Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia, by Eugene Ford

Abstract

ccording to Dr. Eugene Ford, his book tells “a story of twentieth-century Southeast Asian Buddhists engaging with one another and with the international world” (2). And what a story it is, involving characters, some quite unscrupulous, from the US, the USSR, the PRC, Japan, India, Burma, Ceylon, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaya/Malaysia, and Taiwan. According to the author, two interrelated questions drove his inquiry. First, “How was the Cold War experienced within the secretive and staid world of Thailand’s Buddhist monkhood?” (2). Drawing on ample evidence, Dr. Ford argues that “under the pressures of the Cold War, [the] twin planks that were the foundation of Thailand’s monastic culture loosened and finally fell away.” Ford defines the twin planks as abstention from “overt political involvement” and eschewment of “internationalism” (288). Second, Ford asks, “was it possible to write an international Cold War history from a Southeast Asian Buddhist perspective?”(2) This question is particularly interesting to me as a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first-century transnational Buddhism.