McCargo / Changing Politics THE CHANGING POLITICS OF THAILAND’S BUDDHIST ORDER

ABSTRACT: Thailand’s monastic politics are in turmoil. No longer can the sangha be written off as a political force and viewed simply as a fount of legitimacy for the na-tion and the monarchy. The role played by a few hundred pro-Thaksin “redshirt” monks in the March to May 2010 mass demonstrations testified to growing unease within the rank-and-file monkhood, which is drawn from the same regions and seg-ments of society as the redshirt movement more generally. But beyond these overt displays of dissatisfaction, the sangha faces a range of serious challenges. While long-standing tensions between the rival Thammayut and Mahanikai orders have apparently declined, a dearth of moral and administrative leadership has paralyzed the Thai monkhood and rendered it seemingly incapable of reforming itself. Com-peting power groups linked to secular politics are vying for influence within the Supreme Sangha Council, while there is no widely supported successor ready to re-place the current supreme patriarch, himself nearly a hundred years old. In many respects, the political paralysis of the monkhood mirrors the wider crisis confront-ing the body politic of the Thai nation itself. At the height of the pro-Thaksin “redshirt ” demonstrations that convulsed cen-tral Bangkok from March to May 2010, an elderly monk was moved from his room on an upper floor of Chulalongkorn University Hospital and transferred to Siriraj Hospital in Thonburi. This apparently unremarkable transfer was of considerable symbolic importance, however, for several reasons. The monk’s removal from a hospital surrounded by pro-Thaksin protestors was ordered by Her Royal Highness Princess Sirindhorn. King Bhumibol of Thailand has been residing at Siriraj Hospital since 2008. And the elderly monk was none other than Somdet Phra Nyanasamvara, not only the abbot of Wat Bowornniwes, but also the supreme patriarch, the head (literally, the king) of Thailand’s sangha (Budd-hist order), and the king’s personal spiritual mentor since his own ordinatio