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Of Thai Temples
Prologue:
Thailand is Yann Tiersen, dog shit, and groves of rubber trees, their thin bark echoing of eternal fearful symmetry.
The smell of dog excrement plagues my nose wherever I and it goes; my nose is not sufficiently blocked – I can still smell Tom Yum (pungent tang of lemon grass rioting in my nose, no I am not hungry) at temples. It’s funny because I am now a “Spice Girl”, according to Pi Wit.
The Characters:
Achan Pattana: Our feisty mentor, who is steeped in Thai Buddhist knowledge. He has an excellent sense of humor, sometimes, at the expense of his students!
Jack: The creator of the Jack series of jokes, Jack is the resident go-to-guy for Chinese Mahayana Buddhism. His enthusiasm is contagious.
Michelle: The ‘mannenizer’ of the group and financial comptroller. She has all of us in her pocket-book of funds.
Anisha: Perpetually subjected to illnesses and ailments of every kind. The poor girl is in charge of the Thailand leg and tries her best to give everyone more shopping time!
William: The ‘playboy’ of the group, a.k.a the womanizer. Who he ‘womanizes’ exactly, I do not know. He is Ratter’s father and care-taker and is the funniest when he’s intoxicated.
Elvis: Is exactly like his name-sake. Perhaps funnier than William when he’s drunk. Thinks that Obama is a monk. Also has multiple flings with the Indian girls on the trip, despite being racist!!
Yean Chert: Often said to be the wolf-in-sheep’s clothing. His peaceful demeanour is deceiving!
Ratter: Ratter is a ratter. He is strange and vile, but I am being very biased so please forgive my harsh words. He is a bottomless pit when it comes to food and rejoices, audibly, when there are free things involved. Simply put, he has 0 social skills and we spent most of the trip trying to teach him how to be human.
Li Yue: Karaoke queen and Welfare IC. She is chirpy and always there for the team!
Jie Hui: The target of Ratter’s affections. (I would add more descriptors in but I think this is funny enough!)
Swati: Has her accent made fun of by Elvis repeatedly. Everyone’s bitching partner, especially when it comes to affairs of the Ratter. She is vegetarian, which only proves her tenacity in meat-filled places!
Huixian: is the BOSS, according to her latest Facebook quiz. She is no-nonsense and straight-forward.
Sleeping to Dream of Temples and Temple Grounds
Of temples and their officious gold trimmings and trappings that scream “TOURISTS COME HERE”, I cannot say much. Visiting over ten of them has numbed me to whatever true and honest intentions they had in providing migrants and believers a place of respite, a place of order. I feel constantly assaulted by the sheer commodification of the religion, the fact that there is a desperate stench of wanting to preserve and propagate it, using any means possible. Is this an unorthodox way of continuing orthodoxy? I do not know.
“You see this long Naga here? Thai temples have the naga because they symbolize good luck,” our plump guide tells us. Pi (Thai for “brother”, not Phi, because that means ‘ghost’) Wit gestures towards the serpentine creatures, pointing out the way they slither down the stairway, blending in with the architecture as though they could not belong any where else.
And I am overcome with the urge to stroke these long naga, to imbue myself with the luck they promise. If these people, and their descendants, still believed in the supernatural powers these inanimate objects possessed, who am I to argue with years of ancient history? I reach out to touch the head of one of them, but stop before I do so. I notice the fading gold flakes on its head, the slightly dull lustre of blue, red, yellow and green – worn from repeated love and respect. Should I let my own reverence for their magical powers and their cowed heads slowly chafe away their already softened glory? If there is hesitation, it is only for a moment, as I gingerly swipe my hand over a horn, a pair of eyes, the long slender neck in a quick singular movement.
Thai temples are like the 7-11s of religiosity in Thailand – they occur anywhere and everywhere, and even in the deepest of darkest forest, you will find a temple hidden somewhere. While it is disconcerting for me, to be faced with such religious ferocity, an utmost blasé attitude towards offering incense ad the bowing of heads, it is obviously comforting for the millions of Thai people – Buddhist people – in the forgotten corners of the country.
These temples symbolize not only a religious meeting place, but a place of economic stability. Achan (Thai for ‘teacher’) Pattana uses the term “religious market place” whenever he describes the bustling scene inside and outside the temple; an exchange, a transaction, bartering of goods for goodwill. I admit that I am more interested in the small roadside stalls, with their cackling vendors rather than the silent stupas that loom from above.
I am tempted to purchase some of their wares, even a bottle of water would do, but I am pulled away by the group (who, at the first temple of the day, are raring to explore the grounds of) before I can buy a skewer of mystery meat.
