a monk and his nephew

In Bangkok, there are lots of monks with sons.

This statement would seem to be provocative, something meant to begin a discussion about how troubled the Sangha is (in a period when the Kingdom is itself troubled), and how it desperately needs reform. The kind of statement that begins a discussion about monks flying in private jets, or corruption over monetary issues.

Instead, it’s an innocent observation about a situation that I had never thought of. Monks can have sons. And this leads to a wider, completely obvious, observation: monks, nuns and novices, they all have families.

In 2014, I was interviewing Thai monks about their views on their own status as citizens. This was a time of protests which ended up in a coup, and while it was a time of heightened political sensitivity (which has continued), and my questions were often directly about politics, our conversations often veered into non-political areas. I wanted to know how old monks were, how long they had been monks what kind of educational background they had. This was how I learned about the sons of monks. One day in March, while walking through Lumpini Park, I encountered a monk who was in a booth collecting money for rice farmers. Lumpini is a large green space near one of the key shopping/business centers of Bangkok, and when the protests were consolidated after the failed elections of February, they ended up in Lumpini (taking away one of the few exercise areas for many residents of the City of Angels). This was not the first monk that I encountered in Lumpini, but unlike those monks, this monk was happy to speak with me about his views on politics. He admitted to me that he was not the most knowledgeable monk around, and that I should really be talking with one of the protest leaders, Luang Pho Buddha Issara, but he was happy to chat. Perhaps it was because he also wanted to test his English; this was a monk who had lived in Texas for a few years while in the military (probably as some sort of liaison between the US and Thai militaries). He told me he and his wife divorced while he was there, and that his son had remained with his ex-wife when he came back to Thailand. We kept talking for a few minutes, and then it hit me. “You have a son?” “Of course.” I asked the monk if his relationship with his son had changed, and he told me of course it had, but it also seemed that he had not seen his son since he had ordained five years prior.

This was a revelation to me – monks with sons! And it has a perfectly straightforward explanation, not at all associated with monks fathering children. Among the 120,000 or so monks in the Thai Sangha there are many who ordain after they retire, when their spouses have either died or they have gotten a divorce. This is a normal practice within Thailand and other parts of mainland Southeast Asia, though these monks tend not to have a very high status. This is because they have become monks after they have been members of society, usually though not always with spouses, children, jobs and so forth. They have been tainted, as it were, by the world; they have not spent much time in robes, and their knowledge of the teachings of the Buddha, some of these men would tell me, is not very great.  (And of course they are in good company – the Buddha had a son, Rahula, before he became the Buddha.)

Over the next few weeks, it seemed, every time I went to a new wat, I encountered another old monk who was also a father. And I started asking these men about their children. Some were like the monk in Lumpini Park, telling me that their relationship with their children had changed a great deal. Others were far less willing to abandon the nature of their familial relationships. “Of course, it’s the same,” said one monk. “A father is a father; this doesn’t change when you become a monk.” He told me that he would see his son and his granddaughter regularly; there were no problems with this – the son would come and pay his respects to his father, making merit with him a couple of times a month. I suspect that their relationship did change – I know my children don’t regularly make merit to me – but perhaps less than one might expect.

The most interesting conversation wasn’t with a monk at all, but rather with the nun Bhikkhuni Dhammananda. Venerable Dhammananda has been at the center of efforts in Thailand to reestablish an order of nuns, part of wider efforts to reestablish this order throughout the Theravada world). Ven. Dhammananda was formerly a successful academic, Chatsumarn Kabilsingh who decided a number of years ago to take the higher ordination. She resides with a handful of nuns a couple of hours to the west of Bangkok at a wat that was founded by her mother. While her efforts have received some support from individual monks within Thailand, the Sangha hierarchy as a whole has said that her ordination is not legitimate, which puts her in something of an ambiguous state within Thailand. When I interviewed her in February 2014 (again about questions of citizenship), I also asked her if she had children, and how they had responded to her decision to ordain. She told me that her sons were adults, and that they supported her efforts, but also that her relationship with them had changed in radical ways. They too regularly made merit at her temple, but she could not be in a room alone with them anymore because of a need to maintain a very high standard of propriety (cue the comment about plenty of space for mediocre men in an institution, but none for mediocre women). She also said though that she and the other nuns at the wat loved to see her granddaughter. As proof of this, there was a picture of the granddaughter on the side of the wat’s refrigerator.

