Life in Phana

Tod Kathin, Kathin, Kathin ... in Phana

The Tod Kathin season is already in full swing and in small towns like Phana the coming weekend is likely to see a final burst of activity.  This is because of the long weekend starting with King Chulalongkorn Day on the 23rd. Long weeekends are when 'exiles' from rural areas like this return home to their families and roots.

Each wat with at least 5 monks in residence is entitled to benefit from one robe presentation (Tod Kathin) each year. Originally that is all it was, the presentation of a new set of robes to one monk nominated by the abbot. Nowadays, and for some time past, it has become a major source of fund-raising for the temple, a major source of merit-making for lay people, and a major source of economic activity for the makers and sellers of Buddhist supplies and for local construction companies. Oh, and it is also a major source of sanuk for everyone who takes part.

 

Wat Phra Lao was the first of Phana's temples to benefit this year. On 9th October a so-called 'mobile' kathin was organised by a Bangkok family who originated in Phana. They came with their friends and colleagues and were supported by the few distant relatives they have here. I imagine that raised quite a lot of money but don't know how much.

 

On 11th October the family who live just up the road from us held a Tod Kathin at a wat in a village about 2 kms from Phana. We are neighbours but unrelated, so our contribution to this one was small. My own contribution was mainly to give up lots of sleep (see my recent post 'Sleepless in Phana').

 

Next up was a 'united kathin' at Wat Burapha. This one was a bit unusual, at least in my experience. There were 4 different contribution patterns, if I can call them that.  The aim was to raise money to build or re-build the pavillion used for cremation ceremonies. The crematorium at Wat Burapha was the first in Phana and the facilities are very much in need of renovation. One individual, an uncle of the abbot, offered 100,000 Baht. Another family living near the wat pledged to raise at least 120,000 Baht. The wat committee invited people to make individual pledges of 500 Baht per unit (ong). Other people, mostly those living close to the wat could of course join in by making any donation they wished -- those would be samller than 500 Baht. The total raised was 580,000 Baht, so there must have been a lot of 500 Baht ong and small donations.

 

My photos on this occasion were not very good but I will include a few anyway.

Here is Pensri posing in the garden before we set off to Wat Burapha.

 

Donations were registered in separate books for units and other donations.

 

Not only money is offered on these occasions. Many of these small pillows will be given away by the monks on subsequent occasions.

 

 

After the ceremony concluded and I was outside talking to the sandal man (previous post) one of the monks came out with plastic bags of fruit which he hung on the gates of houses in the neighbourhood.

The nest sequence show people enjoying giving to the temple.

 

 

 

And the abbot (whose mother brings him food before noon every day from her house just down the road) was very generous in his thanks. He has a good sense of humour as well as being a 'scholar monk': Phra Maha Jantee is his name. The monks also distributed auspicious souvenirs of the occasion to all the lay people.

 

Coming up is a united kathin at Wat Don Kwan on the 21st, a tetsaban organised kathin for Wat Trirath on the 29th, which will include the bong lang orchestra and dancers from the Tetsaban-sponsored Samakee School. On the 23rd the family of one of Pensri's uncles is holding a kathin in Ubon and lots of her cousins will be coming for that from all over Thailand. On the 31st another kathin in Ubon is being organised by a school-friend of Pensri's. They were at school together more than 50 years ago! These are just the ones we will be involved in! I'll maybe post some photos when it's all done.

And while I was writing this we were visited by an old friend, another who went to school with Pensri. This was Mae Chee Kalya, who is one of the organisers of a kathin in a village just outside Phana (but in the amphur) which is being held on 24th. I hope I can do a post about her because she is an interesting woman and the wat where she stays when she is in Phana is an interesting one too. So there's a bit more kathin to come.

 

 
 

 

 
 
 
 

Phana Song

This is an excerpt from "Phana 300 Years" performed by the people of Phana at Wat Phra Lao Thepnimit in April 2008. The young girl singer is a student at Phana Suksa School. The 3-day celebration was sponsored by Phana Municipality. I think it is rather lovely. I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Missing Phana

         

    

    Like all bloggers, I suppose, I wonder why I didn't start this blog a long time ago. (I did, in fact, but let it drop far too soon, so I'm starting again.) The thing is that so many stories are in the past. You don't have to be old for that to seem to be the case, but there are more stories in the past if you are old, naturally.

    The other thing that makes this an odd time to start a blog about life in Phana is that I'm not actually in Phana at the moment. I spend half the year there and the other half in England. I am here for the spring and summer, and in Thailand by the end of the rainy season and through the cool season. It works out just right.

    So this blog will be reflections and memories of life in Phana for the time being, and thinking about the things I miss there. Maybe there will be things to say about the things I don't miss, too.

    Something I have just missed is the annual Wat Phra Lao festival, three days of Buddhist ceremony, the wat elaborately decorated by the monks, the Buddha images taken out and washed, offerings of candles, incense and flowers, singing and dancing, very loud movies on a giant screen, food and drink. And not much sleep for me because the wat is only about 100m away and the festivities go on into the early morning and start again at dawn.

