
I saw many different
types of centers to prepare for starting our own ashram. My German friend
Michael Baumann took me to see German "ashrams" in the Black Forest
run by Karfield Graf von Durkheim. I also went to see Christian academies in
Germany and Italy. The German Christians started these academies after the
Second World War because they felt that ministers and priests had been too weak
to resist Hitler and stop the Nazis from killing Jews. The idea was to make the
priests and the lay church leaders more aware of
social injustice and
learn ways to confront it through Christian ethics and theology. Practicing
Christians could develop the moral courage
to challenge the
government and society. But I thought that the Protestants stressed too much
the head and not the heart. At the Catholic monasteries I visited, it was the
other way around—too much prayer and not enough social concern. I thought it
was out of balance.
In India I saw the
Gandhian ashrams. Unfortunately, these have become a kind of religious
institution, and Gandhi has become something like a god. The ashrams were a
nice place to do a little bit of spinning, to weave your own clothes, and to
eat simple food. Many of these ashrams are subsidized by the government. They
have become just like some of my country's Buddhist temples—wholly irrelevant
to the larger society. Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village in France, on the other
hand, was much more to my liking than any of these places. He enlivened traditional
Buddhist teachings to be relevant to the modern world, stressing our
interconnectedness with one another and our environment. He teaches mindfulness
as the basis for nonviolent social change.
I had been looking
for land and money for some years. When the karma was right, I thought, someone
would give me a plot of land. It finally happened in 1984. The land I ended up
getting was just a rice field on a canal, seventy kilometers from Bangkok. One
hundred years ago there had been elephants living there. It was cleared by Dr.
Yai Sanidvong, the first Siamese medical man to be trained in Europe. It was
passed down through his family to Princess Samur and her husband Prince
Subhasvati Wongsanit. Samur wanted the land to be used for something spiritual,
a Buddhist contribution to world peace and personal growth. When she died, her
daughter Saisawadi persuaded all her sisters to give this land to the
Sathirakoses-Nagapradipa
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Foundation. Saisawadi
was a good friend of mine. We founded the Mitra Thai Trust together in 1976.
The S-N Foundation's board agreed to take charge of the property and use it for
an ashram. We called it Ashram Wongsanit in honor of her parents, Prince and
Princess Wongsanit.
Wongsanit Ashram is
only about ten Or fifteen acres, but this is fairly large by Bangkok standards.
Unfortunately, the land was not very good, and things did not grow well. Two or
three people came at the start to try it out. We assigned them a plot of land
to see if they could grow something. Although it was difficult to grow rice,
they did grow some vegetables and caught enough fish to live on. One family
lived on part of the land for a few years. In another area, a group of young
people formed a small project to look after street children from Bangkok. Our
land was an ideal place for them—not too far from Bangkok and with a nice,
country atmosphere. The children stayed from two or three days to a few weeks
or months. They learned how to fish, raise chickens, and grow tobacco.
The center of the
ashram, I felt, should be a hail where we could run seminars and retreats. It
was through our activities for the Phya Anuman centenary celebrations in 1988
that we raised enough money to build this hall, which we located in a special
area named for my
The main hail
atAshram Wongsanit
teacher, Phya Anuman.
In the time of the Buddha, this kind of multipurpose hail was called a
santhagara, a meeting hail. You could dine or sleep there, and monks could
preach there. I tried to embrace the whole tradition and put it in the modern
context. The santhagara became our main building.
For improving the
grounds I used the old custom of "Thot Pha Pa. "In our Buddhist
tradition, forest monks typically do not take robes offered to them by anyone
directly. Instead, people leave robes in the jungle, hanging them on trees and
letting the monks find them. Nowadays, we use this tradition to raise money for
building or repairing a temple. I adapted the tradition into a big celebration
and asked for trees to reforest the ashram. The ashram had only rice fields.
People gave trees, or if they didn't have trees, they gave money to buy trees.
As we continued to
grow, many other people supported us. The Green Party in Germany agreed to fund
buildings and programs through the Heinrich Boil Foundation, which supported
our concern for environmental issues, spiritual and intellectual growth, and
social justice in a nonviolent and ecumenical way. A German friend, Reinhard
Schlagintweit, who had been a counselor at the German Embassy in Bangkok back
in 1967, helped us gain this support. We were able to build the library, and we
had money for publications and programs for the next three years. We received a
little help from a Protestant organization in Sweden called Diakonia. Although
we didn't get any official Buddhist money, some Japanese and Thai Buddhists
also helped.
