“If geography is an inadequate criterion with which to define Asia, can religion be seen as playing a unifying role? Animism – a patchwork of beliefs and worships dedicated to the dead, household Gods, and nature spirits – is omnipresent in rural Asia and has permeated the popular form of Taoism also practiced by modern city-dwellers. There exists an awe of the spirit world, and of the soothsayers and shamans who make conact with the beyond. …By and large, this mosaic of pantheistic beliefs has given Asia a high degree of spiritual tolerance, for the monotheistic religions have gained little ground here. The chief characteristic of Asian religious observance is the fact that an assortment of different beliefs can coexist within the mind of each individual, due to the way in which successive strata of religious influence have been superimposed on top of one another, ranging from the many different forms of Hindu Buddhism, through the successive schools of Confucianism, to the more recent arrivals of Islam and Christianity. Governments periodically contributed to this process: imperial China, for example, was instrumental in bringing Confucianism to the Vietnamese farmers by dressing it in what were, for them, the more evocative robes and rituals of Buddhism. Imperial Japan built up the Shinto faith, the personal cult of the Emperor, which also drew on Taoism, creating a system of national observance superimposed upon an assortment of existing beliefs.”
From “The New Asian Renaissance”, by Francois Godement
-Saturday Morning-
I wake to a whole weekend away from work, two entire days where I’m not obliged to be at the office. Call it an early karmic tax return, but I now have 48 hours of free time to kill in Bangkok….
I meet the Colombo crew and Sarah at the hotel’s breakfast buffet and after a brief meal we depart for a morning full of temple viewing and river boat rides. Bangkok is bordered on its west side by the Chao Phraya river, and a slew of luxury hotels line the docks on both banks of the river. The Grand Palace and a number of legendary temples, prominent focal points of Thai culture, are also located along the river, and every day countless boats take thousands of people across the water to these powerful Buddhist pilgrimage places. Sarah, Nicola, Carryl & I caught an elevated train from the hotel to the east bank of the river, and then hopped on a long-tail motor boat that delivered us after a pleasant but choppy 15 minute cruise to Wat Arun Ratchawaram, a Grand Royal Temple built in honor of the Thai King Rama II.
Wat Arun is designed as a stupa, but unlike the Buddhist stupas I’ve seen in India and Nepal, which have been beaten down by centuries of monsoon rains into little more than grass-covered brick mounds, this stupa rises up to spear the sky in a series of what I could only call carved towers or decorated minarets. What makes Wat Arun so stunningly unique is that these towers are inlaid with what seems like a million intricately decorated porcelain plates, which cover every exposed surface, and gives the entire temple an elaborately pieced-together Chinaware surface. Statues of mythical beings from the Buddhist cosmology stare down at you behind big plate-glass eyes, and as you circle through the stupa up a series of dangerously steep stairs, you find yourself tucked into triangular inlets and narrow paths. We ascended, did a circuit or two, and left after just a few minutes.
In retrospect, I imagine Wat Arun to be designed as some sort of 3-dimensional porcelain mandala, that invites pilgrims in, inflicts its thousand glossed reflections upon your eyes, and then pushes you through its corridors as others file in behind you… I’ve been to Mecca, and circled the Kaaba with thousands of Muslim pilgrims, and this structure had a similar kind circuit rhythm inbuilt as to the pace at which people filed in and out…After departing from the Wat Arun complex, we took a ferry across the river and headed to Wat Po, the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. This temple completely blew my mind. I was expecting a Buddha statue lying horizontally on a podium, his head propped up with a hand, and with his body laid out like a man reading on the floor. I had seen pictures of the statue before but none of them offered any perspective as to its actual dimensions. What we found at the Temple of the Reclining Buddha was a gold Buddha about the size of a house. This statue was HUGE.
The temple was roughly the size of my high school gymnasium, and this statue took up a length about the size of a basketball court. As you filed into the temple, the human traffic guided you in a circuit around the statue, which you only see if you crane your neck upwards to view the Buddha looming above, gazing indirectly at the earth. It’s a surreal place. Surrounding the main statue were small altars erected all around his form, comprised of collection boxes, burning candles, incense sticks, and smaller figures, all gilded offerings paying homage to larger Buddha presence. You make your way towards his feet, which are the size of Queen size beds, and are then ushered around the other side, where you see the back of his legs and spine. Pillars along this temple wall are lined with a series of donation bowls. A money changer offers you coins for any bills you wish to break, and provides you with a bowl, filled to the brim with small-value coins. You deposit a few coins in each donation bowl as you make your way towards the Buddha’s head, and by the time you’ve arrived at the temple opening, you’ve offered up dozens of coins to this Buddha, who is said to bestow prosperity and peace upon devotees who honor him. I could use some prosperity and peace in my life, and I’m not beyond endorsing a little well-intended idolatry if it’ll bring such elusive blessings into my life. We all receive our karmic dues eventually, don’t we?
