I’m possessive about this land, but the secret is getting out. Every year, the country fills up with more and more foreigners—farangs, the Thai call them, not entirely happily—who, having experienced Thailand’s sensuality, find themselves unable to leave. One of them is an 85-year-old Frenchman of my acquaintance, who, having traveled the world over during his long life, came to Bangkok a year or so ago. Seeing the place, tasting its delights, he checked into a hotel suite overlooking the Chao Phraya and informed the management that he would be there until he died. It is a demise that I envy.
Robert Sam Anson has been writing about Southeast Asia since the Vietnam War era. He is the author of War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina, published by Simon & Schuster.
I climbed to the sun deck to watch Bangkok from the river as I had so often watched the river from Bangkok. The life of Bangkok is on its waters and it was on the river that I had always sensed the real heart of the country. The bulk of the people in Thailand were like the ones who clustered on the banks of the river or who paddled on it in their teak craft and these were the people with whom no farang ever talked beyond, perhaps, a few words of bargaining. When any Westerner tells you that he knows the East like a book and pretends to be an authority, beware, for he is lying. Even the Westerners who stay for years rarely penetrate below a certain class in the East. They meet the Westernized, the cultured, and the rich and always behind this shallow façade are the numberless Siamese they cannot begin to comprehend and who are Thailand.
—Carol Hollinger, Mai Pen Pai Means Never Mind
TIMOTHY FALL
Monk for a Month
The Western overlay in Thailand is not as thick as it seems.
WITH HIS HIGHTOP TENNIS SHOES, WISHAN SLAPS OUT THE rhythm of a new Madonna track, pulsing through the sound system of the café in southern Thailand where we’ve met. He talks about Western movies and clothing styles as he leans back in his fashionable jeans, pirated knock-offs of a famous brand, available in any of the street markets of Bangkok. His hair is cut just above his ears, falling to the collar of his polo shirt. This guy could pass for a local anywhere from California to Toronto.
We became acquainted through a translator, his English teacher, over ice cream and cha yen, a sweet Thai iced tea with milk. As the conversation winds down, he invites his teacher and me to a party that night. I am all for parties, even parties in Thailand, so it takes me all of an eighth of a second to accept. It is almost as an afterthought that I enquire about the occasion. In the best English he’s been able to pull off all morning, Wishan smiles and says, “Tomorrow I will be a monk.”
Whoa. A monk? That would certainly be a significant departure for Wishan. I mean, he told me that he owned a nightclub in Bangkok. There were movies and fashion magazines to keep up with. What about his jeans and t-shirt? What about his hair? Aren’t monks bald, old men? I had seen plenty. A visit to Thailand is like saffron on parade. Flashes of orange robes worn by the Buddhist monks, the phikkhu, are conspicuous throughout the country.
The devotees to the teachings of Buddha are as ubiquitous as the wats which they inhabit. So, was this to be some sort of religious transformation? Was he going to ditch his business, and his life, to become one of these?
His answer to me was yes, and no. Yes, Mr. Westernized was about to embark in a spiritual journey into the heart of Thai Buddhism, but no it wouldn’t mean permanently forsaking his secular life. As esoteric and incomprehensible as the life of a monk may have seemed to me, I learned that it is a road often taken by the Thai male as a paean to his country’s ancient and revered religious heritage in Theravada Buddhism. Traditionally, a young man at the outset of adulthood enrolls in the community of monks, the sangha, for anywhere from one to three months—although in many cases he will remain a monk for several years, supporting himself as he pursues an education. Many will even return to the wats periodically throughout adulthood.
Wishan seemed eager to continue the tradition by becoming a phikkhu, he was following his father and grandfather before him. For the next 30 days, he would be without his Western clothes, without his nightlife, and yes, without his hair. His head would be shaved that very afternoon in the first step of his initiation.
Nakhon Sri Thammarat is a bustling city of more than 100,000 in southeastern Thailand. It was Wishan’s hometown, and he had made the eighteen-hour journey from Bangkok by train to serve for a month in a familiar wat. Few Westerners are seen there—they are lured either to the beaches of Phuket and Krabi just across the isthmus, or to points farther north. But the Thais are a very friendly people, and Wishan’s family had no reservations whatsoever about inviting me, an outsider, to attend the ceremony by which their son would become a monk.
Somerset Maugham described Thailand’s temples as being “…like prizes in a shooting gallery at a village fair in the country of the gods.” And in the sharp, midday sun, Wat Mahathat was indeed an incredible, spark-ling mosaic of colors and ornamentation. I could almost hear the scissors being readied as we arrived at the temple.
With a relaxing air of informality he was received by the head monk, the jao-awaht. They exchanged bows and went into the older man’s chamber where they kneeled, facing one another.
In a temple, don’t walk in front of praying Thais; walk around them.
