Said Saputra in an interview last Tuesday. “I thought, since I wasn’t playing it and I could be gone, why not do it in another country?”

He said he had a great idea and came to Thailand to discuss it with Chidas. After arriving, Chidas said Saputra took a lot of time to convince him — and another person, one of his friends — that being a Buddhist priest was a good idea.

“I did an interview with a Thai newspaper in May where someone put me on a pedestal in front of the editor and talked about how great I was,” Saputra said. “If I didn’t like this person I should have stayed in my country.”

Then Saputra said that “a long time later I got a phone call from [Johan] Vanthio, then [prime minister Prayut] Jaa’s chief of staff. He was like, ‘Hey you should come by and visit the Nippon Zen Center in Bangkok.’ ”

Chidas had met Saputra earlier in the year at a Zen conference where they had talked about how the Mahayana Buddhist Buddhist tradition teaches that there’s “no time for idle pleasures” and that there are no “false gods,” or spirits, who trick people into thinking they’re doing good deeds.

In the same interview, Chidas said Saputra’s own family was averse to the idea of a priest. He told Saputra his family did not want him to travel to Thailand.

“The only one who understood that this would be a bad idea — he was my friend — and he could make a difference was Vanthio,” Saputra said, describing Vanthio as a well-respected Zen teacher and a close friend. “He knew how he could bring it about, but he wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was.”

Saputra was to remain with Vanthio, who was in charge of the religious affairs in the government-dominated, Buddhist-dominated, northern part of Thailand. According to Saputra, Vanthio, then 55, persuaded Saputra that the idea of a Zen monk serving in a position of power was a good one.

By then, Saputra’s friend had been appointed as Thailand’s state Buddhist monk, or jigdha, which means monk in the Vietnamese language and translates loosely as priest-in-charge of the