If a tree falls a monks blessing for Thailands forest

·期刊原文

If a tree falls .... a monk's blessing for Thailand's forest

Steve Magagnini

The Amicus Journal

Vol.16 No.2 (Summer 1994) pp.12-14

COPYRIGHT Natural Resources Defense Council 1994

Phra Prajak Kuttajitto strides barefoot through the cool forest he
calls home until he comes to a giant teak tree. Then the monk with
laughing eyes cloaks the majestic teak in saffron monk's robes and
whispers a Buddhist blessing.
This gentle, pious act in the remote woods 250 miles northeast of
Bangkok has accomplished what environmentalists, lawyers, and
politicians could not--Prajak says it has stopped, at least
temporarily, the destruction of these forests.
Thirty years ago, most of Thailand was moist and thick with forests.
But private and military interests raped the majestic Thai teak
trees for profit, turning them into boards and furniture for export
to Japan and Europe. Today only a quarter of this once-lush country
is forest. Without trees to hold moisture, Thailand has endured
deadly floods and terrible droughts.
Despite the pretense of "free" elections, Thailand is a military
dictatorship, and dissent is not tolerated. Prajak, a renegade monk
who has lived in the woods for fifteen years, raised a ruckus that
reverberated throughout Thailand when he began ordaining thousands
of acres of trees in 1987 as "children of Buddha," and girded some
of the tallest teaks in monks' robes. Other forest monks followed
suit.
Prajak has been branded a spiritual outlaw by traditional Buddhists
who think monks should keep their noses out of politics. But he has
little patience for high-living city monks who cozy up to Thailand's
military government and sell blessings to those in search of winning
lottery tickets. "The forest is the source of everything in the
world, the dharma, the natural law," Prajak says. "It is the
university of our life and understanding, the place where Buddha
first had a revelation. Monks first came into existence in the
forest."
Ordainment works because many people are afraid to chop down the
"holy" trees and arouse the wrath of Buddha. After Prajak ordained
his first teak, the villagers took white thread used in Buddhist
ceremonies and tied it from tree to tree, creating a sacred space.
"There are plenty of people who believe there are spirits living in
the trees and if you cut them, something evil will happen," says
Prajak in his high, melodious voice. "The military used to pay poor
villagers to cut the logs down for them; after the ordination,
people refused to do that any more."
Prajak, fifty-three, has become a folk hero through his battle to
keep Thailand's forests out of the hands of profiteers and preserve
them for millions of poor peasants who have lived among the trees
for generations.
About 10 percent of Thailand's 300,000 monks live in the forest.
Prajak and some twenty disciples live on a remote fringe of Dong Yai
forest, about sixty-five rugged miles south of Khorat, a city in
northeast Thailand that is four hours by car from Bangkok.
The once-dense woods were being thinned by clearcutting for
farmland, but in 1987 Prajak got the neighboring villagers to donate
a large chunk of forest to the monks, who had it declared a
religious sanctuary. Here he established the "waters of Buddha"
monastery, which consists of a couple of straw-roof huts, a well, an
outhouse, and a temple that is nothing more than an open-air wooden
platform on stilts.
Prajak and his followers, ages thirteen to seventy-five, live
among roosters, dogs, sparrows, and orange-and-violet butterflies.
Every summer evening at dusk, the forest buzzes like a motorcycle
gang on take-off. The high-revving roar is produced by a single
insect--the cicada. But the noise doesn't keep young monks from
seeking enlightenment at Prajak's wat (temple).
Prajak leads them in meditation from six to nine at night, and again
from three to six A.M. Then his morning monk patrol combs the forest
to make sure no trees are being cut down illegally.
Thirty years ago, the Thai government encouraged poor villagers to
clearcut trees to plant tapioca, corn, and other crops for profit.
In 1988, after mud slides flowed down denuded hills in northern
Thailand and claimed more than one hundred lives, all logging was
officially banned in Thailand. However, trees are still being cut
down by villagers and soldiers, Prajak says. A single teak tree
brings $8,000--a fortune to villagers used to only $200 a year, he
remarks, pointing to a large swath of national forest preserve
twenty miles from Dong Yai Forest that has recently been slashed and
burned.
"If they continue to cut all the trees, the well will soon go dry
and there will be no water left in the watershed," he says. "By
indiscriminately cutting, people are destroying their own future."
He points to the shiny layer of morning dew that carpets the forest
and says, "This is how nature planned it. Over by the so-called
'eucalyptus forest' !planted by the government^ the ground is hard
and packed. It's just a bunch of eucalyptus trees. It's not a
forest."
These eucalyptus trees were planted by the government as part of its
controversial "reforestation" program. In 1991, the military--in the
name of "reforestation"--began moving villagers off their farms. The
plan was to uproot nearly 5 million villagers living and farming on
the fringes of national forests. Once the villagers were cleared
out, the government planned to chop down some of the remaining teak
trees and replace them with fast-growing bamboo and eucalyptus,
which would be used to make pulp and paper products.
"More than 12 million people live in national forests, and not more
than 40,000 have been moved," says Kuwalairit Paisal, a high-ranking
official in the Royal Forestry Department. Those who moved
voluntarily were promised two acres of land elsewhere.
But some of the farmers were given half an hour to move, and entire
villages were wiped out, including Nong Yai, a hamlet of 400
families about an hour from Prajak's forest monastery.
"People had been living there for thirty-one years," said Sangian
Pringkatok, a sixty-four-year-old rice and corn farmer. "We had our
own temple and our own temple school. They showed up in the morning
and said get out. They arrested twenty people and started bulldozing
the village. Even the temple was knocked down. Everything I had was
right there. I feel angry, frustrated, and an overwhelming sense of
powerlessness."
The Nong Yai villagers have been forced to live in a makeshift
wooden shelter. "We've been here for ten months already," says
Sompkit Sumongkasert, clutching her five-month-old son, Amnuay. "He
was born right here on the floor." The villagers wash in a polluted
stream near their shelter, eat canned food, and scrounge for odd
jobs.
"Phra Prajak has helped a lot of people change their opinions about
themselves," says Pringatok. "He's really improved the quality of
our lives and given us hope." To help villagers escape the yoke of
usury, Prajak set up a "buffalo bank" and a "rice bank" with donated
money. Farmers borrowed buffalo to till their fields, then gave the
buffalos' offspring back to the bank. They borrowed rice, then gave
a portion of their rice crop to the temple, which used it to feed
the elderly.
Prajak taught the villagers meditation and self-reliance. As he
built them up spiritually, their alcoholism rate--driven up during
the forced relocation--dropped.
And Prajak also made headlines. In 1992, he was arrested twice while
leading protesting peasants who had been kicked off their land for
"reforestation." For two years he made weekly trips to provincial
courthouses in Khorat and Buriram--each a four-hour round-trip from
his forest wat--to face charges stemming from the arrests.
"When people can become so greedy and power-hungry as to arrest a
monk in the forest who's not harming anybody, it's a sad state of
affairs," he says now. "People are so busy trying to control others
because they can't control themselves."
On August 4, 1993, in Buriram Provincial Court, Phra Prajak was
found guilty of two counts of "encroachment of national parks" and
sentenced to eighteen months in prison. But in a remarkable move,
Chief Judge Chaiyuth Srichamnong suspended Prajak's sentence on the
grounds that the conservationist monk had done a good deed for the
country. "He has never done anything wrong before this. He has a
clean record," said the judge. "He helped villagers grow plants,
grow trees."
And last year, Prajak won a tremendous victory when the Thai
government suspended the entire reforestation program.
"We have a long history with Phra Prajak," says Paisal, the Royal
Forestry Department official. "Now he is powerful because local
people respect him."
Paisal said Thailand is now 27 percent forest, and "the government
plans to increase the forest to 40 percent." Much of the new forest
will be teak, while about a third of it will be "economic" species
such as eucalyptus, which Paisal said will only be planted in the
poor soil of northeastern Thailand.
Phra means venerable, but Prajak wasn't always thus. He was born in
a town sixty-five miles north of Bangkok, where "the land and forest
were so rich the only thing we had to buy was salt," he says. At
sixteen, he became a houseboy for some American engineers and
learned a little English. He married and had five children, and
became a waiter and cook at a resort hotel in Pattaya. He drank and
rolled dice with Chinese workers, but one Chinese New Year's he lost
1000 baht ($40) and only had 500 baht on him. "They stomped on my
head and ripped my ear," he says.
During his forty-day hospital stay, Prajak resolved to shed his old
self and be reborn as a monk. So, at age thirty-eight, he began his
wanderings through the forests of Thailand. "My family and friends
became very angry at me for throwing away my wife and running away
from my responsibilities," he says. "But as I walked I discovered
how free I was. I ran across tigers and elephants in the jungle and
wasn't afraid. I found a certain peace and calm I didn't have
before."
His wife will not speak to him, and his youngest daughter has
nothing to do with him. "People said I was crazy and selfish to give
up my wife and five children, but now I have millions of children,"
he says.
Every morning, Prajak roams the woods with his dog Blackie.
"Charging through the forest like this is good for controlling your
moods," he says as he settles on a rock overlooking a vast clearing.

