CHAPTER TWO LAOS
please note: this blog arranges posts according to the date they are posted. To read Searching for the Emerald Buddha in chronological order please go back to chapter one.
When you climb the mountainous steps from the Mekong up to Luang Prabang you can tell right off the bat that there’s something different here. Initially I couldn’t figure it out. Was it the air? The humidity? Or perhaps it’s simply the perfect synthesis of French and Lao food, art and culture. Plainly, this wasn’t the lush lowlands of Lanna “with a million rice paddies”. This was the former kingdom of Lan Xang, the “kingdom of a million elephants under a white parasol”, Laos. Here the rice paddies are infrequently sprinkled amongst the jungle, and the Mekong threads itself through gorges and fantastic karst spires. Everyone is poorer here, the roads potholed. This is where Crown Prince Setthathirath came to when he fled Chiang Mai with the Emerald Buddha.
In 1359 Luang Prabang (formerly Xiang Dong Xiang Thong), had been vitalized by the gift of a small gilded Buddha statue, the Prabang, from the Khmer king of Angkor. It’s an exceptional small statue displaying the double Abyaha mudra, or the gesture of fearlessness. Soon, the Prabang become the Palladian of the Lan Xang nation-state and Xiang Dong Xiang Thong became Luang Prabang.
There is no known documentation for the Emerald Buddha in Luang Prabang. Since the time of Setthathirath Luang Prabang has been sacked and burned numerous times. The last serial destruction of Luang Prabang came as late as the 1880’s! Few temples, and their records, escaped destruction. But its thought that at least initially Setthathirath enshrined the Emerald Buddha in Wat Wisunart, along with the golden Prabang.
When the Black Haw Riders burned Wat Wisunart in 1887 they cracked open the Watermelon Chedi like a nut and extracted the gold and silver Buddha offerings within. Sadly when the burned wooden Vihar was rebuilt it was in concrete, as they almost always are.
Recently when we visited Wat Wisunart it was undergoing reconstruction. The shed-like Vihar was so stuffed with a spider web of bamboo poles that you couldn’t even see the main Buddha image. Everything else was pushed together into the rear of the hall, with the only illumination coming through the Khmer-style windows.
But apparently The Emerald Buddha and the Prabang do not get along well together. At least that is what happened when the Thai military absconded with both statues and took them back to Thailand. Natural disasters ensued, and eventually the Prabang was sent back to Laos! There seems to be some sort of dissonance between them. In 1560 Setthathirath, now the king, built a new temple in Luang Prabang: Wat Xiengthong. In all likelihood the Emerald Buddha was brought here.
Wat Xiengthong is a gorgeous high Lanna-style temple with a down sloping tiered roof that represents a mother hen sheltering her chicks. On the ridge line, the Chofah have been recently re-gilded with emerald colored glass. A beautiful sight! When we came here twenty years ago the place was deserted. But now, pilgrims fill the courtyard from dawn till dusk.
The chapel to the side of the Sim has an elaborately carved facade depicting scenes from the Buddha’s life. The side and rear walls are covered with colorful folk art motifs applied in the 1920’s
We followed some monks on pilgrimage up into the Sim. Monks on pilgrimage are always slightly mysterious: where are the going, what are they doing?
It’s common to see monks on pilgrimage walking beside the road on even the hottest days, sometimes with a sun umbrella but always with a begging bowl slung around their neck and a small pack on their back. Somehow, the difficulties of pilgrimage, of passing through time and space, heighten the feeling of devotion. And yes, this is all about devotion.
Obviously this Search for the Emerald Buddha is a pilgrimage of sorts. I’m like a bee circling around the hive, getting closer and closer but never arriving, my antenna erect and quivering. I know that sooner or later the secrets of the Emerald Buddha will be revealed to me.
While walking around Luang Prabang we began to seek out temples famous for their great meditators. This is relatively a recent thing. After the Communists took over in the 1970’s Buddhism was actively discouraged. But step by step it’s creeping back. Wat Mai, for example, is famous for being the home of great meditators.
Somehow, despite the hordes of tourists and the noisy night market, Luang Prabang still shines with a rare luminosity. I’ve been there five or six times and each time I vow I’m never going to leave. Henri Mohut, the French journalist who rediscovered Angkor Wat insisted that Luang Prabang was far more captivating than Angkor Wat. In the end he didn’t leave; he died outside Luang Prabang of malaria and rests here to this day.
One day we decided to beat the heat and go to the Royal Palace Museum. We didn’t have the right clothes, so we went back to our room and changed. Back at the gate I noticed the NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign and beside it were two Tourist Police thugs. I decided to keep well away from them.
But no sooner were we inside than Yasha pulled out her camera and without a care in the world started shooting photographs! The guards were on her in a second! They took her camera – a cellphone – and demanded she delete all her photographs. She refused. I heard somewhere that ‘discretion is the better part of valor’, so I looked both ways to make sure the Tourist Police hadn’t arrived on the scene and quickly scampered into the rear of the museum. Yasha would have to take care of herself!
The back of the Royal Palace encloses the bedrooms of the former king and queen, while for some reason the corridors outside display crude depictions of the Vessantara Jataka. I had vaguely heard of the Vessantara Jataka – the story of the Buddha’s penultimate rebirth.
