What Happens When Buddhism Is Twinned With Political Power?

It was a curious thing, the Theravada orthodoxy. It possessed all the authority of Catholicism, following ad absurdum monastic rules related to dietary guidelines, celibacy and the minutiae of daily life set down by the Buddha himself, but its bone-dry austerity made it feel more like a form of Puritanism. This was a regal religion, where Buddhism could be observed in all its layers, from village wats and an anti-intellectual forest tradition that had drawn rich city dwellers and Westerners into its midst to charismatic mega-sects like the Dhammakaya — whose octogenarian abbot was a fugitive from justice. This, too, was part of the elasticity of the doctrine. It could be remade to fit the needs of king and country, producing a strict dharma that was threaded into every aspect of life as a thinly concealed means of control, but it could also break from the stranglehold of institutionality, producing surprising new outcomes. The dialectic of codification and fluidity, of man and priesthood, of deification and atheism, of stultifying ritual and spiritual freedom, was ever alive within the compass of Buddhism. This push and pull between the universal laws of the dharma as set down by the Buddha himself and what the dharma became when it embedded itself in a society, draping itself in local vestures like a mannequin, was its own source of vitality, energy and reinvention.