Wat Tham Sua

Visit to Wat Tham Sua

Visakha Bucha 2014

Visakha Bucha commemorates the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death, which all happened on the same date. Visakha Bucha is a public holiday in Thailand. It takes place on the full moon day of the sixth lunar month. Last year I wrote about how Visakha Bucha Day, which fell on May 24, was celebrated at my school in a northeastern Thai village. This year, the full moon was on May 13^th, before the summer school term had started, so Visakha Bucha wasn’t celebrated at Ban Rang Krathai School in Kanchanaburi Province.

Since it was a holiday, members of my host family took me shopping and then to Wat Tham Sua (tham = cave; sua = tiger). It’s a beautiful temple complex on a hill not far from Kanchanaburi City, and close to the Mae Klong Dam, built in the 1970s to facilitate irrigation of crops in several provinces.If you're on Facebook, you've seen some of these photos already, but not all.

  Arriving at the site, you see these stairs leading up to the temple complex. Or, if you like, you can take a cable car.

The temple complex consists of a plaza-type area with several buildings and a large Buddha statue ensconced in a sort of half-shell structure.

Below is a partial view of the plaza to give you an idea of how it's laid out. You see the chedi on the left and a Chinese-style pagoda straight ahead. The pagoda isn’t part of the temple complex, but adjacent to it.

Just for fun, here’s a close-up of some details of the ornamentation on one of the buildings. I have no clue what story these figures are telling, but there they are.

The next photo is a picture of the chedi, which you can enter and climb seven flights of stairs to view statuary, images, altars, and relics housed inside. 

 The photo below is a close-up of some of the ornamentation on the outside of the chedi.

 Here are a couple of views of the beautiful countryside, taken from the level of the plaza.

Here is the tower of one of the plaza buildings taken from several flights up inside the chedi.

Below you see the peak of the Buddha’s half-shell, ss seen from inside the chedi, with the mountains in the distance.

Inside the chedi, near the top, is this shrine (on the left) where visitors can make offerings and pay respect. The photo below is a close-up of the ornamentation on the shrine.

 Below is a view of the pagoda from inside the chedi, at the top

Heading back down toward the stairway you saw at the beginning, I took this video not for the picture, but so you could hear a tiny snippet of the music that floats through the air, seeming to emanate from the peaceful atmosphere.

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Scary chicken-tail guy

Back down at street level, here are a couple of the scary characters who guard the place

Scary red and gold guy

And let's not forget the tigers – it’s Wat Tham Sua, after all.

Me and host sister Mew with tiger

To my knowledge, most of the Wat Tham Sua buildings date back to the 1970s, so it’s not an ancient institution. As for the cave aspect: there are caves in the mountains, probably formerly used by tigers and certainly used by people for various purposes, including meditation. Today, the caves are closed to the public.

If you’re thinking that this post doesn’t exactly convey the religious or cultural significance of Wat Tham Sua, you would be right, because I don’t pretend to understand it myself. But it’s a beautiful place that literally sparkles in the sunlight and gives the surrounding countryside something to, um, surround.

And what about Visakha Bucha Day? One of my host sisters asked me to go with her to the temple that evening to observe Visakha Bucha (yes, the temple with the bunnies in front, seen in a recent post). When we arrived, vendors were waiting to sell us, for a few baht, the flowers, candles, and incense sticks needed for the service. Inside the building, people sat on the floor chatting while waiting for the monks to arrive and begin their chants. When the chanting paused, everyone went outside, walked around the temple three times, and went back in. Presumably the three rounds signify the three events, birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha. After more chanting, the head monk sprinkled everyone with water and we went outside to lay our flowers down on one of the little altars, light our candles and joss sticks, and leave them burning with everyone else’s. In all, it was a very modest and low-key service – casual, but respectful.

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P.S. Note for anyone interested in more information about the Tiger Cave Temple: If you google Wat Tham Sua, you’ll learn that there’s another temple complex with the same name in Krabi, a favorite tourist destination in Thailand – confusing at first glance. As far as I know, the Krabi temple has no connection to Wat Tham Sua in Kanchanaburi Province.