—Elizabeth Devine and Nancy L. Braganti, The Traveler’s Guide to Asian Customs and Manners
Outside, we were like kids taking turns peeking through a knot-hole as we clustered around the small door of the darkened room to see what was happening. For a few minutes they remained on their knees in the shadows. The jao-awaht chanted quietly as Wishan, still and silent, bowed his head. The monk lifted himself to a chair, took a pinch of Wishan’s hair between the thumb and finger of one hand as he lifted a pair of scissors with the other. I held my breath, and cringed a little, imagining my own being shorn away. The others knew, but I didn’t, that this part was only to be the symbolic snipping of a single lock from the top of his head. The old monk worked quickly, allowing not a hair to fall to the floor.
But it was to be only a temporary reprieve for Wishan. Across the sandy courtyard sat a single chair with a small pan of water and a safety razor beside it. He was guided from the room to the chair and instructed to remove his shirt. A younger monk then appeared to tend to the tonsorial duties. With little pause for ceremony, he took it straight to Wishan’s scalp. His head tugged under the pull of the blade as it began slowly to expose the light skin where his hair had been—first the left side, then the right. Finally, as my friend sat quietly with a lap full of hair, the barber-monk shaved off his eyebrows.
Believe it or not, you would have a great deal of trouble recognizing your best friend—even your spouse, after they’d had their eyebrows shaved. It makes for quite a transformation. After just ten minutes he didn’t look like Wishan anymore, to say the least. He looked like…well…like a monk.
He was undressed and wrapped in a simple, orange robe by yet another monk. He knelt beside a stone well as a bucket was lowered, filled, and dumped over his body. Seven times the bucket was refilled and poured on him, drenching as it washed away the hairs and any remaining vestige of the guy I had met a few hours before. He stood, beaming. The water seemed to bring him out of the shallow trance he’d been in for a few minutes. For the first time he smiled, and reached up to touch his smooth head.
The party was an elaborate banquet by any standard. With Thai music played by an orchestra of Wishan’s friends, we dined from before sunset until late that night. Plates full of standard Thai fare and local specialties weighed down tables set up in the family’s courtyard. Thai curried chicken, Thai noodles, shrimp, squid, rice, and Mekong whiskey continued to pour from the kitchen as guests arrived all night long. Although the party was given in his honor, it was Wishan, dressed in a traditional gown of gold and white, who acted as host. He neither ate nor drank, but made sure that everyone’s plates and glasses were constantly refilled as the fête went on into
the morning.
Wishan was still in the gown at daylight—it was forbidden for him to sleep the night before. The tranquilizing effect of the Mekong whiskey had sent most of us home to bed after one o’clock, so the morning arrived somewhat rudely. The bands, drummers, gongers, and a saxophonist reassembled to lead a parade back to Wat Mahathat with Wishan hoisted aloft to the shoulders of his brothers and father. The morning sun was resplendent on the front of the temple. Wishan, the soon-to-be monk, rode along in silence to the cheers, his eyes closed, his hands pressed together in meditation, shielded from the blinding sun by an ornate parasol.
Wishan’s feet didn’t touch the ground until he was inside the temple. He walked up to the altar where he was met once again by his old friend the jao-awaht. The ensuing litany lasted several hours. We, the faithful, knelt stoically on the ungiving marble floor as the old monk read from the Tripitaka, the body of Buddhist scriptures which includes the Vinaya, a set of 227 rules guiding the monastic order. I understood no Thai, but I could tell that all 227 were being read, point-by-point. My knees froze, locked, and began to swell. Hours later, as quietly as it had begun, the ceremony ended. Wishan was a monk.
Wishan the phikkhu would be counted among the approximately 250,000 other monks active at any one time in Thailand. Joining early in the spring, he was missing the season of peak enrollment, Pansaa, a religious holiday best described as a sort of Buddhist Lent, which falls during the three months of heaviest monsoon rains. It is thought that during Pansaa one gains more merit by being a monk than at other times in the year. Civil servants wishing to re-robe for this occasion are even granted leaves of absence by the government.
Today, about 60 percent of those eligible to join the sangha do so. Considering that the sangha, or Buddhist brotherhood, is thought of as having the highest status and prestige of any social group in the country, it is surprising that the numbers have fallen off in recent years—a result of changing economic and social conventions brought about by the Westernization of Thailand and Southeast Asia. But even in light of all this, monks are still being venerated as an integral part of Thai society. They set the standard of behavior in any community. It’s believed that by serving, housing, or feeding a monk, a layman gains merit that will elevate his social standing in subsequent incarnations.
Wishan will rise at four o’clock daily to begin his strictly regimented days in the wat. Following his morning bath and a period of private morning devotions in his own room, a monk will leave the wat at sunrise with a group of others to collect food and offerings from around the community. By 7:30, the monks return to the temple compound for breakfast, usually eaten privately.
