Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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CRYSTAL LADY, APOCALYPTIC MONK

by John Cadet

The arrangement - so far as there’d been one - was that we meet at his place, start from there: a gentle Sunday of zooming round on trailbikes, back before nightfall, nothing too taxing.

Visiting the shrine

But when I got to his door, Gurney was already gone, nothing for it but to do the trip solo - heading east out of Chiang Mai then north on the Doi Saket Road towards Chiang Rai.

Now my experience is that tripping in the Thai countryside is a little like journeying into the unconscious: interesting, challenging, but there’s a chance you’ll come out - always supposing you do come out - not precisely the way you went in. And as with a trip into the unconscious, it isn’t a bad idea to have companionship.

Anyway, here we are - me and the Yamaha 125 - breezing out of the city on a fresh March morning: grey ceiling, moist clean air, myriads of butterflies. And after fifty or so minutes, here I am at my first objective, the Royal Project area of Huay Hong Krai. The fact is I’m a bit of a health freak, and the project sells allegedly insecticide-free produce, one item the almost miraculous Chinese mushroom, het lin jue - guaranteed to cure whatever ails you. But what do you know? ‘Never on Sundays’: said the guard at the barrier. So I rode through the heart of the project area - thinly-forested hills, small valleys, smaller rivers linking sizeable sheets of water, boats bobbing. And eventually was back on bigger roads, longer-established villages: back in the outside world at Doi Saket.

But the second part of the trip was more productive. Over a number of years, on the way to Chieng Rai, I’ve stopped off at the highest point on the road, where to one side there’s the shrine of an interesting spirit. And each time I’ve visited, there’s been evidence of the struggle that never ceases in Southeast Asia: between the exotic, male-dominant, sky-aspiring religion of Buddhism, and the indigenous cult of the predominantly-female earth-spirits.

Buddhism is of course famous for its tolerance, but the reason for the struggle isn’t hard to arrive at - bearing in mind the Indian religion’s fundamental asceticism, and the fact that the spirit paid respects here is a fertility deity - also bearing in mind that while she’s known at this shrine as plain Mae Nang Gaeow (‘The Lady of Crystal’), elsewhere she’s known as Nang Gaeow Hii Luang - ‘The Crystal Lady of the Giant Vulva’, to put it more delicately than it stands in Thai.

Well, now, passing the shrine on the road, you pay your respects by giving your horn a toot. But if you’re in need of personal intercession, you park your vehicle, go up to the sarn jao (spirit shrine) and make an offering. When I first visited the shrine some thirty years back, the proper offering was either a banana or an elegantly-crafted wooden or ceramic siwa-ling, a phallus. The story told then was that the Mae Nang Gaeow had been a local woman, deserted by her lover, who had hanged herself; but it was also clear that whatever the local rationale, she belonged in the Mae Nang Gaeow cult found all over the North, for which the offering is identical.

Some twenty years back though - here we come to the perennial struggle - a change had taken place at the shrine. All the offerings were removed. A board had been put up explaining that a nayn (novice monk) from Chiengsaen had found the practices shameful, causing embarrassment and suffering to the Nang Gaeow. He was inviting all who were not “blind and in error” - as the board put it - to make their offerings of incense sticks, candles and flowers to the Buddha image installed by his followers. This was named the Phra Buddha Ratana Narinat, or ‘The Buddha who is the Patron of the Mae Nang Gaeow’; and the object of the nayn and his group was “to get people to worship and respect the Buddha in the right way.”

But that was then. Now - I’m speaking of the March morning of my latest visit - there had been more changes. First, a number of notices had been affixed to trees warning that Thailand would become a desert unless people respected nature and stopped destroying the forest. Also the nayn’s board had disappeared, another in its place saying those who wanted details about the shrine should get in touch at a certain Chiengsaen address. But the biggest change was that instead of a single shrine, there were now four of them, two for Buddha images, two for the Mae Nang Gaeow herself. And if the original offerings were nowhere to be seen, a spectacularly large siwa-ling had been erected to one side of the shrine, and the road traffic was still tooting vigorously, hardly a vehicle passing that didn’t give a blast.

Tooting as they pass

As I was taking some pictures, a Honda Accord pulled in at the shrine. A young woman stepped out to pay her respects, displaying in her person the almost perfect balance between art and nature you often meet in these parts - is it any wonder the deities here are seen as feminine? And when she’d made her offering, I asked if she knew the history of the shrine, hoping to hear at least a variant of its story. She was reluctant to talk, though: claimed to know nothing, nothing at all, having just stopped on her way from Chiengrai - and she left immediately, hastily, anxious to get away, it seemed to me. But almost certainly there’d been some sort of gaebon transaction. “If you’ll do this for me, spirit, I promise something out of the ordinary for you”: a gift of some description - perhaps another animal to add to the tiger-, cock-, buffalo- and elephant-figures around the shrine.

