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Chapter 1

Experimenting with Fate

In this chapter, I make the case that human rights emerged in Thailand significantly in relation to experiments with Buddhist morality. These experiments employed everyday ethics turned in specific ways by certain readings and practices of Buddhism that are at once recognizable within the Thai ethos and yet at odds with principles that many Thai take to be intrinsic to Buddhism (especially around questions of kamma, nibbana,¹ meditation practices, or merit in relation to social stratification). I examine here how Buddhism, which in principle eschews participation in worldly affairs like politics, becomes a resource for human rights and how, in turn, human rights invite a renewed consideration of debates over Buddhist morality. This is evident in the ways that key figures in the NHRC formulate human rights as available, if latent, in Buddhism and in the way Thai lawyers advocating for Burmese migrants’ rights enact consonant egalitarian principles. In this way, human rights politics and Buddhist politics configure or transfigure one another within a history of Thai Buddhisms that manifest progressive and reactionary faces, engaging sometimes with one another and sometimes with political events of the moment.

This chapter argues that in this contingent nexus of historical, moral, and political forces in Thailand at the dawn of the millennium, human rights emerge as an event that reduces neither to the force of the official human rights discourses and practices of international organizations (like the United Nations [UN], in which the NHRC nonetheless participates) nor to indigenous forces (despite the claims of NHRC commissioners who find human rights in Buddhism but must still account for why they emerge at this time). I argue that human rights appeared as if overheard, involving a construction of understanding around a fragment, with the resources one has at hand rather than a process of vernacularization. Ultimately, such overhearing provides an opportunity, through engaging human rights, to renew stakes in an egalitarian Buddhist morality that provides for an articulation of human rights.

The Event of Human Rights

While Thai did not widely employ the language of human rights in their struggles, I contend that human rights were themselves an emergent event² in Thai political and moral life, as distinct from a critical event that introduces a break with the everyday.³ To say that human rights are in this way ordinary in Thailand does not mean that they are normal. The way that particular social actors articulate human rights with or through Buddhist ethics is not a normalization of human rights but a turning back to alternatives within Buddhist moral thinking on the occasion of human rights’ emergence.⁴

In this sense, human rights offered an opportunity to resist dictation or conformity on moral issues, with conformity effectively crushing ordinary efforts to think and act morally or ethically.⁵ I take suppression of the ordinary to be the suppression of voice through dictation, with the implication that the recovery or discovery of voice may be possible only within the everyday, hence the need not to transcend but to turn again to the everyday. The aversion of conformity, or normalization, is a task that involves declining available discourses where one cannot find one’s voice with them (see Cavell 2003, 192–214). This is not an inability to speak—scripts are available, thrust upon us—as much as it is an inability to have one’s say. Cavell captures this perspicuously when he says that the aversion of conformity is “to turn around, or turn back (Wittgenstein says lead back), the words of ordinary life … that now repel thought, disgust it” (Cavell 2003, 193). Finding or recovering one’s ethical voice takes a turning back, again or anew, to alternatives that have remained suffocated—in the present work, stifled in Thailand’s particular religious, political, and social ethos. Below, I argue that the emergence of voice with or through human rights involved opposing hegemonic Buddhism not through escape but by a turn to specific Buddhist alternatives. In this way, transfiguration, rather than transcendence or rupture, connects the event to the eventual in the everyday.

This is not an inevitable product of human rights, so we must attend to the specificities of human rights as an emergent event in Thailand to see how their articulation with and through Buddhist morality provided resources for the transfiguration of that very morality.

Human Rights and Worldly Buddhism

On 25 September 2005, the NHRC hosted a memorial service for Phra Supoj, a monk assassinated while promoting conservation in Chiang Mai province. It was 100 days after his murder, and the banner announcing the memorial at the NHRC’s original Phyathai Road location⁶ counted him among human rights defenders. In the lobby, outside the hall where the memorial would take place, were tables with coffee and food, as well as CDs and books for sale recounting Phra Supoj’s work and life. A little after 10:20 a.m., a dozen monks and around fifty laypersons entered the hall, which held a small shrine with a statue of the Buddha, lotuses, candles, burning incense, the Thai flag, a photo of the king, and a photo of Phra Supoj. The monks sat shoulder-to-shoulder, facing the seated attendees, and just before 10:30 a.m. began chanting. Forty minutes later, the religious ceremony concluded with individuals offering alms to the monks. They then extended a string from the Buddha statue around the monks and the photo of Phra Supoj, along which merit would travel to the deceased.

Following the religious ceremony and a break for lunch, there were sessions by NHRC commissioners, monks, human rights activists, and government officials on topics ranging from the security of human rights defenders, the stagnation of Phra Supoj’s case, and the problem of “influential persons” in areas where threats to human rights defenders arise. The ostensive reason for convening this event was to sustain attention on the case. What interests me in particular, though, is how this effort—and, indeed, the work of Phra Supoj and his colleagues—brings together religious and secular activity, each bleeding into the other.

The head monk, Phra Kittisak Kittisophon, who chaired the proceedings, was a controversial figure, in part for his previous campaigning for the Democrat Party in the South and in part because he had remained openly and publicly critical of Prime Minister Thaksin (of the rival Thai Rak Thai party). Of interest to me here is both that these monks participated, as monks, in this-worldly activity, and that the NHRC hosted the religious ceremony for Phra Supoj. I take the crossing of human rights and Buddhism not to be coincidental but to reflect positions within political and religious debates.

