“Is that new silk?” in Thai is mài-mǎi-mái (ไหม่ไหมไม่). While we’re at it, “small iron” is lèk lék (เหล็กฌล็ก) and “leather movie” – for fetish-film viewers – is nǎng nǎng (หนังหนํง).
Let’s learn Thai – part 7. Is that new silk?
The Sanctuary of Truth
Last stop of the day: the Sanctuary of Truth. The Sanctuary of Truth is a wooden temple that features carvings representative of ancient Hindu and Buddhist teachings. “The concept of truth and value of life has been crystallized and shown to the public through the works of arts and architectural sculpture that reflects the philosophy of living,” says the brochure. The temple contains an enormous number of figures including representations of the four elements; the Hindu godhead of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; Bodhisattvas from Mahayana Buddhism, and various celestial beings.
The project’s owners began working in 1981, and construction is scheduled to run until 2050. (In fact, visitors have to wear hard hats on site.) The sanctuary’s website says, “This work indicates that humans are only dust in the universe and will ultimately become one with it. Physical beings deteriorate, ravaged by the time, But truth and goodness are immortal.” Well, if all physical beings are going to deteriorate, they’re certainly putting a lot of effort into this one for nothing, but in the meantime, let’s look around:
On our way out, we walked through the workshop. Once the logs are sawed down, all of these carvings really are done by hand.
Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden
The Thais certainly appear to be a people who like religious figures. After visiting the Buffalo Head Temple, we went to Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden. The path in is lined with scenes from Buddhist mythology. All very pleasant.
Then you see this:
Welcome to Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden, a park dedicated to showing people what will happen to them in Buddhist hell. The two towering figures above are the ghosts of Nai Ngean, a man who violated the Five Precepts of Buddhism during his life, and Nang Thong, a woman who engaged in immoral sexual conduct. They are surrounded by a circle of figures with animal heads, each representing the punishment for a specific kind of sin, and a representation of sinners being boiled in a cauldron.
That is just the beginning. As you go through the park, you see the punishments meted out to people who violated each of the Five Precepts of Buddhism, as well as those who committed other types of sins. First, if you violate the precept of refraining from “killing and the mind without loving-kindness,” this happens to you.
If you violate the second precept by “stealing, cheating or destroying others’ property,” you can expect to be sawed in half, speared, and bashed in the head with an iron club.
Violating the third precept by “infringing the sexual intercourse, being paramour with the others’ wives or husbands” gets you a good stabbing and being torn apart by wild dogs.
While we’re on that topic, let’s look at some other punishments for sexual misconduct:
On to violations of the fourth precept, by telling lies and deceiving others. This is much more of the standard punishment: being stabbed, having your eyes and tongue torn out.
Finally, those who violate the fifth precept by drinking intoxicants and “losing control of their mindfulness” … actually, it looks like they just have to get drunk and stay drunk. Given what’s going on around them, I’m not so sure that’s the worst punishment.
It all makes for a fun afternoon.
Wat Hua Krabue
Welcome to Wat Hua Krabue, the Temple of the Water Buffalo Head! We visited Wat Hua Krabue recently, enticed by the public domain photos we saw on the internet, such as these:
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The story of Wat Hua Krabue is that the chief abbot decided to create a memorial to the Asian water buffalo, which has seen a rapid decline in population as farming has become more mechanized and people have increased their consumption of buffalo meat. The abbott began collecting skulls from nearby farms and slaughterhouses, and – according to one website – now has a collection of over 8,000 skulls that he will use to create a museum to the animal. The abbot apparently has a penchant for collecting things: originally, he collected old Mercedes Benz cars. When we showed up, his collection of votive figures was well in evidence.
