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Published: July 11th 2011
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Finishing up from Wat Arun, we hopped on the cross-river ferry that would take us to the pier to Wat Pho, the ferry ride short and sweet, taking no more than 5 minutes for the boat to practically drift to the opposite pier.
Getting off the ferry you walk through a small market packed with dried and salted seafood, the Thais seem to be particularly fond of dried squid. Unfortunately we got stuck behind a painfully slow lady right in the midst of the dried squid and salted fish so we were experiencing an olfactory overload by the time we managed to escape onto the street, where the walls of Wat Pho waited to greet us with open doors. Of course, you can avoid this by just sticking to the road where there aren’t any fish stall.
The temple wasn’t quite what I remembered, but then, you never remember things as they were, only as they have been preserved in your mind, and my memory of the temple was that that of an eight year old boy with a slingshot and a pocket full of pebbles. We enter the temple grounds and are once again ushered with a smile
Reclining Buddha
You can roughly see the sheer scale of the enormous Buddha image towards the ticket booth. We pay our entrance and join the other travelers in the square before the Buddha’s hall, there is a waterfall fountain covered in trees and we take a moment to allow the fresh mist to envelope us.
Heading into the temple you are required to take off your shoes which is of course customary when entering any temple, I’m quite pleased actually, the marble floor is cool to the touch and I’ve spent the day walking around in my sandals which are getting a bit hot and slightly uncomfortable. There I am, enjoying the cool marble floor, when towering above me is the world’s largest reclining Buddha, completely golden, how blissfully ignorant we can sometimes be. I try to make up for it by whipping out the camera and taking photos form every conceivable angle permitted. There is a barrier around the Buddha so you can’t actually get too close but even if you could, there is just too much to fit into a single photograph.
The Buddha is an awesome sight, impossibly large and wondrously beautiful, its head rests gently in the palm of its hand with a look of absolute serenity on
Dropping Prayers
Visitors drop coins into collection buckets its face. Something I learned only recently was that in many cases, the image of the Buddha is depicted as having a rather feminine body; you can see the slight rise of the chest in this photograph. This isn’t to portray the Buddha as a female, rather to portray the image of beauty, for the female form was, and still is I might ad, considered something of beauty. The face of the Buddha is often featureless and the best way the sculptors could translate his beauty was through the female form. To carve this would have been a feat akin to the construction of the Statue of Liberty, and the Americans had to outsource to the French for that while the Buddha is considerably older. Wat Pho was built two centuries before Bangkok became the capital in 1781 and is famous not only for the reclining Buddha, but also because it was the first public education institution in Thailand and considered the birth place of traditional Thai medicine and massage. Massage courses are actually offered on the grounds with a massage school located towards the back. If I’d known that this was a massage school I would have gone, I
Monks Between the Chedis
Two monks strolling through the grounds discussing... what? think we both could have done with a spot of relaxing and pampering after our long walk and day in the sun, there’s always next time though.
Walking through the hall following the body of the Buddha from its head to its toes you can hear what sounds like metallic rain drops, this is the sound of hundreds of coins being dropped into prayer buckets running along the back wall. You can buy a small container of coins for 20 Baht and drop them in the buckets, saying a prayer with each or just walking in quiet reflection. I didn’t get a chance to count how many there were but our coins weren’t enough for all of them. The Buddha’s feet are designed using mother of pearl, the designs depicting the 108 characteristics of the true Buddha. I wish we had hired one of the many tour guides plying their trade at the entrance because I am very curious as to what these characteristics are. Needless to say, they were beautifully designed and the mother of pearl was a great touch. The entire Buddha and temple, from the roof to the floor, were hand painted, only adding to the
awesomeness of the experience.
Walking through the temple grounds was very peaceful. Most of the visitors had filtered through and departed after seeing the Buddha so we were practically alone as we wandered between the lines of chedi, following two monks as they discussed things that I could only imagine. In my head they were talking about the infinite wisdom of the people responsible for creating the temple and the various meanings and reasons for the chedis around the grounds. They could equally have been discussing the upcoming election but I prefer my version. Although I didn’t see most of them, the temple grounds boast the largest collection of Buddha images in Thailand at more than 1000.
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Xiomara
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this sounds absolutely beautiful! i know what you mean about wanting to hire a tour guide at some sites - i feel like i miss out on so much information so much of the time.