Alms for the auburn army - Thailand and Laos - Part 5

It was 6 AM and 50 degrees out. The steam from the container of sticky rice was enough to slightly warm my hand and inflate the plastic glove I was wearing. We were cold.  

Ten minutes had gone by so I put the top back on my bamboo rice container and pulled out my phone to scroll idly. “Get ready, they’re coming!” said Ivy, sitting next to me. I fumbled with my container and pulled out a wad of rice just as the first auburn clad monk walked by. I dropped some into his bowl and did the same for the parade of monks that shuffled silently past us in bare feet. They came in waves. Some looked to be in their 50s, others barely even teenagers. 

This was the daily ritual of giving food to monks. These are the people who inhabit and maintain the tens of thousands of temples across Thailand and Laos. They’re easily identified by their auburn robes and shaved heads. They wake up at 4 AM, and typically begin walking around at around 5:30 AM to pick up the food they’ll eat for the day. Their vows prevent them from asking for anything. So they depend on donations from their community and in some places from tourists like ourselves, as well as devout Buddhists from China, Korea and Japan.

The experience was both interesting and unusual. It felt like a strange way to interact with someone. We didn’t always know how much rice to give them, because at any given moment it wasn’t evident how many more were coming. We were putting rice on top of food they’ve already gotten, which included significant numbers of what looked like locally produced Kit- Kats and Oreos. Foreign tourists apparently had a habit of giving this sort of thing. It seemed odd that someone would later have to separate the rice off of these plastic wrappers, and this didn’t seem like a particularly balanced diet.

The lifestyle of the monks generated a fair amount of back-and-forth within the Flashpack group. Some people had a visceral reaction to the idea of an entire class of people who did not have jobs and depended on the largesse of others. There was also some contemplation of the social value provided by monasteries that took in poor children from rural families and guaranteed them an education.

In this light, joining a monastery seemed to me a lot like joining the army. It was an escape route for kids who didn’t have a lot of options. It offered discipline and rigor and education and was frequently a springboard to other things, but also involved a lot of manual labor, self-deprivation, and not eating what you want. It was a stark contrast to the blissful detachment of Buddhism as practiced in pristine yoga studios or sleek modern apartments.

One of our first activities in Chiang Mai was a chat with a monk who identified himself as Pra KK. He was a charming and youthful monk with very good English.

 

He talked about the underlying principles of Buddhism, which he insisted is not in fact of religion. This is because religions link human beings to God. But Buddhism has no God he told us, it has no heaven. These are things that we create for ourselves. People of other religions can be Buddhist he said, mentioning one woman from the United States, who described herself as Jew-Bu.

He described a combination of beliefs and practices that have gained increasing currency in modern world through concepts like mindfulness and self-awareness. He described ideas of living in the moment, of being true to ourselves, of living simple lives and of developing our meditation practice. I appreciated the messages he was delivering because they resonated with the types of things I’ve been trying to do in my own personal life. He was funny and relatable.

But there was something unsettling about his delivery that took me a little while to pinpoint. What I landed on was that his words described peace, but his underlying demeanor conveyed anger. And this did not seem surprising. He lived a life in which he could not build his own economic stability and at the same time, he could not ask for anything. This to me meant that he had to spend a lot of time asking for things without asking for them, which I took to be a frequent underpinning of human interactions in Buddhist societies. It seemed like a difficult way to live.

He later said he was not ethnically Thai but rather from a tribal village of the mountains and had been orphaned at a young age. I found myself deeply saddened by this because not only had he given up hope for the material things that I take for granted, he had grown up without the affection of parents. He’d fought for everything on his own.

He started taking questions, and I spent a while thinking about what to ask him. A reporter’s instinct is to look for something uncomfortable like the systematic persecution of Rohingya Muslims by Buddhist authorities in Myanmar. I decided this would get wound up in Zen Buddhist sound-of-a-tree-falling-in-the-forest solipsism. So I kept it simple.

“What makes you the happiest?” I asked.

He paused for what must’ve been 20 seconds.” That’s a very good question,” he said. And then paused for another 20 seconds.

“I appreciate the simplicity. When I shave my head. There’s a feeling of satisfaction in wearing the same robe every day. I never have to worry about what I’m going to wear.”

We wrapped up and the group stood up to go outside. We stood for a group photo in front of the school that had hosted the chat, the school’s social media guru ducking awkwardly to get the gaggle of foreigners and the school’s logo into the shot.

I wanted to tell him, “I’m sorry you lost your parents and had to do everything on your own. That nobody helped you get through your childhood trauma. That after so many years as a monk, nobody ever asked what makes you happy.” I wanted to offer him some money so he could treat himself to something, but of course he wouldn’t be able to take it or even spend money on himself. We walked to the nearby temple and people took their shoes off to go inside.

I stepped away to record a voice note about what I’d felt during that session. I felt choked up and wiped away tears. I wasn’t sure who in the group noticed. Nobody said anything. But I also walked away with a reminder that every one of those anonymous auburn robes holds a universe of stories, fears, joys and triumphs that the world is unlikely to ever ask about. 

 Part 6 - Rollin’ on the river - Thailand and Laos