Bangkok Temples

Wat Pho is probably the most famous and most visited temple in Thailand – every day it’s crowded with tourists eagerly taking pictures in front of little statues of thai eremits performing thai-yoga exercises.

The Wat Pho is also the temple that has the famous reclining buddha. The statue of the reclining buddha is huge – all gold-plated it’s 64 meters long and 15 meters high. It represents the moment when the buddha died and passed into nirvana. It’s quiet impressive to see that and Thai people have a small ritual that they perform around it. They carry a handful of coins and drop them into 108 prayer bowls. You can get a bowl for yourself (just leave a small donation in exchange).

The Wat Po temple complex is gigantic too – it spreads around 20 acres of land and there is a whole area attached (separated by the temple walls and a small road) where the monks reside.

The architecture is pretty fancy and not exactly what you imagine when you think of an Asian Buddhist temple – it’s Thai style!

The Jakarta Post just had a nice travel writing piece on a Bangkok trip by Prodita Sabarini. Included is a small part on the Grand Palace (with the emerald buddha) and the Wat Pho monastery (with the reclining buddha).

Bangkok has around 400 temples. A Thai temple is open to everybody – so you are free to enter any temple, as long as you have common courtesy and follow a certain dress-style (no mini-skirts, etc. – you don’t want to make the monks horny!).

Some temples charge you to enter them, but these are the main tourist destination temples where there really are high maintenance costs because of the massive influx of tourists – the Grand Palace with the Emerald Buddha and the Wat Poh temple. Most of the temples are done in the modern Thai-style and they are pretty fancy, not like the zen-style Japanese temples. Thai temples are full of colors, mirrors, golden buddhas, colored glass.