Concluding Remarks

Summary

In the preceding chapters the political and ideological conflicts between the Thai establishment and middle class have often been portrayed somewhat simplistically as a bipolar conflict between two monolithic and contradictory positions. This simplistic analysis has had a heuristic value in providing a theoretical framework capable of broadly categorising and schematising the divergent trends and movements within urban Thai Buddhism. However, a comprehensive analysis of each religious movement would in fact reveal it to be a complex phenomenon riven with contradictory elements and tendencies. The analytical categories “reformist” and “establishment” used in this study denote ideal types. In fact, there is no pure “reformist” form of Buddhism which is devoid of atavistic “establishment” features just as there is no longer any pure “establishment” form of the religion untouched by modernising “reformist” tendencies. While the terms “reformist Buddhism” and “establishment Buddhism” do have an analytical import in denoting the epistemological differences between the two religious forms, in practice individual Buddhist movements often exhibit the theoretical features of both religious forms to a greater or lesser degree. In such cases the terms “reformist” and “establishment” take on a more descriptive quality, denoting the practical political alignment of a movement's leader or audience and the political functions that a movement's teachings fulfil, rather than any inherent theoretical quality of those teachings themselves. In this concluding section some of the contradictory aspects of “reformist” and “establishment” Buddhist movements, which give each religious form some of the characteristics of its political opposite, are briefly noted.

Democracy, the political form espoused by the Thai middle class, draws little support from the traditional metaphysical forms of Thai Buddhism, which have historically functioned to support the centralisation of political power. Middle-class Buddhist theoreticians must therefore repudiate metaphysical Buddhism and break new theoretical ground in order to develop a Buddhist justification for political democracy. However, an unequivocal Theravada Buddhist justification of full representative democracy has not yet been formulated in Thailand.