Parsing Buddhism in a shrine to abundance
IT IS a temple for a changing Thailand: clean, unadorned, high-tech and unashamed of praying for wealth.
“Sit here and get rich” read small medallions embedded in the floor under each white plastic chair in a vast, open-sided meditation centre. In his sermons, the temple’s charismatic 72-year-old leader, Phra Dhammachayo, often exhorts his adherents: “Be rich, be rich, be rich!”
With its endorsement of worldly comforts and its no-nonsense approach to ritual, the temple, known as Wat Dhammakaya and the largest in Thailand, has attracted the allegiance of growing numbers of followers in a movement whose popularity has unsettled the government and the Buddhist hierarchy.
The authorities have long tried to clip its wings, and for the past month the police have been threatening to arrest Phra Dhammachayo despite a warning by the temple that it would mobilise a human shield of chanting monks to protect him.
The charge against him is embezzlement, the latest of many accusations that stretch decades, while the top body of Buddhism has accused him of heresy. Last week, it stripped him of his title, though that hasn’t threatened his status on the grounds.
The temple is the spiritual embodiment of the social and economic dislocations that have shaken Thailand. The boom of the 1980s created a wellto-do middle class for whom moneymaking rivalled Buddhist tradition as a core value. They needed something that brought the two together.
ATMs are placed conveniently near a meditation hall with screens that declare, “Shortcut to making merit”, the important virtue of doing good deeds. As a merit-making bonus, credit card points earned by the transaction can go directly to the temple.
“Buddha never taught us to live in hardship,” said the temple spokesman, Phra Pasura Dantamano. He added: “Buddha teaches moderation, but there are different levels of society. If I were a businessman or a farmer I would define moderation in a different way.”
This is a departure from traditional Thai Buddhism, in which there is less acceptance of wealth, said Suwanna Satha-Anand, a professor of philosophy at Chulalongkorn University.
“They crafted a possibility of a new form of Buddhism which is friendly to capitalism or wealth,” she said. “This is the voice of the urban middle or upper class who are looking for a more modern image of what a Buddhist can be.”
Well-designed websites promise a form of meditation that is “simple, easy and effective.” The temple itself manifests cleanliness and efficiency alongside tech-savvy sophistication. Its boxy buildings are plain, finished with unpainted concrete. It has no spire, few bells and little incense.
But it does not lack grandeur. Its centrepiece is a huge, flat dome more than 600 metres in diameter that looks like a flying saucer. It radiates wealth. The dome’s surface consists of 300,000 small Buddha statues made of silicon gold, each as tall as an open hand and engraved with the name of a donor – suggested donation 10,000 baht, or about $300.
In keeping with the stark design of the temple, even these extravagant displays are marked by almost militaristic order and precision.
The same rapid rise to prosperity that inspired the popularity of Wat Dhammakaya also underlies the political divisions that have shaken Thailand in recent years.
Those divisions are being held in check by a military junta that seized power in 2014. “When you have hundreds of thousands of devotees, some people with power would be scared of that,” Phra Pasura said.
He compared the Dhammakaya movement to the populist rise of Thaksin Shinawatra, a prime minister who was ousted in another coup, in 2006, and now lives in exile.
“People are afraid that if we get too large we could be a threat,” Phra Pasura said. He would not estimate the number of followers, but said they were in the hundreds of thousands.
At the moment, the government is pursuing several cases against Phra Dhammachayo, the foremost of which is a charge that he embezzled $40 million from a credit union. He has said he was unaware of the source of the funds, and his followers have paid off the debt.
But the government is still trying to bring him to court. For weeks, the police have been threatening to seize him, at one point saying they were ready to deploy 2,000 officers to confront what was likely to be a phalanx of monks.
Phra Dhammachayo has refused to turn himself in, asserting that he suffers from diabetes and Turner syndrome, a chromosomal disorder. He has not been seen in public for six months, and there is no confirmation that he is still inside the temple.
Wherever he is, Phra Dhammachayo remains a magnetic figure who draws intense devotion from his followers.
“I am what I am because of him,” said Watjana Suriyatham, 51, an assistant professor of English at Thammasat University.
Mirella Kampus, 34, a Swiss member of the staff, said she had been at the temple for six years and had found her calling there.
“If I had not known him, my life would be difficult,” she said. “I would not have found a reason for my life.”