Both monks were active in the Buddhadasa Study Group, which follows the teaching of the late monk Buddhadasa. Although Phra Kittisak has been criticized for the attention he has drawn to his own voice as a critic of Prime Minister Thaksin, Phra Supoj has won accolades for his work through the group, especially for the project in Chiang Mai province to extend Buddhadasa’s work by founding the Metthadhamma Forest Dhamma Center. The Thai news outlet Prachathai covered Phra Supoj’s murder extensively, describing increasingly violent efforts by local business interests to usurp land from the center in order to plant an orange orchard.⁷ The center’s land was around 600 acres (240 ha)—too much to monitor—and so, when developers started to clear, plow, and plant it, Phra Kittisak sought police assistance. Once the police overcame their reticence to visit the scenes, they told the workers who were clearing land that henceforth they had to request Phra Supoj’s permission to enter the fields. Several weeks later, Phra Supoj was hacked to death on the center’s grounds.

These accounts and a report by the Thai Civil Action Network⁸ (in which the NHRC participates) conclude that it was Phra Supoj’s sustained efforts to protect this land from development over several years of escalating threats and developers’ brash disregard for the center’s land title, as well as his efforts to protect forests in Chiang Mai province from logging, that irritated local power brokers and business interests to the point of murder. Ultimately, the few protections offered by Thai law, human rights, and his monk’s robes were enough to facilitate Phra Supoj’s activism but not to deter his killers.

Phra Supoj is by no means the only monk attached to the forest monk lineage to suffer persecution.⁹ Arguably, powerful state, economic, religious, and monarchical interests have dogged forest monks from the outset (Jackson 1997; Kamala 1997; Tambiah 1984).¹⁰ Forest monks may be defined roughly by their observance of thirteen ascetic practices described in the Visuddhimagga, or discourses of the Buddha (Kamala 1997, 1; Tambiah 1984, 33–34),¹¹ and the importance they place on retreat from towns and cities, dwelling in the forest, in open air, and so on (practices eight through twelve). They are, thus, removed from easy observation and control by the sangha. It is, therefore, not entirely surprising that the “wandering monks” have often had a tenuous relationship with the sangha (Kamala 1997, 172–186). All the same, their emphasis on helping villagers through their acts (like healing, assistance cultivating new crops, as community leaders and advocates), as well as their religious teachings—in short, their mobilization of Buddhism to help others in both spiritual and practical matters—generated trust among villagers, even as the sangha regarded them as lazy and doctrinally dubious (Kamala 1997, chaps. 7–8).

Tension with the sangha shifted from coercive persecution (including, in the 1920s, incarceration of forest monks and villagers who gave them alms) to grudging tolerance and later a degree of acceptance (Kamala 1997, 174–175, 187–197). One can see how a figure like Buddhadasa, whose scholarship and practice were so securely tethered to the principles laid out in the Visuddhimagga, may simultaneously challenge the conservative bent of the sangha and yet remain unimpeachable. That the sangha should reach a level of equanimity with forest monks, however, clearly does not imply that other sectors of Thai society would, especially where the monks’ practices to preserve their forest domains or promote the rights of poor Thai interfere with the economic projects or social privileges of powerful individuals. The activism of followers of Buddhadasa, then, raises the question of what relationships there might be between Buddhist morality and this-worldly action.

Such questions are especially pointed with respect to human rights, imbued as they are with ethics and this-worldly action. Indeed, Buddhadasa’s teaching, influential as it was in the monkhood, is central to the lay movement of socially engaged Buddhism, perhaps most prominently and influentially embodied in Thailand by Sulak Sivaraksa (see Sulak 1988). I will return to Sulak’s contribution to Buddhist scholarship and this-worldly action below, but for the moment, I will note that Sulak has had a lengthy and profound impact on Thai society. On one hand, he has been politically nonconformist and publicly critical of authoritarian regimes since the 1970s and threatening enough to the reactionary right wing that he has been subject to lèse-majesté charges several times (Sulak 1998). A rough contemporary of commissioners like Saneh Chamarik and Khunying Amphorn Meesuk, Sulak was also preoccupied with the application of Buddhism (and, especially, Buddhadasa’s vision of Buddhism and social action) to the pursuit of a just society. Also like Saneh and Khunying Amphorn, his appeal to Buddhism had both progressive and conservative qualities to it. His antiauthoritarianism combined with a longing to restore the virtues of a particularly Siamese Buddhism, and in this light, he saw Buddhadasa extending the Siamese king Mongkut’s scholarship and vision of Buddhism as a means of confronting social ills (Sulak 1988, 37–38).

Ideas of Buddhadasa as a Buddhist source for responses to social injustices through social action were then circulating widely among influential Thai figures. It is, therefore, unsurprising that commissioners in the NHRC took up these sorts of questions. In particular, the chair of the commission, Saneh, and Khunying Amphorn¹² addressed the relationship between human rights and Buddhism, each claiming that human rights are available in Buddhism. Khunying Amphorn, for example, told me¹³ that the international debate between universalism and cultural relativism, especially its Asian Values¹⁴ variant, is misplaced in Thailand. Buddhism provides a domestic sort of human rights, she said, such that human rights are Asian values. Significantly, she placed the emphasis less on a Buddhist conception of rights than on a Buddhist picture of the human. The five precepts that all Buddhists ought to pursue in their daily lives (abstaining from taking life, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from intoxicants), combined with an emphasis on collective harmony, she said, frame human rights practices, not that she foresaw any direct line between the availability of these precepts and an end to human rights violations: “I quote, a lot, the Lord Buddha: We must practice compassion, starting from the family, and go on to the community, then national and also international [levels]. If we practice compassion, then things will be much easier. The problems won’t go away, but it will be much easier.” In this way, she thought it a misconception that human rights must be imposed on a society. “We are all born with certain basic rights, we are all human,” she said, adding that what she takes from Buddhism is a search for the middle path as a human rights model but admitting that “it is difficult to determine which is the middle path, especially because societies tend to be in the extremes, including Thailand, like a pendulum, from one extreme to the other. Which is the middle one?”

