Editing Khamtan Thepbuali (section)

== Ideas ==

Thepbuali's "revolutionary Buddhism" rested on a historical-materialist reading of Buddhist history. The Buddha, he argued, had been born into a feudal society, and his original teaching had been inherently opposed to caste hierarchy and exploitation; after his death, however, feudal elites had captured the Sangha and turned Buddhist ethical concepts to their own purposes, using the ''brahmavihāras'' (the "divine abodes" of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity) as instruments of quietist social control.<ref>Stuart-Fox (1999), "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State", p. 161.</ref> Under capitalism, in his account, Buddhism had become further corrupted and pressed into the service of an unjust social order; under socialism, it would at last be purified of superstition and unnecessary dogma and restored to its true, liberatory function.

The sharpest edge of this argument fell on the traditional Buddhist virtue of ''upekkha'' (equanimity). Thepbuali held that a monk's studied detachment in the face of social injustice amounted, in practice, to acquiescence in the oppression of the dominated classes, and that maintaining such detachment under present conditions was "a sin that the monks of our day must not accept," effectively a betrayal of Buddhism's own liberatory purpose and of the Sangha's true character.<ref>Phinith (1977), [Review of ''Le Sangha lao''], p. 322, translating Thepbuali, ''Pha Song Lao kap Kan Patiwat'', p. 76.</ref> The traditional lay practice of ''dāna'' (merit-generating almsgiving to the Sangha) was likewise reframed as an instrument of feudal extraction: in Thepbuali's own words, feudal elites merely "pretend to be meritorious" while appropriating the people's belongings to build temples and stupas.<ref>Ladwig, Patrice (2013). "Schools, Ritual Economies, and the Expanding State: The Changing Roles of Lao Buddhist Monks as 'Traditional Intellectuals'". In: Whalen-Bridge, John, & Pattana Kitiarsa (Eds), ''Buddhism, Modernity, and the State in Asia: Forms of Engagement'': 63–93. Palgrave Macmillan, p. 79.</ref> Marx and Lenin, in this framework, were held up as a guiding illumination for a global predicament that Buddhist ethics alone could no longer adequately address, an argument Thepbuali elaborated further in his 1976 companion volume ''Buddhism and Society'', which traced a parallel history of anti-colonial Buddhist activism in Cambodia, Burma, Japan, and Vietnam and framed the contest between capitalism and socialism as one between the representatives of the dhamma and its opposite.<ref>Ladwig & Rathie (2020), "Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution", pp. 413–414.</ref>

Thepbuali's synthesis was, by design, a popularizing rather than a scholarly project. A contemporary reviewer, working through the book chapter by chapter, judged it a manual of vulgarization rather than a work of erudition, aimed at rallying ordinary monks and peasants—including those still inclined toward quietist detachment—to the tasks of the revolution, in plain and direct language that moved from an account of the Buddha's renunciation of a feudal, caste-bound society, through the corruption of the Sangha by feudal and colonial elites, to a final chapter posing and answering, in simple catechism form, basic questions about the Sangha's proper relationship to revolution and to scientific progress.<ref>Phinith (1977), [Review of ''Le Sangha lao''], pp. 317–323.</ref> This distinguishes his project structurally from more theoretically ambitious Buddhist-Marxist syntheses developed by isolated intellectuals in other communist states: Thepbuali did not need to argue Buddhism into a position of parity with, or priority over, Marxism, because he was writing as an insider commissioned by a revolutionary movement that had already resolved to subordinate Buddhist doctrine to party ideology. His task was to make that subordination doctrinally palatable to a Buddhist population, not to negotiate the terms of Buddhism's institutional survival from a position of intellectual independence.

A related, more sophisticated formulation of this argument, developed in Thepbuali's contemporaneous interviews with the historian Martin Stuart-Fox, held that Buddhism's timeless core had survived through history only by continually adapting to new social and political circumstances: corrupted and pressed into the service of an unjust order under capitalism, it would, under socialism, at last be purified of superstition and unnecessary dogma to serve as a vehicle for moral and social progress.<ref>Stuart-Fox (1999), "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State", pp. 160–161.</ref> This modernizing impulse extended to a rationalizing critique of popular cosmology: Lao Marxists under Thepbuali's influence argued that space exploration had demonstrated the earth to be round and had found no heavens above it, while deep drilling for oil had failed to locate any hell below, and that the traditional belief that karmic merit could be accumulated through donations or transferred through the pouring of holy water was similarly untenable.<ref>Stuart-Fox (1999), "Laos: From Buddhist Kingdom to Marxist State", pp. 161–162.</ref>