The interpretive frame associated with Buddhist doctrine is deeply rooted in Thai culture and has been familiar to Thais for centuries. Although the karmic explanation of injury may seem conceptually inconsistent with village-level remedy systems that stressed the importance of injury payments by the injurer, Thais have long viewed these multiple interpretive frames as integrated with one another and part of a coherent whole. In this article, I suggest that the injury narratives may reveal a fragmentation of what was once an interlocking and coherent set of practices. Although Buajan and other injury victims offer multiple causal explanations, few if any of these explanations are associated with a remedy system that still functions effectively, at least in this lifetime. This was clearly the case with Buajan, who found that none of the interpretive frames she described could lead her to an outcome in which the old man would pay her adequately for the harm he had inflicted on her.

Buddhist beliefs and practices, it appears, are less and less connected to village-level cosmologies simply because individuals no longer live exclusively,  if at all, in integrated village communities. In the injury narratives, Buddhism appears to have separated from its connections to village life and is described in less localized and more universalized doctrinal terms. This was true, in any event, for the 35 interviewees in my study, and they were selected specifically to provide a range of rural and urban backgrounds, occupations, and viewpoints. Without the remediation practices that were formerly part of daily life in Chiangmai province, injury victims find themselves stripped of a set of choices that were once available to them. Their attachment to Buddhist beliefs and practices remains strong, but Buddhism without its roots in village-level practices seems to draw them away from the pursuit of a remedy. Globalized "mediascapes" have accentuated this new, de-localized form of Buddhism. The popular Dhammakaya temple, for example, has launched its own pay-TV channel ("Do heaven and hell exist? Where will we go after death? Why were we born? Only DMC will tell you.") (Kongrut 2004). [FN23] Although globalization has also brought increased exposure to the discourse of law, it is not obvious to ordinary people how to reconcile liberal legalism with religion. Buddhism and law now appear to be opposed to one another and to promote different and contradictory responses to injury.

Thai Buddhism, separated from the efficacious local remedy systems to which it was formerly linked, appears to counsel injury victims to absorb the harm that has been done to them without any aggressive attempt to obtain compensation. Those who attempt to follow its teachings settle for smaller payments than they think they deserve and, in some cases, receive nothing at all from their injurers. They explain such outcomes by pointing to their own karmic responsibility for the harm and by emphasizing their pursuit of a virtuous course of conduct as defined by Buddhist doctrine. The opposition of religiosity and legality in Chiangmai today is evident in the following examples drawn from the injury narratives.

Sawat, an agricultural extension worker whose motorcycle was struck by a car, attributes his serious injuries to his own karma. The other driver visited Sawat in the hospital and accepted total responsibility, yet Sawat refused to accept any payment from the driver or to file the papers that would provide payment by the other driver's insurance company. Although Sawat considers the other driver negligent, he thinks it is ultimately a matter of karma. Sawat did not receive justice, he acknowledges, and it may be better for people to invoke the law, but Sawat characterizes himself as typical of the people of northern Thailand who prefer to accept the consequences of their own karma rather than seek a remedy to which they are legally entitled.

Janya, a middle-aged civil servant whose husband was killed in a traffic accident 10 years ago, suffered multiple fractures and lacerations when her motorcycle was struck at an intersection by a teenager driving a large motorcycle without a license. Janya thought she deserved about 30,000 baht in compensation. When the boy and his relatives offered 5,000 baht, Janya rejected any payment at all and instead agreed to serve as a witness in the boy's criminal prosecution for reckless driving. She was pleased that the court imposed a suspended sentence and hoped that two years of court supervision would help the boy to straighten out his life and resume his education. Janya thinks her injury was caused primarily by her own karma, and she guesses that she injured the boy in a previous life just as he injured her in their present lives. By forgiving him and rejecting his inadequate offer of compensation, Janya hopes that her bad karma will come to an end, and the cycle of injury and retaliation will not continue into the next life.

Aran is a young, accident-prone restaurant worker who came to Chiangmai city from a village background. His fractured knee required surgery following a motorcycle accident in which a teenage girl cut in front of him. She and her father apologized and promised to pay all the costs for lost wages, medical treatment, and repairs to his motorcycle, but after his surgery Aran never saw them again and received no compensation from them at all. Through the restaurant where Aran works, he has access to a health insurance plan that covered his hospital bills. Aran refuses to pursue the possibility of additional compensation by filing a civil or criminal case against the other driver. He believes that he suffers frequent injuries because of the bad karma he accumulated when he killed animals while working in a slaughterhouse. His mother finally made him stop and find other employment, but Aran thinks he has not used up his bad karma yet. His wife was later unfaithful to him, and she took his motorcycle and deserted him after his injury, but he forgives her. Aran believes that if he were to pursue a legal remedy against the teenage girl who injured him in this case, karma might cause his own daughter to encounter some accident or misfortune when she becomes a teenager. He is unwilling to subject her to this risk, and he chooses to protect his daughter by forgiving his injurer in accordance with Buddhist teachings. Aran believes that the other driver and her father will someday suffer the karmic consequences of their misdeeds and their broken promise to provide compensation. It is, therefore, better for everyone if Aran allows the law of karma to produce justice in the long term rather than to seek a legal remedy in the short term.

