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> LAOS. A Laotian bonze is likely to remind questioners that for a priest to talk politics violates one of the 227 Theravadan rules of conduct. The constitution stipulates that the King must be a "fervent Buddhist," but fervor in happy-go-lucky Laos covers a multitude of careless religious enthusiasms. Perennial civil war has left Buddhist practice virtually uninvolved, though near the Luang temple, skilled, cigarette-puffing monks cheerfully cast their Buddhas in brass melted down from 37-mm. and 105-mm. artillery cartridges.
Laotian soldiers wear Buddhist necklaces into battle and often piously shoot to miss, but it is considered highly bad form to wear the amulet into a bordello. And though Vientiane's whisky-tippling set often honors Buddha's fourth rule more in spirits than in spirit, at least their chauffeurs use only the softest tail feathers of a rooster to dust the Mercedes-so as to avoid crushing the least ant, who could well be somebody's mother.
> CAMBODIA. One of the greatest kings of early Buddhism was Cambodia's Jayavarman VII, the builder of Angkor Wat. Today leftist Prince Sihanouk, as Cambodia's Chief of State and High Protector of the Buddhist religion, assiduously cultivates the god-king role. Following the Buddhist road of the middle, intones Sihanouk, he means to be halfway between capitalism and Marxism at home and neutralist abroad.
"Our equality principle isn't from the French Revolution or Karl Marx," he says, "but from the Buddha." Though this is largely rhetoric, Sihanouk has so cultivated his clergy that Cambodian monks have voluntarily pitched into his public-works projects, and help build country roads, bridges, dig wells.
> THAILAND. Probably nowhere in Asia is Buddhism a gentler, more pervasive force than in pro-Western Thailand. Though now a constitutional monarch. King Bhumibol is still widely revered as a Buddhist god-king. Everywhere monks are valued not only as spiritual leaders but as astrologers and diviners. Some have even become management consultants, called on by businessmen before major investment decisions.
The Thais tithe their annual income in contributions to temple building and Buddhist ceremonies—good Buddhism but a serious drawback to the government's efforts at capital formation. Not long ago, Bangkok carried out a little-publicized roundup of leftist-oriented monks to prevent any Communist infiltration of the clergy. But by and large, in peaceful, prosperous Thailand, the golden mean rules. Bangkok is still rocking from the Sarit scandal—the tough, able late Prime Minister is charged with misappropriating vast government funds—and King Bhumibol has been urged to strip Sarit posthumously of his title of field marshal.
Replies the King: "We are all Buddhist, and it is un-Buddhist to be vengeful because of a personal grudge."
> JAPAN. Amid the dizzying changes of industrialization, Buddhist laymen have seized on the widespread yearning for new values to form Soka Gakkai (Value-Creation Society). Staging great circuses with acrobats, brass bands and dancing girls, Soka Gakkai has recruited over 13 million adherents, largely from Japan's lower middle class and urban-poor discontents. Tightly regimented, from family squads on up, they must vote for the sect's political candidate as a religious duty.