Khunying Amphorn and Saneh have published their thinking along these lines under the title Human Rights in Thai Society, and Saneh has also published Buddhism and Human Rights. He, too, insists that human rights are available in Buddhism, so that they are not an import, not grafted on to Buddhism, but arise, as it were, naturally and harmoniously with Buddhism.

Buddhism and the National Human Rights Commission

Saneh, like Khunying Amphorn, argues that the guidance Buddhism offers human rights is to direct them toward the cultivation of good and that “there is no need to search for a place for human rights in the Buddhist tradition. Freedom is the essence of Buddhism” (Saneh 2002, 57). He notes, however, a conservative potential in the popular understanding of Buddhism that emphasizes personal salvation and supports the status quo (Saneh 2002, 60). In a broadside against patron-client relations (which are typically understood through the prism of persons’ relative kamma), he criticizes the claim that it is necessary—either as a matter of nature or of history—to submit oneself to one’s “superior group ‘who knows better’” (Saneh 2002, 74). Rather, he takes freedom in Buddhism to contrast with liberal notions insofar as Buddhism looks inward for freedom, and liberalism looks for freedom from external constraints.¹⁵ The obstruction, in Saneh’s view of Buddhism, is “one’s own ego and the three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion” (Saneh 2002, 68; see also 77). The grounding of human rights in Buddhism, in this view, begins with the idea that individuals are neither a means (as in patronage) nor an end (as in the pursuit of individual merit) but rather that “although men may not be born ‘free’ [because born into an ephemeral world of suffering], they are equal in dignity and rights, that is to say, dignity and rights to their own salvation or freedom” (Saneh 2002, 76).

In Saneh’s view, the route to this salvation, the Noble Eightfold Path (right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentrations) essentially concerns conduct and, therefore, training (in higher morality, mentality, and wisdom). In this connection, he cites the Buddha instructing his disciples, “I, monks, do not say that attainment of profound knowledge comes straightaway; nevertheless it comes by gradual (doing of) what is to be done, a gradual course. In this connection, one having faith draws near, he comes close, he lends ears, he hears Dhamma and learns it by heart … being self-resolute, by means of body he realizes the highest truth itself” (Saneh 2002, 77, cited from Humphreys 1987, 89).

Saneh summarizes the ethical weight of conduct as follows: “It is this principle of human conduct which is inherent in the essential meaning of the 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 also circulated in the service of Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Burma (Bartholomeusz 2002; Obeyesekere 1990, 167–174; Tambiah 1992, 1, 86–87).²³ The point in each case is that Buddhism and national politics entwine. Kittiwuttho offered, however, two sorts of clarification in response to criticism. The first concerns what counts as killing according to Buddhist doctrine, the second just what he pictures himself to advocate killing. On the first count, he said, “I still hold the opinion that killing communists is not demetorious. This is because for an act to be considered as killing and thus resulting in demerit it must fulfill the following conditions. First there must be an intention (cetana). Second, the animal must have life (pana). Third, one must know that the animal has life (panasannita). Fourth, one must intend to kill (vadhakacittan). Fifth, one must act in order to kill (upkano). Finally, the animal must die by that act (tenamaranan)” (cited in Somboon 1982, 152).

Kittiwuttho claimed that his comments in Jaturat met none of these conditions. He claimed, further, that when he said Thai should kill leftists and communists, he meant these as ideologies. “Communism is a complex compound of false consciousness, delusion, greed, jealousy, malevolence and anger. It is not a person or a living animal. Thus killing communism is killing ideology” (cited in Somboon 1982, 153). In 1977, he seemed to obstruct this backpedaling (that is, wishing to kill only an abstraction, an ideology, not living humans). In a speech commemorating the founding of the Buddhist order, Kittiwuttho told his audience of monks, “Let us take today as an auspicious moment to declare war on communists. Let us determine to kill all communists and clean the slate in Thailand. The Thai must kill communists. Anyone who wants to gain merit must kill communists. The one who kills them will acquire great merit” (Somboon 1982, 153).

Throughout these passages, Kittiwuttho’s central concern is whether or not killing leftists gains or loses merit, and he marshals Buddhist doctrine to claim that it gains merit. The initial passage from Jaturat suggests, however, that his dodge—he wishes only to exterminate an ideology—is not what he took to be at stake. If the communists on whom he rallies Buddhist Thai to declare war and eliminate completely (in order to gain merit) are like the fish he suggests killing for the curry you would put in a monk’s bowl (to gain merit), then in fact he advocates killing actual, living persons and not abstractions, just as he advocates giving actual, not abstract, curried fish to monks. Kittiwuttho called on Buddhism to justify large-scale murder but denies that the dead are, in fact, fully human.²⁴ Against this backdrop Saneh writes,

Buddhism as a social reform movement, has its own dynamic attitude towards life and great innovative potential. On the other hand, Buddhism, as an institution, could be vulnerable … to a relapse into mere dogma, incapable of living up to new challenge, that is, the crisis of change. There will then be a danger in that Buddhism, too, would serve the status quo and the powers that be, instead of humankind, which is the central purpose of Buddhism. There would be a further danger in that it could even degenerate into becoming a coercive and oppressive instrument, instead of promoting Path towards human liberation, which is the ultimate goal Buddhism. If such is the case, Buddhism, like any other religions, would need its own transformation to be of true service to mankind. (Saneh 2002, 60)