The ashram has
contributed at the local, national, and international levels. We have used it
for International Network of Engaged Buddhists meetings and many workshops and
training programs. Out of our training for Khmers, we planned a peace march
from the Thai border to Phnom Penh in 1992. Venerable Maha Ghosananda, the
leading Cambodian monk, started off the march by circling our santhagara three
times. They began the march on the traditional Cambodian, Siamese, Burmese, and
Laotian New Year of April 13. They went slowly, and along the way people came
offering food and talking with the marchers. They planted bodhi trees along the
road. It started out as a small group but ended up with thousands. With
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these sorts of things
happening, I think my dream for the ashram has finally come true.
Buddhist
connections around the world
The term
"engaged Buddhism" was coined by Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1950s. The
idea is that Buddhism is for social as well as personal
liberation. This was
in direct contrast to the Buddhism I encountered
at the Buddhist
Society in London in the 1950s- I was told that Buddhism was for meditation,
and that Buddhists had nothing to do
with society. That
shocked me. It seemed very selfish, as if Buddhism were being used solely for
one's own ends. Meditation alone may have been relevant for the British
Buddhists at that time, but I felt it was not quite right. It entirely
contradicted my upbringing in traditional Buddhist society.
Even so, I also
encountered this attitude back home. The World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB)
had established their headquarters in Bangkok. Dr. Malalasekera, their founder,
wanted it to be an organization in which Buddhists could develop a social and
ethical message. I attended one or two of their meetings, and I found that it
had become a sort of club for Buddhists from around the world to come together
to pat each other on the back and say, "We Buddhists are wonderful people.
But they did nothing. When it was proposed that we discuss the Buddhist stand
on military conscription, many members said, "That's a political issue. We
can't talk about it." "What about capital punishment?" They
said, "Ah, that's political, too." It reminded me of the Buddhist
Society in England. Again, I felt there was something wrong.
By the time I came
home from England, Buddhism was being destroyed in the villages in my country.
In South and Southeast Asia, the heart of Buddhism is the village temple, and
the present model of development was destroying villages. I felt my role was to
restore Buddhism at the rural level. Those of us who had been educated abroad
could help people understand the larger social realities and how they relate to
the villages. A few friends and I began working with village people, helping
them at the grassroots level to preserve the environment, to make them feel
proud, to empower them nonviolently.
We have been working
with the villagers for the last twenty years, joining not only with Buddhists,
but also with non-Buddhists who work with the poor for their liberation. We
formed the Thai Interreligious Commission for Development, the Coordinating
Group for Religion in Society, and other groups, all at the local and national
levels. But we saw that our work at the national level was not sufficient and
began trying to work with our neighbors, the Burmese, Laotians, and Khmers,
while working with the grassroots people in our own country. This was an
important step, since we Thai tend to look down on our neighbors for having been
colonized. We regard the Laotian people as very backward, the Burmese as very
poor, the Khmers as nobodies. The Buddha taught that we are all equal, and that
we must respect each individual and each culture. That is how our international
network started to grow.
Many more connections
were developed together with a friend named Pracha Hutanuwatra. He had spent
eleven years as a monk, and, when he left the monkhood in 1986, I sent him to
live among the poor Buddhists and non-Buddhists in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
In India, he met a group of newly converted Buddhists. They really wanted to
understand Buddhism, but many didn't know even the basic Buddhist precepts. We
started a program to bring these Buddhists from India to be trained in Siam.
Pracha also talked with Buddhists among the tribal people in the north of
Nepal. They had been Buddhists since the time of their ancestors, but as a
minority in Hindu society, they were in a desperate situation. We tried to find
some concrete ways to work together in the future. In Sri Lanka, he was
involved in a peace mission to Jaffna, a Tamil area, with another
interreligious group. This was the first time that Buddhist monks from the
south had come to visit Jaffna. We tried to provide them with international
encouragement and support.
