Word: monke
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...saffron loiters idly beside a Bangkok noodle stand, cradling a bowl stuffed with money. It's a dead giveaway. Real monks don't loiter when they beg. Real monks keep walking. It's part of the patimokkha?the monastic vows. But Thailand is teeming with phony monks. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fraudulent holy men roaming the country's roads and markets, bilking people out of cash, food and other donations. And that's just the beginning of Thailand's rogue monk problem. In recent years, real monks have been caught embezzling, selling and using drugs, seducing parishioners...
...tamruat phra?literally, the monk police?are on the case. A force of about 160 clerics, they were formed 11 years ago to do battle against a rising tide of scandals engulfing the Buddhist clergy, known as the Sangha. Buddhist scholars say wayward monks make up only a tiny minority of the country's 300,000 clergymen. The damage they're doing to the faith, however, is so severe that Thailand's Supreme Patriarch, Somdech Phra Yanasangworn, appealed to the government last December for help to "save (Buddhism) from this serious crisis...
...Many monks know it. That's why Phra Sawoey Chanasapo, the 45-year-old assistant abbot of Bangkok's Temple of the Dawn, and Phra Adul Atulapanyo, 32, the assistant abbot of Wat Sangkrajai Voraviharn, enlisted in the tamruat phra at its inception. "We wanted to do something for our brothers," says Sawoey. But not all their brothers like what they do. Even when just paying a friendly visit, they're as welcome in some temples as internal-affairs investigators in a police station. Adul, who is an avid fan of detective flicks, says the life of a tamruat phra...
...village of Nongkham Baan, several men are wearing Buddhist robes, but they're not monks, says Thongdee Hawnjahn, a local housewife. "They make a lot of money begging, but it's wrong," she says. According to Thongdee, a bogus monk can net as much as $2,250 a month. Most fake monks come from villages like this in Chaiyaphum province in the poor northeast, and "poverty is what drives them to do it," says Sanitsuda Ekachai, a religion writer for the Bangkok Post. Some villages knowingly use bogus monks for ceremonies, she says, because, as many real monks gravitate...
...from scholarship. In reality, there is little to gain by further inflating the egos of academics. The beauty of the life of the mind is that it is unadulterated by temporal concerns like fame and money. An academic’s habits need not resemble those of a Benedictine monk, but the driving force of an academic’s ambition should be truth for the sake of truth...