The Religious Impulse: That Pha Nom

All of life is religious, we say. Even if we claim to be irreligious, looking around our lives will result in us finding the iconography of the religious: neatly clipped lawns and Beemers in driveways are signs of the religious as well as churches with stained glass and crosses. I say this; I believe this; yet I still wasn’t prepared for the degree to which Buddhism is present in the Thai world. Orange-robed monks appear in the street every morning; they’re pictured on banners and billboards along the highway and in the city streets; our tuk-tuk driver had images of monks like trading cards pasted in the cab just above his head. In our trip across country yesterday, we saw one magnificent Buddhist university under construction and at passed at least two or three others, including one where boys with shaved heads sat taking instruction in an open-aired classroom. Yesterday, we stopped at a magnificent wat (temple) sponsored entirely by a famous Thai movie star and were served free pork noodle soup; across the road from our hotel in Mukdahan is a wat; there’s another up the street; we’re headed to see another more famous one 50 kilometers away.

As opposed to the US, where at least protestant ministers blend into society in a way that makes them almost indistinguishable from the average citizen, Buddhist monks are meant to be noticed, are subjects of conspicuous simplicity, if you will. I’m unclear as what all these monks do, though I know they direct religious rituals from birth to marriage to death. I also know they’re the object of charity. In Theravada Buddhism, the path to nirvana is not an easy one; one doesn’t simply take on another’s merit and “get in” in one life-cycle. No, in Theravada Buddhism, one is in it for the long haul, but monks are clearly out in front and the rest of us can better ourselves by blessing them.

I’m not sure whether I’m letting my understanding of the desert fathers impact me here, but thinking of these figures, of the posters and stickers, I’m struck with the idea of “athlete of God.” Clearly, these monks are meant to be thought of as out ahead of us on the path, capable of a type of living, a type of religion that means discipline and rigor, a lifestyle of which we as commoners are simply not capable. With this idea in mind, the iconography especially makes sense.

(To be fair, in Christianity, too, I’ve no doubt that some people “run with perseverance the race marked out” for them better than others. Yet there’s always this bizarre thing called grace, too, where someone can step out of the crowd right near the finish line and step across. Even as I look at this formulation, though, it seems cheap; I’m not sure the metaphor holds absolutely, here.)

And merit. Seeing them brings the idea of merit up close and personal, too. When someone is an athlete of transcendent proportions, mere mortals buy their shoes, get their autographs, saves their ticket stubs to any game where the player is in attendance. Why buy Air Jordans except to particate in the merit that somehow gets engrained into the shoe?

Again I know I’m cheapening something here, yet the view of monks as meritorious is in the atmosphere. Downstairs in our hotel is a pot with offerings of money tied to sticks; above the desk is a picture of the proprietors with an aged monk whose vision is clearly for the next life. Participation in merit.

It’s not very democratic, and that’s what makes me not distrust it. There’s something intensely undemocratic about life in Thailand, from the radically distinct class separation to this blatant acknowledgment of spiritual superiority evident in monastic life, and both of these admonitions seem more truthful than American pretensions equality that ignore real differences in people.

However, I’m also struck by the glaring dualisms in Buddhism. I’m unclear as to the role of the monks in daily life except as it relates to an otherworldly superstition. Passing these very clearly marked institutions of learning on our trip, clearly Thai Buddhism does keep a foot in this world as it applies to education, and there was the free food at the wat, too, though those who partook in that food were people of the means to travel outside of Bangkok by bus. However, I’m not convinced that an air of detachment is present in the open dumping that happens along the highway, the broken bottles that are strewn along the concrete steps down to the Mekong below our hotel, the legendary sexual abuse that happens in the underbelly of Bangkok.

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After two days here, of course, I know I’m making a snap judgment; I know that tremendous poverty is ripe for tremendous evil; I know that I have seen little of Buddhism but the surface, but first impressions do mean something.

Yesterday afternoon, we traveled to a famous or powerful wat, one that my mother-in-law told us we were “lucky” to have visited, since most people in Thailand never get to visit it. In terms of its beauty, it was significant if not overpowering. However, in terms of its practice, it was more overtly religious than any temple or shrine I have ever visited.

Around the outside of the shrine, people had set up all sort of shops to sell religious paraphernalia: bronzed figures of monks to keep in your pocket; lotus flowers; birds in cages, turtles in tubs and eels in bags that could be released for good luck. This outside the outer walls of the shrine; the inner courtyard of the shrine was a raised tile floor on which you had to remove your shoes; there my mother-in-law and her friend bowed before leaving the flowers of the lotus flower on the golden shrine. In another building of the compound, and lasting for the duration of our visit, monks chanted while others, many of them school children, watched and listened.

I had a hard time suspending disbelief . Admittedly, all I thought about was the whole “den of robbers” episode in the Bible. It was just such a focused, overt show of religion that, again admittedly from my individualistic religion-of-the-heart mentality, I felt besieged by the superstition of it.

Then again, there was admittedly a certain power in some of the rituals. As we pulled up, a teenage girl and her boyfriend were reading a half-page tract; then the girl lifted a small red cage that they had bought, opened one end of it, and released two small birds into the air, who eagerly flew their cage and escaped into the freedom of air. The wonder of it all was unmistakable, a powerful if contrived vision of freedom performed by young lovers who the next moment no doubt turned to their phones to text, its own form of cage and freedom.

This image, if anything, helps me guide my children through an experience that felt, for all the world, like what I’d always been taught it was: a competing, idolatrous religion. This was the impulse that was uppermost in my mind throughout our trip, but in the vision of teens there it was—the seeking after something more, something higher, something better that is the religious impulse in us all.