Word: thailander
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Eberstadt, a visiting fellow at the Center for Population Studies, recently returned from a month-and-a-half visit to Thailand and Cambodia. He and his interpreter, Kim Gooi, a Malaysian journalist for a Thai English-speaking daily, spent most of September and October on the Thai-Cambodian border, making illegal border crossings into Cambodia whenever they could...
...tend to think of them as Malthusian disasters," Eberstadt says, but he adds that "all you have to do is look at Soviet collectivization or the Biafran disaster or Uganda." You cannot divorce the two, he maintains, and his recent experiences in Thailand and Cambodia reinforce his belief...
...Buddhist teaching is summarized in the Four Holy Truths: 1) existence is suffering; 2) suffering springs from desire; 3) this desire can be extinguished by 4) following the Buddha's path of truthful and chaste behavior. The introspective Theravada school of Buddhism is predominant on the plains of Thailand and western Kampuchea, where the faith was once centered in the fabulous Angkor Wat. In Viet Nam, whose Mayahana school permits social concern alongside withdrawal of the self, Buddhists have sometimes supported nationalist movements, but rarely actively...
...reminded by the bust of Uncle Ho and numerous red banners that the religion is tolerated only as an appendage of the state. In Laos, over the past five years, one-fourth of the peasant population of 3 million have swum or rafted across the Mekong River to Thailand. One of the most famous of these waterborne refugees is Laos' 88-year-old Supreme Patriarch, Pra Yodkaw Vachirorods, who sighs, "Buddhism is alienated and separate from the people. Religion is dying in Laos...
Scholars in Thailand disagree. They are sanguine about Buddhism's long-range prospects in Indochina, since they feel the Gautama's ideas are not incompatible with Communism. Observes Thai Scholar Sulak Sivaraksa: "Christianity and Communism have a lot of ideological conflicts, but this is not the case with traditional Buddhism, which is socialistic in that it champions the equality...