In August 2018, revelations of the sexual, financial, and administrative misconduct of a high-profile Chinese Buddhist monk named Xuecheng 學誠 were in the spotlight of domestic and international attention. The validity of the allegations and their social and religious impact have been widely debated, and this article focuses on the legal procedures used in handling the allegations and traces their source back to the Republican era (1911–1949). The state's governance of Buddhism and the efficacy of the Buddhist clergy's jurisdictional self-governance operating in Xuecheng's case in China today are significantly older than the People's Republic of China. As early as 1929, ordained Buddhists collectively denounced personal clerical privileges, in exchange for the state law's protection on monastic properties. Then, while protesting against unfavorable articles in the Charter of the Buddhist Association of China (Zhongguo fojiaohui zhang cheng 中國佛教會章程) proposed by the Nationalist government in 1936, the Buddhist clergy lost their legal jurisdiction over adjudicating internal disputes among ordained Buddhists. These two events have come to define the relationship between the state and the Buddhist establishment in contemporary China, where state law is harsh on religion while enforcement through legal practice is lax.

This essay explores the extent to which Thailand’s secular legal system reinforces the imagined divide, common in Thai Buddhist conceptions of society, between a “worldly” sphere and the “religious” sphere of the sangha (order of monks). It asks: How far does secular Thai law exclude clergy from the “unmonkly” domains of politics and commerce? It shows that there is a striking discrepancy between the systematic way in which secular Thai law has kept monks from formally participating in “politics” and the rather more permissive way in which it has facilitated participation by the monkhood in the sphere of “commerce.” The essay concludes with some reflections on this finding and the questions it raises.