Customer Reviews

Right Development: The Santi Asoke Buddhist Reform Movement of Thailand

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This is a very worthwhile book. Rather specialized, I suppose. However, people interested in Thailand, Buddhism, the impact of globalization and consumerism on rural people, and alternative, locally authentic forms of development will find the book helpful.

Juliana Essen wrote up her doctoral dissertation as this book following several months of participant observation of the life of a Buddhist community in the poor Northeastern region of Thailand in 2000-2001. A fluent speaker of Thai, having served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Thailand, she lived the strict life of the community - austere, vegetarian, hard working - and put her hand to the tasks allocated to her - gardening, labouring, trash-sorting, whatever. And she spoke to a wide range of community members - monks and nuns, village leaders, teachers, farmers, administrators, young people and urbane Bangkokians trying an alternative lifestyle to consumerist materialism.

The result is an empirical and etic study, together with the insights and analyses of community members in their own words. The closing chapters discuss development models and the Asoke philosophy and practice within the context of a nation caught between clashing value systems and the expectations of life they engender.

There is some, but not a lot of discussion of the conflict between the official state-sponsored Buddhist institution and Samana Photirak, the Asoke founder and leader. Possibly this is not central to the theme of "right development", but it is central to the theme of "Buddhist reform" in Thailand, so for a student of Buddhism a little more on the teaching and dhamma practice differences would have been good. It has been taken up to a limited extent in Seeger and Parnwell's lengthy article, "The Relocalization of Buddhism in Thailand".

There are some small, but noticeable printer's errors in a few of the first 20 pages of the book. Some lines are missing, so I contacted the author and she very graciously supplied the missing lines.