The stories of Buajan and of Sawat, Janya, and Aran are but four examples of a pattern that emerged in most of the injury narratives. The injured individuals believed themselves to be the victims of injustice and thought they were entitled to compensation from the other party. Formerly, local remediation systems and community pressure would have compelled compensation and, when they failed, might occasionally have encouraged injured persons to pursue traditional remedies in the Chiangmai Provincial Court. Nowadays, as Buajan, Sawat, Janya, and Aran acknowledge, local remedies are unavailable, and only the law can compel the payment of damages, but they express a strong disinclination to pursue that option. Instead, they invoke Buddhist doctrine to explain why they chose to forgive the other party, accept little or no compensation, and end the karmic cycle of injury and response. The injury narratives reveal a form of legal consciousness in which Buddhist religious precepts, disconnected now from village-level systems of belief and social control, predominate over legalism and rights consciousness.

What is the appeal of Buddhism to injury victims as they attempt to understand their experience and determine what to do next? Buddhism provides a powerful and comprehensive interpretive framework through which individuals can explain who they are, why they have encountered misfortune, and what they can and should do about it. It suits the world in which injury victims now live, a world in which community pressures no longer reinforce the expectation and pursuit of a remedy. It provides a discourse in which individuals can claim a measure of justice and virtue even as they abandon other kinds of claims that they could have made in times past. To those who believe in the workings of karma, Buddhism offers not a rationalization for inaction but a different and more efficacious form of action that, unlike the law, can end the cycle of injury and retribution. The invocation of Buddhist precepts in response to an injury gives the interviewees greater control over the incident by enabling them to confront the root cause of their suffering. Buddhism offers rewards that appear greater than the rewards the law could provide, since--from a Buddhist perspective--the assertion of rights may ultimately prolong conflict and may in the long run contribute to suffering, misfortune, and distress.

The injury narratives reveal a form of legal consciousness in which Buddhism floats free of its anchor in locality-based remediation systems. An expectation of "remedies without rights"--shared by injury victims and the communities in which they lived--has given way to an expectation of neither remedies nor rights. Instead, injury victims claim that they seek to end the karmic cycle of pain and retaliation in this lifetime and in future reincarnations by adhering to Buddhist principles of forgiveness and selflessness. Yet the injury narratives also suggest that the absence of a remedy throbs like the pain of a missing limb. In the multiple perspectives so characteristic of the legal consciousness of ordinary Thai injury victims, the aspiration to religious virtue is at times coupled with an expression of unfairness and frustration, because the compensation that was formerly routine has now become more difficult to obtain. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the religiosity of forbearance is enhanced by the degree of unfairness the injury victims must virtuously accept.

When injury victims express unhappiness about the unavailability of a remedy, they do not use the language of rights nor refer to the law. They are no longer impelled by community pressure to seek compensation, and they do not consider the law as an option when negotiations break down. Their concept of injustice, despite the sweeping effects of globalization in Thai society, does not appear to have been shaped by liberal legalism. To probe their understanding more fully, I asked each interviewee to describe in general terms an example of injustice [in Thai, khwaam mai pen tham] that they or someone they knew had encountered. Interviewees' examples of injustice were varied and sometimes unexpected. For Saengkam, injustice is illustrated by the inequality between the high cost of fertilizer and the low market price she receives for her rice and vegetables. For Banchaa, injustice is illustrated on the highway when big cars cut off motorcycles. Several interviewees said that injustice was exemplified by a dispute whose resolution left one party angry and dissatisfied, regardless of who was right or wrong. Justice, by contrast, is achieved only when both parties accept the outcome, regardless of the equities in the dispute. [FN24]

Responses of this kind suggest that the interviewees did not conceptualize justice and injustice in legalistic terms, or at least not in terms that map readily onto concepts of rights drawn from Western liberal legalism. The Thai term for justice, khwaam pen tham, derives from the word dhamma or dharma, which is rooted in traditional Hindu-Buddhist thought. Khwam pen tham, or dharma, refers to a cosmic law of existence governing all substances and beings in the universe according to their intrinsic nature. It is very broad, comprising the law of gravity as well as the law of torts. Dharma implies that cosmic rules will eventually produce appropriate results for virtuous acts and for acts lacking in virtue (Lingat 1973, 3-4; Engel 1978, 65).

[FN23]. DMC is an abbreviation for Dhammakaya Media Channel.

[FN24]. Compare the Tibetan emphasis on complete agreement and acceptance of an outcome by both parties in a dispute (French 1995).