Street-fighting monks defrocked after dust-up

(From this morning's (Melbourne) Age newspaper (2nd June 2005):

BANGKOK. Five Thai Buddhist monks have been defrocked and fined after a brawl with monks from a nearby temple.

The street fight was the culmination of years of antagonism between monks from the two temples who had often exchanged curses, insults and rude gestures as they collected alms on different sides of the road. 'When an ordinary person is given a middle-finger sign, he will be mad. So am I,' one of the defrocked monks said after the brawl in the north-eastern state of Nong Khai yesterday.

Boonlert Boonpan said he usually carried a knuckle-duster in his shoulder-bag during the morning collections of alms on which Buddhist monks depend.

He and four other monks, all aged between 15 and 28, were each fined 1000 baht ($A32) by police for public brawling and were defrocked by senior monks.

Footnote: our son Paul wrote a book on The History of Buddhism in Australia (University of NSW Press), and got into trouble for mentioning the in-fighting that occurred between different Buddhist groups in Australia and the U.S.