The Power and Authority of Monks in the Contemporary Thai Sangha

Politics is a frequent subject in scholarship on Theravada Buddhism in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. However, considering politics, scholars are most likely to talk about the way that states and/or kings interact with sanghas. They rarely consider how monks engage in powerful activities within their sanghas and with lay actors. Using ethnographic interactions with powerful monks from 2014 as a starting point, this paper considers the foundations of power that Thai monks rely on, as well as tools that they can deploy to achieve their goals.