erawan shrine

If you've visited Bangkok, you've probably seen the Erawan shrine at the intersection of Sukhumvit and Ploen Chit roads. It's the small corner-lot shrine that is always bursting with visitors who bring thousands of jasmine and marigold garlands to hang on the shrine's statues and who burn millions of sticks of incense every day. The air around Erawan is a strangely pleasant mix of the usual Bangkok traffic fumes and vast roiling wafts of incense perfume. On site there is also a traditional Thai dance troupe who will perform upon donation. Since it's as shrine, however, there isn't a temple attached and there are no monks there. Which is too bad, really, in light of what happened last week.

I picked up the paper the other morning and read a fairly short article that said the main statue of the shrine had been destroyed. Here's the statue below. Beautiful. Anyways, I kept reading the article. It explained how everything but the feet of the statue had been destroyed and it outlined the ways in which the shrine-keepers were dealing with the loss of the statue. A replacement statue made of sturdier and more ornate materials had already been ordered and in the meantime the shrine would remain open to visitors.

It was only in the very last paragraph that the journalist explained what exactly had happened to the statue. Apparently, a mental unstable young man had attacked the statue at 1 am with a hammer and had smashed it until it was destroyed. It was only in the near-to-last sentences that the journalist mentioned that after having destroyed the statue the mentally unstable man had then been beaten to death by angry onlookers.

Today I read another article that quoted a member of Thaksin's government as saying that he had consulted top religious experts and that their opinion was that the statue, known as Phra Prom, had in fact sacrificed itself for the greater good of the nation at this time of civil unrest. He made no comment at all about the man who had been killed for acting as a conduit for this miraculous self-sacrifice by an inanimate object. [Bangkok-29-March-2006]