OPINION

Bahtist meditation

Re: "Temple graft shows need for reform", (Opinion, April 11).

I applaud Sanitsuda Ekachai's criticisms of contemporary Thai Buddhism, but have no illusions that any of them will be heeded. When an entire country is corrupt, it would be naive to expect its religion to escape contamination.

In this case, the corruption consists largely of hypocrisy. People pay lip service to transcendental ideals in which they do not really believe.

The great 19th-century Indian sage Sri Ramakrishna identified the prevailing flaw of humankind as attachment to kamini-kanchan.

This has traditionally been translated as "woman and gold", but is nowadays more accurately identified as sex and money.

The real religion of Thailand, and indeed of most of the world, is not Buddhism, but Bahtism: worship of the baht and its equivalents.

Until this changes, Thailand and all its institutions, however glorified, will languish in moral squalor.

Re: "Endemic status still some way off: expert", (BP, April 11).

There is much discussion about government policy regarding the testing of inbound tourists, even though it has a negligible effect on the overall number of Covid cases and less on vaccination rates among the elderly in Thailand.

According to the World Health Organization, 60% of Covid deaths in Thailand are now among the unvaccinated, 75% of deaths are in the over 60s and 20.2% of over-60s have not received two doses of vaccine, compared to 2% in Cambodia.

I would estimate that if vaccination rates among the over-60s were comparable with Cambodia or the UK, at over 98%, then Thailand would at least halve the current Covid death rate.

Persuading the over-60s to get vaccinated does not seem to be discussed at all, yet this has a massive potential to improve the death rate. Travel restrictions are widely discussed, but these account for well under 1% of infections, so are almost irrelevant. This doesn't seem to get much newspaper coverage. Ideally, both Thai and English language newspapers would be covering the topic extensively.

Re: "Raised To Win", (PostBag, April 9).

In Saturday's letter to the PostBag, Khun Vint Chavala refers to Thaksin Shinawatra as a "fugitive politician."

I think I recall Thaksin as the very popular, legitimately democratically elected prime minister that was ousted by an illegal army coup. Am I confused?

Re: "Unlocking the keys to health and longevity", (Online, April 8).

In the best-selling book The Blue Zones there were four factors involved in explaining why some people not only live to be very old but were in good health as well. (The belief that if you live to be a hundred years old you'll spend the last 10 years on life support is nonsense.)

The four factors were: 1. A low-fat plant-based diet. 2. Exercise. The exercise didn't have to take place in a gym but could come from physical labour. 3. Family ties. Some of those people lived with extended families including their grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. And 4, a spiritual outlook. (It didn't have to be any particular religion). If the public ever knew all this, the medical establishment would practically go out of business.