We are at Wat Chalong, Chalong being the town that it’s situated in, and any of Singapore’s Wats, temples, cower beside the sheer size of it. And it is not the largest temple in Thailand. For a moment, I am awed at the sight of towering stupas, It is hard to imagine that there are relics, to use the term loosely because any of value was a relic to poor villagers and greedy tomb raiders, in every single one of these stupas in all the temples we visited.
Quiz time, Achan says, asking the group what the main difference is between the Thai Buddhist temples in Singapore and Thailand. It is only till much later, at our second or third temple, that we find out that Thailand’s Buddhist temples have a columbarium on the temple grounds. Columbarium or crematorium, we get the words mixed up, because death means the same thing to us city-folk. We use the terms interchangeable, we use them incorrectly.
The second temple we visit, sits far apart from Wat Chalong in terms of both location and architecture. Wat Thamanai, in Suanmok, is a forest monastery of sorts. Mixing together animism and Buddhism, the temple grounds are a five minutes walk (slowly, steadily) from the main gate – a rusty affair of metal wrung together. We slather on insect repellent before we cross the threshold, only to discover that mosquitoes will feast on us with or without it.
The monk we are supposed to meet, I never caught his name, comes after five minutes of the group wandering around the reception area. We are more interested in the wild chickens and roosters rather than the monastics. Maybe ‘we’ is generalizing, I really mean me.
Monk M was from Bangkok. Brought up as a boy breathing the asphalt and fumes from where rubber hits tarmac, and who will probably die as an old man, breathing in cigarette smoke and chewing on betel nuts. I look at him and I feel it in my gut that he will leave the monastic life after his tenure as a monk, and return to city-life. Refreshed, ready to be dirtied all over again. Why do I know this? Indeed, he has extended his initial two year trial to four years. Does that not indicate a certain affinity towards a life that is much simpler? There is something in his demeanour, probably in the way he talks about his life as a TV producer, that does not align itself with the serene and selfish way other forest monks conduct themselves with.
Perhaps ‘selfish’ is too strong a word to use, but it is a fact that forest monks are one of the most self-centred people in the world. They live for themselves and themselves alone. So the way that M and Wat Thamanai try to make Buddhism more appealing to youngsters, strikes me as hugely hypocritical on their part. Of course, M knows that he is being unorthodox when he tells us that he tries to incorporate aesthetics and art into Buddhist teachings. He has attachments, and he is not afraid to admit that. Thai Buddhism is at most, a “good, ideal environment” for him to seek refuge.
He speaks of the ‘middle path’. Most of these forest monks speak of a ‘balanced’ life, walking down the ‘middle path’ and not seeking either extreme. But to me, this layman ignorant of even the larger Buddhist tenets, I find that their lifestyle is extreme. It is a matter of relativity and this relationship between self and other, in a ascetic world, strays too far from my middle path.
My guidebook says that Wat Thamanai combines both spiritual and philosophical Buddhism together; M does not make any mention of the spiritual, animistic aspect of Buddhism. I languor in the heat and insects. We are made to trek up to a small hill, which is a 20 minute sweaty affair. My fat legs cannot take the strain and I pause every 200 metres to catch my breath, and reattach a new pair of feet. Walking uphill is not easy, and with my camera bag and body weight, I am struggling to keep up.
If it is spiritual, then the sneaky presence of it’s founder, Achan Buddhadhasa that evokes a sense of otherworldliness. We finally make it up to his burial ground. It is an unkempt place (we later get more acquainted with unkemptness) with hordes of mosquitoes and other biting things that await us. I fight hard against the urge to just kill them all, my hands itching to swat and squash them. Ratter tries to ward the insects off by waving his tub of tiger balm around wordlessly. I would like a tub of something to ward him off, I think as he silently tries to offer everyone a wave of tiger balm. But of course, no one gets it because we do not understand his silent gestures. They are lost in the oppressing silence of the forest.
From this point on, I stop taking notes with my pen and start relying on my camera. After all, doesn’t a picture tell a thousand words? While walking back down to an art gallery and meditation hall, we are accompanied by a pair of temple dogs, gambolling about in the sun. They annoy me to a certain extent; their carefree nature offends me. M brings us to the meditation hall where a large class of Thai students are meditating. We are told to enter, quietly, and we do so gladly to get out of the heat.