In Kamala Tiyavanich’s The Buddha in the Jungle she talks about how the Vessantara Jataka is commonly performed during the rains retreat as a sort of passion play, with the various monks taking the voices of the participants in the jataka.
Basically, the Bodhisattva Vessantara, in his last rebirth as a prince before being reborn as Buddha Shakyamuni, practiced the Perfection of Generosity. First he gave away his father’s money, then the royal white elephant, then his chariot, and finally his children! When an evil Bhramin asked him for his wife the gods intervened. He had passed his test, the test he had set himself for this life. I know it sounds crazy but I asked myself, “what would I give away to attain Buddhahood?” Everything? I remember asking one Buddhist friend if he would give everything away to attain Buddhahood and he said that if he tried that his wife would kill him! But what are we talking about here? Metaphorically giving everything away or actually doing it?
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition they say that making visualized offerings, immeasurable visualized offerings, leads to the causes and conditions for devotion. One visualizes all things, the earth and the four continents, Mt Meru, the cosmos and everything it contains, and gives them away freely.
But I was always an indifferent practitioner, and despite having performed over two hundred thousand mandala offerings I still seemed to to be no closer to devotion than before.
Maybe I was just looking at things the wrong way. It isn’t giving things away that’s important. It’s giving things away freely. To open ones heart and to let go… of yes, everything.
I left the back galleries of the Royal Palace and found Yasha waiting for me out front. The guards had sweated her until she deleted the one photograph she had taken. Tan pis, it was a nice one. At this point she had lost her taste for the Royal Palace. We walked over to the seldom visited Wat Pra Huak.
The serenity of the Buddha’s face said it all. Open your heart and bingo! That’s it, isn’t it? Unfortunately for all potential awareness seekers the Emerald Buddha’s residency in Luang Prabang was short; a brief twelve years. With the approach of Burmese forces Setthathirath moved his capital, and the Emerald Buddha to Vientiane. And where the Emerald Buddha went, we followed.
Sadly, Vientiane has not weathered the forces of the 21st century as well as Luang Prabang. What were once dusty streets are now crowded with cars, and cheaply constructed mid-range skyscrapers dominate the horizon. It’s quite a change from when the French seized Laos in the late 19th century.
A hundred years before – 1779 – the Thai invaded, sacking Vientiane and carting off the Emerald Buddha and the Prabang in a gilded cage. The Thai returned again in 1829 to burn the city over one more time.
So the city we’ve visited again and again has been reconstructed and deconstructed during occupations by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans. Today the Chinese are the big players here.
After enshrining the Emerald in the Haw Phra Kaeo Setthathirath immediately built the iconic Pha That Luang.
Legend has it that the original structure at this location was built at the time of Ashoka and enshrined a piece of the Buddha’s breastbone. Although this is unlikely there were groups of Theravada Mon migrants in SE Asia before the dawn of the current Common Era. I suppose anything is possible when myth, devotion and history intersect.
What definitely is true however is that after Setthathirath constructed the That Luang it has been destroyed over and over again by Burmese, Siamese and Chinese troops. Invariably they stripped the gold plating from the Chedi and carried it away. That was the point of it all, really. Loot. The botched French restoration of 1900 led to the current 1930’s reconstruction based on the drawings of Louis Deleporte. On the outer level, the That Luang, along with the Prabang, represent the spiritual underpinnings of the Laotian state.
The Haw Phra Kaew was never meant to be a temple. Setthathirath built it not far from the Mekong River on the grounds of the royal palace. It must have been a beautiful place back then. Kind of like the dawn of history on the Mekong. But it didn’t last long. The Haw Phra Kaew, rebuilt in the French style, still stands on the grounds of the Presidential Palace.
Unfortunately once the Emerald Buddha was enshrined the Haw Phra Kaew became Setthathirath’s own personal chapel. It stayed that way until 1779 when the Thai finally came to take the Emerald Buddha away.
Today the Haw Phra Kaew exists solely as a museum. Photographs are not allowed. It’s too bad, because behind the large sitting Buddha was a massive pile of broken Buddha statues, dusty candelabra and all sorts of unidentifiable but definitely cool stuff. Looking at everything I felt oddly emotional, so I bought a small Thai-style Emerald Buddha pendent with dozens of fake diamonds and put it around my neck. Yasha laughed but I’m still wearing it today.
Right across the street lies Wat Sisiket, a temple rebuilt in the same French classical style. It looks much like the Haw Phra Kaew. But unlike the Haw Phra Kaew Wat Sisiket is an actual monastery, with monks hanging out in the back. Also unlike the Haw Phra Kaew the Sim at Wat Sisiket is surrounded by a colonnade of a thousand buddhas.
The problem with Vientiane is that your footsteps are always dogged by history. I haven’t even mentioned the thousands of people who fled Vientiane when the Communists took over nor the thousands who were sent to re-education camps. Nor the king… I haven’t talked about what happened to the king.
Yet somehow the absence of the Emerald Buddha in Lao continues to be deeply felt. It’s like an empty heart that’s still beating. It was calling to us, even in Vientiane. So we packed our bags and took the overnight bus to Bangkok
I would like to thank Louis Deleporte and Wikipedia for the use of their royalty free images