Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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CHIANG MAI GUARDIAN SPIRITS
It's Time to Keep Them Happy

Text: J.M. Cadet
Images: SP & J.C.

Pu Se Ya Se Ceremony

It's been said before but is worth saying again - and again: nothing is more commonplace in Thailand than the supernatural. Gods, ghosts, spirits and elementals are everywhere, and foolhardy is the person who fails to take account of them. Hence the astonishing array of ceremonies presided over, and the devices provided by, specialists in the field, from monks and brahmin priests to mediums and magicians.

You want to pass an exam? Go abroad? Start a business? Get married - or unmarried, or remarried? Understand a dream? Win the lottery? Scupper a rival in business or romance? Live longer? Be healthier? There's a ritual for each of these purposes, and an expert who can lead you through it.

But as well as activities keeping the individual and family in good standing with the spirits, there are those too of the community, and at this time of the year, Chiang Mai has three of them: Piti Bu Se Ya Se, Prapaeni Tambun Sueb Chada Muang, and Prapaeni Sao Intakhin.

Paying respects

Given this city's pustulating growth and the speed of its modernisation, you may wonder how these ancient ceremonies are faring. Well, if you take trips at the appropriate times - respectively to the foot of the western mountains; to the sacred centre of the city and the significant points of its defensive wall; and to Wat Chedi Luang - you'll find that in some ways traditional practices are holding up remarkably well, though in others they're under a certain amount of pressure.

Take the Piti Bu Se Ya Se - the Ceremony to Propitiate the Cannibal Guardian Spirits of the City, over at Mae Hia village, near the temple of Wat Phra That Doi Kham. An example of the oldest and most widespread of the ceremonies of Southeast Asia, it requires the sacrifice of a young male buffalo to ensure the safety and fertility of the community in the year to come. (If you saw the film Apocalypse Now, you'll have caught a shorthand reference to such practices at the climactic moment when buffalo and Brando get their quietus - the suggestion of a connection between animal and human sacrifice in the region by no means inappropriate).

"Are such ceremonies anachronistic? Are they necessarily doomed by modernisation? Not at all, if Japan provides a suitable point of comparison."

Piti Sao Intakhin

And at Mae Hia (or more precisely in a forest clearing at the foot of the mountain near that village), the complex and dramatic ritual still demonstrates how close modern surface and archaic foundations are in Southeast Asia - or at least it did until recently.

The late Ajarn Kraisri Nimmanahaeminda was the first person to draw attention to the Bu Se Ya Se ceremony with an article in the Journal of the Siam Society in the 1960s. Fifteen years later, when this writer first went out to it, the rituals were still much as he'd described them. After the buffalo had been killed and cut up in the early morning, the protective spirits - that's to say, Grandmother and Grandfather Se, their numerous daughters, their son Suthep (who became the area's first Buddhist monk and is now the guardian of Wat Phra That Doi Suthep), along with the Lua chieftain Viranka - were invited to come down and regale themselves. Mediums acted out the parts of some of these spirits, and a chapter of monks from local temples came to recite sutras. A large banner of the Buddha and his two main disciples was hung from a tree, and a couple of mediums danced in front of it, allegedly in acknowledgement of the Great Being's superiority, though that isn't an interpretation everyone goes along with.

At this time, in the early '80s, the spectators were still almost exclusively local villagers, with a scattering of anthropologists among them, but about twelve years back a video made by a Chiang Mai University mass-com. lecturer and broadcast widely, brought in an enormous influx of local tourists. Since then, as publicity has

Invoking rain

intensified, the course has been unmistakably downward. Some ten years back the event had become a media jamboree. The 'spirits' argued publicly about how to run the ceremony. TV and print journalists surrounded the participants and virtually blocked off the view of what they were doing, while irreverent and noisy spectators eventually broke through the thread marking off the sacred enclosure and brought the ceremony to chaotic closure. In other words, what had quietly survived for thousands of years, first as a primitive ritual and then as a civic rite presided over by the z - the ruling prince of the city - has now become something of a farce…and still without the first foreign tourists showing their faces, though obviously it's only a matter of time before they too become part of this circus. By contrast, the Piti Tambun Sueb Chada Muang - the Ceremony to Make Merit and Lengthen the Life of the City - at first sight looks to be holding up well. Like all walled cities in the region, Chiang Mai was built as a mandala, with its centre, gates and corners points of sacred significance requiring regular ceremonies to keep them up to scratch. Nowadays, at each of these points a pavilion is erected, a tripod along with ritually important materials is assembled, offerings are made to the deities of the four quarters, and monks - 108 all told - chant sutras. Threads connect each of the outer points to the centre, conducting a new access of sacred strength to the whole city.

Here too though changes have been taking place. In the past, the focus would have been on the brahmanistic and animistic rituals propitiating the powerful city spirits - the seua muang. These days urbanites, particularly academic and official urbanites, prefer a Buddhist colour to their ceremonies, archaic rituals that may be embarrassing tidied away out of sight. Some fifteen years ago, many ceremonies

were conducted by kon song (mediums), particularly at the Jaeng Si Phum (north-east) corner of the city moat. Now the mediums appear to have been banished, having no part to play in what as a result has become a bland and featureless occasion.

Gaining merit

The Intakhin Ceremony, on the other hand, which begins normally in the last week of May and finishes during the first week of June, has borne the pressures of modernisation remarkably well. The sao intakhin - Indra's Pillar - is the city's lak muang or central phallic post. Originally located at Wat Sadue Muang - sadue literally translating as 'navel' but most plausibly referring to a yoni - it is now housed near the main gate of Wat Jedi Luang, and like many male-gender power objects in the North, may not be closely approached by women.

Enormously popular, the ceremony brings people flocking from outlying districts as well as the municipality, to make offerings and watch the lustration and procession of the Buddha Fon Saen Ha image (the Buddha of the One Hundred Thousand Showers). As with the other ceremonies, this one has abstract objectives such as strengthening the morale and unity of the people of the city, but is also clearly intended to enhance fertility and in particular to bring rain. One of its most attractive features is the graceful and well-executed Northern Thai dancing that accompanies it, and among the reasons for its success in coping with ever-increasing crowds is the fact that it has an urban location and is spread over seven days.

Are such ceremonies anachronistic? Are they necessarily doomed by modernisation? Not at all, if Japan provides a suitable point of comparison.

There, in cities technologically already deep into the 21^st C., ceremonies with their roots in the Neolithic past are still going strong, not merely as tourist spectacles but as deeply-valued traditions that maintain and strengthen the modern community. Not long ago, Chiang Mai's city fathers paid a visit to the United States to study tourism procedures in cities comparable in size to this one. Perhaps now they might profitably turn to Kyoto, Nara and Nagoya to see how cities of another modern super-state are maintaining their connections with the distant past.

It would surely convince them that far from giving up hope where the rational modernisation of this city is concerned - far from allowing money to call the tune, rather than the fullest range of human values - they have every reason to keep up their, and this city's, spirits by sensible planning.

The alternative, after all, is to see Chiang Mai transforming itself from the Rose of the North into a second Bangkok.

And who would that benefit?