Pets

Life in a Thai monastery (Part 4 of 7)

These monks at Nanachat had a mystique about them. . . unmistakable, but difficult to explain. They were barely noticeable, so modest and understated, childish in many ways, and our hearts could not help but pity them. This was not Bangkok, where the city’s monks donned their robes only to earn merit for relatives, or for reasons other than dedicating their lives to meditation and enlightenment. This was the real deal at Wat Pah Nanachat, and I wondered if the stories of narrow escapes to death at these wats were exaggerated. I had the strange feeling that we were about to find out.

The next morning I came across a villager and a monk, chatting and busily working on a corpse. It was on a bamboo table in the shade of some banana trees near the living room and it seemed to be an animal or something. They seemed to be skinning. MMM. I didn’t think monks did that? So I went over and found out what they were working on: a human skeleton! “Wow,” I thought, remembering my treasured autopsy photo, “maybe I should round up Janet and head back to good old Colorado right now.” This was truly macabre – they were actually scraping dried meat off of dead, gray bones.

Later that day, overcome by curiosity and a sense of the macabre, I asked about the skeleton. What I pieced together was that it had apparently been curing in a sealed box under one of the kuties for two years, a necessary process so that the meat could be more easily removed without damaging the bones. The two years had already expired and it was time to scrape up the meat before sending the cleaned bones to Bangkok to be nailed and whitened.

During the years the body was in storage, many monks inhabited the kuti to overcome their fear of ghosts and, not surprisingly, had unusual meditative experiences. The skeleton ghost was believed to wander the monastery grounds every night in search of its children.

The remains were those of a young woman from the local village. She and her husband (the villager who scraped the bones) visited the monastery regularly to offer food and listen to dhamma talks or sermons. The couple had a beautiful, healthy baby boy and another child on the way. They were very much in love and expected an uncomplicated life in the village, raising their children and growing old together.

It was obvious that this couple was not asking for much. . . it was them? They were happy with the simplest things; farm, raise children and then die in the same town where they were born. This was in 1981, just before Thailand became westernized to the extent that it is now, and the humbleness and humbleness of these people overwhelmed us time and time again.

The story of the skeleton continued: after her daughter was born, the woman began to experience constantly worsening pain. It became so intense and relentless that she could only curl up in bed all day. With no money available for treatments in Bangkok, the village remedies and aspirin were her only option, and the pain eventually became unbearable. One night she asked her husband to bring her children to her room and just hug her. She was saying goodbye.

Her soft cry wasn’t so much from the pain now, but from what she was about to ask her husband to do. She wanted to die, the pain was too much, and yet how could she abandon her little children? What would she become of them and of her husband? Her dreams were shattered. She asked her husband to leave his gun on the table.

He said no! How could he do this? He felt ashamed and unworthy that he couldn’t heal her. He would take her gun and rob someone, and he would get money to take it to Bangkok, but there was no one to rob; the monks had no money, and neither did the poor villagers.

The woman he loved was in pain, and there was nothing he could do about it except help her commit suicide. How could he live with such a thing? she would have to kill her himself and spare him the horror of pulling the trigger on her. He then she would commit suicide. . . but what about the children?

He couldn’t do it; all he could do was place the revolver on his desk and quietly leave the room, unable to meet his eyes. Moments later, he rang out a shot.

It was a sad story, and I couldn’t help but wonder who really pulled the trigger. If he did, was it wrong for him to take his own life? Yes, according to the monks, it was, but I reserved judgment. How could I know what he was going through unless he put me in his shoes?

He would see the monk and the villager chatting and working on the skeleton from a vantage point across the courtyard, and occasionally he would notice the kindly little villager with the hunched shoulders put down his knife and stand silently, looking out into the woods. His wrinkled face and weak smile revealed the pain of a poor villager’s life that had come undone, and now he was doing the only thing left to do, fulfilling a promise to the woman he loved for most of his life. his life.

His last wish was that his skeleton be displayed in the main hall for all the monks to look at every day, reminding them that death can come at any time, and that death is always painful, and therefore they should not delay in his efforts to find her. freedom in their hearts and hopefully not experience death for many more lifetimes.

The moving story and the actual experience of seeing this skeleton with a bullet hole in its skull affected me deeply, far more than any lecture about us being just “bubbles in a stream that could burst at any moment.” In fact, he was now living the words of the Buddha.