But then came the meeting that made the trip. At the back of the shrines was a lean-to, crackling noises coming from a walkie-talkie within. Inside was a monk, small, lean, his dark skin generously sprinkled with power tattoos. He wasn’t pleased to see me, obviously: hesitant, hostile even, not inclined to talk. But when politely I kept at it, he gestured to some plastic chairs, stacked to one side. “All right. Take one. Sit down.” And then talked.

And talked.

I’ve called him a monk, and he was wearing the dun-coloured forest robes, but the fact is there are times when a man takes a break from monastic discipline: problems occur, an absence seems appropriate. You can of course disrobe, or become another kind of ascetic - a pha khau dressed in white. Sometimes though a change of location fits the bill, and a shrine of this sort provides a convenient refuge - remote as it is, but not so far away that people can’t support you…

This monk was from Prachinburi, over by the Cambodian border, so he told me - luckily, since he was using Central Thai, a great deal easier to follow than the Northern dialect. And, as I say, speak he did, forcefully, once the reluctance was overcome. I got some questions in about the shrine, but when he’d dealt with them - yes, the spirit was old, much older than Buddhism, going back beyond the local chronicles or even Queen Chamadevi of Haribunchai - it was his own concerns that replaced them.

Now on the whole it’s nicer to be liked than otherwise, particularly in a foreign country. And in Thailand it’s easy to feel you’re accepted, even welcomed: Land of Smiles and so on, and there’s a lot to be said for that. But that there are plenty of negative currents close to the surface, this monk shrine provided a useful reminder.

Of course, hermetic-prophetic testiness isn’t confined to Thailand. Read the Hindu epics: check the Bible and see what Ezekial or Jeremiah on one of their off days could be like: or, to bring the matter right up to date, translate what I’m describing here into a similar meeting in an American setting - do the names Jim Jones and David Koresh ring a bell in this respect? But what am I saying? Don’t stir a step out of your house for this experience. Just press a button and cast yourself up on one of the wilder shores of the Internet. You’ll find it there in all its glorious luridity.

Because what the monk was offering was a preview of the Apocalypse, with Western and mainly American agents as its instigators. Their fundamental corruption, immorality and downright lack of culture, riding on their naked power, so he told me, were the signal, if not the cause, of what was coming. Of course, I got in a few mild objections. There were all kinds of farangs, weren’t there? We too had our concerns about the future. And wasn’t there corruption, abuse of power, self-destructive ignorance closer to home - his home, that is. But he had the bit between his teeth and there was no holding him.

And the fact of the matter was I didn’t entirely disagree with him. What he was saying was entirely within the Hindu-Buddhist tradition concerning the cyclic nature of history, and fitted in with ancient Western traditions, come to that. Didn’t the Greeks believe the Age of Gold had been replaced by one of Silver, while they themselves languished in an Age of Iron, with destruction and regeneration to follow? And while he spoke dogmatically, not inclined to discuss or persuade, there was nothing rabid or disordered in the manner of his presentation. He saw signs in the weather, spoke of manifestations among the elect of special powers, was waiting for iron to float on water - an infallible indication - and had no doubt as to the inevitability of the cataclysm to come, though it wouldn’t be tomorrow. But apart from the terms in which he couched his forecast - the gali-yuk (Kali-era) approaching its climax, the way he saw it - there wasn’t a lot that didn’t touch on the average Westerner’s concerns about the way things are going…

But if it’s as well to be reminded of Last Things once in a while, it was nevertheless a relief to get away, to prize myself politely free of my doomsday interlocutor - to get on the chopper and bomb back down the road to Chiang Mai, the birds singing, the butterflies dancing, the sun beginning to poke a hole in the ceiling. Back to the city, back to the comforting round of the quotidian. Sufficient unto the day, etc…

The Shrine of the Crystal Lady remains, of course, both at the back of the mind and out in that complex reality: and who knows what message it’ll be offering next time round?

Text and images © J.M. Cadet 2003

(The author has written extensively about Thailand and Southeast Asia over the last three decades, and a new book - The Mountains of Sacrifice: Chiang Mai’s Ceremonies of Death and Regeneration - is due out at the end of the year).