From the Orange Robe to the Mission Field: Mani Seangsuwan, the Buddhist Monk Who Became a Latter-day Saint Missionary in His Own Homeland (1973)

Mani Seangsuwan spent two years as a Buddhist monk, studying in the Wats of Bangkok and learning sacred techniques of self-mastery — control over every thought, action, and feeling. "As a monk, I was to teach self-mastery and show by example what true happiness was," he wrote. "However, despite the deep love that I had for the Thai people and Thai culture, I was haunted with feelings that there was still something missing in my life." He had become a monk precisely to find the answers that were eluding him.

The answer began to reach him through an LDS serviceman who told him about Jesus Christ and about young men in white shirts and ties who teach Christian beliefs. Three months later, Seangsuwan came across Baptist missionaries on a Bangkok street corner and walked right up to them in his orange robe to hear more about the Savior. He took a pamphlet back to the monastery, read it cautiously, then sent for a simplified Bible and studied it despite the dismay of the other monks. His reading convinced him he was not meant to remain a monk, and he left the monastery.

Some time later he found Mormon missionaries preaching near his bus stop. Aware that it was too public a place to be seen talking with Western preachers, he walked with them to a quiet spot. "As we walked the missionaries began to tell me the most wonderful story that I had ever heard," he recalled. "The gospel was something that made so much sense to me that I wished that my family and friends and even the people around me could hear what I was learning." He met the missionaries quietly on the bus and in a park near his cousin's home, and six months later he was baptized — on April 21, 1973, in a tub on a roof built to collect rainwater — knowing full well that his family would be appalled and his culture offended. "It was time for me to do something right," he said.

At 26 he was called to serve a full-time mission — in the Bangkok Thailand Mission, in his own homeland, facing people who had known him as a monk and felt betrayed. His monk's training in peace steadied him through insults and persecution, and his cultural fluency protected other missionaries from the mistakes that could gravely offend the Thai people. He later married in the temple, raised a family including two sons who served missions, translated general conference speeches into Thai for twenty years, served as a temple ordinance worker in the Ogden Utah Temple, and returned to Thailand with his wife on a second mission.

The improbability is unmistakable: there were roughly 200 members of the Church in Thailand when Seangsuwan joined; there were 15,000 when he and his wife returned from their mission. The fifth native Thai Latter-day Saint — a former Buddhist monk — became one of the bridges over which the restored gospel crossed into Thailand's Buddhist culture, a story documented in Reed B. Haslam's The Light Breaks on Southeast Asia and in Seangsuwan's own account, Monk to Missionary (assisted by Haslam). "I came here with $25 to go to school," Seangsuwan said of his later life in Utah. "My Heavenly Father helped me. Now the plan for me is to go back and serve him."