Public advocacy and activism play an important role in shaping public culture and civil society. In modern Thailand and historical Siam, Buddhism has been a key factor in the social change processes shaping modern civil society, and rhetoric has been a key factor shaping this sphere of public life. This study examined two problems: (1) how contemporary Thai Buddhists justify their advocacy and activism in rhetorical practice--efforts that are under the duress of justification because of the expectation for monastics in particular to operate apolitically and the widespread false assumption that Buddhists are not concerned with social problems or public issues--and (2) how Thai Buddhists use rhetorical practice to influence the way we understand the issues they work on. To examine these problems, I used a combination of inductive approaches to rhetorical criticism and grounded theory methodology. I interviewed nineteen Theravada Buddhists and considered twelve various written but mostly spoken public statements made by the participants in the study. While I identified twenty sources of justification for engaging in social change efforts, I found participants’ use of five of these rationales were particularly salient: (a) suffering (dukkha), (b) interdependence (paticcasamuppada), (c) loving-kindness (metta) / compassion (karuna), (d) duty / obligation, and (e) a text from the Mahavagga (1.11.1). Of the five, duty / obligation was the unifying theme of the other four in that each of the other four warranted a duty / obligation. I found that these five sources of justification operated rhetorically in one of three ways or in some combination of the three ways: (a) by producing identification with others, (b) by situating the social actors morally and ethically, or (c) by providing a credible basis from which to perform social action. In terms of the second research problem, I found a number of themes, but for practicality, in this project, I examined only one closely, namely what rhetorical practices Thai Buddhists use to dignify / humanize or degrade / dehumanize subjects of their discourse in their efforts to resist or promote social change. I found six rhetorical practices that participants used to dignify / humanize: (a) stressing similarities, (b) using dukkha (suffering) as a humanizing rhetorical frame, (c) employing humanizing and dignifying tropes, (d) impersonalizing the “enemy,” (e) seeing wrongdoing through the lens of Buddha-nature, and (f) deploying the juxtaposition of contrasting images as a dignifying rhetorical scheme. I found one rhetorical practice that participants used to degrade / dehumanize: animal metaphors. I conclude with a discussion of a rhetoric of duties in contrast with a rhetoric of rights, identification and rhetorical ethics, and the implications of humanizing and dehumanizing rhetoric for civil society and conflict communication.