This passage is not just an indictment of the sorts of theo-politics Kittiwuttho extolled but also takes a side in debates ongoing at the time (1979) that Saneh first drafted it. A distinctive feature of Buddhadasa and his followers’ teachings can be glossed as a focus on nirvana, rather than the stress on karma favored by the religious and political establishment. I have noted above that Saneh and Khunying Amphorn connected Buddhism and human rights in the pursuit of a vision of Buddhism departing from the popular emphasis on individual merit, and their primary view, which they share with Buddhadasa, is that the relevant Buddhist quest is the world here and now (on this emphasis in Buddhadasa’s writing, see Tambiah 1976, 411). In doctrinal terms, Buddhadasa opposed a vein of eternalism that he saw dominating Thai Buddhism (the picture Kittiwuttho promoted), in which there is an eternal soul that gains and loses merit (a view he criticized as Hinduism or Brahmanism), and argued instead for an immanentism that finds nirvana possible at any and every moment (Buddhadasa 1992, 51–52 passim; Tambiah 1976, 412). This is not to say that he saw nirvana as easily attainable, but he did see it to be the original condition of the mind and in principle available to any practitioner, not just long-practicing monks (Jackson 2003, 137).

The repercussions of Buddhadasa’s challenge to traditional Thai Buddhism extend beyond religious doctrine and practice to touch Buddhism’s legitimating role in Thailand’s political structure. As one of the three pillars of Thai politics (nation, religion, and monarchy), a chief justification for social stratification (as a reflection of kamma), and a conceptual ground for monarchical legitimacy (the king attaining his position via accumulated merit), “even apparently theoretical debates on Buddhist doctrine may have political implications” (Jackson 1987, 123). We may then approach the relationship between Buddhism, politics, and Buddhist alternatives by recalling the normalizing role Buddhism plays. Contests over interpretations are unavoidably contests over legitimate forms of authority, sociality, and morality. This relationship naturally works in reverse, too. The political use of religious symbols (say, during demonstrations) shows how Buddhism becomes not just a political resource available for diverse agendas but also a stake in political struggles.

While egalitarian Buddhism of the sort modeled on Buddhadasa’s teaching provides a sort of ethical and philosophical grammar for emergent human rights, in doing so, it turns back to ethical visions that resist the normalizing role of Buddhism. That such a model of Buddhism participates in the secularization of Buddhism and politics in Thailand makes it part of the story of distinct Buddhist movements like Santi Asoke and Wat Dhammakaya²⁵ that arose as contemporaries of Buddhadasa (Swearer 1991, 654–655) and show how an insistence on egalitarianism can slide into an insistence on conformity. As influential Buddhist movements that have stood, at times, in dramatic tension with the Thai sangha, in what relation would they stand to human rights? For reasons that I explore below, the first cohort of the NHRC proposed a relationship of Buddhism and human rights that not only diverged from Wat Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke’s models of Buddhism but also placed them in revealing ways on the opposing side of a push toward a more secular state and religion.

Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke

Late in 1988, as part of a youth exchange in Thailand, I went to a spacious and distinctive temple near Bangkok. Rather than the ornate gold, red, and blue typical of Thai wat, with layered roof tiers and intricate carving on the tympana, this temple was minimally adorned, with white soaring columns and walls supporting a simple, dark roof of two steep, concave arches that met in the middle. We were brought into a comparably spare interior, where we were seated facing a monk who instructed us in meditation and fielded our questions. In this chapel at Wat Dhammakaya, he had us visualize an orb moving through seven points in or near our bodies (corresponding to chakras), finishing near the navel, where we were to visualize progressively refined images of ourselves. This stress on meditation, especially through visualization, rather than on doctrine and concepts, is central to the Dhammakaya movement.

Initiated by the former abbot of Thonburi’s Wat Paak-naam, who is known popularly as Luang Por Sot, the Wat Dhammakaya movement has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity and influence since the consecration, in 1980, of its ordination hall in Phathum Thani province (Jackson 1989, 199–200; Swearer 1991, 656–657).²⁶ This growth in popularity coincided with a wave of religious intolerance in Thailand (Jerryson 2011, 63–64), and one reading sees both Santi Asoke and Dhammakaya as fundamentalistic reactions to the secularization of Buddhism (in which reformist Buddhists like Buddhadasa participated), albeit in distinct ways (Swearer 1991). The Dhammakaya movement was institutionalized by two of Luang Por Sot’s disciples (Phra Dhammajayo and Phra Dattajivo), who maintained the emphasis on meditation technique, principally organized around concentration on a crystal ball (as I described from my own experience, above), a method of meditation characterized in Buddhist tradition as samadhi, concentration meditation (Keyes 1989, 135; Jackson 1989, 203). In this respect, Wat Dhammakaya offers a view of Buddhism that differs from Buddhadasa’s in a way that makes it incompatible with human rights, as the NHRC was conceiving them. Where samadhi meditation allows for the supernatural and posits nibbana as a transcendental reality, reformists like Buddhadasa emphasize vipassana (or insight) meditation that stresses insight into immanent reality, here and now (Jackson 1989, 203). As part of a secularizing movement in Thailand, human rights first avoid recourse to the supernatural and second maintain an ethical focus on the here-and-now, rather than on a transcendental realm, which lends itself to the justification of social inequality as an expression of kamma.

