I was born in the year of the rabbit and that year comes round every twelve years. For me, it has come round six times so far. Traditionally, the sixth cycle (and the seventh) are celebrated more than an annual birthday here in Thailand. It is considered quite an achievement, I suppose, to see your sixth cycle. I certainly feel a sense of achievement, partly perhaps because I can still remember thinking that 30 years old was OLD AGE, and I could not imagine living that long.
My actual birthday was back in October, but we decided that the best time to celebrate it would be close to Christmas. We ended up with Christmas Eve for several reasons, the main one being that the family was asembling in Bangkok the previous weekend for the wedding of Liew and Ashley. By family 'assembling', I mean that our children Dominic and Darunee, with Jay and Adam and our five grandchildren would all be in Thailand for the wedding and then staying on for some holiday time. Liew and Ashley would be here from England too of course. Our Thai family (Pensri's sisters and their children and grandchildren and her cousins and their children and grandchildren) were also able to come up to Phana, as most of them do each year for a tam boun for the ancestors.
Most people arrived in Phana on the 23rd, Dom and Darunee's lot with us in the house, everyone else booked into Phana Garden Resort. Food was organised, monks invited, a stage put up in the garden, and a marquee, plastic tables and chairs stacked up ready for use. In the morning we were going to feed nine monks (one forgot to come!) and then have a baci su kwan ceremony with one of Pensri's second (?) cousins the spirit-caller. The neice of Mom, the woman who spent several months with us in England in 2011, had offered to dance the benediction dance, and three other young women were going to perform another dance for the baci.
Hundreds of photos were taken, none of them by me on this occasion. It is difficult to make a selection,but here goes.
Beautiful dancers -- worth waiting 72 years for this picture, I think.
The monks beginning their chanting; the senior monk here kindly told me I could sit cross-legged. He could see that I was likely to topple over otherwise!
The woman on the right is well past her seventh cycle. She must have attended hundreds of ceremonies like this one. She used to give me massages when I first came to Phana, and I thought she was really old then. Really old, but her thumbs were amazingly strong, and she gave me some of the most effective massage I've had. It was good to see her again because she doesn't get out and about much any more.
And then the sacred threads were tied around wrists while blessings were muttered. It is usual to wish the receiver good health and a long life but people seemed to enjoy trying to outdo each other by wishing me 100, 300, 600, 1200 years of life! I'm not sure I wish any of those for myself, but who knows.
Then we all had lunch and everyone except the families from Bangkok, Abu Dhabi and England disappeared rapidly, as is the custom. But in the evening we had an entertainment arranged and I'll post some pictures of that very soon.
The village guardian spirits inhabiting the Bue Baan in Ban Phana have been kept informed of the plans to build a new Lak Muang on the site of the old market-place. In effect their place is being down-graded, or at least overshadowed, by the new structure. (See the previous post for details of this.) So a ceremony was held early one morning according to local Isan customs to call the spirits and apologise to them for any inconvenience. I think their goodwill was called upon. If I have it right, there is not much these spirits can do for you, but a whole lot that they can do against you if they are not on your side.
The crowd was not a huge one, but it included most of the elderly residents of Ban Phana, a couple of abbots and a few novices, the District Officer (nai amphur), the mayors and deputy mayors of Phana Municipality and Phra Lao Municipality, and possibly a few other notables I didn't recognise.
We were asked to be there at about 8 am but we have learned to take starting times to be largely ignored. Besides, we knew that the auspicious time for the spirits to be called was at 9.09, so we got there much nearer to that time. Here we see the spirit expert (a former head teacher from a nearby village) pointing out the need to be precise.
The calling of the spirits was a very serious matter. Some monks will have nothing to do with this kind of rite, but this monk had been called in from outside Phana because he was particularly skilled in communicating with the spirits.
The spirits had been offered a generous amount of fruit, but as usual they didn't actually consume any of it. It is always a nice moment in these ceremonies when it becomes clear that the spirits, although no doubt very pleased by the generosity and thoughtfulness of the people who have made offerings, are not going to take up the offer, except perhaps in a very spiritual way rather than a mundane one. This is the moment, you might think, that people have been waiting for. Help yourself (and a few others) time.
And since the number 9 was so auspicious on this day, I had better add one more photograph to this collection. There I was at the end. Just me, a resting monk, and the village guardian spirits at the navel of the village, the bue baan.
