The beauty of the beach at one of Thailand’s most popular sea resorts did not seem to soothe his frustration. He was suffering from “culture shock”—sudden immersion in a culture where values and psychological cues were quite different from those in Hometown, U.S.A.
He told me that he had been serving as an advisor to the Thai Air Force Training School, a few dozen kilometers to the south. He had been invited to a government official’s home for a lawn party attended by the socially elite of the town. Amid the din and hilarity (which usually rises in proportion to the Mekong whiskey consumed), a single-engine training plane could be heard. It was Saturday afternoon, and a cadet was putting in extra time flying out to sea for target practice. But he released the bomb prematurely, and it fell in the midst of the revelers, killing several and injuring others.
The American’s first reaction was to save life, and he frantically called for assistance. He spotted a doctor and pleaded with him to help load the injured people into a jeep. The response was, “It’s Saturday afternoon. The hospital is closed.” As he implored others to help him, the refrain always was, “It’s no use. They are going to die anyway.”
I have made several visits to a school for the blind in Bangkok that had a rather hesitant beginning. An American Catholic woman, blind herself, heard of the plight of the many blind people in Thailand who had no opportunity to get an education. She approached the minister of education with the request to establish a school for the blind. His first answer was, “Miss Caulfield, these people are blind because of their evil actions in their previous existence. As Buddhists we do not believe that we should interfere with a person’s fate or Karma.” But then his mind flashed back to his exposure to another value system during graduate studies in the West, and he added, “However, we will grant your request.”
Many factors influence people to feel, think, and act as they do, but chief among these is their religious orientation. Anthropologists have never yet found an ethnic group without a religion. Robert Bellah in an article entitled “The Sacred and the Political in American Life” writes, “Religion is as central to a culture’s self definition as speech or tool-making. It is the key to culture. Every nation finds its legitimacy in being a part of a larger context. The cosmos, the movement of history, or the purpose of God provides a nation with its reason for being. Society is never merely a social contract, an association of individuals who band together out of mutual self-interest. It … transcends the social and finds its meaning in the sacred” (Psychology Today, January, 1976).
In an age of secularism it is not popular to speak of values derived from religion. Modern man feels awkward and nervous about using moral language because he is uncertain of his values. But it is possible for a person to renounce all religion and yet follow an ethical code that is derived from a religious tradition.
Buddhism is the state religion of Thailand. Its influence pervades education, government, business, and other spheres. A Thai person’s view of the world and himself, his value system, and his thought patterns are influenced by Buddhist philosophy.
Buddhists believe in reincarnation, “samsara.” They hope through many existences to evolve into non-existence, or Nirvana. The law that determines the quality of a particular existence is “Karma.” The root idea of the word is “action,” and Karma is the force that causes reincarnation to take place. In the doctrine of “samsara,” Buddha taught that all existence is illusion or continual change with no reality beneath the change. As Paul Eakin explains it, “there is no being, but only an eternal becoming.”
The cardinal sorrow and sin of man are due to the demon “desire,” which makes human beings cling blindly to this fleeting experience called life, or individual consciousness. The root of evil is the will to live.
Karma produces a new existence. It is not “I” that am reborn, for there is no “I”; but the sum of all my doings is carried over to a new account. We evolve from the wheel of existence into a state of extinction (Nirvana) when all desire has ceased.
Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths, which lead into The Eightfold Path, as the means of attaining Nirvana. The Four Noble Truths are:
1. Life is painful.
2. Desire brings pain.
3. Pain vanishes when desire ceases.
4. Desire ceases when the eightfold path is followed.
To understand the law of Karma in Buddhist thought, one must examine three principles (I am paraphrasing these from Paul Eakin’s book, Buddhism and the Christian Approach to Buddhists in Thailand, printed in Bangkok in 1956):
1. The individual is like an airtight compartment and completely independent of external forces. Any seeming external influence is an illusion. The person is a captive of fate.
2. A person’s sufferings are the result of his own actions. He is free from suffering in proportion to his credit balance from his past existence.
3. Justice rules supreme in the world. It is relentless and complete: the last cent must be paid. There is no room for mercy or forgiveness.
This system received support as an explanation for the suffering and inequalities that are the common experience of mankind. It seemed logical to postulate a previous life in which evil deeds were sown that were reaped in succeeding existences. This has given consolation to some who want to work out their salvation at their own speed without guilt complexes and fear of impending doom.
