Honoring the Dead

 

Most people in Southeast Asia are Buddhist, and the Buddhists cremate their dead. So what do they do with the ashes? It may depend on how much money they have.

Those who can afford an elaborate burial place build mausoleums, which they call stupa. Most are built to hold a family’s ashes, although some are simply built as memorials. Regardless, they are all beautiful. The photo at the top of this page and the one that follows were taken at a stupa cemetery just outside Oknha Tay, Cambodia.

People who can’t afford to build a stupa place the ashes in a spirit house in front of their home or place of business. The next three photos show spirit houses located outside a home and a business and a place where they are for sale, respectively.

If you can’t even afford a spirit house, it is apparently acceptable to spread the ashes in the river. Our Cambodian guide said that some people even make their own spirit houses, which look something like a rural American mailbox.

As mentioned above, however, some stupas are built as memorials not to specific individuals but to a group of people, much like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Cambodia went through a particularly violent period in the 1970s when the Khmer Rouge controlled the country. The Khmer Rouge decided to get rid of the upper classes and the educated citizens and slaughtered several million men, women, and children. These days, many of the former “killing fields” have become memorials, or at least have memorials built next to them. The next photo shows what our Cambodian guide call the Stupa of Regret, an empty stupa erected at Phnom Pros, the site of a former Buddhist temple where people were held and executed. The stupa was built by a member of the Khmer Rouge who was later remorseful about his role.

The final two photos show the temple used as a jail and a centuries-old stone lion with a missing hip from being used as a sharpening block for the weapons the Khmer Rouge sliced people’s heads off with.

Memorials help us remember people and historical events, but in the end it doesn’t matter where our ashes or bones are kept or how elaborate or simple the burial place. What does matter is whether the final destination is heaven or hell.

Still, I love looking at those elaborate stupas.

Temples Now and Then

 

When we were in Southeast Asia, we saw a number of temples, both new and old. Actually, all of them are old. The real distinction is between those that are still in active use and those that are ruins.

Our first visits were to Buddhist temples that are still in use, starting in Bangkok, Thailand. The first, and largest, of those was the Temple of the Dawn, shown in the photo at the head of this post. It had been built centuries ago but underwent a recent restoration.

The next day we saw two Buddhist temples, still in Bangkok. The Temple of the Emerald Buddha is within the grounds of the Grand Palace. The Emerald Buddha is actually jade, and we weren’t allowed to enter the building that housed it. We could view it through a window, but I wasn’t able to get a good photo. I did get good pictures of some of the details of the temple buildings, however. Demons were a frequent decoration, and the next photo shows three of them. Our guide made a point of telling us that demons didn’t equal bad—some are and some aren’t, much like people.

The last temple we saw in Bangkok was the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. Its main feature is a very long golden statue of Buddha reclining. We could get close up and personal with that statue, but that had its own disadvantages. I couldn’t get far enough away to take the entire figure or even most of it at once. The next photo shows Buddha reclining on his right elbow.

From Thailand we flew to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where our cruise director took us to a Chinese temple. This one didn’t celebrate any particular person or god but was meant to be a place where people could come to honor their own particular household gods. At least I think that’s the gist of what she said.

The other active temple we visited was Udon Monastery north of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where two of the monks on duty at the prayer building gave us a group blessing before one of them was chased away by a possibly rabid monkey. This photo shows the steps leading up to the prayer building.

One of the main reasons we took this trip was to see the ruins of Angkor Wat near Siem Reap, Cambodia. That temple was built almost a thousand years ago. Cambodia was Hindu at the time, but the king married a woman who wanted him to transition the country to Buddhism, so there are elements of both in the temple. It was well built and is remarkably well preserved for such an old building. The first photo shows the main building reflected in the water of a pool within the grounds, and the second shows the steep steps to the third floor. It was worth the climb for the views, but the stairs were a little scary, and the woman coming down in front of Roland was terrified.

We saw two other ruined temples before leaving Siem Reap. The first was Phrom Temple, which had several gigantic trees growing over the stonework. Our guide said that type of tree lives for only about two hundred years so they won’t be there forever, but they are pretty impressive now. The next photo shows the roots growing over the entrance within the temple.

The last temple ruin we went to near Siem Reap was Bayon Temple, which is a place of many faces. It’s common to find towers with a face of a different god on each side, but Bayon Temple had 54 towers of different sizes and each one had the four faces. Apparently there were 54 provinces in Cambodia when the temple was built, and each tower represents the size and location of one of the provinces. The next photo shows Bayon Temple, and the last shows three of the stone faces (one in front and one on each side) above a living one.

We actually saw one more temple that is no longer in use, but it has a different history and will be covered in next week’s post on how Buddhists honor their dead.