You need to log in or subscribe to read more articles

Subscribe and get unlimited access to our complete archive

Subscribe

In 1975 Benedict Anderson first visited the extensive monastery of Wat Phai Rong Wua, one of dozens in central Thailand; he returned in the 1990s and again a few years ago. Any wat is an imagined community, and this one, a Buddhist Disneyland, presents a special case for Anderson, whose curious book, The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand, enlivened with startlingly brash photographic evidence, is about currents in the national imagination, about modernity and about forms of religious practice (Seagull, £6). In the abbot’s private museum, for example, next to a skeleton in a vitrine, there used to be a replica of Michelangelo’s David, exposing himself, scarlet Y-fronts fashionably dropped, to show a sea cucumber-like penis quite unlike the original.

Their numbers have now dwindled to a mere million or so, but forty years ago there were many millions of monks in Siam (as Anderson often calls the country), and an abbot enjoyed – still enjoys? – the kind of prestige that Suger of St Denis or Hildegard of Bingen had in the early medieval era. Luang Phor Khom (Venerable Monk Called Khom) was ordained in 1922 and became abbot in this rural backwater in 1936; at the apex of a system of polite slavery and homosocial enclosure, he began a programme of intensive building, with funds chiefly raised by the sale of amulets. The venerable monk wanted his vast monastery to make manifest the international ecumenical character of Siam Buddhism, and he had the backing of a local grandee growing rich on new industry in the area. With the assistance of temple boys, he raised colossal replicas of Japanese buddhas and Indian stupas – one of these statues was intended to be the largest in the whole world. When a visitor informed him that the Buddha of Nara was even bigger, the abbot immediately enplaned to Japan, checked the buddha out, and came back to enlarge his version.

At Alton Towers in the 1980s (I may be misremembering) there were miniatures of the seven wonders of the world, alongside the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and Saarinen’s arch in St Louis – and very fascinating they were, intricately modelled and quite embarrassingly enticing in their newfangled dinkiness. Susan Stewart writes about the attraction of the tiny and the gigantic, the souvenir and the collection, in her book On Longing (1984), where she identifies the erection of colossi with the invention of a collective and the miniature with the construction of the personal. But there the resemblances between the nostalgic kitsch of contemporary theme parks and Abbot Khom’s weird creation end. When Anderson returned in 2009, the abbot had been dead 19 years, and David was now gilded all over and covered up in ample boxer shorts.

Praeds guilty of looking for sex in the grounds of the wat.

Please login or subscribe to read the full article.

Login

Send Letters To:

The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 18 · 27 September 2012

I would like to thank Marina Warner for her friendly, amusing and sharp-eyed review of The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism andDesire in Buddhist Thailand, my ‘bizarre opuscule’ (LRB, 13 September). I am writing only to alert readers to two misapprehensions. First, at the end of a list of the tortures inflicted on the praed she mentions ‘breasts lopped off and genitals horribly swollen and luridly aflame’. Actually, part of the eerie eroticism of this popular, hellish collection of statues comes from the fact that breasts, penises and cunts are the only body parts which are never mutilated or disfigured. The abbot of Wat Phai Rong Wua surely had personal reasons for laying down this rule, but for local teenagers, would-be pilgrims and tourists, the allure comes from the inexplicable juxtaposition of tortures with large unharmed genitalia. This explains why male teenagers can get caught masturbating against full-breasted female praed. Besides, it would not be easy to find many X-rated nudes in conservative Siam’s museums or public parks.

Second, it is said that ‘the sinners are tormented by invisible demons.’ In fact, each sinner has a very visible male torturer of his or her own. I think the misapprehension here comes from the interesting way in which the agents of the absent God of Hell (Yama) are represented. The earlier agents look like wiry, barefoot Thai peasants, have the same height as the average Thai male, are clad in simple rural loincloths, and have quiet, expressionless faces. Later on, the abbot decided that these old-fashioned ‘demons’ were not frightening enough. The new generation of agents look physically like upscale versions of the two champion wrestlers who won medals for India at the recent London Hyperolympics: warm reddish-brown skins, quite handsome faces with curly-tidy moustaches and elegant short beards, wasp waists, and whopping thighs, chests and upper arms. They wear nice boutiquey boots, skin-tight shorts, armlets and fetching headcloths. (What the sculptors got from Superman and Batman was surely models of exotic masculine fancy dress.) The facial expressions are mildly intimidating, not a patch on those of India’s goondas or the grim gangsters who appear in Thai movies and on the streets of Bangkok. I described these second-generation agents as ‘gymrats’, but the term, alas, is not my coinage. It is sarcastic gayspeak for narcissistic fitness freaks.

Benedict Anderson
Freeville, New York

Vol. 34 No. 19 · 11 October 2012

I never imagined I’d be swapping observations of genitalia with Benedict Anderson, but I am puzzled when he writes that the privates of the praeds are ‘the only body parts which are never mutilated or disfigured’ (Letters, 27 September). On p. 72 of The Fate of Rural Hell, an 18th-century painting showing a torture victim, with his elephantiasis-afflicted penis loaded over his shoulder, is captioned ‘“the standard iconography” that Luang Phor Khom [the abbot] apparently wanted his sculptors to follow’. Although my expertise is limited, the photographs of scarlet sea urchin-like or black sea cucumber-like organs – on the jacket and several inside – rather bear out the feeling that, in this exaggeration and grotesqueness as in much else no doubt, the monks obeyed their superior. I concede, though, that under the influence of The Golden Legend and such stories as the fate of St Agatha, I overdetermined the wounds inflicted on the female victims in the wat. I’m relieved to learn, from Benedict Anderson’s amiable letter, that they suffer from different, but at least less painful, attentions on the part of young men.

Marina Warner
London NW5

send letters to

The Editor
London Review of Books
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address and a telephone number

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences