Temple Blessing
Current mood: intrigued
I went with my friend Laddawan to a blessing at one of the local temples the other day.
We got up really, really early and arrived there right at sunrise. A blessing is a sort of rebirth ceremony. The people being blessed offer individual prayers to a group of Buddha images and pictures of monks, then gather together on a platform where the head monk chants a sort of prayer. Then, for each individual, a group of monks covers the blessed in a white cloth, the same kind used to cover a dead person. They chant for about a minute, lay out the offerings the blessed brought to them, chant for about another minute, then remove the cloth. When you're under the cloth, you are supposed to think about dying and what it would be like to be dead. When it is removed, you are brought back to life, a new person and refreshed. Then all the blessed are sort of united by a string and there is more chanting.
Finally, each person takes a sqaure little bamboo boat filled with something they own and some clippings of their hair and fingernails and floats it down the river. They are not allowed to look at the boat as it moves away in the water; only turn around and let it go.
What struck me about the whole process was not how holy or exotic it was, but how ordinary. Before starting the blessing, the head monk was chanting a prayer for another person. I happened to glance over and he was picking his nose. The phone went off in the middle of one of the chants and there were these four poodle-looking fluffy dogs running around the inside of the room, sometimes climbing onto the monks' laps or licking the blesseds' toes.
When Laddawan was covered, one of the monks made a comment about her offering (I don't know what it was but he looked amused), and they yawned several times during the ceremony. I almost dozed off myself, as did the other people there. They let me film it and take pictures (posted on the Thailand photos page). In the end, it reminded me of the Catholic church and when I was an altar girl. I fought so hard for that priviledge, to be close to the divine and divine happenings, and found, really, that it was ordinary people doing a routine act.
This Buddhist ceremony was nothing how the movies portray it. Even in this exotic location, with this religion we revere as somehow more noble or true, it's humans performing actions and doing them every day. I asked Laddawan if she felt like a new person and she said she didn't really know. She thought it'd be a good thing to do. We were both exhausted and she had actually woken up drunk from the night before.
In the end, then, I guess, the important part of religion is the meaning put into the actions, the intent of the pursuer and the openess of heart. Whether or not your monk is picking his nose matters not so much as what you are thinking while he's doing it.
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