There are, however, other aspects of Dhammakaya that make it prohibitive to human rights advocates. While it is critical of the sangha’s ecclesiastical hierarchy (partly over its bureaucratization), Wat Dhammakaya resists the secularization of (what it sees as) besieged personal, community, and national identities by promoting a fundamentalistic, authoritarian ethos, built around its two charismatic leaders (Keyes 1989, 135; Swearer 1991, 661, 665, 667). This, on its own, would be anathema for human rights advocates promoting an egalitarian vision of humanity, but there are issues of political toxicity, as well. Dhammakaya is a conservative movement prone to accusations of elitism in part because of connections to the military, which became highly visible as early as 1982, with the “conspicuous” support of the commander-in-chief of the army, General Arthit Kamlengek (Keyes 1989, 135; see also Jackson 1989, 205–213). Perhaps the most noxious association, however, is with Kittiwuttho (Swearer 1991, 666). In promoting a distinctive Thai Buddhist identity designed to enforce a religio-nationalistic ethos in alliance with influential members of the military and militant monks like Kittiwuttho, Wat Thammakaya embraces the sort of normalizing Buddhism that an egalitarian human rights vision opposes.²⁷

By contrast, Santi Asoke embodies a form of “dhammic socialism”²⁸ (Keyes 1989, 13) that would seem, on the face of it, congruent with Buddhadasa’s egalitarianism. Further, for some time it has been inextricably linked to Chamlong Srimuang, the popular former governor of Bangkok and retired major-general, who became especially visible in popular uprisings against the coup government of General Suchinda Kraprayoon from 1991 to 1992 and has been a key figure in the Yellow Shirt protests over the past decade. In the first instance, he is the picture of incorruptible Santi Asoke asceticism: a vegetarian taking only one meal per day; abstaining from alcohol and sex (though married); abjuring materialism and living in an old garment factory, where he sleeps on a mat on the floor; and dressing in the traditional, indigo mohom clothing of the peasantry (Swearer 1991, 674).

Santi Asoke also seems closer than Wat Dhammakaya to Buddhadasa’s reformist Buddhism in its rejection of magic and superstition in traditional Thai Buddhism, as it seeks to restore national, community, and individual integrity through the ascetic practices to which Chamlong adheres (Swearer 1991, 668). In fact, it is this very asceticism, folded as it is into critiques of the sangha, that has generated ecclesiastical challenges for Santi Asoke. Phra Bodhirak,²⁹ who founded Santi Asoke on the strength of a revelatory experience in 1970, has been harshly critical of monks within the sangha on a number of counts. In the early 1970s, he took his sermons to lay Buddhists as an opportunity to denounce other monks at the monastery (Wat Asokaram in Samut Prakan province) for a variety of transgressions, including eating meat and consuming stimulants like cigarettes and betel nut, and later for engaging in supernatural rituals (Jackson 1989, 160–161). Perhaps his greatest offense to the sangha, though, was his renunciation of membership in it and his denial, upon establishing his own center in Nakorn Pathom, that it was necessary or desirable to register it officially (Jackson 1989, 161). Bodhirak, compared to “the vegetarian turncoat from the Buddha’s time, Devadhatta” (Klima 2002, 98), was forced, along with Santi Asoke monks he had ordained, to defrock (Swearer 1991, 676–677).

A number of things, though, set the NHRC and human rights advocates along a diverging path as they formulated human rights in Buddhist terms. In the 1970s, when the NHRC commissioners were cutting their political teeth, Photirak was occupied with criticizing other monks and the sangha, rather than politics, leaving him somewhat marginal to the political debates around Buddhist morality that would later inform the reception of human rights. Further, Photirak deviated from Buddhadasa, pointing out that the latter privileged doctrinal scholarship (to which, however, Photirak finds Buddhadasa’s contributions important) over practice (Jackson 1989, 161–165). On doctrinal issues, further, Bodhirak maintains a less radical rationalism than Buddhadasa and continues to “regard traditional notions such as rebirth and kamma—notions which Phutthathat de-emphasizes to the point of rendering them irrelevant—as denoting real conditions as in the traditional interpretations of Thai Buddhist doctrine” (Jackson 1989, 167). This varies directly with the notions of rebirth that Buddhadasa rejects in favor of the immanentism that contributes to his egalitarian Buddhist formulations, which in turn allow for a Buddhist articulation of human rights (Buddhadasa 1992; Tambiah 1976).

Having noted these serious obstacles to drawing on a body of practice that bears at least a superficial comparison to Buddhadasa’s teachings, which are serious enough in themselves, Chamlong remains an insurmountable problem. At the time of the 6 October 1976 massacre of Thammasat students protestors—the moment when Kittiwuttho was at the height of his influence—Chamlong was associated with the Young Turk faction of the military. There is a persistent haze around Chamlong’s role in the massacre but a widely held conviction that the Young Turks were behind (though not active on the streets with) the violent, reactionary groups that participated in the massacre at Thammasat University (Klima 2002, 96; McCargo 1993, 34). While Chamlong denied participation in rather equivocal terms, a candidate in Chamlong’s Palang Dhamma Party (Dhamma Power Party) publicly attested to his participation in antistudent (and antidemocratic) maneuvers:

