Day 15

Toured the temples in town today. Jono will elaborate....

So our tour today took in a few of the temples within the old city moat in Chang Mai and ended with the Monk Chat at one of the larger and more beautiful temples in Chang Mai city. One of the temples we visited was made almost entirely of Teak back when the stuff was plentiful and Kings/Rulers wanted a legacy to be remembered. Some of the later century temples were funded by British teak companies, whether or not they built them with teak or not.

In Thailand temples are much more casual affairs in terms of visits and gathering than the average church. This has its good and bad aspects. Great for community gatherings not so good for being hassled by tuk tuk and taxi drivers annoying you as soon as you put your shoes back on. One 0f the more clever scams that goes on up here are the so called teachers/bankers who are hanging about the temples during the weekdays to befriend tourists. They don't try to get you to go anywhere intially, they just, piece by piece, temple by temple work you over to get you to go to a certain tailor or attraction.

One guy we met was a 'teacher' (it was Friday, so you do the maths where his class was) who spoke very good English but I think I hijacked him with so many questions that he wasn't able to give his speil. (For those of you going he probably was a teacher you're just being cynical, I've seen him three times around the temples since then. That's a lot of school excursions for one week, especially seeing most kids are on school holidays.) The othey guy we met was a banker from Bangkok who had a friend working for the Commonwealth Bank in Adelaide (a double strike) who had come to Chang Mai to shop for a new suit for work (hint hint he was waiting for us to say we were looking for a tailor). And then he royaly stuffed up because he told us it was a Buddhist holiday (hence why he wasn't at work on a Friday). Now for most tourists that wouldn't ring any bells except that as you may remember we were heading back down the road to go do the Monk Chat for the afternoon and the Lonely Planet says it doesn't run on holidays. So as we head to the Monk Chat I'm going this will be interesting, a scammer telling the truth but alas he wasn't.

So anyway we get to the Monk Chat and met a Buddhist Monk of 25yrs old, name Phra Tea who we discussed Buddhism and meditation with. We also discussed kangaroos and my shoes and freckles but you've heard that all before. Monks in Thailand are Theravada Buddhists which essentially means they practice meditation as compared to Mahayana Buddhists elsewhere eg China who practice Kung Fu. Other differences but you get the drift. The central meditation they practise is Vipassana (a type of insight meditation), which is known to be the meditation Buddha used to reach enlightenment under the Boddhi tree. The middle way as such. We also got to find out that they also practice a range of meditations. The most interesting one for me was the meditation that allowed the monk to 'leave their body' to assist people 'in heaven or hell' especially those who could not enter a temple. So the Monk would go to assist them in the inbetween stage before they reincarnate. Sounds a lot like astral projection. Apparently takes about 2 years to develop the skill and meditative skills that extend to about 2 hours straight, such is the concentration required to achieve this 'out of body' state. Fascinating to say the least.
Em was like a posion chalice while we were there, because Monks aren't allowed to touch females even accidentally so she had to be very careful, so were they.

So after a good hour of talking we went over to hear the monk chanting but it wasn't on because of the novice monk ordination happening over the weekend. Not all was lost. There were a bunch of kids playing badminton, along with shooting each other with BB handguns (yes they're legal in Tland; they hurt too. A lot.) So I invited myself into the games, I haven't played Badminton for a long time, especially without a net and certainly not in 35degrees, but it was great fun especially seeing we understood very little except pure silliness.