The mid-fifties were the climactic years of the countrywide sponsorship of meditation by Wat Mahāthāt. It represented an impulsion generated from the capital, which, as the radial center of the country, attempted to spread a religious renewal to the periphery, to the various provinces that were thought to need a revitalization. We have seen that the monk who was at the center of this missionary drive, Phra Phimolatham, was the abbot of the country's largest wat. He was a titled monk holding a high position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and he incarnated the prestige of the established sangha in its self-assured authority and superiority over the wat distributed throughout the country. Phra Phimolatham was up to a point a scholar-monk, but not eminently or exclusively; he was an adept teacher and propagator of meditation without being a great meditation “master” or a dedicated ascetic and recluse on the path to arahantship. He was rather the urbane, eloquent, powerful cleric of the establishment, especially of the Mahānikāi sect – the largest in the country, the sect with which the great body of the nonaristocratic commoner population was affiliated, a sect of varied achievements and worldly attachments.

It is very much in line with this orientation that Phra Phimolatham's meditation drive was (and still is, under the leadership of Phra Thepsiddhimuni) addressed to both monks and the laity alike; in some respects, the latter has been the more important constituency. And it was for this reason that Prime Minister Sarit, aided and abetted by certain Thammayut-sect authorities, could construe it as more than simply “religious, ” as threateningly “political, ” in significance.