Sulak was chair of the Asian Cultural Forum on Development and has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, the University of Toronto, and Cornell.

[2] The grandson of a Chinese immigrant[3] whose surname was Lim and born into an affluent Teochew[4] Sino-Thai family,[5] Sulak Sivaraksa was educated at Assumption College in Bangkok and at the University of Wales, Lampeter,[6] where he is now an honorary fellow in Buddhism.

[9]: 199  Also in 1968, Sulak founded the Sathirakoses-Nagapradipa Foundation (SNF), which publishes "the intellectual successor" to Social Science Review and acts as an umbrella organization for a group of NGOs.

[9]: 204 The foreign contacts he made while in exile proved beneficial when Sivaraksa was arrested in 1984 for lèse majesté, causing international protests which pressured the government to release him.

Sivaraksa was again charged with lèse majesté in September 1991 after a talk he gave at Thammasat University about the repression of democracy in Thailand.

Sulak's comments were condemned by Somsri Hananantasuk, former Chairperson of Amnesty International Thailand, who said that such words could provoke violence.

Nonetheless, Sulak Sivaraksa's speeches and other writings discuss political and economic corruption in Thai government, universal ethics, and socially engaged Buddhism.

Some of Sivaraksa's most influential works include his autobiography, Loyalty Demands Dissent, as well as Seeds of Peace: A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society, and Conflict, Culture, Change: Engaged Buddhism in a Globalizing World.

[15] In a 2019 interview with The Isaan Record, Sulak expressed his disappointment with the government of Prayut Chan-o-cha, but saw great promise in the rise of new progressive parties.

His concern for social change as a religious matter moved him to found the Coordinating Group for Religion and Society (CGRS) in 1976, which included Buddhist men, but also students, women, Catholics, Muslims, and Protestants.

Sulak established a relationship with the World Council of Churches (WCC) and believed that there was much work to be done within society by Buddhists and Catholics together.

With growing concern about communism in Asia in the early-1960s, Sulak received funding in 1962 to promote a reform of Buddhism as an alternative means to social change.

[17]: 88 In a movement to modernize monasticism, Sulak began a group named sekhiyadhamma in order to increase social awareness among monks.

While Buddhadasa Bhikku advocated a theory of Dhammic socialism, Payutto's main focus in Buddhism was studying the original teachings of the Buddha and making them more applicable to the modern world.

[18]: 68  Sulak feels that these dimensions of religion lead to chauvinism and prejudice, so he believes humans must step away from these and focus on the basic teachings of the Buddha.

Sulak describes the three forms of violence according to the Buddha's teachings, "Every action has three doors, or three ways we create karma: through body, speech, and mind".