A traveller follows her son’s lead on a visit to one of northern Thailand’s most sacred temples, which takes a mysterious turn when monks, speaking only Thai, summon the traveller’s son, believing he has unknowingly carried home the spirit of a long-deceased monk.
The motorcycle roars as it struggles up the steep road toward a Thai temple. On clear days, Wat Prah Thaat’s golden stupa can be seen for miles, glistening beneath a fierce sun that banishes the mist of each awakening day. For the moment, I enjoy the touch of wind dancing across my face, unaware of what is about to reveal itself once we’re inside the temple.
This is my first trip to Thailand. My son, Jason, handles the road well, eager to show me places he had wandered years ago after arriving as a high school exchange student. The narrow road snakes through a jungle until it stops at the bottom of the highest peak. Above us, the temple looms in the morning fog. The original structure, hidden behind great walls of trees and shadows, was built in the fourteenth century, its location selected by a sacred white elephant who led monks here, trumpeted three times, and lowered himself on the earth to die.
We reach the stairway that leads to the temple, and I rest my hand on a low wall that edges the stairs. Covered in thousands of green ceramic tiles shaped like snake scales, the wall is designed to resemble the body of a five-headed serpent, called a Naga. At the base of the stairs, four serpents, dragon-like, emerge from the gaping mouth of a larger one, their fangs bared, their spiked horns rising skyward.
Already, in these early hours, the heat and humidity rest heavily against my shoulders. I listen to voices in the jungle, a concert of buzzing, the piercing cry of an invisible bird. Beneath it all is the whoop, whoop of monkeys who mark their territory with calls that rise and dip somewhere in the dark recesses of the space around me.
Jason turns around several steps ahead and waits patiently while I pause to catch my breath. Behind him, through what little sunlight has broken through jungle growth, my eyes settle on droplets of water that fall in slow motion from the petals of a wild orchid clinging to a tree.
At the entrance, we remove our shoes before stepping across the threshold to the interior complex filled with shrines, paintings of the Buddha’s life, and a seventy-nine-foot stupa covered in gold. The sounds of the jungle give way to the constant hum of chants mingling with a deep, resonating tremble of gongs. All that changes when Jason takes his first step into the temple, and another sound breaks through the chants. Moving along the breeze is a flutter of whispers rushing from the mouths of monks.
With startled words, they hurry toward a small prayer chamber: “Yohm you tee nee. Yohm you tee nee.” He’s here. He’s here.
Jason translates, and I ask who they’re talking about.
“No idea.” He nods toward two monks standing near a line of Buddha statues. “See those two?”
The men stare back at us, a troubled question wavering at the edge of their eyes.
“They’re talking about a spirit.”
“A ghost?”
“No. That would be ‘Pee.’ They’re using the word for something more benevolent. Something about the spirit of a Thai monk.”
A young monk approaches. “You, to be coming with me,” he says, sweeping an arm to the right as if to guide Jason. “Please.”
Jason switches to Thai, a language he absorbed the way most people breathe in air. “What about my mother?”
The man giggles. “Yes, yes! Mae!” He nods, having bestowed upon me the title of Mother, a traditional sign of respect. Within minutes, we find ourselves in a small chamber that looks like a miniature temple itself, its two-tiered roof sweeping up at the edges, each tip decorated with more dragons, these ones small, arching and curving toward the sky. Before leaving, the young monk directs us to kneel on the floor in front of three other monks, the oldest in the middle.
Everything from then on is in Thai. I can do nothing but take cues from my son, who’s so relaxed it seems as though he understands he is meant to be here, in this particular room, at this point in time. Since he first traveled to Thailand as an exchange student, it has seemed as though a piece of him, one of the essential building blocks of his soul, remained here, pulling him back time and again, creating a cycle that forces me to question where my child belongs, where he seems most complete. Breathing in the scent of old wood and time-worn fabrics that permeate the prayer chamber, I can’t help but wonder how much time will pass before Jason moves to Thailand permanently.
Still kneeling, I shift my knees and feet, trying to settle into the stiff marble floor while around me swirls the conversation between Jason and the wrinkled man who sits slightly above us, bald, nearly toothless, looking like he’s ready to discuss why he sent that young monk to find us.
