THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST

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