Things Just Happen - Fixing Flats, Meeting a Monk and a Gaur

Last Wednesday I rode my bike to the bike shop to get the rear brake tightened. He fixed this and that too and then I rode into the old town to meet J for dinner. Since she doesn't have a bike here or show an interest in one, she walks a lot. (If you ride anywhere besides the back sois I take to work, you really have to ride in the traffic.




No bike lanes, no sidewalks you could ride on - you can barely walk on them. So it can be pretty intimidating.) So we walked home - it took about two hours. Just before we got home I realized we needed bananas and I was ready to ride up Thanon (road) Suthep. But my bike was weird. I had a flat in front. So I just pushed it the rest of the way home. And the next day we left for Mae Sai.

So yesterday (Sunday) I borrowed a monkey wrench and took the front wheel off and we walked to a little shop that fixes flats.

We left the wheel there and walked up the road to Wat Umong. This temple is known as the forest temple. I ride past it every day on the way to and from work, but I'd never been in it. J had gone in once to look around. This is a major wat that tourists go to, but it isn't in the middle of town. For most people, you have to work to get to it. So it seemed like, since it's in our neighborhood, we ought to check it out.

After looking at a few books on Buddhism, environmental issues in Thailand, meditation, we moved on.







Looking at the map, we decided to just follow the trail. This is not your average Wat. It's in a forest and the buildings are scattered here and there amongst the trees.
First we went to the library. I haven't been in one for a while, so it was nice to browse the books - they had English as well as Thai and other languages.


The middle sign is in English and says there will be Monk talks in English on Sundays from 3-5 at the fish pond. It was four. The blue arrow signs points to the fish pond.
So we wandered down and found about 15 foreigners sitting in a little round pavilion next to what was more a small man made lake than a pond, listening to a British (I think) monk talking about Buddhism.

A young man asked for a definition of Enlightenment. The monk explained why simple explanations were problematic. Then he described enlightenment, using his hands, as two sheaves of grass leaning against each other. One is a person, the other is reality. Then his hands collapsed. When man no longer sees the world from his subjective view, when this separation between a man and the world collapses - that's enlightenment. (I've fudged a bit because I can't remember exactly the words he used.)

I was struck by how this parallels one of the points of post-modernists who talk about how we objectify the world instead seeing ourselves as being part of the world. (That's not quite right either, but there is a connection here that I can't explain well.) The monk had to attend to things at 4:30 and so we wandered further along the trail around the lake.

[The internet connection ended last night at this point. I was going to write more on this post, but it's long enough and I'll do a part 2 later to finish Sunday. I'm in the office again, working on my presentation that will be sometime this week. No one else is here again - they were supposed to get back yesterday (Monday) night - so I have a quiet place to get this powerpoint so it makes the points I need to make in a fun way. They really have a lot of their planning in place - thanks in part to the requirements of the original grant application to Oxfam. Now it's just a question of being able to break down the major expected outcomes (it's taken me a long time to learn that in Thai well enough to roll easily off my tongue. In Thai it translates as "results that we expect to receive" or ผลที่คาดว่าจะได้รับ)
into steps that need to get there. Maybe I'll do a post on that too. So this is it for now. I'll do the monk and gaur in part 2.)