Where Buddhist’s 8-fold path leads to 6-figure salary
Temple in Thailand that encourages praying for wealth is provoking confrontation with military, religious hierarchy
PATHUM THANI, THAILAND — 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 mobilize 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 does not seem to have threatened his status on the grounds of Wat Dhammakaya.
The temple is the spiritual embodiment of the social and economic dislocations that have shaken Thailand. The economic boom of the 1980s created a well-to-do middle class for whom money-making rivalled Buddhist tradition as a core value. They needed something that brought the two together.
Cash machines 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 spokesperson, 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 perspective 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 techsavvy sophistication. Its huge, boxy buildings are aggressively plain, finished with unpainted grey 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 2,000 feet in diameter that even the temple concedes 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.
On special occasions, the vast plaza around the dome is the scene of spectacular gatherings — tens of thousands of monks in orange and worshippers in white — that rival an Olympics opening ceremony. The monks circle the dome as if the little statues had come to life and they sit in perfect, ordered rows that seem to stretch to the horizon. At night, they march with glowing lights and thousands of lighter-than-air lanterns float into the sky.
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 and outbreaks of violence 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.
It is a common pattern in Thailand of threat and retreat, whether for the surrender of “red shirt” demonstrators in 2010 or for monks at another temple earlier this year to give up their tame tigers at a money-making petting zoo.