THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST
THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST
THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST
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himself. Making a pledge to rule with justice, he scattered silver and gold flowers on the floor,<br />
symbolically spreading goodness over his kingdom.<br />
Other holy acts, like formal horoscope reading and two hours of lying on the royal bed in the<br />
ceremonial residence of the king, sealed his deity. After two days, Bhumibol finally emerged<br />
in front of his subjects, accompanied by a trumpet fanfare and a cannon salute. The now fully<br />
crowned Rama IX declared that he was deeply attached to the Siamese people and would reign<br />
with righteousness, for their benefit and happiness. [Handley, The King Never Smiles]<br />
In an interview with New York Times correspondent Barbara Crosette in June 1988, Bhumibol was<br />
dismissive of the more arcane symbolism and rituals of his role, suggesting talk about this aspect of the<br />
kingship was exaggerated by the foreign media:<br />
''At first, it was all this rubbish about the half-brother of the moon and of the sun, and master of<br />
the tide and all that,'' he says, in slightly accented English. ''I don't know where they found this -<br />
I think they did it for my uncle, King Rama VII, when he went to America,'' he says, adding that<br />
foreign correspondents, having made up those titles for a predecessor in 1931, continued to apply<br />
them to him in the 1950s. He considers it ''irking.'' ''They wanted to make a fairy tale to amuse<br />
people - to amuse people more than to tell the truth.''<br />
Bhumibol was, of course, being disingenuous. He has always downplayed the ritualistic and spiritual<br />
aspects of the Thai monarchy when talking to a Western audience, but within Thailand he does exactly<br />
the opposite. In her thesis Thailand: The Soteriological State in the 1970s, Christine Gray identified<br />
an inescapable source of friction in Siam’s contacts with the West, which helps explain Bhumibol’s<br />
behaviour - and much else in Thai history and politics. She argues that a fundamental incompatibility -<br />
or “antinomy” - between the universe that most Westerners believe in and the universe experienced by<br />
most Thais has been a source of constant tension since the two worlds first came into contact, and that this<br />
tension has been another influence on Thailand’s historical development. People around the globe may<br />
not be so very different, but there is often an enormous gulf between the cultural and spiritual universes<br />
they inhabit that can profoundly impact the way they interact:<br />
South and Southeast Asian cultural systems share a common cosmological framework,<br />
terminology, and emphasis on asceticism whereas Western and Thai-Buddhist cultural systems<br />
do not. The antimony theory was developed from the observation that the cosmology and<br />
symbolic systems of Western and Theravada Buddhist societies are so disharmonic as to be<br />
mutually negating. For a Thai-Buddhist king or Thai political leaders to advance or otherwise<br />
embody Western ideals or adopt Western speech styles is, in most cases, to automatically<br />
transgress indigenous ideals. The reverse situation also hold true: in many cases, for Thai elite<br />
to advocate or embody indigenous ideals in ruling the modern polity or in their interactions with<br />
Westerners is to automatically delegitimate themselves with that audience. [Gray, Thailand: The<br />
Soteriological State in the 1970s]<br />
The spiritual and cosmological foundations that underpin the monarchy are absolutely fundamental to an<br />
understanding of the role of the role of the palace in modern Thailand.