One of Chamlong’s PDP candidates, a Mrs Chongkol Srikancha, told a July 1988 election rally that she had worked with Chamlong in a right-wing movement during the period immediately preceding the massacre. She also claimed that Chamlong had gone in disguise to rallies of this movement, the Klum Maeban, or housewives’ group, and had shared the platform with her, even handing her the microphone. Mrs Chongkol insisted that both she and Chamlong had been actively working for the overthrow of the (democratically elected) government, which they had held responsible for the prevailing political turmoil. Mrs Chongkol seems to have believed that her claims would increase support for Chamlong and the Palang Dhamma Party…. Although Chamlong’s religious precepts forbid him from lying, many of his attempts to explain his role in 1976 “honestly” begged more questions than they answered. (McCargo 1993, 35)

While Chamlong, like Bodhirak, cites Buddhadasa favorably (Jackson 1989, 184), his murky connection to 6 October 1976 refracts his religious asceticism in ways that raise suspicions rather than accolades, leading some to wonder if he would rather be more a “Buddhist Ayatollah Khomeini,” favoring authoritarian theocracy over secular democracy (Gooi 1988, 118, cited in Jackson 1989, 189; Swearer 1991, 676). Because of his virtual identity with Santi Asoke, it should be clear that, in fact, the Buddhist vision for society that it holds aligns it with conformist authoritarianism and in conflict with a Buddhism that resists normalization.

The NHRC, as the product of a secularizing constitution (which is to say, a constitution that both arose from and sought to extend a secularist ethos), marshaled reformist Buddhism to articulate human rights as already intrinsically Buddhist.³⁰ The particularity of the commissioners’ election of egalitarian Buddhism to frame human rights as Buddhist dates, as I have tried to show, to the political and religious ferment of the 1970s. The gravity of debates around Buddhist morality in that moment and their relation to political movements has continued to exert its force to the present. While fundamentalistic and highly conformist Buddhist movements like Wat Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke have arisen as a response to modernization and secularization, trying to invigorate conservative Buddhist morality, reformist Buddhism has struggled to promote an egalitarian, secularizing, and nonconformist moral vision. What I have tried to show here is that, in the uniquely progressive, democratic moment of the turn-of-the-millennium, the emergence of human rights both benefited from the availability of reformist Buddhism and in turn provided secularist reformism a platform from which to push against not only conventional Buddhist rationalizations of social stratification but also fundamentalistic movements with roots in the reactionary, right-wing politics of the 1970s. In a sense, then, human rights have been an occasion to revisit the disputes of that time and reignite the democratic secularism that flickered to life from 1973 to 1976, only to be (incompletely) suppressed until Bloody May 1992.

Overhearing

Near the beginning of this chapter, while I opened the discussion of Buddhism at the NHRC, I raised overhearing as an aspect of how human rights have emerged in Thailand. A way that “overhearing” may elucidate the emergence of human rights is how it suggests catching a fragment of conversation, possibly addressed elsewhere, that holds interest or implications for oneself, while leaving one to do the work of finding one’s way about with respect to the overheard. A human rights activist and professor at the Office of Human Rights Studies and Social Development at Mahidol University told me a story of her political activism with the nascent Democracy Campaign Program when she was in high school that demonstrates this aspect of overhearing. In the early 1970s, she was inspired to join a movement pushing for increased freedoms and democracy. She went to Surat Thani province with a student group seeking to educate villagers about democracy, even though they, the students, as yet lacked a clear concept of democracy. The implications of this conceptual murkiness, tied as it was to a compulsion to explain something, became clear during one particular meeting. The meeting had just started, with the students saying that they were there to talk about democracy, prachaathipatai (ประชาธิปไตย), which has the ring of a personal name. One of the villagers then spoke up, asking, “Who is this Prachaatipatai?” Human rights, she continued, faced the same sort of problem: 80 to 90 percent of Thai do not know of human rights. This is a different sort of claim than saying they do not understand what human rights are, as she did not understand what democracy was when she was a teenager. Rather, it says that, like the man who asked, “Who is this Prachaathipatai?” they do not yet have a place for human rights, in contrast to the way that she had a place for democracy, just not an explanation of it.

Here, the inability of the teenage student to explain democracy is not congruent with the villagers who, so to speak, had no place prepared for it, in the way that someone who has no familiarity with board games will have no place prepared for a piece called the king in chess. Those, like the professor when younger, who had heard of democracy but could not explain what it meant, received it like something overheard.³¹ Crucially, to make something audible is not to make it intelligible. Making sense of something overheard is a work of transfiguration of the sort we saw with Saneh’s understanding of human rights through a Buddhist grammar of freedom and liberation.

This is a second aspect of the trope of overhearing that is important for our understanding of human rights’ emergence: it is not a matter of passive reception but is rather an active engagement—a making-familiar (or making-one’s-own). Pim had worked in the Bureau of Human Rights Promotion in the ONHRC, where she worked closely with the director, Dr. Chuchai. While she had a graduate degree from an American university in women’s studies, Pim had no special training in human rights and initially was unsure how to promote or teach them or even what they meant. Her problem resembled what the professor faced when she went to disseminate democratic ideas in Surat Thani. Pim tried to educate herself, but the challenge was that commissioners had differing views of human rights, leaving her unsure whom to consult. She began work on public education campaigns uncertain if the message she was delivering was right, and she had difficulty securing enabling recommendations from commissioners for her projects. The trouble Pim faced was twofold. First, she ran up against her own uncertainties about what to teach and how to teach it because human rights were unfamiliar. Second, she found that the NHRC was beset by the “culture of bureaucratic ranks” that left commissioners somewhat inaccessible to her. This system of ranks had a divisive influence on the director of the ONHRC, too, who found, despite his position, that his proposals for pursuing human rights fell on deaf ears.

