A Thought

"God is Immaterial". A wonderful place to pray is at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok CBD. It's beautiful and so full of human intensity and meaning. It's a shrine to Brahma but is also well known as the Buddha of the Four Directions and it is a deeply spiritual place; and, importantly, for the hugely-rising number of Chinese visitors, who are fundamentally atheistic, it is a Lucky Place. I love to kneel there on the old concrete (all the street-concrete in Bangkok is always cracking because the city is sinking into the marsh beneath it. Sometimes in the wide concrete expanses, you can see the slow waves of the underlying formal tides) with the business men and the office girls and the general fluid mass of people that is Bangkok. This remarkable Krung Thep Mahanakorn. This is an amazing human city, fully dedicated to the real abiding deity of itself. All my life I will only pray in this place. I love the noise of the traffic, the smell of carbon and incense, the music of human movement, the boring chants, the beautiful flowers, the burning eyes, the raspy throat, the dance, the orange candle flames, and the depth of this astounding place. It is just near the Louis Vuitton shop and some bright and shiny massage parlours, and not far from the weapons-dealers, as it well should be, to come to terms at all with real human meaning.

I recall being in a prayer-garden in Singapore and noting that of all the Buddhas there, it was the marble head of the Buddha of Prosperity that was worn down the most through the decades of ardent human touch in total supplication.