Where Nothing Is Fixed, Anything Can Become

Book reviewed: Buddhist Spirituality and Social Action: The Collected Writings of Phra Paisal Visalo, edited by Jonathan S. Watts, INEB 2025.

The title of this book already contains its most important message: spirituality and social action belong together.

Phra Paisal Visalo does not advocate a Buddhism that withdraws from the world. Meditation, mindfulness and inner calm are not, for him, an escape from social problems. Rather, they should enable people to engage with the world more clearly, compassionately and nonviolently.

Published in 2025, this collection brings together forty earlier talks, essays, interviews and teachings. They address personal conduct, the reform of Thai Buddhism, consumer society, environmental destruction, social development, political conflicts, nonviolence and end-of-life care. The book is therefore not a systematically structured monograph. Some ideas recur, and several political texts are closely tied to the Thai circumstances of the periods in which they were written. Yet taken together, they form a remarkably coherent picture.

At its heart lies a simple insight: the crises of the world and the crises of the human mind cannot be separated. Environmental destruction, compulsive consumption, religious corruption, political violence and social injustice arise not only from flawed laws or poor institutions. They are also driven by greed, fear, hatred, delusion and the desire to secure and protect the self.

Conversely, it would be too simple to reduce all social problems to the inner attitudes of individuals. Here I draw on Western thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan to make these ideas more accessible to us “Westerners”, and to complement them where social relations of power need to be described more precisely.

Consumption and the promise of a better self

Phra Paisal’s critique of consumer society is particularly compelling. People buy things not only because they need them. They buy recognition, belonging and the image of a happier self. The right car, the right clothes or a particular social status are supposed to prove that one is somebody.

Adorno and Horkheimer described how advertising, media and the culture industry produce needs that then appear to be entirely personal desires. Phra Paisal makes a similar observation in simpler, more immediate language: we create technology, money, brands and social norms, then allow ourselves to be ruled by our own inventions.

Lacan approaches the same process from the psychological side. Human beings sense a lack and hope to fill it through a new object. Yet no possession can ultimately give them what they seek. As soon as one desire is fulfilled, the next appears. The problem is therefore not that we have yet to find the right object, but the expectation that any object could make us complete.

Phra Paisal’s response is not a moral condemnation of all desires. Rather, he invites us to become consciously aware of the movement of desire. Through mindfulness, we can recognise how a desire arises, what idea of happiness is attached to it and why its fulfilment brings only temporary relief.

His criticism also extends to a Buddhism that itself becomes a consumer product. Amulets, blessings, religious titles and generous donations can turn into a kind of spiritual status commodity. Even meditation can deteriorate into a technique of neoliberal self-optimisation: people meditate to become more productive, successful or respected. Spirituality then no longer questions the ego; we simply arrive on a new spiritual ego-platform. The ego has many faces.

Power is not located only at the top

Phra Paisal’s critique of the Thai Sangha, the community of ordained practitioners, can be understood particularly well through Foucault. Paisal describes a centralised system in which hierarchies, personal dependencies, close ties to the state and a lack of oversight encourage corruption.

Foucault shows that power does not emanate only from a ruler or an institution. It operates through rules, educational pathways, habits, language and ideas about what is normal or true. A monastery is no exception.

This makes Phra Paisal’s reform proposals interesting. He advocates transparency, local participation and greater responsibility for laypeople. A new ministry or a special state status for Buddhism would not resolve the crisis. More state power cannot bring a weakened religion back to life.

Foucault also helps us pose a critical question to Paisal himself: who decides what “true” Buddhism is? Reform movements, too, create new rules, authorities and ideas of the right way to live. Power does not simply disappear, but it can become more visible, accountable and less centralised. This perspective also has implications for politically created structures. Laws and reforms can gain broad social support only when decision-makers are themselves involved in personal development.

Everything exists in relationship

Gilles Deleuze offers another approach. For him, the world is not made up of fixed, separate things. Reality consists of relationships, changes and ever-new connections.

This resonates with Phra Paisal’s description of impermanence and interdependence. No human being exists independently. Food, air, language, community and nature sustain our lives. Our personality, too, is not unchanging. It is continually formed anew through experiences, relationships, memories and decisions.

Deleuze would, however, understand desire less negatively than traditional Buddhism. For him, desire is not only greed or the expression of a lack. It is also a creative force. The decisive question would therefore be not only how to calm desire but also what shapes it: why is it directed towards consumption and status? How could the same energy instead produce community, creativity and ecological ways of living?

Phra Paisal’s accounts of Buddhist environmental movements, local cooperatives, engaged monks and international networks show such possibilities. Social change does not emerge from a single centre alone. It grows from many interconnected initiatives and yet always begins with ourselves.