What greets our eyes are peculiar murals on the walls, beams of the building. Jesus Christ eschewing Buddhist sayings, the Big 5 under the assault of nuclear warheads, a million breeds of dogs running around the pillars in muted colours. It is very un-Buddhist, if you take in account every stereotypical Buddhist symbol there is; almost blasphemous, really. But it is very tongue-in-cheek, yet taking itself so seriously at the same time that I cannot help but give these murals a second look. Hidden in a corner of the forest, in a cool, dim building are secret works of art. A group of us cluster around M, who tells us more about the paintings. A few others walk around with Pi Wit as he chuckles along with us. I walk, for the most part, alone because it is the only time when I can get away from the buzzing of insects.
In contrast, Wat Mahatat in Central Bangkok is everything that these provincial Wats aren’t. It is the ultimate syncretisation of Sino-Thai elements: lipsticked stone gate-keepers mingling about with demons from the Ramayana. Of course I am caught by surprise: the only Buddhist thing about this temple is the gigantic reclining Buddha in the central hall, and a gathering of monks by the back gate. Otherwise, I feel completely at home, with it’s Chinese deities and bodhisattvas adorning every corner of the temple grounds. Adorn is the correct word here, because these statues are kept meticulous by some invisible care-taker.
At Wat Bowon, we purchase tickets – fully paid for, much to the joy of Ratter – to see the museum and the Emerald Buddha. I had always imagined the Emerald Buddha as a massive jade monument, something like the previous reclining Buddha, but in a more subdued and refined size. So imagine my slight amusement when I realize that the Emerald Buddha is smaller than I am. That said, it’s probably hard enough to find a block of jade that size – let alone the size I had imagined it to be. The hall that it sits in, quietly dressed in it’s summer clothes to keep out the humidity the monsoon brings, is filled with people. Farangs prostrate themselves with the locals who might have travelled miles from their hometowns to pay respect to this symbol of royal and religious power.
I buy two guidebooks, one English and one Japanese (which will take me three times the time to read it), 200 baht each. They too, like the temple, are gold. I hold them in my hands for a while; I can smell the plastic-paper they’re printed on, it smells.
At night, I dream of boisterous garuda flapping their wings as they attack the naga, who try to seek refuge by pretending to blend in with the stairways and rooftops. Confused, the bird-like creatures cease and desist, only to perch forevermore on the tips of roofs as they wait for the naga to move again.
Note: Have yet to process most of the photos so, it's pretty picture-less for now!
Thailand is Yann Tiersen, dog shit, and groves of rubber trees, their thin bark echoing of eternal fearful symmetry.
The smell of dog excrement plagues my nose wherever I and it goes; my nose is not sufficiently blocked – I can still smell Tom Yum (pungent tang of lemon grass rioting in my nose, no I am not hungry) at temples. It’s funny because I am now a “Spice Girl”, according to Pi Wit.
The Characters:
Achan Pattana: Our feisty mentor, who is steeped in Thai Buddhist knowledge. He has an excellent sense of humor, sometimes, at the expense of his students!
Jack: The creator of the Jack series of jokes, Jack is the resident go-to-guy for Chinese Mahayana Buddhism. His enthusiasm is contagious.
Michelle: The ‘mannenizer’ of the group and financial comptroller. She has all of us in her pocket-book of funds.
Anisha: Perpetually subjected to illnesses and ailments of every kind. The poor girl is in charge of the Thailand leg and tries her best to give everyone more shopping time!
William: The ‘playboy’ of the group, a.k.a the womanizer. Who he ‘womanizes’ exactly, I do not know. He is Ratter’s father and care-taker and is the funniest when he’s intoxicated.
Elvis: Is exactly like his name-sake. Perhaps funnier than William when he’s drunk. Thinks that Obama is a monk. Also has multiple flings with the Indian girls on the trip, despite being racist!!
Yean Chert: Often said to be the wolf-in-sheep’s clothing. His peaceful demeanour is deceiving!
Ratter: Ratter is a ratter. He is strange and vile, but I am being very biased so please forgive my harsh words. He is a bottomless pit when it comes to food and rejoices, audibly, when there are free things involved. Simply put, he has 0 social skills and we spent most of the trip trying to teach him how to be human.
Li Yue: Karaoke queen and Welfare IC. She is chirpy and always there for the team!
Jie Hui: The target of Ratter’s affections. (I would add more descriptors in but I think this is funny enough!)
Swati: Has her accent made fun of by Elvis repeatedly. Everyone’s bitching partner, especially when it comes to affairs of the Ratter. She is vegetarian, which only proves her tenacity in meat-filled places!
Huixian: is the BOSS, according to her latest Facebook quiz. She is no-nonsense and straight-forward.