Wild pigs, small bears, chickens, rabbits, monkeys, snakes, deer,
and the occasional tiger roam Prajak's pristine patch of forest. But
if the clearcutting continues, "Dong Yai forest will be all golf
courses and plantations," he says. "Ultimately the responsibility
lies with the people, the monks themselves who have gone to the
cities to comfortable temples and forgotten their roots in the
forest."
With a caterpillar at home on his shoulder and a giant beehive at
work over his head, Prajak asks his guests to consider life in
Bangkok, one of the world's most traffic-choked, polluted cities.
"Compare that to what it's like here," he says. "Are you calm, is
your mind at rest, are you happy here? Then think about being back
in Bangkok.... You need to bring people here when they're children
and sit them down on this rock and make them part of the forest,
have them plant trees and watch them grow. Otherwise you're going to
have suffering and death.
"I didn't realize how important and vital the forest was until I
came here and experienced it for myself. Like most everyone else, I
saw the forest in terms of its uses, what you can exploit--wood for
homes, or for charcoal. It was a one-sided relationship.
"Once I became a monk I came to understand that you can't just take
without giving back or it will all dry up and everything will die,"
he says.
In the forest, Prajak gradually gained control over his moods,
breathing, and mind. "I looked at my body, my flesh, the meat on my
arm and realized it's intrinsically no different than this twig and
these leaves--we all die and are reborn.
"What these soldiers and police and other people do is not in
accordance with what is naturally right and true," he says. "I alone
can do nothing--it won't be possible to save the forest through the
efforts of just one monk. It's time for people all over the world to
realize that what we have is very limited. It's time to focus all
our energies on what we have left--it can't wait any longer."
Steve Magagnini is a senior writer at The Sacramento Bee.