   

   

Perhaps next year I will stay long enough to enjoy Boun Phra Lao again.

Phrakru Udom, Abbot of Wat Phra Lao

4th May 2009

 

 

 Whenever I am in England, as I am now, I find myself spending a lot of timethinking about Thailand, and Phana in particular. So last week I resolved to re-start my blog about life in Phana. I had just made up my mind to make the start, when I got the news that someone I had got to know well there had died. It was not at all unexpected, but it means that I start 'phanathailife' by writing about someone who will not be there when I get back later this year; someone I had come to know quite well over the last five or six years, but whom I had actually first met at a very important  moment in my life just a little short of forty years ago.

 

    Phrakru Udom, Abbot of Wat Phra Lao Thepnimit, Phana

 

                        Phrakru Udom taking part in the Boun Pravet celebrations, Phana

 

 

             Phrakru Udom died last week in the Cancer Centre at Saphasit Hospital in Ubon. The last time I saw him he was in a private room at the hospital on a floor reserved for monks.   

 

             Three of us had gone to visit him, my wife Pensri and I together with Tuan, Phrakru Udom’s younger brother, who had been adopted by Pensri’s father because Tuan’s family was poor and contained a lot of boys, whereas Pensri was one of eight girls and no boys. He was not alone in the hospital room. Another monk was also there as was the secretary-monk who had shared his kuti at Wat Phra Lao in Phana ever since he became abbot at Wat Phra Lao, the two of them staying with him 24 hours a day. And we were soon joined by his sister, who had brought his morning meal. She had never married, and had brought her brother his meal every day that he was in Phana for the last sixty-one years, the time he had been a monk.

           

                Phrakru Udom was a mor lam singer before he was ordained, quite a well-known one apparently. As a monk he became well-known for his chanting as I learnt when I took him on a trip to the Lao border at Chong Mek / Vang Tau. We arrived there at about 10.30, so he guided us to a restaurant where the owner told us that she had known him for years because of his chanting, and she tried to go to Phana to pay him her respects several times a year if she could. The three monks in our little party sat at a table apart, of course, and I formally offered them food, but it was provided by the owner and she made sure that all her staff came to pay their respects. I have been back to the restaurant several times since then, and she always remembers me and my connection with Phana and Phrakru Udom.

 

       Phrakru Udom (on left) outside the restaurant at Chong Mek

            Another trip we went on with him was to the amazing, as yet unfinished, Phra Maha Chedi Chai Mongkhon at Wat Phra Nam Thip in Roi-Et Province. Phrakru Udom’s sister joined us on this one. She said that she had always wondered what it would be like going on a trip with a farang! On the way up the mountain that the Chedi sits atop, we stopped for grilled chicken, sticky rice and som tum. Here they did not know our abbot, but it was interesting to see how quickly and thoughtfully they made the necessary arrangements for him to eat.

 

 

                        Phra Maha Chedi Chai Mongkhon, Roi-Et Province

 

                                   Phra Maha Chedi Chai Mongkhon

 

 

            But what was the important moment of my life when I first met Phrakru Udom?

 

            That was when I married Pensri in Bangkok in November 1969. Her parents and a lot of friends and relations came down from Phana for the occasion, and so did a sangha of nine monks, including the then relatively young Phra Udom, only about 40 years old then. I wasn’t aware of seeing him again, or of having seen him before at all, until November 2003 when our family organised a Kathin at Wat Burapha. He sat in our garden all through the afternoon when a group of old men were building the traditional ong kathin, a pavillion made of bamboo poles and thatched with banana leaves. The following year, when he had become abbot of Wat Phra Lao,Pensri and I went to pay him our respects and he reminded me of having been at our wedding, and also of seeing me when my father-in-law celebrated his sixth-cycle birthday (72 years) in 1982, and again when my mother-in-law died in 1995. At these times he had been the abbot of Wat Burapha and so had been the senior monk at Yai’s cremation.

 

            Pensri and I did not always agree with the ‘improvements’ Phrakru Udom proposed to make at Wat Phra Lao, but in just about every case he proved to have been right. We were the conservative ones. The Wat Festival has grown bigger in his time, and so has the budget available to him, much of it coming from the government since Wat Phra Lao is a ‘cultural heritage’ site, and the development of Amnat Charoen as a new province has seen the wat promoted as a tourist destination, with some success. Trees have been cut down – they were diseased – and replaced by new plantings; the main compound area in front of the ubosot has been laid to tiles; a new long, open-fronted sala has been built facing the ubosot and at last the wall on the southern boundary of the compound has been rebuilt. And early this year several new, small, wooden kutis have been built. Though pride and pleasure are ‘defilements’ which a long-term monk like Phrakru Udom should not indulge in, the people of Phana have felt both when visiting Wat Phra Lao these last few years.

             

            Phrakru Udom, a senior monk, and one born, raised, ordained and resident in Phana all his life, will probably not be cremated for about a year. I hope that Pensri and I will be in Phana when that time comes, to pay our last respects to him.