Buddhism and Social Action

Dr. Chuchai came to the ONHRC from the Ministry of Public Health, which had become home to many leftist student activists of the 1970s. In a way, his model for human rights appeared entirely congruent with the Buddhist ethic, promoted by Saneh and Khunying Amphorn, to awaken potential human rights violators to the possibilities of abuse. Dr. Chuchai was pivotal in drafting the master plan of the NHRC’s inaugural strategic plan. The plans were proactive in conception, modeled on the Ministry of Public Health system of surveillance for disease, and called for the establishment of mechanisms to work on focus groups or subcommissions. The idea, Dr. Chuchai explained in his office, was to identify high-risk areas like juvenile correction centers and meet with children, families, and officials to collect data on abuses and then set up fora to find solutions. Central to this model was that all parties would search for ways to resolve problems together. This way, he said, they could undertake “capacity building” for officials (not unlike the awakening Saneh advocated), so that they could learn how to abide by the constitution and avoid violating children’s rights.

An important agency for Dr. Chuchai was the police, who he said are major violators of human rights. His wish, though, was to show the police data on abuses without blaming them and without taking an adversarial posture; in short, he advocated the nonconfrontational ethos of Thai culture, as he saw it. To accomplish this, the NHRC would invite retired police officers to accompany them on investigations so that the police would listen and be able to hear their findings. Again, he reiterated, it was important to remain sensitive to Thai culture. Not all commissioners shared this view, though. Lowering his voice, Dr. Chuchai said that over half of the commissioners had rejected the original master plan he had drawn up according to these principles.

“Because they come from NGOs they are anti-bureaucratic. The problem is that they are [now] national commissioners, not national activists.” The commissioners, Dr. Chuchai continued, spend most of their time on case-to-case investigations and are only reactive.

“The commissioners are interested in their own areas, not in strategic foci. There has been a proliferation of sub-commissions,” he concluded. They have brought a negative attitude toward government agencies that has resulted in their adversarial approach to human rights. Dr. Chuchai found this regrettable because with the “charisma and social capital” of the commissioners, he felt that they could successfully mediate with government agencies to avoid violations.

Politics Otherwise

If members of the NHRC intervene in debates on Buddhism and politics in Thailand to promote an immanent understanding of Buddhism (one occupied with action in this world) and use human rights to awaken people to their own possibilities for liberation by avoiding abusive acts, then it is noteworthy that they have not incorporated ideas of monarchy into this understanding. Throughout my fieldwork at the NHRC and with lawyers working under its auspices, mention of the monarchy in relation to human rights was conspicuously absent. A quick look at the rhetoric and tactics of political movements and political leaders for several generations shows consistent—even pervasive—invocations of the monarchy. It seems unthinkable to mount any sort of political campaign without proclaiming loyalty to the king.

I contrast this form of political expression and the silence on kingship in discussions of human rights to emphasize the extent to which the NHRC was cultivating an alternative politics: not just another position within an existing political formation but a differently oriented politics. Commissioners like Saneh and Khunying Amphorn maintain the relationship between Buddhism and politics but direct it away from an explanation for or justification of social inequality based on kamma and toward a defense of human equality and commensurability, which lie at the heart of their picture of human rights. Prevailing ideas of kingship are coterminous with a view of Buddhism that places kammic inequality in the foreground, the king holding his position through kammic superiority. It follows that those who argue through Buddhism for equality rather than social stratification must also mute the kammic justification of kingship. Although they may not be in a position or of the disposition³² to argue the legitimacy of kingship, promoting human rights through an egalitarian Buddhism reflecting Buddhadasa’s denial of the importance of kamma in favor of quotidian striving for nibbana implies a corresponding denial of the link between spiritual merit and legitimate authority.³³ It seems, indeed, a refutation of royalism generally.

What, however, might this sort of political orientation look like in practice? On the whole, the NHRC adopted an adversarial approach to human rights, preferring to pursue individual cases on a plaintiff-defendant model, particularly human rights causes (like community or environmental rights), in the mode of NGOs protesting an extravagant state. Such a model for receiving and investigating human rights violations may be inevitable, and it follows the Buddhist critique of social stratification, that is, the idea that nobody is above investigation, and nobody may, by virtue of status, abuse another’s human rights any more than anyone’s position is so lowly as to disqualify a claim on them. I did, however, see another expression of the presumption of human equality in Thai human rights promotion.

During a July 2005 trip to the Andaman coast in southern Thailand, the group of lawyers I accompanied worked to help Burmese migrants affected by the destruction of the recent tsunami. This population already felt vulnerable to abuses by Thai police and business owners, and the devastation many experienced as a result of the tsunami—including not only property, work permits, and visas but also wrenching losses of family and friends—haunted their lives with the threat of human trafficking. Their specific fear was that, if arrested, they would wind up sold to trafficking rings at the Thai-Burmese border. Two scenes will illustrate how the egalitarianism I mentioned above showed itself in the lawyers’ work.

Scene 1: The Military as Human Rights Defender

The threat of trafficking to Burmese communities in Phang-nga, Ranong, and Phuket had become a pressing concern for the lawyers. Early in July, they held a meeting at World Vision in Ranong, in a new, sparsely furnished but spacious building at the end of a muddy road, next to a Thai health center. Pinyo, who had joined the lawyers for this trip, explained that it had been built with a $500,000 donation from the Japanese government, primarily to address the health care of Burmese migrants. It served around 100 people per day and was heavily used by pregnant women. Having such a high level of contact with the Burmese in Ranong, it was inevitable that the staff would learn of cases of human trafficking and had recently interviewed a Burmese man who had worked several months without remuneration. World Vision had passed the information on to the lawyers, who were now strategizing how to address trafficking. They had started to discuss whether it was better to have a team come to Ranong or have migrants travel to Bangkok to conduct interviews when an army general entered. He was stationed near the border, and he and his soldiers witnessed human smuggling and trafficking of Burmese, a problem he attributed to mafia working in the area. That it was both illegal and a human rights problem was exacerbated, he said, by border police collusion with mafias.