Gold-leaf Bodhisattvas in rooms of Mother-of PearlTranscendental Truths Sealed Inside A Samsara World
Encompassed in these statues exits a universe of historical wealth
The center of gravity of certain societies sits upon their spiritual health…
After Wat Po, we walked a few blocks northward to the sprawling complex of the Grand Palace. We must’ve walked a few hundred meters along the Palace’s high barrier walls before finding the lone entrance dedicated to the thousands of tourists intent on paying homage to the Thai kingdom’s most famous artifact, the legendary Emerald Buddha.
The story of this particular statue dates back to the year 1434, when a Buddhist abbot at a monastery in Chiang Rai discovered that one of the life-size Buddha statues had a few pieces of paint missing from its nose, which revealed a strange green glow from beneath it. After more paint flaked off, the statue was polished, to reveal not a plaster Buddha at all, as it had been thought to be, but an image carved from one solid block of green jade. The origin of this statue was a mystery, and over subsequent centuries, it became a priceless and powerful symbolic talisman of the Thai kingdom. As a consequence of several wars, the statue changed hands a few times, and for a little over 200 years was appropriated to Laos, until a victorious Thai army captured it and returned it to Bangkok in 1778. The Grand Palace was constructed in 1782, in part to create an adequate resting place, the Royal Monastery, to house this profound statue. There is sits today, on an elevated altar, at a central location in the palace complex. To see it you must remove your shoes, and enter into a hall filled with gilded statues and the most elaborate gold altar I’ve ever seen. The Emerald Buddha does not have the same overwhelming size as some of the other statues we saw today, but it does exert a definite gravitational pull, and it looms high above the hordes of people offering authentic prayers to this Buddha in the Royal Monastrey. The scene at the temple was powerfully reminiscent of a visit to a religious building that houses a relic, as such articles of faith are often cornerstones of people’s belief systems. This statue and the complex it lies within are not to be missed when visiting Bangkok, and even though this was my second visit in 4 years, I was still overwhelmed by the grace, elegance, and the refined Mahayana decadence of the Grand Palace.
Buddha Bling – gold plated terraces and white plaster elephants
Mausoleums of dead kings and murals narrating Ramakien elements
Galleries and guest houses for visiting heads of state
Manicured trees amidst armed statuesque protectors laying in wait
Power is only as potent as the structures it erects-
In this complex, spiritual and material energies overlap & intersect…
Floating piers on murky brown water
Odoriferous dried fish and a day that gets progressively hotter
We get lost after the palace, disoriented and distracted –
Portraits of sun-drunk folks who’ve had presumptions refracted
Reframed
Refocused
We seek out a quiet meal
We stumble across a spot and feast for a steal…
After being turned away by the legendary Oriental Hotel for not having appropriate attire (!!!), we ate out our lunch at a small restaurant we found tucked into an alley, sitting at a garden-terrace table beneath an overarching tree and a few slow buzzing electric fans. The restaurant was a quiet little place decorated with tropical vines and hanging flowers, and the food was fantastic. We ate a spectrum of spicy and compelling Thai cuisine, and finished up with a dessert of mango slices and sticky rice, as well as fried bananas over coconut ice cream… ahhh… all in all, a sweet ending to a seemingly stretched morning…
We spent the evening at Khaosan road again. I bought a few trinkets and a t-shirt or two for friends, and drank some MaeKong Whisky, a local distillation that actually stands up well to its overpriced English and American cousins. I pretty much give my stamp of approval to any country that manages to turn out good Whiskey….
We made it home right before midnight after a misguided and rather hectic tuk tuk race instigated by one of my traveling companions. Jesus Mary Joseph Allah & Buddha, thank you for letting me survive that little drag race through Bangkok traffic… I’ve seen too many rickshaw & baby taxi accidents in my day, so riding fast on a three-wheeled motor scooter filled with 4 intoxicated people isn’t really high on my list of cheap thrills. Damn I sound like a wuss, but man, I've got too much to live for… like tomorrow for instance, and a shopping spree at the Sunday Market…
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