When I conducted research on Theravada, minority monks of Southwest China in 2001-2002, I was accompanied by my wife and our now 15 year old son who was one at the time. He fascinated the monks and the novices of the wat. They would play with him every day after I taught English to the novices – they even threw his first birthday party, making him cry when they sang Happy Birthday (see the picture). When I have returned to the region, even after a decade, the monks ask how he was doing and if he remembered them.

One day in spring 2002, when the abbot and I were chatting and watching the novices play with my son, he sighed and said, “Children, they are lovely…but they are dukkha,” using the term that is part of the “first truth” of Buddhism, that suffering or dis-ease is an inevitability in existence. This seemed a curious thing to say at the time, because the abbot was as likely to play with my son as the novices were (if not quite as boisterously). I don’t know why he mentioned this, but I do know that for many years, the abbot (a figure who has “left home”) supported his younger sister and her children after they had come to Southwest China from the Shan States in Myanmar. While not a father, perhaps he was feeling a little too clearly the difficulties that familial attachments inevitably cause.

The abbot’s comment is one that we have come to expect from the monastics of Buddhism. After all, it conforms with the ideal that we find in a number of Pali texts such as the Khuddaka Nikaya which talks of monks “wander[ing] alone like a rhinoceros,” or the Dhammapada: “Better it is to live alone; there is no fellowship with a fool. Live alone and do no evil; be carefree like an elephant in the forest.” (trans. By Acharya Bodhirakkhita, 1985; accessed at www.buddhanet.net). This also fits nicely into Weber’s influential framing of Buddhism as “other-worldly asceticism.” It is also, if not wrong, at least too limited a way of looking at Buddhist religious specialists, confusing an ideal within Buddhism with the ideal.

Why does this matter (beyond the fact that I have a bit better sense of the experience of Thai Buddhists)? There are two points here. First scholarly work in English on monastics and families has been insufficient. Gregory Schopen twenty years ago drew our collective attention to how inscriptions showed monastics dedicating merit to their parents. More recently Shayne Clarke’s (2014) Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms reading of disciplinary commentaries tells us that family relations inside and outside the monastery were of significant concern, and there is a special issue of the Journal of Global Buddhism (released a few weeks ago) which is dedicated to the “Family in Modern Buddhism.” While this work is welcome, it is really focused on pre 20^th century Buddhisms, or on Japanese forms which have a long history of clerical marriage. Indeed, with the exception of a chapter on monastic recruitment in Jeffrey Samuels’ important book on emotion in Sri Lankan monastic culture, Attracting the Heart, there has been no attention to the position of Theravada monks in the contemporary world as members of families (let alone as fathers).

This insufficient scholarship points to a problem with the way we have framed our interests in monks and nuns as actors, no doubt. But I suspect that there is a broad reluctance within the Thai world (and indeed perhaps the Theravada world more broadly) to talk about the ways that monks remain imbricated within family relations, and certainly with the ways that they could be fathers. The status of monks as sons is clear and obvious since the merit of ordination is often dedicated to one’s parents. And Thais are certainly aware that monks can be sexual beings, and were before they ordained, but that sexuality is a problem to be resolved or repressed once one has taken on robes. Moreover, structurally, monks have left the family, even if they still communicate with their family members regularly. Most of the monks I have talked to in Thailand (and indeed in China as well) are willing to answer questions about their families, but they rarely bring them up in the course of a conversation. In other words, while these “monks with sons” are nothing out of the ordinary, they are a subject about which Thai Buddhists are generally silent.

So let me modify my opening statement. There are monks with sons in Bangkok, but I don’t know if there are a lot of them, or if this is a significant phenomenon or not. However, because of scholarly inattention and internal silences, no one else does either.

What do you do when religion and politics get mixed up? In Thailand, this has happened recently, largely in the midst of the larger conflict that has been going on in society for the last decade.

