PATHUM THANI, THAILAND, December 20, 2016 (New York Times): HPI Note: This article worth reading for the shear scale and showmanship of the temple’s gatherings as shown in the article’s opening photograph.
It is a temple for a changing Thailand: clean, unadorned, high-tech and unashamed of praying for wealth. “Sit here and get rich,” read small medallions embedded in the floor under each white plastic chair in a vast, open-sided meditation center. In his sermons, the temple’s charismatic 72-year-old leader, Phra Dhammachayo, often exhorts his adherents, “Be rich, be rich, be rich!”
With its endorsement of worldly comforts and its no-nonsense approach to ritual, the temple, known as Wat Dhammakaya and the largest in Thailand, has attracted the allegiance of growing numbers of followers in a movement whose popularity has unsettled the government and the Buddhist hierarchy. The authorities have long tried to clip its wings, and for the past month the police have been threatening to arrest Phra Dhammachayo despite a warning by the temple that it would mobilize a human shield of chanting monks to protect him.
The charge against him is embezzlement, the latest of many accusations that stretch decades, while the top body of Buddhism has accused him of heresy. Last week, it stripped him of his title, though that does not seem to have threatened his status on the grounds of Wat Dhammakaya. The temple is the spiritual embodiment of the social and economic dislocations that have shaken Thailand. The economic boom of the 1980s created a well-to-do middle class for whom money-making rivaled Buddhist tradition as a core value. They needed something that brought the two together.
Much more at “source” above.