Jason follows instructions and sticks his tongue out for the monk to examine. Next, the monk studies Jason’s palms, examining the path of every line, before grasping his chin. He leans forward, tilts his head to the side, and stares into Jason’s eyes as though trying to see through them to the other side of the world.
I watch the monk move through his thoughts, study his memories, chase a possibility until he finally releases my son’s face. After several more questions, the man nods. The other two exchange satisfied smiles.
“Yohm you tee nee,” the old monk declares.
This time, I don’t have to ask for a translation, though I still can’t figure out who ‘is here,’ and what that has to do with us, things I’ll have to ask Jason later. The conversation moves on, leaving me behind until I sense it’s time to go. But not before our blessing.
“Copy what I do,” Jason whispers while joining his hands in a gesture of prayer. The monks chant, their rhythmic blessings washing over our skin like a warm breath. Candlelight shimmers against red and gold walls, spilling a tender light across the room while the monk dips a whisk made of thin branches into a bowl of temple water. He splashes us several times, the moist drops cooling our faces. After standing, we edge toward the door, backward and bowing, our silence tucked within.
Later that day, Jason sits across from me in a small restaurant at the base of the mountain peak from where the temple looks down at us. Our faces shine with the sweat we built up during our walk down the Naga stairs. The back of my neck shivers from a chilled wind pushing its way through the restaurant, tossing paper napkins across the grimy floor where frustrated kittens attempt to pounce on them. I shake my head, and eventually dig into my plate of vegetables and rice, breaking the tension with one question: “So how do we explain what just happened?”
Jason shrugs. “It’s Thailand, Mom. You just get used to stuff like this.” After returning to this country, on and off for twenty years, he’s familiar with Buddhist traditions. With wooden spirit-houses that dot the landscape, drawing believers to stop and pray. He’s been warned about places known to be haunted, about bamboo groves he should avoid because demons are known to be lurking among their branches. Nothing surprises him.
We go over the conversation in the temple, time and again, all the details the same as before. Last night, as the old monk lay awake beneath a hovering moon, he felt something—another person’s desperate yearning for a final return home. A desire so powerful, it caused the monk’s ribs to ache as though his heart was being crushed from within. He sat at the edge of his bed, covering his eyes after seeing the image of a deadly car accident he knew had taken place on a winding road far from Thailand. Because it ended the life of a revered monk who hoped to spread Buddhism in the West, most monks were aware of it, though it belonged decades in the past.
This time, the monk at Wat Prah Thaat saw it, heard it, tasted the terror. Alongside the road was an ocean. Flowing through his head were the letters PCH, letters that would remain unfamiliar to him until the moment Jason answered a question with the words, “Pacific Coast Highway. California.”
Perhaps because of his age, perhaps because he understood the weight of time, this monk had sensed a deceased man’s longing to find just the right person to carry his meandering soul back to the temple he’d loved since childhood. What the old monk seated before us didn’t know, until a few hours ago, was that the man’s wandering was destined to end today.
As our motorcycle rushed up the mountain, the elderly monk felt the Thai man’s approach and instructed everyone to be on the lookout for a foreigner, someone from the west whose first footstep into the temple would cause a slight stir in those who stood nearby. It finally happened. Jason had become what Thai people call a “spirit vehicle.” Not a reincarnation, just a homecoming made possible by a mystical connection between a lost soul and a young man who keeps returning to the place where a jasmine-scented breeze has always thrown open the gate to his heart.
Throughout the years, Jason and I have ridden back up to Wat Prah Thaat, but there was a three-year hiatus between our visit with the old monk and our next return. We expected to be greeted with smiles and familiar faces, but the truth is, no one noticed us. The elder monk had passed away, and the other two moved on to separate temples. I suppose the young man who invited us to follow him to the small prayer chamber didn’t recognize us. With the passage of time, we’d simply faded into the throng of other foreign visitors as if there was nothing special about Jason. No link, like an invisible umbilical cord, tied him to this place forever.
But we know better. Jason brought a lonely man home. Back to this land beneath our feet. Back to this temple. And maybe we have been recognized after all, but never felt it. Perhaps a peaceful soul has walked beside us like a distant loving relative every time we’ve circled the stupa, our hearts beating in time with those of the people who move with us, our chants rising as one, into the dawn mist that hovers above Wat Prah Thaat.