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| Some temples include figures that stand outside and offer the “wai” – a bow with the hands pressed together – to visitors while a greeting plays on a loop from a speaker. For some reason, one of them is dressed like the King of Pop. Meanwhile, a disturbingly realistic monk statue holds a bowl for alms. | ||
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| That same monk again, seated near the real thing. Or you can offer prayers to, well, whoever these four represent. And for some reason, there is a soldier figure hiding behind some animals. | ||
The temple seems to be pretty syncretic; you can leave offerings in front of the deities of your choice.
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Some people, however, prefer to worship Mammon.
But let’s get to the buffalo heads. We asked a two people who worked on the temple grounds where we could find them, but they couldn’t tell us; finally, someone pointed us to a pile of old skulls under a tree near a garbage tip.
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The next week, I asked a Thai friend to call the temple and ask where they were. According to her report, the temple decided to move the skulls to the back of the temple, and when they did, some of them were damaged and thrown onto the heap. We never found the rest of them, so I’ll have to look the next time I’m out that way.
Phraya Nakhon Cave
The Phraya Nakhon cave is situated in Khao Sam Soi Yot National Park, outside Hua Hin, a beach town about 2½ hours outside Bangkok. To get there, you take a 45 minute (more or less) hike over a hill and along a beach, and then another half hour up a hill to get to the cave.
The cave consists of two limestone chambers, both of which are open to the sky. In the second one is the Kuha Karuhas pavilion, built by King Rama V some time at the end of the 19th century.
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| Inside the first chamber, looking up. | The “Bridge of Death.” | Kuha Karuhas pavilion. |
A website I read advised visitors to get there by 11:00 am to get the best light, and we just made it.
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The Bridge on the River Kwai
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This is the bridge over the Kwai river. (It actually was the bridge over the Mae Klong river, but the river was renamed the Khwae Yai in the 1960s to “bring geographical fact more in line with the fictional association with the name River Kwai,” according to Wikipedia.) It was a link in the Burma-Siam railway, also known as the “Death Railway,” that the Japanese Army built using POWs and local pressgangs during the second World War: after the Japanese seized Burma, they realized they needed an over-land route to supply their forces. The British had considered building such a route years before and abandoned the idea because of the difficult terrain, but the Japanese saw no alternative since the naval passage was being threatened by Allied submarines.
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Most of us know of the bridge from the 1957 film “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (based on the 1952 novel “The Bridge over the River Kwai”), but that film was highly fictionalized. A plucky band of whistling British POWs did not build a wooden bridge for the hapless Japanese and – apart from some references at the start of the film – come out no worse for the wear; instead, the Japanese army shipped in an iron bridge that they had captured in Java and enslaved soldiers and civilians who came to resemble the emaciated figures like the ones displayed in the nearby museum (above right). Overall, in the fifteen months it took to construct the railway (April 1942 to October 1943), approximately 100,000 POWs and civilians – 1 out of 3 workers – died from overwork, starvation, abuse, and diseases such as malaria, cholera, and dysentery.
On November 28, 1945, Allied bombers flew in to destroy the bridge. The Japanese forced prisoners to stand on the bridge and wave at the planes, to dissuade them from dropping their bombs, but the tactic was futile: the Allies destroyed the bridge anyway, littering the river with metal and corpses. After the war, the Thai government forced the Japanese to rebuild the bridge as part of the reparations package.
The war cemetery near the Railway Museum:
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Next: something more cheerful.
A few more elephant photos
Feeding time:
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Elephants, or an excuse for lots of elephant photos
One of the big attractions in Kanchanaburi is Elephants World, a sanctuary for elephants that have been rescued from work in logging camps or on the streets, where they are frequently employed in begging schemes. The sanctuary offers two programs, a one day visit in which you feed and bathe an elephant in a large group, and two day visit with an overnight stay, in which your small group of overnighters gets extra, up-close time with the elephants. Naturally, we chose the two day visit.
First, let’s start with elephant feeding pictures. It’s not simply that the elephants look very happy while they’re eating, but that their trunks are so incredibly dextrous.
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Elephant-bathing photos: first, mud.
