Editing Khamtan Thepbuali (section)

== Biography ==

Khamtan Thepbuali was born in 1919 in Champasak province, in southern Laos, then under French colonial administration. He entered temple school in 1927, was ordained a novice in 1931, and received full ordination (''upasampadā'') at the age of twenty.<ref>Ladwig, Patrice, & Martin Rathie (2020). "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution: The Life and Career of Maha Khamtan Thepbuali (1919–2019) in the Context of Buddhist Socialist Movements". ''Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient'' 106: 403–431, p. 410.</ref> He then spent over a decade studying in Thailand, first at Ubon Ratchathani and later in Bangkok at Wat Molilokkayaram and Wat Mahathad, eventually reaching the eighth grade of the Thai Pali examination system, an exceptional scholarly attainment requiring the memorization of well over 160,000 words and achieved by very few monks of any nationality.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", p. 411.</ref> It was in Bangkok, where Marxist-Leninist texts circulated clandestinely in Thai translation, that Thepbuali first encountered revolutionary political thought and began to develop his synthesis of Buddhism and Marxism.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", pp. 410–411.</ref>

He returned to Laos in 1955, was appointed editor-in-chief of the Buddhist periodical ''Buddhavong'' and head of the Pali school at Wat Sithan Neua in Vientiane, and made contact in 1957 with Phoumi Vongvichit, the Pathet Lao's leading official on religious affairs; that same year, in a detail he later recalled with some irony, he took part in a Lao monastic delegation's brief visit to the United States, the country whose policy in Laos he would soon be devoting himself to opposing.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", p. 405.</ref> By 1958 he had been elected first president of the Lao National United Buddhist Organization at a meeting of roughly two hundred monks in Vientiane.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", p. 411.</ref> When the Royal Lao Government moved against suspected Pathet Lao sympathizers within the Sangha in 1959 through Royal Ordinance 160, which placed monastic appointments and correspondence under government control, Thepbuali's radicalization accelerated. In late 1960 or early 1961 he led a group of between one hundred and two hundred monks out of government-controlled territory and into the Pathet Lao's liberated zone, settling eventually in Sam Neua and Viengxay in Houaphan province, a region subjected to sustained American aerial bombardment throughout the war. Monks in the zone lived in caves and forest shelters for over a decade.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", pp. 411–412.</ref> On 14 November 1961 he joined Pha Maha Buakham Voraphet and Pha Maha Vichit Singhalat in founding the Lao Buddhist Fellowship Organization in the liberated zone, a body distinct from the Sangha administrations still operating under Royal Lao Government authority in Vientiane, Champasak, and Luang Prabang.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", p. 412.</ref>

It was under these conditions that Thepbuali developed and taught "revolutionary Buddhism" to younger monks, training a generation of Buddhist cadres who would go on to staff the Sangha of the postwar Lao People's Democratic Republic (LPDR). After the Pathet Lao victory, he published the theoretical substance of this teaching in a series of propagandistic books, most importantly ''Politics and Buddhism'' (1976), aimed less at scholarly readers than at a Lao peasant audience with limited prior exposure to either systematic Buddhist doctrine or Marxist theory.<ref>Phinith, Saveng (1977). [Review of Khamtan, ''Le Sangha lao et la révolution'']. ''Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient'' 64: 317–323, p. 322.</ref>

Thepbuali's institutional rewards after 1975 were substantial. On 2 December 1975 he represented the monastic order at the founding congress of the LPDR. In June 1976 he chaired the eleven-day meeting that merged the historically rival Mahanikay and Thammayut monastic orders into a single Lao United Buddhist Organization, with all executive positions filled by party-approved monks, and was appointed its first president.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", p. 420.</ref> The following year he led a thirty-six-day political training course for over a hundred monks and nuns from Vientiane province, part of a broader program in which the Sangha's traditional fortnightly recitation of monastic precepts (''pātimokkha'') was supplemented, and in some accounts effectively replaced, by sessions of political self-criticism.<ref>Stuart-Fox, Martin (1999). "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State". In: Harris, Ian (Ed.), ''Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia'': 153–172. Continuum, p. 163.</ref>

Thepbuali disrobed in 1979, after almost forty years in the monkhood, explaining in a later interview that "my job was done," and that with the nation liberated and the monastic order now organized, he wanted simply to start a family.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", p. 422.</ref> As a layman he served as Director of the Department of Religious Affairs in the Ministry of Education and as a permanent member of the Standing Committee of the Lao Front for National Construction until 1996. Some of his acquaintances privately speculated that his old ally Phoumi Vongvichit had encouraged the move so as to open a senior lay position to him.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", p. 424.</ref> He died in Vientiane on 1 September 2019; his funeral, held at Wat That Foun, the same temple where his political career had begun in 1958, was patronized by the sitting Prime Minister of Laos.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", p. 403.</ref>