Editing Thailand (section)

=== Institutional Reform and State Repression: Phra Phimontham ===

Phra Phimontham (born Aat Duangmala, 1901–1980s) is not a "radical Buddhist" figure in the project's left-wing sense — his project was the democratization of sangha governance, not the fusion of Buddhism with socialist or Marxist politics — but his case is historically indispensable to understanding what activist Buddhism was up against. The first major figure to translate reformed religious consciousness into a demand for structural change within the sangha's own governance, Phimontham rose through the Mahanikay Order to become abbot of Bangkok's Wat Mahathat and, by 1949, its senior administrator; he promoted popular meditation practice, sent monks abroad for study, and was widely expected to become the sangha's supreme patriarch. His progressive reputation made him a target of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat's authoritarian government: stripped of ecclesiastical office in 1960 and disrobed and charged with communism in 1963 — a charge with no real ideological basis, but a convenient one for a government seeking to discredit a popular reformer — he was ultimately acquitted in 1966. His prosecution nonetheless served, in Keyes's assessment, as a durable warning against drawing on Buddhism to mount any critical stance toward the existing political order — a warning that would not go unheeded until the crisis of the 1970s.

The October 1973 student uprising that toppled Thailand's military government opened a five-year period of intense ideological contest. Secular socialist politics, drawing on Western leftist thought, initially dominated among students and intellectuals but failed to secure electoral support; when a 1976 coup crushed the civilian government, many activists fled to the jungle to join the Communist Party of Thailand. By 1978, however, this secular insurgency had largely collapsed, its recruits alienated and drawn back by government amnesty, and — in Keyes's phrase — many returned instead to "the roots of indigenous revolutionary thought" in the nineteenth-century Buddhist reformation.<ref>Keyes, Charles F. (1987). ''Thailand: Buddhist Kingdom as Modern Nation-State''. Westview Press, p. [TK].</ref> Ironically, the state's own anti-communist and missionary programs among hill peoples during the Sarit and Thanom governments had already normalized the idea that Buddhism could supply a moral rationale for political action — a precedent the state itself could not, once established, fully contain.