Temple Hopping in Bangkok

Ok, so this is a bit sheisty, but I'm going to go ahead and cut and paste a blog entry I wrote a couple years ago to cover what Becky and I did this past Saturday... Becky came to Bangkok this past weekend for the first time, and we chose to spend our Saturday doing what all tourists do, which is to visit the Grand Palace. It's an essential trip if you come to Bangkok, because there are few places on earth that are centers of both political and spiritual power, and the palace is replete with incredible imagery, stunning architecture, and temples drenched in the devotion of a nation... It's a pilgrimage site, and I come as a supplicant every few years with a little more life experience, and every time it totally delivers at least one completely overwhelming moment. It was delightful finally bringing Becky along to check it out, although she did get a little peeved at me when she tried to take my picture and I shrugged her off saying "i already have some pics." That didn't go over too well... But it's true - everyone takes pictures at the Palace, and since I take lame pictures, I've got several folders buried on a hard drive somewhere of the place, and me mugging next to ancient statues and colorful murals... The place is a photographer's dream... I'll let Becky post her pics later, when she has a chance...
In the meantime, below is a post taken from an old Thai travel blog I wrote, about the last time I visited this complex. It's cheating to just cut and paste, maybe, but my impressions of this place have not changed much, and I don't want to try and write all this anew... The pictures aren't mine either...

Next....we visited the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. This temple completely blew my mind. I was expecting a Buddha statue lying horizontally on a podium, his head propped up with a hand, and with his body laid out like a man reading on the floor. I had seen pictures of the statue before but none of them offered any perspective as to its actual dimensions. What we found at the Temple of the Reclining Buddha was a gold Buddha about the size of a house. This statue was HUGE.

The temple was roughly the size of my high school gymnasium, and this statue took up a length about the size of a basketball court. As you filed into the temple, the human traffic guided you in a circuit around the statue, which you only see if you crane your neck upwards to view the Buddha looming above, gazing indirectly at the earth. It’s a surreal place. Surrounding the main statue were small altars erected all around his form, comprised of collection boxes, burning candles, incense sticks, and smaller figures, all gilded offerings paying homage to larger Buddha presence. You make your way towards his feet, which are the size of Queen size beds, and are then ushered around the other side, where you see the back of his legs and spine. Pillars along this temple wall are lined with a series of donation bowls. A money changer offers you coins for any bills you wish to break, and provides you with a bowl, filled to the brim with small-value coins. You deposit a few coins in each donation bowl as you make your way towards the Buddha’s head, and by the time you’ve arrived at the temple opening, you’ve offered up dozens of coins to this Buddha, who is said to bestow prosperity and peace upon devotees who honor him. I could use some prosperity and peace in my life, and I’m not beyond endorsing a little well-intended idolatry if it’ll bring such elusive blessings into my life. We all receive our karmic dues eventually, don’t we?

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After Wat Po, we walked a few blocks northward to the sprawling complex of the Grand Palace. We must’ve walked a few hundred meters along the Palace’s high barrier walls before finding the lone entrance dedicated to the thousands of tourists intent on paying homage to the Thai kingdom’s most famous artifact, the legendary Emerald Buddha.



The story of this particular statue dates back to the year 1434, when a Buddhist abbot at a monastery in Chiang Rai discovered that one of the life-size Buddha statues had a few pieces of paint missing from its nose, which revealed a strange green glow from beneath it. After more paint flaked off, the statue was polished, to reveal not a plaster Buddha at all, as it had been thought to be, but an image carved from one solid block of green jade. The origin of this statue was a mystery, and over subsequent centuries, it became a priceless and powerful symbolic talisman of the Thai kingdom. As a consequence of several wars, the statue changed hands a few times, and for a little over 200 years was appropriated to Laos, until a victorious Thai army captured it and returned it to Bangkok in 1778. The Grand Palace was constructed in 1782, in part to create an adequate resting place, the Royal Monastery, to house this profound statue. There is sits today, on an elevated altar, at a central location in the palace complex. To see it you must remove your shoes, and enter into a hall filled with gilded statues and the most elaborate gold altar I’ve ever seen. The Emerald Buddha does not have the same overwhelming size as some of the other statues we saw today, but it does exert a definite gravitational pull, and it looms high above the hordes of people offering authentic prayers to this Buddha in the Royal Monastery. The scene at the temple was powerfully reminiscent of a visit to a religious building that houses a relic, as such articles of faith are often cornerstones of people’s belief systems. This statue and the complex it lies within are not to be missed when visiting Bangkok, and even though this was my second visit in 4 years, I was still overwhelmed by the grace, elegance, and the refined Theravada decadence of the Grand Palace.