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Then, water:
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| A group of clients bathe “their elephant” … | … and another elephant bathes back. | A mahout with his elephant. |
The mahout is a key part of the elephant culture. Each elephant has a mahout who is the elephant’s primary caregiver, and the only person who can ride the elephant. In traditional culture, a mahout and an elephant might grow up together, and they form an inseparable bond. For many of the elephants at the sanctuary, however, their mahouts over-worked them or mistreated them,so the mahouts at Elephants World have to work to gain their charges’ trust.
More feeding photos, featuring some guy I don’t know:
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| The elephant’s trunk is sensitive as well as dextrous. It can tell if a yam bean is good to eat or not, and it can handle even small pieces of fruit. | ||
At night, the elephants are put outside the compound, on a chain so they don’t wander into the forest, and given lots of banana trees to eat, which they munch on as though they were celery stalks.
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| Their feet are pretty neat, too. |
Next: a few more gratuitous elephant photos.
Kanchanaburi
This past weekend, Abby and I finally made it to Thailand. “Now, wait,” you might say, “aren’t you already in Thailand?” In the sense that we live in Bangkok, we also are in Thailand, but in another sense, we’re not.
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| Bangkok. | Thailand. |
We went to Kanchanaburi, in the western part of the country. Kanchanaburi is the home of the bridge over the River Kwai, which I’ll get to later; for now, we’ll look at other things to see in Kanchanaburi.
The area has many temples that are tourist attractions as well as religious sites. First we visited Wat Ban Tham. Entrance is made via the mouth of an enormous dragon, which I found – close up – to be a little reminiscent of a Rankin/Bass character.
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Once you get through the dragon’s mouth and then climb a little further, you come to the temple, inside a cave. There is a beautiful Buddha statue inside, as well as a monk who will bless you if you ask, although he seemed a little disengaged when we were there. Then at the top there is another stupa which is undergoing some renovation work.
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| Anyone who wants to say that this is “stupendous” can stop reading right now. |
The next temple is Wat Tham Sua, which is intriguingly visible from the road:
There was another climb, which opened onto an 18-meter high statue of the Buddha.
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| An idea of the scale. |
The temple has other beautiful buildings as well, with fascinating sculptural details (and bells).
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On a quieter note, Sino-Thai graves and Buddhist stupas:
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Let’s learn Thai! – part 6, in which it gets worse
Thai has three types of consonants: “middle” consonants, which are simply regular consonants; “high” consonants, which follow certain rules; and “low” consonants, which follow certain other rules. Within the low consonant class, there are “single” low consonants and “paired” low consonants. Paired low consonants match the high consonants, so we start with these. For simplicity’s sake, I am including in the below table only the primary consonant, rather than (for example) all the different ways one can make the “s” sound. “kh,” “th” and “ph” are aspirated k, t and p, respectively.
| /kh/ | /ch/ | /th/ | /ph/ | /f/ | /s/ | /h/ | |
| high | ข | ฉ | ถ | ผ | ฝ | ส | ห |
| low | ค | ช | ท | พ | ฟ | ซ | ฮ |
To make it more confusing, high consonants can only have low, falling, and rising tones, while low consonants can only have no, falling, or high tones, and the tone markers for the low consonants are effectively “one off” from the tone markers used for high and middle consonants – i.e., a falling-tone high or middle consonant and a high-tone low consonant get the same tone marker. In some respects, this makes things easy: if you hear a word beginning with “kh” that has a high tone, you know that you have to spell it with the ค and not the ข – but it would be easier still just to have one set of letters and one set of rules.
| no tone | low tone | falling tone | high tone | rising tone | |
| high | – | ข่ | ข้ | – | ข |
| middle | ก | ก่ | ก้ | ก๊ | ก๋ |
| low | ค | – | ค่ | ค้ | – |
My teacher tells me that grammar school students learn this over the course of four years.