Phana is busy with the spirit world at the moment. Placating spirits in one place and inviting them to another. It is all about Phana Municipality's plans to have a new lak muang (usually translated as the city pillar). This will be sited at the old market, in front of the community building which is taking shape based on the old fresh-market building. All of these developments are a blend of the old and the new. It is a compromise: many people want the new as a source and sign of civic pride; many others want to cling to the past, to preserve their unique history. Many people have only a hazy idea of the past. History doesn't figure much in the minds of most people, maybe because so much effort has been made by the Thai education system to expunge the memory of a time before the Thai state took over. That effort hasn't been entirely successful in Phana; there is still a strong feeling of Lao-ness here amongst the ordinary people.
The compromise was necessary because a lak muang (of sorts) existed beside the main road through the old village. Here is a photo of it taken back in February 2011 when Pensri and some friends tidied it up before the cycle rally. A group of school students were there on the day to tell people about its history.
What you can't see from the photograph are the marker stones. You can't see them from the road either. They are exposed, but are about one metre below the level of the road. What that tells us is that the original sandy track was also about one metre lower than the present road. The houses nearby tell us this, too, because to get into them you have to go down some steps.
For years, after the road was raised by several successive 'improvements', the marker stones (bai sema) were buried and forgotten. Then about ten years ago, the Phana Municipality unearthed them (an old-timer must have drawn attention to them) and erected the concrete structure and wooden pillar you can see in the photograph above. This came to be known as the lak muang, though a surprising number of people pass it in their cars and never see it. It became neglected, as the original stones had.
Rumours went about that the current Phana Municipality planned to move the lak muang to a new site. Elaborate plans were drawn up and a lot of excitement was generated. But there were people, too, who felt that the move should not take place. This is where the compromise came in. It was finally agreed that the marker stones should stay where they have been for the last 300 years, and that their site should revert to the old Lao name of Bue Baan (navel of the village) and be marked as such. The pillar would be removed to form part of the new lak muang. Perhaps surprisingly, the site chosen for this new structure is at the old market place, in the original village, rather than the administrative centre known as 'the amphur', two kilometres further west. A good decision. Everybody happy. Hopefully, the spirits housed at the bue baan and later at the lak muang will be contented, too, when this grand new structure is completed.
Parades are an essential ingredient of many celebrations in Thailand and parading a monk when celebrating his promotion is no exception. When the lay people of Phana were celebrating the abbot of Wat Burapha's promotion to the rank of Phra Kru recently, a parade through the streets was the order of one of the days.
Dancing girls are an important ingredient. Here they are all wearing skirts woven in Phana to a traditional pattern.
Lay people follow the band, all smartly dressed and in exhuberant spirits. The umbrellas are to keep off the sun rather than the rain.
The organisers were keen to involve the tetsaban officers and were insistent that they wore their white uniforms. Many social occasions in Phana are organised either by the wat committees or by the tetsaban; and as in this case, often both are involved together.
Here we have the mayor and his deputy seemingly glad to see me; or glad to see me taking their photograph, perhaps.
The small children amongst the onlookers got very excited when the mayor threw small coins wrapped in silver and gold paper into the crowd and there were wild scrambles to pick up the coins.
Taking part in the parade or standing by and watching it go past -- both are seen as auspicious events, and the people of Phana make sure that they take advantage of as many occasions like this one as possible.
Songkran is a festival that I don't often see. Most years we return to the UK round about the beginning of April. But this year we are still here and I went down to Koh Samui to spend a few days with our son and his family who were back in Thailand for the first time in several years. Dominic's wife is from Samui but although I had met many of her family I had never been to their home. So it was a good opportunity to put that right and I must say that everyone was very welcoming and made me wonder why I had not been before. Part of the reason was that I had thought Samui was another Pattaya but I now know better. I loved the place, and I loved the close family feeling we got as we moved around from house to house visiting Jay's mother, her brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles. Unfortunately I also had a slight accident so some of her cousins we met when I was at the Samui Hospital where they are nurses.
Because of my accident, I didn't go out on the streets to celebrate Songkran but stayed in the resort recuperating a bit while they went out with their water guns. But first we celebrated in the traditional way. This Buddha image had been set up in the reception area, along with a bowl of scented water. I felt that as well as for the new year, I was in need of a bit more blessing than usual to balance out my accident, so finding this seemed quite auspicious.
To start with, we each blessed the Buddha image by pouring water over it very gently.
It was a very nice preliminary to the wilder celebrations out on the streets.