The bell is sounded a second time at 8:15 to call the monks into the inner sanctuary of the wat, for the commencement of the day’s spiritual teaching. After recitation of the morning prayers, the new monks stay behind to receive instructions from the jao-awaht before adjourning for the main meal of the day. It must be finished by noon according to strict Buddhist doctrine. No one may eat between midday and breakfast the following morning.
At five o’clock the monks have a second bath before returning for prayers. Evening classes follow, beginning around 7:30. It is during this session that the monks examine one of the four areas most central to the knowledge they will gain while in the monastery: the story of the life of Gautama Buddha; the Dharma, or the philosophy of Buddha; the essays written in discussion of the Dharma; or the Vinaya, the rules governing the sangha and by which each monk is expected to conduct himslf.
The monks retire between 10 p.m. and midnight for a night of hungry sleep before the next morning’s bell. Wishan may well have decided to remain a phikkhu for another thirty days or for a year, or forever. But chances are he is back in Bangkok, back in blue jeans, in the office of his nightclub. Every single day he will encounter at least a few of the monks that populate the numerous wats in and around the city. Whether or not he rejoins at some time in the future for a weekend, or for a Pansaa season, he is sure to carry with him a new understanding of the religious and social heritage of his people. And hey—the eyebrows will grow back!
Timothy Fall is a writer and actor who played Chad, the strange comic book artist, on the television series “Bob,” starring Bob Newhart. He lives with his wife in Los Angeles.
Let not a man trace back the past
Or wonder what the future holds:
The past is but the left-behind,
The future but the yet-unreached.
In the present let him see
With insight each and every instant
Invincibly, unshakably,
That can be pierced by practising.
—Bhaddekarat-tagatha (Verses on a well-spent day), quoted by Tim Ward, in What the Buddha Never Taught
PICO IYER
Love in a Duty-free Zone
The currency of erotic commerce is emotion as well as cash, and morality falters beneath a gentle human touch.
MY FIRST REACTION TO BANGKOK WAS SHOCK; MY SECOND WAS to know that shock was not right, but I didn’t know what was. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril,” wrote Wilde, and the more I looked at the bar scene, the more my vision blurred.
Before very long, in fact, I began to discover that the ubiquitous couple of Bangkok—the pudgy foreigner with the exquisite girleen—was not quite the buyer and seller, the subject and object, I had imagined. In many cases, I was told, the girls did not simply make their bodies available to all while they looked at their watches and counted their money; they chose to offer their admirers their time, their thoughts, even their lives. The couple would sometimes stay together for two weeks, or three, or thirty. They would travel together and live together and think of themselves as lovers. She would show him her country, cook him local delicacies, mend his clothes, even introduce him to her parents and her friends. He would protect her from some parts of the world, teach her about others. For the girl, her Western suitor might prove the mature and sophisticated companion she had always lacked; for the man, his Eastern consort could be the attentive, demure, and sumptuously compliant goddess of his dreams. He would obviously provide material comforts and she physical; but sometimes—in subtler ways—their positions were reversed. And as the months passed, sensations sometimes developed into emotions, passions settled down into feelings. Often, in the end, they would go through a traditional marriage in her village.
Thus my tidy paradigm of West exploiting East began to crumble. Bangkok wasn’t dealing only in the clear-cut trade of bodies; it was trafficking also in the altogether murkier exchange of hearts. The East, as Singapore Airlines knows full well, has always been a marketplace for romance. But Thailand was dispensing it on a personal scale, and in heavy doses. It offered love in a duty-free zone: a context in which boy meets girl without having to worry about commitments, obligations, even identities. Love, that is, or something like it.
As with gambling, the trick is to go to Patpong [the red-light district] in a group—far safer and more enjoyable than wandering around on your own—and to look “poor.” I spent five nights researching Patpong’s bars and clubs—the first four nights, I dressed casually and received no hassle whatsoever.The last night however, I wore a smart 800B [B denotes baht,Thai currency] shirt, and was bodily assaulted within 30 seconds of arrival. It’s generally a good idea to have no more than 1,000B in your pockets—that way, even if you get talked into trouble (bar girls can be very persuasive), you won’t be able to afford it.
—Frank Kusy, Cadogan Guides: Thailand
As I returned to the bars, I steadied myself against their mounting equivocations by noting that at least some of the girls were as hard and fast as their propositions. These creatures of easy virtue were indeed no more than what they seemed: all artifice. Their pleasure was strictly professional, their “darlings” dangled in all the wrong places. They could be touched in any place except inside; they would extend themselves to any man who entered. When money was mentioned, their so
ft gaze turned hard; when a fat cat came in, their eyes irresistibly wandered; and when the closing hour finally arrived, they took off their glass slippers and turned off their tricked-up charm. In all of a second, these temptresses could shrug off or reassume their serviceable grace; in a single night, they would sleep with three or four customers. Did she enjoy what she did? “Ah,” croaked one husky-voiced young girl who had been dancing with extraordinary abandon. “It’s a job.”
Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides) Page 3