In 1987, I sent
Pracha to Japan as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Religion and Culture
at Nanzan University. I had talked to the
Japanese before, but
I didn't get very far until Pracha went there. He
was much better than
I at making connections. He spent a lot of time with radical priests, many of
whom were former Marxists like him-
self. He brought them
to talk with me. They also saw the need for some kind of international group so
that we could work together. Our
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main concern was not
only for those of us in Asia and the Third World but to make people in the
First World aware of people's suf-
fering as well.
Back in the late
seventies I had heard about the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) from Nelson
Foster, who had helped found it with the American Zen teacher, Robert Aitken
Roshi. I felt that BPF could help us form a link between Western and Asian
Buddhists. We made links with the Japanese, Americans, English, and Germans. I
also became involved in Mongolia and the former Soviet Union. We had other
connections in Asia and the Pacific through ACFOD. It was a
large network.
International
Network ofEngaged Buddhists
When the chapter of
the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Britain contacted us, we felt it was
appropriate to formalize this international network. That's how the
International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) came into being. Although I
am supposedly the founder of INEB, it was really more Pracha Hutanuwatra?s work
than my own. We organized our first INEB meeting in 1989. It was held in Siam,
in the town of Uthaithani, my wife's birthplace. We met on a houseboat owned by
a temple that had been headquarters for Buddhist education at the time of King
Rama V. The supreme patriarch during the reign of King Rama VT was also very
active here. It was a very auspicious meeting place to begin INEB.
Two men almost
prevented INEB from getting off the ground. A German fellow wanted INEB
membership to be very strict: no smoking, no drinking, no superstition, no, no,
no. I told him, "It is wonderful if you yourself want to take these
precepts seriously, but the strength—and weakness—of Buddhism is that we do not
place prohibitions on such things." He didn't like it, but he remained. A
British man was even worse. He wanted things his way. He insisted we use
voting, while the
rest of us wanted to use consensus in the Buddhist manner. This caused a
leading Japanese man to suggest to me, "Sulak-
san, let's not make
this an international network but simply an Asian network. Western people will
never understand us." I had to tell my English friend, "Please, shut
up." He was very nice, he shut up, and
INEB came to be.
All along, we have
received a lot of help from the Japanese chapter of INEB. They have provided
much of the funding to run the office
and INEB activities.
We have very little structure, and, as I learned
from my experience
with ACFOD, it is best not to have too much money or power. I also learned that
we need a strong spiritual ele-
ment, and so we
include meditation and spiritual practice at INEB meetings. We started very
small. Pracha was paid as a part-time executive secretary, and a volunteer
helped him. We couldn't take on very much and had to work on things one by one.
First, we organized a
human rights campaign for the Buddhist minority in the Chittagong Hill tracts
in Bangladesh. These tribal people were being killed or forceably relocated to
India. The Japanese took this issue quite seriously and invited the Bangladeshi
representative, Venerable Bimal, to speak all over Japan. Japan was a major
source of foreign aid for Bangladesh, so our efforts had a great impact.
Next on our agenda
was to work with the students and minority groups living along the Burmese
border. This was just after the 1988 uprising in Burma, in which a lot of
people had been killed. They had been fighting in the jungle, generation after
generation, for forty years and had very little communication with the outside
world. This was our first chance to get to know them. Since other organizations
were already helping with clothes and medicine, we concentrated on the
students' requests for education and training. We arranged basic health and
medical training because many of them were dying from malaria. Our most
important work was to expose them to the world outside Burma. With our help,
they set up a "jungle university" right across the border. We
arranged for teachers from Bangkok and the international community to visit the
university and run training sessions for a period of time. The Buddhist Peace
Fellowship and Greenpeace helped arrange a communication system for the border.
After the third
annual INEB conference, we focused on Sri Lanka. Historically, there's a very
close link between Sri Lanka and Siam. Buddhism had been imported to Siam from
Sri Lanka eight or nine hundred years ago and exported back to Sri Lanka during
the eighteenth century after the monkhood had disappeared there. On their
request, we arranged a six-week conflict resolution training for thirty Sri
Lankan monks. The trainers were the American Quakers George
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Lakey and George
Willoughby and Tord Hovick from the International Peace Research Institute in
Oslo, Norway. The whole approach was very Western—how to solve conflicts from
the viewpoint of modern sociology and political theory.
