The Making of Modern Monastic Autonomy in Thailand

Co-sponsored with the Asia Center

Since the 1990s, monastic political activism has become a conspicuous aspect of Thai politics. The political salience of the contemporary Thai sangha, however, is usually explained through institutional or legal frameworks from the Sangha Act to state patronage and ecclesiastical hierarchy. I argue for a different entry point: the ideological formations embedded in the writings of monastic intellectuals during the 1980s and their role in the making of modern monastic autonomy. Drawing on texts by the likes of Phra Tham Metaporn (Rabaep Thitayano) and P.A. Payutto, I explore how a generation of Buddhist thinkers, shaped by Cold War counterinsurgency and the sangha’s expanding institutional role, articulated a new vision of monastic authority, one which championed the superiority of Buddhism as a source of Thai cultural identity and positioned the sangha as its primary custodian. I argue that this repositioning was not simply doctrinal but a formative moment in the reassertion of monastic authority against state control, creating the foundation for monastic institutions and political subjectivity in the decades that followed. These writings traveled from texts to institutions and political action through monastic education, the expansion of the sangha’s educational apparatus, and the networks of students and publications that carried these ideas into subsequent generations. This process is central to what I call “monastic ungovernability”, or the sangha’s claim to internal authority rooted in the Vinaya and monastic lifeworlds as a condition for resistance. From the protests against Pope John Paul II’s 1984 visit, to the founding of the Buddhism Protection Center in 2001, to the constitutional campaigns demanding Buddhism’s recognition as de facto state religion, to the 2016 Phuttamonthon protest over the Supreme Patriarch nomination, these events were authorized by a cultural framework that positioned the sangha as the rightful defender of Buddhism. The history of the Thai sangha, understood through this lens, is a history of monastic resistance in search of autonomy whose conceptual roots run deeper than its most visible political moments.