The Other Tales of Chiang Mai by Alex Gunn

Author:Alex Gunn [Gunn, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

Just Moving On

A while ago I attended a three day funeral and body burning at a Buddhist Temple just outside Chiang Mai. It was the steepest learning curve since my secondary school art teacher leant me an album called Hot Rats by some goatee bearded genius called Frank Zappa at the same time as giving me an art book called Fat, Felt and Flat Batteries by the modern German artist Joseph Beuys. I went home, put on the record and read the book and my brain exploded.

There is so much that is remarkable about death and the funeral process in Thailand that it’s hard to know where to start. Some of my brain synapses are still trying to make new connections in order to comprehend and understand the avalanche of new thinking and alien concepts.

Did you know, for example, that if a person dies suddenly and unexpectedly, say in a road traffic accident, their spirit doesn’t necessarily know they are dead and will be wandering around the crash site lost and bewildered like a man in a lingerie department.

Also, that the dead person can “hear” for some time after they have actually died and your last whispered words, and even thoughts, affect the transition of the “dead” person from this life to the next.

Just in order to write about it requires me to use multiple quote marks as I no longer seem have useful English words to describe what I thought were standard truths. The notion of “dead” is up for grabs in Thailand.

On the evening of the second day, just as dusk was falling in the temple, a portly beneficent faced monk appeared. There was a ripple of excitement and a friend whispered to me that this was a “celebrity monk” from a neighbouring temple who had been asked to make a “special talk.” I could feel my poor old western brain synapses fizzing again.

He walked through the congregation, smiling and talking to people as he went, and sat in a large, uncomfortable looking wooden chair at the far end of the open sided hall where we were all crowded. “You must not be sad, you must not be unhappy,” he said in perfect English, and then said a lot of things in Thai which made everybody laugh. He was sitting about 10 feet away from the refrigerated coffin and often talked directly to the person inside.

He broke into English again, “things are just moving along, that’s all that is happening, we are moving along,” and to emphasize his point he made all 300 of us stand up and move one place to our left and sit down again. “Just moving along, same thing different place,” he said.

He continued to speak and chant and sing in Thai and English for about two hours, during which time the phrase “just moving along” kept circling my head like vultures over a dying man in the desert. Occasionally the whole congregation would laugh, even the close relatives of the deceased, or to use my new terminology, the close relatives of the person who had just “moved along.

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