My daughter just posted this picture of me in the vicinity of Wat Pho in Bangkok. I liked the message on the awning.
Of course, I don’t much like ANY tattoos, but at least we should be able to avoid using Buddha as personal skin decoration. OK? Buddha is for respecting. Here’s the website on the awning.
and printing a message on a parasol is so respectful….
I enjoyed that part — seeing a message to respect Buddha in a medium where you expect to see “Enjoy Coca-Cola”… I love a touch like that…
There are two things that I particularly love about travel, and they are opposites:
1. When things are exactly as I imagined they would be, just as books or movies or whatever had prepared me to expect. Examples: Listening to the accent of a New York cop, riding down the street in London with every building just screaming “England” at me. Those hats Bobbies still wear in London. A guy bringing a live chicken onto the bus in Thailand.
2. When I see things I couldn’t possibly have imagined in advance. Such as messages to respect Buddha presented in such a commercial, Western manner. Surprises like that delight me…
Another one of my faves from category one… the time I got onto the bus from Oxford to Woodstock, and while fumbling with my cash to pay the driver I dropped a 20-pound note onto the floor.
As I bent to pick it up, a guy in a nearby seat said in a mock-disgusted manner, “You Yanks, comin’ over ‘ere and chuckin’ yer money about…”
Thereby evoking the classic complaint about Americans in Britain in the couple of years before D-Day. The Brits loved the Yanks, saying there were only three problems with them: They’re overpaid, oversexed and over here.
I should have just given the guy the 20 quid in appreciation for the moment…
A sad note on the state of our state (of civilization) — no thanks to Buddha:
“90 percent of Buddhists in America are Jews” – Steven Bram, documentary filmmaker and Jew
http://www.jpost.com/Not-Just-News/A-personal-exploration-of-Kabbalah-402875
What’s up with that?