In the last few weeks, there have been three different stories in the English media in Thailand involving Buddhist monks and temples. The first two, from the English-language branch of the “Khaosod” (“Fresh News!”) website, had a distinctly “yellow” – as in yellow shirt (royalist) – hue. The first was about everyone’s “favorite” firebrand monk, Buddha Issara. Luang Puu Buddha Issara was one of the protest leaders from January to May of this year which aimed to “shut down Bangkok,” prevent elections in February and generally make things miserable for the caretaker government led by Yingluck Shinawatra. These protests, ostensibly about the corruption of the Thai government, ultimately precipitated the coup in May. In mid-November, Buddha Issara delivered a letter to the legislative and reform council of Thailand providing several proposals about how to reform Thai society and get rid of corruption. The article is not about the letter he delivered, but about the warm reception he received from the lawmakers who said that they appreciated his letter, and that his proposal is “very beneficial to the administration and economy of [the] nation.” Buddha Issara is a fascinating monk, in part because (at least when I was in Bangkok last spring) he was something of a bell weather of people’s political stance. With some interesting exceptions among monks, people who were generally “reds” (red shirts – pro-democracy/Thaksin/anti-royalist party, though not anti king) disliked him and said he was “not a monk,” and those that were generally “yellow” appreciated what he was doing in leading the protests.

The second article is about a monk, Phra Papakaro (receiving alms in picture above), giving a decoration to a high-ranking police officer in Surat Thani, one of the Southern provinces of Thailand. Phra Papakaro was, until recently, also a protest leader, and former politician, named Suthep Taungsubal. Suthep is a former deputy prime minister, and leader of the Democrat Party, and was the principle leader of the protests that took place starting in the fall on 2014, precipitated by the amnesty bill put forward by Yingluck, which was opposed by most Thais on the grounds that it would have pardoned her brother (on the Red side) and the leaders of the Democrat Party that ordered the clearing of central Bangkok in 2010 which led to the deaths of some 70 protesters and another twenty or so members of the police/military. These leaders were primarily Suthep and Abhisit, the Prime Minister at the time. Suthep was the leader of most of the protests from January to May 2014, but Buddha Issara was an aligned figure, a fellow traveler in the yellow movement if you will, rather than a follower of Suthep’s (and indeed, throughout the spring, there were various moments of tension between these two figures; the first picture is the two of them talking). In the immediate aftermath of the coup in May, Suthep crowed a great deal about his close relationship with General Prayuth (the leader of the coup, and now the prime minister). While the coup-led government has worked hard to institute reforms that resemble what the protesters were calling for, particularly in June, it also wanted to call itself independent and Gen Prayuth did not appreciate Suthep’s general demeanor. And so right about a month later, Suthep ordained as a monk. In this he has followed a well-worn path of politicians seeking to avoid political troubles in the monkhood.

This brings us to the last piece, an op-ed in the Bangkok Post by Sanitsuda Ekachai, is about the need to keep Suan Mokh free of politics. Suan Mokh is a temple that was established by the important reformist monk, Buddhadasa, in the early 1930s as a place to reform Thai Buddhism and “return to the roots of Buddhism.” It has been an important place over the decades for meditation movements in Thailand (as well as reflective of Buddhadasa’s fairly eclectic architectural vision) and middle class Thais and foreigners interested in meditation programs have flocked there over the decades, though by most accounts it’s been fairly quiet since Buddhadasa’s death in the early 1990s. It is also where Suthep/Papakaro, the erstwhile leader of the protests leading up to the coup in May has gone since he ordained this past summer. As Khun Sanitsuda notes, hundreds of people come to visit Suthep each week, not so much disturbing the peace of the place as giving it an overtly yellow-shirted cast that it had not had before. Moreover, while monks are forbidden by an order of the Supreme Sangha Council from participating in politics, Suthep bestowed a decoration on a Surat Thani policeman, described in the article as a “hardcore yellowshirt” activist. This he did as a monk.

Here’s the thing that I think is interesting about the coincidence of these two events: the play of politics, or rather the way that “politics” becomes a problem for monks to address. As noted above, monks are not supposed to be involved with politics because they are supposed to be learning, preserving and teaching the dhamma. Good/pure/original Buddhism is free of politics,

just as Khun Sanitsuda suggests Suan Mokh should be. The opposite is also true – Buddhism which is not free of politics is necessarily tainted. And indeed one of the critiques that one occasionally hears about monks like Buddha Issara is that they are tainted by politics, they are “political monks”. Yet in many ways this is an anti-political discourse, in which Thais (among others) fail to acknowledge or perhaps better specifically refuse to acknowledge how monks are engaged in politics. Khun Sanitsuda talks about Suan Mokh under Buddhadasa as a place that was free of politics but then she notes that he was critical of capitalism and urged inter-faith understanding with Muslims (who are a much larger part of the population in the southern part of Thailand). These are of course highly political acts and being accused of being a communist in Thailand during the Cold War potentially had serious consequences (just as reading 1984 in public or using the Hunger Games salute can be in this post-coup moment).

