my favorite parts of thailand: forest wots and tunnels

My first day in Thailand I had to kill some time while my sister was teaching at the university, so I went to a forest wot down the street from where my sister lives.

The name of it escapes me now, but I'm sure Heidi can fill me in the next time she is reading my blog.

At any rate, in retrospect, it was my favorite of all the temples that I visited in Thailand, owing mainly to the fact that it lacked anything covered in gold, was relatively abandoned on the afternoon I visited, and had a lake, by which I could sit and ponder to my heart's content, while feeding the mysterious monster-like fish (below) living in its depths with a bucket of fish pellets helpfully provided by the temple's monks (for, of course, a small donation of 10 baht).



Several of the trees at the wot were adorned with pieces of cloth and sticks. I thought perhaps that anthropomorphizing things like trees and dogs, who all seemed to be wearing odd scraps of fabric, even the strays, was a kind of Thai ritual.

But, I asked the monk during monk chat, and he said that the sticks, leaned up against the aging tree trucks, had to do with supporting the longevity of relatives. And I'm still unclear what the cloth is for, but I saw it on trees all over Thailand, so I'll assume it was important.





The temple also had a series of dark tunnels, supposedly carved out in the 13th century by monks, but which were renovated or finished or perhaps actually started in the late 19th century.

The tunnels were nice, and in the darkness one could sit and stare at faintly lit Buddha statues and light candles without feeling too much like a tourist, as they were mostly abandoned by all, except some of the local wildlife.

Above the tunnels, there was a large outside temple, half-forgotten on a patch of scrubby grass surrounded by sloping woods.

I walked around it for a little while, and sat on the stone wall behind it before lighting several candles, which I think I wrongly approached from the perspective of someone who typically only lights candles on birthdays, or when motivated by the opulence of stained glass windows in Catholic cathedrals.

Still, I watched the flame flicker and blow in the wind, and garnered the kind of satisfaction that must signify a kind of faith in a larger unknown forces from watching the fire spark back to life after almost being extinguished several times.

I also felt compelled to take a picture of this flower, which was growing out of the temples rock face. I'm not sure what it meant, if anything at all, but I liked it on the most basic of aesthetic levels.



The temple also had what seemed to be a junk heap of broken Buddha statues and other kinds of mislaid relics. On a small scale it looked kind of what I imagine a city ravaged by war might look like, but it was also kind of serene, to see the pieces of holy things, broken and misshapen, all collected together in one place, not wasted or forgotten, but revered still.



The last thing that I did before leaving was wander through the temple's museum. I seem to remember reading something in a travel guide about the art having been painted by the temple's monks.

It was vastly different from art I would expect monks to have created. While some of it looked appropriately Buddhist, others looked like murals that could have been painted on Guam, or included references to Christianity, which I honestly couldn't tell if they were ironic or not.

My favorite two images were a painting of a wheel, which so completely reminded me of tarot that I had to take a picture of it, and an image (below) that I think proves even monks watch Battlestar Galactica. (That's sort of a joke).