Construction Site

When you get off work tonight, meet me at the construction site, and we'll write some notes to tape to the heavy machines, like

"We hope they treat you well. Hope you don't work too hard.
We hope you get to be happy sometimes."

-Wat Pho, Bangkok, Thailand. Summer twenty-eleven.

Wat Pho

Around the corner from the restaurant, a site I can’t resist. Wat Pho is like the Buddha Disney. Poles shoot up all around the site, starting as thick flower covered pillars and thinning into teeny-tiny towers.

Taylor spent a day seeing the city’s temples and leaves me to wander the Wat with my lone gaping wonder. So different from the Korean palaces and temples, Wat Pho is covered in gaudy, ornate details. From every vantage in the sunlight, the buildings sparkle.

Buddha statues line the interiors, the shadows coloring the gold and black paint covered bodies. Gargoyles protect the spirits and monks bow to shrines lit with an eerie clubish blueness.

I lose myself in all the corridors; turn round and round till I find the exit. She’s waiting on the curb outside, ready for the next adventure.

Temple Grandin

The lantern line up started at the mountain base. It led us up to the temple, where it broke into a canopy. With Buddha’s birthday four short days away, all the decorations had been hung. They floated overhead, a crowd of lights to be lit.

The old women sat on laid out carpet, shining silver in the sun. Gloved fingers grasped newsprint to polish brassy bowls. On knees they bowed before gold statues and lit candles, as our headshake gestures said to each other: no pictures here.

First built in 1613 the temple sits at a mystic mountain’s foot. As legend goes, a golden fish once descended there on a five-coloured cloud. From the Brahma heaven he came to play on top a rock three-people tall with water falling down.

Towards this fountain we walked through a forest full of giant tortoise rocks.

Buddha sitting pretty

At the base of the mountain, a massive sitting Buddha. He watches out all day on the temple at his toes and Cheonan city sprawling out below. Candles drop wax on the cement as we climb the steps past the plaques of the dead.

Duck into the forest and you’ll find the path the monks follow up hill. Spring brought yellow bud blossoms, to be replaced by fruit with the heat. Stacks of stones reach towards the tree-tops on both sides of the path.

Just before the land goes flat it breaks out into rock face. There three gods look out at the clearing, their likeness etched into the stone. Climb the steps up into the cracks and you’ll find a cubby-cave with a prayer mat, which the monks visit for their vigils.

The path keeps going some seven kilometers, but that story is still to tell.

Ten thousand Buddhas

That Friday I finally got my answer: the monks eat the fruit. These six months of visiting temples, I’d wondered what happened to the gifts at their feet. Did the fruit below the Buddha’s belly eventually rot, inviting flies around?

No, they eat past lunch in the afterlife, as good in their bellies as in the dead. Sometimes though, there’s too much for the temple’s residents to feast. That’s why, Joyce’s uncle told me, he slips his oranges in his pockets after they’ve served in ceremony, to be eaten back at home.

I ask my silly questions on the walk up the hill. We hadn’t known the stack of stairs would reach so high, got to the top out of breath. All up towards the monastery are the golden characters of stories from ancient times. At the summit ten thousand six inch Buddhas, glowed in the dark prayer room.

Felt the light happy on my face, and very, very small.