Ironically, when I interviewed Buddha Issara in June, he told me that he was not involved with politics. Rather there was a crisis for the people and what he was doing was because there was no one else that was speaking for the people. Just to bring it all back together, when I asked Buddha Issara if there were any monks that he admired, he paused and said Buddhadasa, the founder of Suan Mokh.

Today, it was raining in Burlington, and so I have been walking around with a brownish orange umbrella. This is not a particularly remarkable umbrella, except for perhaps the fact that it was given to me by a novice in Thailand. A year and a half ago, I was in Chiang Mai, studying Thai at a program run by the University of Washington and Chiang Mai University (language work, alas, is never done). I was spending the two months with my then five year old daughter. We had rented a bike for the two months, and she rode on a bench on the back of the one speed bicycle, and we went all over town. Fortunately for us, the first part of the rainy season (which usually starts in mid-July) was pretty dry, and so we really were able to get away with not having much in the way of rain gear. However, one day, when I picked her up from the Thai pre-school she was attending (learning Thai much more quickly than I), this run of luck ran out. As often happened when I picked her up, we picked up a few bottles of yakult (a Japanese yogurt drink that can be found at any of the ubiquitous 7-11s in Thailand), or an ice cream cone and walked over to the wat next door to the preschool. This was your standard old wat in Chiang Mai: perhaps 500 years old, it couldn’t quite decide if it was a community temple, or a tourism oriented temple, so it ended up being both. Regardless, soon as we were sitting there snacking, the heavens opened up and we, raincoat-less and umbrella-less, were stuck. And we were stuck for a long time. There was a small sala with a couple of wheel of fortune fortune telling devices, and for some odd reason an old mercedes that was under a canvas wrap. We were not the only one’s stuck at the temple. There was an old woman and her daughter. They were from out of town, but the old woman had grown up nearby and so they had come to visit her old community temple. So we all sat in the sala and waited. After about 45 minutes, although the rains had not really stopped, I was ready to go home, and so I put my daughter on our bike and started to mentally prepare myself to go out into the torrent. And a novice came up with an umbrella. I said, no, really. And he said to me that I should take it, that they had a lot of umbrellas and it was fine. This went on for a few minutes, but eventually I took it and biked to our apartment one-handed in the rain (which my daughter really liked).

This was actually one of several umbrellas that I have received from monks in similar circumstances (one in 2001 in China and another in Bangkok in 2014). So what? While it has made my world easier (keeping a five year old dry is not a terrible idea), does it really matter that a monk gave me an umbrella?

Scholars often talk about monks as fields of merit. This means that they provide lay people with the opportunity to make merit by being worthy of receiving gifts. Gifts (Dana) which make merit, as Reiko Ohnuma and Maria Heim have talked about, are gifts that go to figures that are presumably morally superior, such as anyone in robes. In other words, we normally think of gifts passing in one direction from lay people to monks (and indeed that is normally the way that they pass).

However, monks receive far more than they can use. While there are occasional examples of monks who engage in conspicuous consumption (in the movie, the Funeral, there is a great scene where a Buddhist priest gets out of a big old limousine in slow motion), many of these monks get in trouble (like the Thai Phra Nen Kham, whose indiscretions with the wealth donated to him was revealed inadvertently when he was captured wearing ray bans on his private jet in June 2013). Every year, monks, particularly senior monks right around now receive many different sets of robes (the celebration of kathina). Far more than they can use. Isn’t this wasteful, one might ask? I’ve heard monks respond to this question by saying that it’s a misunderstanding of generosity. The gifts don’t belong to them, and they spread it out. The dana moves on to others.

So on one level, my brownish orange umbrella was an example of a monk being a nice guy to a foreigner with a little girl. But on another, it was also an example of dana and generosity moving down the road to the next person.