“The police have the power of the law,” he said, “the army has only force to use with the mafia,” the problem being that the army has no standing authority to deploy its force as a law enforcement agency. They have, further, little power with respect to the police, he added, and so nothing they can use against police officers with mafia connections. Still, his soldiers witnessed trafficking, and he wanted, on his own account, to help confront it. Alip, heading the lawyers’ team, summarized the meeting and the team’s tasks on a poster, which I reproduce in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Alip’s poster.

The perpetrator-victim model is not absent here, but the interesting thing is the placement of soldiers as witnesses alongside the injured party, foreign workers. An abiding concern for Alip was that witnesses feel secure in coming forward. The implication of this meeting was that collaboration with the military was an important aspect of responding to human trafficking, both in receiving soldiers as witnesses, as allies of foreign labor, and in being able to ensure the soldiers, as witnesses, adequate protection. Collaboration with agents of the state arose again the following day, in Takua Pa, Phang-nga.

Scene 2: The Prison Warden as Human Rights Promoter

The lawyers had arranged with Phiphat Samphaonoi, the warden of Takua Pa Prison, to talk to foreign migrants held there. Departing from our mini-van, we entered the prison after depositing all of our cameras and cell phones in a secure room inside the gates. We walked along a stone path on the edge of a large clearing, sparsely shaded by trees, that was surrounded by low, mostly single-story buildings occupied by the inmates. Many inmates chatted in groups in or on the edges of the clearing. We entered one of the bungalows, which was packed tight with inmates (mostly young men) sitting on the concrete floor. Besides the lawyers and Madawi, the translator, the warden, and several officers, there were forty-nine inmates, of whom forty-three were Burmese. There was a small space at the front of the room with a microphone and an easel with large sheets of foolscap. Phiphat took the microphone and introduced the lawyers, telling the inmates that the lawyers were there to explain their rights under Thai law and to answer any questions they might have.

Chokchai, a prominent lawyer who had joined the group for this project, spoke first, briefly explaining that the constitution guaranteed certain rights to all of them, regardless of their nationality. Making conspicuous use of the language of human rights, he said, “You are human, and so you have rights. The police must explain them clearly and offer translation.” He emphasized the problem of acting under conditions of lack of understanding, like signing forms the police present to them when they are unsure if they must sign or what the forms mean. Chokchai continued, saying that they may be held a maximum of two days without charge and are entitled to lawyers who speak their language. In response, a Burmese man stood to ask whether, when a man is arrested, the police can then go and arrest his wife and children. At this point, Madawi leaned to me and said, “Some people stay in here for years but do not know they have rights … do not know their own rights.” In part, she blamed this on the Burmese government, as it was very sensitive on the subject of labor migration and on human trafficking in particular. It was, therefore, unsupportive of Burmese imprisoned in Thailand and uninterested in pursuing or even informing them of their rights.

After Pinyo’s brief presentation on HIV/AIDS prevention, the inmates, who had remained attentive but said little, filed out, and the rest of us went to have lunch with the officers and the warden. After ensuring that Phiphat, the warden, was sitting between Alip and Chokchai (the senior lawyers), the rest of us took our seats and engaged in small talk over our meal. An atmosphere that could easily have been testy—human rights lawyers sitting with prison officers—was light and congenial, underlining the spirit of cooperation among the lawyers and officers. This seemed to epitomize the model of human rights protection that Dr. Chuchai had described, but there is an ethics underlying it that reflects, implicitly, Buddhadasa’s teachings. That is, this approach seems to wish for circumstances that facilitate Burmese migrants’ movement toward nibbana but more directly guides agents of the state away from demeritorious acts—human rights abuses—by acting in the world. The ethical model, then, is not the renunciate monk but an engaged Buddhist who promotes social welfare.

These examples, echoing Dr. Chuchai, Saneh, and Khunying Amphorn, show how Buddhism and human rights lent one another force. As an ordinary event in Thai political and social history, human rights’ emergent character imbued them with an indeterminacy that resisted reduction to a settled body of principles and practices. Receiving them as if overheard, Thai human rights advocates were then able at this moment to conceive of human rights through egalitarian views of Buddhism, finding their voices in human rights by way of everyday moral understandings. Buddhism allowed human rights an especially potent anchorage in Thai morality, but securing the moral and cultural salience of human rights in this way has allowed experimentation in the politics of Thai Buddhism. Human rights here did not transcend the Buddhist morality that supported authoritarian rule and social stratification but became a way of turning that morality and reoccupying its moral space. Taking the ordinary as the ground of events (Dumm 1999, 21–23), human rights partake of the eventedness of the everyday in that, inviting a turn within Thai morality to an egalitarian vision of Buddhism, they allow an alternative not as revolution but transfiguration, the ordinary invaded by another ordinary (Mulhall 1994, 166; Cavell 1989, 44). To be sure, human rights discourses can appear as language on holiday, disconnected from ordinary life (Das 2007, 6). What I have tried to show, however, is how finding human rights a home in everyday ethics—a struggle within the everyday for persuasiveness—in fact opened Buddhist morality to experimentation, to transfiguration, to new opportunities for the discovery or recovery of an ethical voice.