However, when a new religion is introduced, social practices can change not only for the converts but even for those who still maintain nominal allegiance to the traditional religion. I have seen numerous examples of this in my many years of representing Christianity in Thailand.
1. Women. When Christians from the West opened the first elementary school for girls in Thailand, they were met with almost complete indifference from the general public. The sponsors of the school had to offer money to some of the parents to help persuade them to send their daughters to the school. The parents had the ingrained feeling that you “may as well teach a buffalo as to try to teach a woman.”
Now schools for girls are universally accepted in Thailand. The status of women has been greatly upgraded with the advent of Christian missions, which teach that men and women are equals in the sight of God but differ in function.
2. Manual labor. One of the first pieces of advice I received when I arrived at my up-country home in Thailand was, “Do not do any manual labor in public such as working in the yard or lifting boxes. If you do manual labor, the Thai people will say that you are stingy and too cheap to hire a coolie.” When we first arrived in Thailand it was difficult to find a Thai who could build a house or overhaul a car. The prevailing idea was that “Thai are born to be kings. Other nationalities can do manual labor.”
At the Bible institute, I heard stories of Christian students who had come from rural areas and who upon visiting their homes refused to work with their hands. One student visited his village wearing gloves (in the tropics) and insisted that his aged mother build the fire for meals.
When I had the opportunity, I spoke of the example of Christ in learning the carpentry trade and of the Apostle Paul in supporting himself and sometimes his co-workers by making tents. A work program was established at the Bible institute. Students were required to work (usually manual labor) for four hours a day in addition to spending four hours in classrooms. This helped them develop an appreciation for their education and also an empathy for the working class.
In recent years vocational schools have become popular in Thailand, and the blue-collar worker is coming to have almost as much status as the white-collar worker.
3. Wealth. Most Thai Buddhists until recently have been indifferent to the acquisition of wealth. A favorite saying of rural people is, “Hunt for your food in the morning and eat it at night.” They have been content with a hand-to-mouth existence.
Western experts showed some farmers how they could get two crops instead of one in a season from the same plot of land. The first year two crops were successfully reaped. The second year the experts returned to find the people whiling away their time during the planting season. “Why aren’t you working the fields?” they asked. The answer was, “You taught us to get two crops last year, so we had a surplus and don’t need to plant this year.”
Buddhist priests are not supposed to handle money, and many lay people shy away from occupations that handle money.
The Bible teaches not that wealth is wrong in itself, but that wealth is not an end in itself to be accumulated for selfish indulgence; it is entrusted to us to use for the furtherance of God’s kingdom. Christians will be held accountable for the manner in which they have used the wealth that has been entrusted to them.
4. Ambition. I was teaching English to a high school class in Korat. The textbook told of a school teacher who taught in a poor section of Cleveland, Ohio. One day she gave a very poor girl a pretty new blue dress. This dress sparked a chain reaction. The parents noticed how the new dress showed up the shabbiness of their kitchen and table, so they bought a tablecloth. They began to develop a feeling of self-esteem, and their drab surroundings began to take on a new look. Neighbors noticed and began to clean up their own properties.
The article mentioned that before the gift of the dress the people of the area had lacked ambition and the desire to improve their lot. I asked the students, “Is ambition evil?” Their reaction was “Yes, of course. Ambition is sin.” I tried to show that certain kinds of ambition, where we work for the betterment not just of ourselves but of others, might be very beneficial.
5. Government officials. An English-language newspaper in Bangkok has introduced the term “prependalism” to describe a practice that is common in much of Asia. In this system the average government official is paid only a subsistence allowance. He is expected to make up the difference between that and an appropriate income by accepting “gifts” from citizens who come to his desk for the processing of various applications.
The people are victimized because they must present the “gift” before the service is rendered. Since there is not a generally agreed upon amount, such as the 15 per cent tip of the West, people wait and wait for action. Thinking that their request is being delayed because their gift was too small, they are likely to give more.
Some cabinet ministers have been known to stipulate gifts of $2,500 before they sign such things as export-import permits. This of course has made government officials very unpopular with the people.
Although one of the best-known Buddhist precepts is, “Do good and you will receive good, do evil and you will receive evil,” many of the people doubt the truth of the statement as they see corrupt people flourish materially.