Of temples and their officious gold trimmings and trappings that scream “TOURISTS COME HERE”, I cannot say much. Visiting over ten of them has numbed me to whatever true and honest intentions they had in providing migrants and believers a place of respite, a place of order. I feel constantly assaulted by the sheer commodification of the religion, the fact that there is a desperate stench of wanting to preserve and propagate it, using any means possible. Is this an unorthodox way of continuing orthodoxy? I do not know.
“You see this long Naga here? Thai temples have the naga because they symbolize good luck,” our plump guide tells us. Pi (Thai for “brother”, not Phi, because that means ‘ghost’) Wit gestures towards the serpentine creatures, pointing out the way they slither down the stairway, blending in with the architecture as though they could not belong any where else.
And I am overcome with the urge to stroke these long naga, to imbue myself with the luck they promise. If these people, and their descendants, still believed in the supernatural powers these inanimate objects possessed, who am I to argue with years of ancient history? I reach out to touch the head of one of them, but stop before I do so. I notice the fading gold flakes on its head, the slightly dull lustre of blue, red, yellow and green – worn from repeated love and respect. Should I let my own reverence for their magical powers and their cowed heads slowly chafe away their already softened glory? If there is hesitation, it is only for a moment, as I gingerly swipe my hand over a horn, a pair of eyes, the long slender neck in a quick singular movement.
Thai temples are like the 7-11s of religiosity in Thailand – they occur anywhere and everywhere, and even in the deepest of darkest forest, you will find a temple hidden somewhere. While it is disconcerting for me, to be faced with such religious ferocity, an utmost blasé attitude towards offering incense ad the bowing of heads, it is obviously comforting for the millions of Thai people – Buddhist people – in the forgotten corners of the country.
These temples symbolize not only a religious meeting place, but a place of economic stability. Achan (Thai for ‘teacher’) Pattana uses the term “religious market place” whenever he describes the bustling scene inside and outside the temple; an exchange, a transaction, bartering of goods for goodwill. I admit that I am more interested in the small roadside stalls, with their cackling vendors rather than the silent stupas that loom from above.
I am tempted to purchase some of their wares, even a bottle of water would do, but I am pulled away by the group (who, at the first temple of the day, are raring to explore the grounds of) before I can buy a skewer of mystery meat.
We are at Wat Chalong, Chalong being the town that it’s situated in, and any of Singapore’s Wats, temples, cower beside the sheer size of it. And it is not the largest temple in Thailand. For a moment, I am awed at the sight of towering stupas, It is hard to imagine that there are relics, to use the term loosely because any of value was a relic to poor villagers and greedy tomb raiders, in every single one of these stupas in all the temples we visited.
Quiz time, Achan says, asking the group what the main difference is between the Thai Buddhist temples in Singapore and Thailand. It is only till much later, at our second or third temple, that we find out that Thailand’s Buddhist temples have a columbarium on the temple grounds. Columbarium or crematorium, we get the words mixed up, because death means the same thing to us city-folk. We use the terms interchangeable, we use them incorrectly.
The second temple we visit, sits far apart from Wat Chalong in terms of both location and architecture. Wat Thamanai, in Suanmok, is a forest monastery of sorts. Mixing together animism and Buddhism, the temple grounds are a five minutes walk (slowly, steadily) from the main gate – a rusty affair of metal wrung together. We slather on insect repellent before we cross the threshold, only to discover that mosquitoes will feast on us with or without it.
The monk we are supposed to meet, I never caught his name, comes after five minutes of the group wandering around the reception area. We are more interested in the wild chickens and roosters rather than the monastics. Maybe ‘we’ is generalizing, I really mean me.
Monk M was from Bangkok. Brought up as a boy breathing the asphalt and fumes from where rubber hits tarmac, and who will probably die as an old man, breathing in cigarette smoke and chewing on betel nuts. I look at him and I feel it in my gut that he will leave the monastic life after his tenure as a monk, and return to city-life. Refreshed, ready to be dirtied all over again. Why do I know this? Indeed, he has extended his initial two year trial to four years. Does that not indicate a certain affinity towards a life that is much simpler? There is something in his demeanour, probably in the way he talks about his life as a TV producer, that does not align itself with the serene and selfish way other forest monks conduct themselves with.
