Thailand started off a bit crazy with a two day stint in Bangkok, saying goodbye to Jac, and traveling to Chiang Mai with just four of us left on our original team of six. While we were in Chiang Mai, some parents flew out for a week and then we had a week of debrief leaving little time for us to live our more “regular race life”. Chiang Mai was cool, but Thailand wasn’t really my favorite month. It was a heavy month full of spiritual warfare, and it was challenging with so much going on including team changes and pushing through month nine with a significant amount of the race left, yet the end was in sight. Thailand will also forever be marked with memories of coexisting with rats in our hostel… but what we loved about Thailand was our time we spent with and loving on the monks. Talk about a different way of life.
We took a long bus from Bangkok and immediately upon arriving in Chiang Mai, we saw lots of boys, young men, and older men walking around in different shades of orange with different colored bags slung around their shoulders. They were all in flip flops and had shaved heads, some riding in the back of trucks, some being driven around on motos, and moving all around town before eventually walking back to the temples where they stayed. Chiang Mai instantly had a different feel to it than Bangkok, it was more historical, smaller, quieter, calmer, and full of tourists and locals alike. It was pretty intriguing to us having heard a lot about monks but never seeing them until Chiang Mai. We ended up visiting one famous temple which was also where Monk University was, and we got to participate in “monk chats”. It all sounded funny to me at first, but the school was real and the monk chats were an opportunity in their schooling to practice their English and answer questions about their significantly different way of life.
Monks base everything around the beliefs of Buddha, reaching enlightenment, and eventually being reincarnated. We sat down the first day and talked to Arnit, a young man similar in age to us, who had been a practicing monk for almost ten years. After a couple of hours, we got a lot of questions answered and were even able to connect and relate with him at different points in his story. Apparently, it is good and highly encouraged for all Buddhist men to be a monk at some point in their lives. The time is not determined and is up to every person when they want to enter and when they want to go back to “regular life”. Every monk gets into it a different way. Some come from extreme levels of poverty and use monkhood as an escape and benefit from the access to school. For some it’s a spiritual journey. For others, it’s something they see as necessary to do and something to check off their list in order to fulfill living a good and full life.
We met one monk, Alan, who was in his 40s and had been working as a banker in Bangkok for years. He took a break from that to come to Chiang Mai and teach English while he began practicing monkhood himself. He had only been a monk for four months at that point and joked with us not to ask him any questions yet because he knew nothing. At one point when leading the English lesson, we got up to introduce ourselves and he started clapping and encouraging everyone else to clap! The monks hesitated and we weren’t sure what to do… we had learned that one rule they live by is to not clap. When asking about Alan about it later, he was embarrassingly laughed it off claiming there are too many rules to remember! He’s not wrong… they live by a list of 227 rules.
There are different levels in the monks’ world. At the beginning and when you’re very young, you’re consider a novice monk and responsible to live by the basic ten rules, some including not killing any living thing, not thinking bad thoughts, not lying, not participating in sports or dancing, not cheating, no sexual misconduct, etc. In some ways, they were similar to the Ten Commandments in Christianity. Once you get older and become a regular monk, the list jumps up to 227 rules. According to Arnit, they know all the rules but couldn’t list them off. Some of the rules were a little stranger like not being able to look a woman in the eyes on the street, not peeing standing up, and not clapping apparently. The discipline gets harsher as well. For example, if they kill something as small as a mosquito, they are required by the rules to go to each person they know in the temple and admit their fault. If too many mistakes are made, they are forced to leave monk life behind and are not allowed back in. They get up at around 3:30 or 4 in the morning to meditate for 3 hours, then they go around town asking for donations for breakfast. It is considered good karma to give to monks and in return, the monks bless them and go on their way. They go to class in between the allowed two meals a day, they cannot eat after 12 pm. They go back to class in the afternoon and visit the temple to pay more respect to Buddha and they end their days pretty early.
While sitting with the monks at the temple, I met one man who moved here to practice Buddhism the same weekend he retired. He was a man from San Francisco, frustrated by things happening in the States and seeking something much simpler. I’m not sure yet that he found what he was looking for, but it was another conversation and another opportunity to love on a fellow traveler in search of answers. Looking back on our time in Asia so far, it’s unreal how many temples we’ve been to and seen. It’s crazy how many people are lost and searching for Jesus and they don’t even know it. People are out here living by these extreme lists of impossible rules and it spurs us on to love people to the truth. I’m overwhelmed by what the LoRd has allowed me to see and feeling so blessed because of it. Stay tuned for my Cambodia blog… I’d say it’s been my favorite month yet:)
If you have any more questions about monks, feel free to shoot them my way and I’ll answer them as best as I can! It’s hard to sum it all up in a blog!