6. Taxes. Many people feel they do not owe loyalty, respect, or taxes to the government because of the ill treatment they have received at the hands of some officials. They try by every conceivable way to avoid paying taxes. One method is to rent out a house for a very minimal amount because they pay taxes on the basis of the rental, and then charge a much larger amount for the furniture in the house, even if it is only one piece, because they do not pay tax on rental of furniture.
7. Job satisfaction. A Thai achieves satisfaction not in accomplishing a job so much as in the “sanuk” (fun) he can have in doing it. For the average Asian, time is not a factor—there is always tomorrow. An American sergeant came to me after he had watched a Thai sweep a huge hangar with a soft, short-handled grass broom. “Why can’t they get a wide, heavy-duty broom and finish the work in a third of the time?”
An American well-digging team felt its efforts in giving villages pure drinking water from underground reservoirs were not really appreciated. The villagers complained that the Americans were destroying their fun by placing a pump in reach of their houses. This deprived them of a quarter-of-a-mile hike to the village pond, which was always a social event. Neighbors exchanged gossip there, and boys met girls. And after all, the water from the pump was not quite so tasty as that of the village pond, where people and buffalos bathed.
The foreign advisor wants to get the job done and send a good report to the head office. His local host wants him to relish the local food, learn the local idiom, execute the tribal dances gracefully, and enjoy himself.
8. The handicapped. At the age of six, a few weeks after he had started school, Brayut was involved in an accident that made him permanently blind. His mother and relatives felt that the evil actions of his former existence were catching up to him, and they assigned him the fate of the average blind person in rural Thailand—alienation and loneliness.
Deprived of the opportunity to attend school, he played in the dust as close to the school yard and to the sounds of the children’s voices as he could. When he was about nine, a missionary came by and noticed the blind boy crying. He told Brayut about the blind man who came to Jesus. The disciples had pressed their question heartlessly: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus replied, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” This story gave hope to the lonely boy, and in simple faith he reached out to Christ. The missionary gave him some literature for his friends to read to him, told him of a school for the blind in Bangkok, and went on his way.
The blind boy persuaded a neighbor to teach him how to weave baskets. After many painful injuries to his hands, he mastered the art, and after a year he had earned the equivalent of twenty-one dollars. He pleaded with his parents to let him go to school in Bangkok, but they felt it was worthless and foolish.
Finally when Brayut was sixteen he locked himself in a room and said he would not come out until his parents agreed to let him go to the school. Reluctantly they gave him permission, and an uncle helped him make the daylong journey to the big capital city.
Imagine their disappointment when the headmistress at the school for the blind told him he was over age and could not be accepted. She encouraged him, however, to enter the adult-education classes. He entered classes with people who had normal sight and in a brief time was able to complete a twelve-year curriculum, supporting himself by teaching manual arts to blind boys at the vocational school.
It was during this time that we became acquainted with Brayut. He came the farthest of anyone to the Sunday worship service, having to change buses and find his way through busy traffic and down our lane. My wife gladly taught him English for an hour each Sunday.
After he finished the high school curriculum he insisted on taking the entrance exam for the teacher-training college. He has now completed two years of college and hopes to establish his own school for the blind someday.
A Thai living in the United States would doubtless be able to call attention to American cultural patterns that seem to contradict our ethical precepts. Wherever one lives, it is necessary to understand the prevailing value system if one hopes to influence people to change for the better.
Love of Darkness
In a heart of night
blacked in by solitude
and wrapped around by grief,
hearing in its darkness
pity as a token
of its choice to die,
against the wall at once
a shadow moves, then fades
into obscurity
of memory that so quickly
would deny the fact
that Light has shined.
CAROLE SANDERSON STREETER
The Spirit of God
Always I hear the soft, invading sound
Of Your inimitable voice, and fear.
Your slow and even steps upon the ground
Are the annunciation You are near.
When in the pool You touch my naked side,
Confound me as a shadow on my face,
Reveal Yourself where lonely gentians hide,
Or in the pale green willow’s sorrowful grace.
You are past understanding to conceive,
To be arrested in intrinsic might;
I have no sight, and I cannot perceive
How beautiful, how awful is the light.
I only feel that You are deep and true
And that I would know all if I knew You.
GEORGE E. MCDONOUGH
D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.
