Wat Phai Tan: How a Bangkok Temple Renamed Itself

One expects, turning off Phahonyothin into Soi 15, that the city will fall away, because that is what temples are supposed to do to a city; and it does not. The motorcycles come through the lane regardless, using it as people have always used a lane, which is as a way of getting somewhere else faster. Somewhere off to the side a few hundred schoolchildren are audible doing what schoolchildren do, and at intervals a bell goes and they get louder. Nothing here has been sealed off. The wall is a boundary and not a defence.

It would be pleasant to report otherwise. A good deal of writing about Buddhist monasteries in Asian cities depends on the figure of the sudden hush, the green lung, the pocket of stillness in the roaring metropolis. But that's not what it's like in Soi 15. What is on offer is something less picturesque and rather more interesting: a working monastery entirely porous to the neighbourhood around it, in which the noise of the district is not an intrusion but the ordinary condition of the place.

The schoolchildren, one should say, are the monastery's own. It gave up its preaching hall to them in 1933 and has never got it back.

And it is, remarkably, the only such foundation in the whole of Phaya Thai district; one Buddhist monastery for an entire administrative district of condominium towers and craft beer bars, in a country that maintains something in the region of forty thousand of them. It has been here longer than any of it.

A foundation in the mud

The monastery was established in about 1770, a date which repays a moment's attention. Ayutthaya, the great cosmopolitan capital of the Siamese kings, admired by French envoys and Persian ambassadors alike, had been sacked and burned by the Burmese only three years earlier, its libraries and lacquered halls reduced to the ruin fields that tourists photograph today. King Taksin was ruling from Thonburi, across the river from a village that had not yet been elevated into a capital; Rama I would not found Bangkok proper for another dozen years. The country was being reassembled out of its own ashes, and one of the ways it did so, as it always had, was by planting monasteries.

This one went up in the market gardens, some hours north of anything that mattered, on flat wet land threaded with the canals that watered it. There was no Phahonyothin Road. There was no bridge. There were, in due course, buffalo, and a bridge for them to cross, and the memory of both survives in the name of the district: Saphan Khwai, the buffalo bridge. As late as the early 1960s the herds were still being driven over it in the evenings, around eight o'clock, and there are men and women alive in these lanes who watched them go.

The point, and it is easily missed, is that the sequence runs the other way round from the one we assume. The temple did not establish itself in a city. The city came out to the fields, over two hundred years, and closed around a monastery that was already there.

The old name

For the first two hundred and thirty years of that long encirclement, the foundation was not called Wat Phai Tan. In the registers of the ecclesiastical authorities, and in the mouths of everyone who lived within walking distance of it, it was Wat Sai Tan.

Sai is a gut; an intestine; by extension a channel or conduit, the thing through which something passes on its way elsewhere. Tan is blocked, stopped, dead-ended, solid in the sense of impassable. Taken together they produce a name of a bluntness that would be unthinkable in a modern Thai institution: a monastery called, more or less, Blocked Gut.

It is important to resist the temptation to find this merely comic. Toponymy in the old agrarian Siam was not a branch of poetry but of navigation. Names described what was there, with the flat literalism of people who needed to tell a stranger where to turn: the bridge the buffalo used, the canal that went nowhere, the strip of land that narrowed and stopped. The name was a set of directions frozen into a syllable or two, and it worked perfectly well for as long as everybody still knew which canal was meant.

What defeats such a name, in the end, is not offence but time. The canal is filled in and becomes a road; the gardens become shophouses and then towers; the last person who could point to the obstruction dies; and what remains is a sound, floating free of the landscape that produced it. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, in a district being reshaped by an elevated railway, the monastery was carrying a description of a feature nobody could any longer identify. It was simply, and now rather awkwardly, called Blocked Gut.

The emendation

In the year 2000, corresponding to 2543 in the Buddhist era, the monastic authorities made the change official. Wat Sai Tan became Wat Phai Tan.

The elegance of the solution lies in its restraint. They might have reached, as institutions in every country reach, for something grand and remote: a compound Pali honorific of the sort that fills the longer temple names of Bangkok and which no layman ever uses in full. They did nothing of the kind. They changed sai to phai, bamboo, and stopped.

The alteration is a single consonant. The two names are near-homophones, so that nothing was demanded of the neighbourhood: no relearning, no correcting of grandmothers, no confusion in the mouth of a taxi driver. And tan, the offending syllable, was not removed at all but quietly reassigned. In the compound phai tan it ceases to mean blocked and comes to mean solid, describing a real and well-known variety of bamboo, the dense kind that grows without a hollow at the centre.

The same sound, the same syllables, very nearly the same word; and a gut becomes a stand of bamboo. It is not a rebranding so much as a small act of scholarly tact, of the kind that Siamese literati have been performing on inconvenient inheritances for a very long time.

What the change tells you

There is a certain kind of preservation that consists of freezing a thing and putting a rope around it, and it is not the kind practised here.

Consider what else the monastery has done with its own past. In 1961 the original ordination hall, which had stood since the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, was found to be past saving and was pulled down; the ubosot that replaced it, finished in 1967, is reinforced concrete dressed in wholly correct Rattanakosin proportions, and it will outlast the timber it replaced by centuries. In 1933 the monks gave over their great preaching hall to be used as a schoolroom for the children of the local farmers and traders, and that school, having outgrown one building after another, now rises six storeys and has a lift in it, and is still loud enough to be heard from the ubosot. In 1953, at a time when a pilgrimage to Chachoengsao was a serious undertaking for a working family, the monastery cast its own replica of the celebrated Luang Phor Sothon and installed it in a cruciform pavilion, so that the miraculous might be reached on foot.

None of this is museum practice. It is the behavior of an institution that intends to remain in use, and which treats its inheritance as something to be kept working rather than kept intact.

The neighborhood outside the wall has made the opposite bargain, and made it unthinkingly. Saphan Khwai is still named for a bridge that has gone and for animals that stopped crossing it sixty years ago; nobody has proposed that the railway station be given a name better suited to a district of co-working spaces, bars, restaurants and hospitals. The buffalo survive as pure sound, a fossil in the mouth.

The monastery, alone among its neighbors, went the other way. It kept the sound and changed the meaning beneath it, so that a man saying the name today makes very nearly the noise a farmer made standing in this mud in 1800. He is simply no longer saying it about an intestine.

Practical notes

• The monastery lies inside Soi 15, off Phahonyothin, which is why it is so easily missed from the road; Khlong Bang Sue runs along the northern boundary.

• The grounds run to some fourteen rai, hemmed by the canal on one side and private property on the others. It is a large space rather than a quiet one.

• It is the only Buddhist temple in the district of Phaya Thai.

• There is no entrance fee and never has been.

• Or Tor Kor market is 235 meters away, which is to say you may buy fruit and be through the gate before you have decided what to do with the afternoon.

• If you want to see the place at full pitch, come in the first week of April, when for seven days the faithful press sheets of gold leaf onto the Luang Phor Sothon by hand. Decades of this have thickened the image visibly. It deserves an essay of its own.