This dissertation traces the transnational and local origins and the historical and intellectual development of a set of Buddhist activist networks in Thailand beginning in the 1960s up to the present. I argue that as a movement beginning in the mid-1960s, socially engaged Buddhism in Thailand emerged as a response to particular historical and political realities and represents a religious response to the upending of older models of society, brought on by the earlier onset of modernity and its resultant societal or structural suffering.