The real enemy

In political and religious conflicts, too, Phra Paisal begins with inner experience. The opponent is not only the person on the other side. The real opponents are hatred and anger, which cause us to stop seeing the other person as human.

Lacan helps explain why enemy images are so persistent. Groups often gain their identity through exclusion. We are the good ones because the others are supposedly evil. What we do not want to recognise in ourselves, we project onto the opponent. Even outrage and moral superiority can produce a peculiar satisfaction.

Phra Paisal’s teaching of nonduality interrupts this mechanism. Good and evil cannot always be neatly divided between two groups. Those who use violence in the name of good can themselves become part of the violence. For Paisal, nonviolence is therefore more than a polite negotiation method. It rests on recognising that opponents remain interconnected and that neither side stands outside the shared causes of a conflict. With Dudley Weeks, we can also say that a conflict exists “only” through the other person. This creates a conflict partnership: I need the other person to resolve the conflict, and very likely the same underlying needs matter to both of us.

The positive power of non-self

The deepest point of the book, however, lies beyond social criticism. It is the Buddhist insight of non-self, anattā.

Non-self does not mean that human beings are worthless or do not exist. It means that no fixed, independent, unchanging essence can be found within us. This is hard for Western thinkers to digest, shaped as we are by Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. Yet once this bitter pill is swallowed, it opens the possibility of “non-identification”. Only then can we play with life’s roles, use them when necessary and let them go when unnecessary or burdensome. What we call “I” is a living constellation of body, perceptions, memories, relationships and consciousness.

This insight can initially be unsettling. Western thought usually asks: if there is no fixed self, who acts? Who decides? Who bears responsibility?

Phra Paisal’s answer lies less in theory than in experience. When fixation on the self loosens for a moment, life does not disappear. It becomes wider. The boundaries between our own well-being and that of others become more permeable. Compassion no longer has to be imposed from outside as a moral duty. It arises from the experience of connectedness. A “must”, as a social demand, becomes a “can”: the experience of having the inner strength to act.

Non-self is therefore an opening rather than a teaching of negation. Where no rigid identity needs defending, change becomes possible. Where no isolated self stands at the centre, space opens for other people, nature and new forms of living together.

Where no fixed essence can be found, anything can become.

For our deeply polarising Western society, this is an absolute game changer.

This is the positive social power of Phra Paisal’s spirituality. Human beings are not fixed in greed, competition or violence. Institutions and societies also have no immutable nature. Because everything arises through conditions, it can change.

Thinking is a map, not the landscape

The Western authors reach such insights by long routes. Adorno and Horkheimer analyse the culture industry and instrumental reason. Foucault investigates power, knowledge and self-governance. Deleuze describes becoming, difference and social assemblages. Lacan traces the movements of language, lack and desire.

These concepts are valuable. They help us recognise invisible relations of power and avoid premature spiritual answers. They show that greed and fear are not merely personal failings: they are organised through markets, media, institutions and political identities.

Yet Western thought often remains within language and thinking. It describes, distinguishes, criticises and generates new concepts. Buddhism takes another path. It asks not only how the self is theoretically constructed, but invites us to observe, now, whether this fixed self can be found in immediate experience at all.

This does not mean that thinking is unimportant. That would not be a Middle Way either. Without thinking, we could not name power and injustice, develop political alternatives or take responsibility. But thinking is not the crowning achievement of being human. It is a tool, perhaps a map. Reality itself meets us only in the present moment.

Phra Paisal’s particular achievement is that he does not separate this moment from the world. Mindfulness does not end on the meditation cushion. It leads to questions about how we work, consume, deal with opponents, shape institutions, protect nature and accompany people who are dying.

The book is not equally strong in every part. It repeats itself, some political examples need explanation, and its social analysis occasionally risks being reduced too far to individual greed or lack of mindfulness. Here, the Western thinkers provide a necessary complement. They show how individual consciousness is shaped by social conditions.

Conversely, Phra Paisal protects Western critique from another problem: endless analysis without inner change. Understanding power does not mean being free of hatred. Criticising consumerism does not mean being free of greed. And theoretically deconstructing the self does not mean having experienced non-self.

Read in this way, a fruitful conversation emerges between two worlds. Western thought makes structures visible. Buddhism makes the present mind visible. One protects against naivety, the other against hopelessness.

Buddhist Spirituality and Social Action shows that insight into non-self need not lead to withdrawal from the world. It can instead become the foundation for a more humane world. For if the self is not a closed thing, our national borders are not final either. The suffering of others is not separate from our own lives. This allows us to shoulder responsibility for the coming centuries, because responsibility itself gives us the strength to do so.

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Author: Christoph Richter · SAILR
Category: Publications / Review

Also published in English by INEB – read the article at INEB.