When we were invited
to do a similar reconciliation training with the Khmer monks and lay community
in Cambodia, we used a Buddhist approach. All the factions involved in the
Cambodian conflict came except the Khmer Rouge. We tried to understand their
country's situation within a Buddhist framework using the concepts of upadana
(attachment or clinging), right speech, and so on. At the end of the training,
one of the Cambodian patriarchs, a faction leader, noted, "All the
factions in this conflict are under the illusion of upadana." It was a
very good experience for us all.
INEB has worked
closely with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters
International, and Peace Brigades International. We also work on more
theoretical issues such as Buddhist social analysis and women in Buddhism. Our
annual INEB conferences have been an inspiration to everyone. These conferences
are only possible because our members in the First World often pay double so
that members from the poorer countries can be invited. We have received
donations from friends in the U.S. to help us continue our work. After much
initial support from Christian organizations, INEB decided that for the
organization to survive meaningfully it must be supported by Buddhists. From
then on, we have received support from Buddhists throughout the greater
international community. Rev. Teruo Maruyama, INEB's cofounder, said of our
group, "We must do everything possible to maintain the international
network. It is the only really viable network we have in the Buddhist
world." I am very proud of INEB. It does wonderful work.
Reviving
our democracy
In 1988, I founded
the Santi Pracha Dhamma Institute. The name came from Dr. Puey's well-known
book, Santi Pracha Dhamma (Peace, People, Righteousness) that I had published
at Klett Thai in 1973. This name and the book's ideas had become well-known
among many progressives during the 1970s. With this organization, I wanted to
carry on both Dr. Puey's and Dr. Pridi's ideas for democracy and social
justice. I began it
with Dr. Puey's blessings. The institute does research and arranges public
forums on social justice and Buddhism under the umbrella of the
Sathirakoses-Nagapradipa Foundation.
In the early 1990S,
some of us worked to have August 16, 1995, recognized as the fiftieth
anniversary of Peace Day. The first Peace Day had been declared by Mr. Pridi,
then regent of King Ananda Mahidol, on this same date in 1945. It signified the
end of the state of war between Siam and the Allies. As the military is still a
state within the state in Siam, the civilian government did not want to tread
on the military's toes. They were reluctant to commemorate Peace Day because it
celebrates the power of nonviolence and the wartime Free Thai Movement, the
clandestine but popular freedom movement headed by the regent himself.
Nonetheless, we
managed to gain approval from HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. She agreed
to preside over a Peace Day ceremony at Thammasat University. We arranged a big
gathering. Adam Curle, the Buddhist Quaker from London, delivered an opening
address before Her Royal Highness. We named Dr. Puey Ungphakorn the "Man
of Peace." In the evening, Lady Phoonsuk Banomyong led a peace march from
Thammasat to the Democracy Monument on Rajadamnern Avenue. There, hundreds of
people joined us. We had a minute of silence amidst the Bangkok traffic to
honor all who had died for peace. We prayed that there would be no more war,
that justice and peace would prevail in the world. Two years later on this
date, the City of Bangkok dedicated a large, beautiful park—Suan Seri Thai—to
the Free Thai Movement. This has become a significant day for all of us, a
reminder of the meaning of nonviolence.
206 1 LOYALTY DEMANDS
DISSENT
Monks and laypeople
offer their support
on false witnesses.
That was fifty years ago, and the police had still not changed. Fortunately,
the judges have changed, and when judgment of the court came, I was acquitted.
Even more, I was praised for defending democracy, defending the monarchy, and
alerting students to the dangers of consumerism. This was a first in Thai legal
history. The judgment was quoted in the law report of Thammasat University. I
hope my case has set a new trend.
To top it off, the
new public prosecutor did not appeal. He had the right to appeal within one
month, and he even extended the period of appeal for another month. But in the
end, he was very brave and did not appeal. Normally, the case would have gone
through two more courts. It could have lasted at least three more years. Of
course, there had also been international pressure. The International Commission
for Jurists wrote a nice letter to him asking him not to appeal and praising
the judgment. Legally, my case ended on June z6, 1995.