Perhaps ‘selfish’ is too strong a word to use, but it is a fact that forest monks are one of the most self-centred people in the world. They live for themselves and themselves alone. So the way that M and Wat Thamanai try to make Buddhism more appealing to youngsters, strikes me as hugely hypocritical on their part. Of course, M knows that he is being unorthodox when he tells us that he tries to incorporate aesthetics and art into Buddhist teachings. He has attachments, and he is not afraid to admit that. Thai Buddhism is at most, a “good, ideal environment” for him to seek refuge.
He speaks of the ‘middle path’. Most of these forest monks speak of a ‘balanced’ life, walking down the ‘middle path’ and not seeking either extreme. But to me, this layman ignorant of even the larger Buddhist tenets, I find that their lifestyle is extreme. It is a matter of relativity and this relationship between self and other, in a ascetic world, strays too far from my middle path.
My guidebook says that Wat Thamanai combines both spiritual and philosophical Buddhism together; M does not make any mention of the spiritual, animistic aspect of Buddhism. I languor in the heat and insects. We are made to trek up to a small hill, which is a 20 minute sweaty affair. My fat legs cannot take the strain and I pause every 200 metres to catch my breath, and reattach a new pair of feet. Walking uphill is not easy, and with my camera bag and body weight, I am struggling to keep up.
If it is spiritual, then the sneaky presence of it’s founder, Achan Buddhadhasa that evokes a sense of otherworldliness. We finally make it up to his burial ground. It is an unkempt place (we later get more acquainted with unkemptness) with hordes of mosquitoes and other biting things that await us. I fight hard against the urge to just kill them all, my hands itching to swat and squash them. Ratter tries to ward the insects off by waving his tub of tiger balm around wordlessly. I would like a tub of something to ward him off, I think as he silently tries to offer everyone a wave of tiger balm. But of course, no one gets it because we do not understand his silent gestures. They are lost in the oppressing silence of the forest.
From this point on, I stop taking notes with my pen and start relying on my camera. After all, doesn’t a picture tell a thousand words? While walking back down to an art gallery and meditation hall, we are accompanied by a pair of temple dogs, gambolling about in the sun. They annoy me to a certain extent; their carefree nature offends me. M brings us to the meditation hall where a large class of Thai students are meditating. We are told to enter, quietly, and we do so gladly to get out of the heat.
What greets our eyes are peculiar murals on the walls, beams of the building. Jesus Christ eschewing Buddhist sayings, the Big 5 under the assault of nuclear warheads, a million breeds of dogs running around the pillars in muted colours. It is very un-Buddhist, if you take in account every stereotypical Buddhist symbol there is; almost blasphemous, really. But it is very tongue-in-cheek, yet taking itself so seriously at the same time that I cannot help but give these murals a second look. Hidden in a corner of the forest, in a cool, dim building are secret works of art. A group of us cluster around M, who tells us more about the paintings. A few others walk around with Pi Wit as he chuckles along with us. I walk, for the most part, alone because it is the only time when I can get away from the buzzing of insects.
In contrast, Wat Mahatat in Central Bangkok is everything that these provincial Wats aren’t. It is the ultimate syncretisation of Sino-Thai elements: lipsticked stone gate-keepers mingling about with demons from the Ramayana. Of course I am caught by surprise: the only Buddhist thing about this temple is the gigantic reclining Buddha in the central hall, and a gathering of monks by the back gate. Otherwise, I feel completely at home, with it’s Chinese deities and bodhisattvas adorning every corner of the temple grounds. Adorn is the correct word here, because these statues are kept meticulous by some invisible care-taker.
At Wat Bowon, we purchase tickets – fully paid for, much to the joy of Ratter – to see the museum and the Emerald Buddha. I had always imagined the Emerald Buddha as a massive jade monument, something like the previous reclining Buddha, but in a more subdued and refined size. So imagine my slight amusement when I realize that the Emerald Buddha is smaller than I am. That said, it’s probably hard enough to find a block of jade that size – let alone the size I had imagined it to be. The hall that it sits in, quietly dressed in it’s summer clothes to keep out the humidity the monsoon brings, is filled with people. Farangs prostrate themselves with the locals who might have travelled miles from their hometowns to pay respect to this symbol of royal and religious power.
I buy two guidebooks, one English and one Japanese (which will take me three times the time to read it), 200 baht each. They too, like the temple, are gold. I hold them in my hands for a while; I can smell the plastic-paper they’re printed on, it smells.
At night, I dream of boisterous garuda flapping their wings as they attack the naga, who try to seek refuge by pretending to blend in with the stairways and rooftops. Confused, the bird-like creatures cease and desist, only to perch forevermore on the tips of roofs as they wait for the naga to move again.
Note: Have yet to process most of the photos so, it's pretty picture-less for now!