Meditation on a rainy Sunday

Today's photoblog link

09/16/07

After breakfast, a lavish buffet with Western and Thai dishes, we went to the Red Cross snake farm to see a snake handling, feeding, and milking demonstration. The slide show was interesting and informative, and the presenter was good except for an accent that led to gems like 'lespilatoly fairule'. The presentation itself was fun. We sat in bleachers under a canopy as it poured down rain outside. The handlers seemed very unconcerned about their safety around cobras, pythons, and vipers, despite the presenter's comment that every handler at the hospital had at one point been bitten. His own story involved a Siamese cobra and a paralyzed, necrotic finger that was saved by grafting a big chunk of tissue from his forearm. The cobras struck a lot while we were there, but didn't hit anything.

It was still raining after the presentation, but less, so we decided to push on to our next destination- Wat Pho. We took the subway to near a river dock, but by then the rain had started again in earnest so we holed up in coffee shop. Oh, the subway. It uses a different system from the skytrain, meaning to transfer between the two you need to buy tickets twice. The skytrain uses a paper card with a magnetic strip, the subway uses a small, black, plastic token with an embedded RFID chip. The subway itself was modern, had AC, and was nearly empty, which seemed stranger. Maybe it was a Sunday afternoon thing. Also of interest, there was a cop checking bags at the entrance to the subway, but not hard enough that I couldn't had carried, say, 10kg of high explosives on with me.

After sitting with our coffee for a while, dad reading the guidebooks and me catching up on journal writing, the rain eased off again and we pushed on. We got a bit lost, but a Thai guy stopped and tried to point us toward the boats. He gave up, but another Thai guy came over. He was friendly, spoke good English, and gave us some story about being a schoolteacher. He said that the boats weren't running because of the rain, and that Wat Pho was closed for a holiday. For some reason my father, who's read the same scam advisories I have, bought the story and was trying to get info on this guy's recommended Wat as I was trying to get us out of there without explicitly saying that he was full of shit. I finally pulled my dad away (“I want to explore this neighborhood”) and waved off the tuk-tuk driver who was conveniently standing by. When I outlined the characteristics of the guy's scam my dad felt suitably foolish, and we both got a good laugh out of it.

We couldn't find the dock. We walked through back alleys and poor neighborhoods trying to find the place, but none of the alleys were on our map and we didn't even have the sun to navigate by. We were approached by another Thai guy who suggested a different Wat, but in the end he gave us good directions, and it was unclear how he might have profited from the situation, so I guess he was probably on the level. We finally found the dock and waited for our boat.

On the boat, the orange line of the Chao Phraya express ferry, they tore our tickets in intricate ways that made us afraid to hold the damn things for fear of invalidating them by some subtle fold. The river itself was opaque brown and fast-flowing, carrying patches of floating vegetation as it moved. There were ferries like ours, long-tail river taxi boats with outboard motors driving long propeller shafts, and one gargantuan barge carrying an indeterminate cargo. On the way we passed a combination of river-front slums, gleaming white luxury apartment towers, the naval headquarters, and the imposing Wat Arun.

We got off the boat right at Wat Pho. I don't have much to say about the place that can't be better conveyed in pictures. We took off our shoes and entered a side temple, kneeling on a plastic Winnie the Pooh mat in front of an 800 year old golden Buddha. The main Reclining Buddha was huge. Again, the pictures tell the story better, except for having to fight small crowds to actually take them, and this was a rainy Sunday in the low season. The Reclining Buddha's toes were inlaid with a gorgeous mother of pearl depiction of other Buddhas, but were rubbed down right next to a 'do not touch' sign.

After Wat Pho we quickly hit the amulet market outside of nearby Wat Mahathat before heading in. We were there for meditation classes, and at 6PM we sat down with a Buddhist monk and 3 other Americans. He gave us a primer on meditation theory, most of it fairly vague to my unenlightened mind, but my dad, who's read some texts on meditation, understood some of the subtleties. One idea the monk had that was new to me was the idea of moving a hand slowly up and down with your breath in order to help you focus. He also suggested banishing wandering thoughts by identifying them and repeating them 3 times, for example, 'pain, pain, pain” or, “noise, noise, noise”. After the primer we practiced walking meditation, in which you focus on the soles of your feet, then seated meditation, where you focus on your abdomen. The seated meditation lasted until 8, over an hour, and got pretty excruciating. That was by far the longest I've ever tried to sit still and not think.