Leslie bai taambon OR How I ended up on my knees in the street at 6:30 this morning

I just got back from picking up breakfast. It's going to be: Pat fak tawng sai tawhoo gap cao daeng. Fried pumpkin with tofu and brown rice. It's also going to be fantastic. But I thought that before I did I should talk about this morning before it becomes lost in the bends and eddies of my twisted cloudy mind like so many other noteworthy events in the past little while.

This morning I got up to go with Ying to make merit. But lets back up a little bit.

Merit is a concept in Buddhism (especially in Theravada Buddhism which is quite prevalent in Southeast Asia). It can be obtained in a number of ways, most of which relate to doing good deeds for others or having good thoughts. These good deeds, acts or thoughts are thoguht to carry over to help you later in life, or to your next birth. Basically on the quest to reach ever higher levels of purity, merit is a helpfull push in the right direction on the quest for enlightenment.

I've been passively interested in Buddhism for quite a while now (which wouldn't be difficult considering how heavily the religion influences Thai culture and society), which is why I was fairly curious to see what this would be like. I think I've spoken before about seeing the monks out walking the streets barefoot in their brown or orange robes every morning with their copper offering bowls. Giving the monks food is one way to make merit, and from what I'm told, most (if not all) of what the monks eat at the Wats is donated.

I asked quite a few questions on the way to the vegetarian restaurant (one I frequent often because of the cheap food and good eats. I've also been going there every day for the past two weeks or so because of the Jay Festival, which is this big national vegetarian festival that takes place for 10 days at the end of September every year in Thailand. If you choose to be Jay, you can't smoke, drink, eat meat of any sort (eggs, fish and dairy included), or eat any food that is smelly, such as onions or garlic. I was (for the most part) successfull. Unfortunately one of my weekends teaching frisbee in the camps fell during the festival so I requested vegetarian food but I'm pretty sure there was garlic in it...I think it would've been worse overall not to eat the food that had been prepared though though, jay or not) about the proper technique for doing offerings:

You begin by taking off your shoes and waiting for a monk to reach you as he walks down the street. When the monk (or monks) come to you, you use your right hand (supported by your left to show respect) to place food in the offering bowl. We began with the rice, then the curry, then the desert, giving one set to each of the monks. After the food was given, we knelt down and waied (palms together, head (but not back) bent as low as possible, thumbs on the nose, pointer fingers between the eyebrows). As we knelt, the monks chanted a blessing which was somewhat surreal yet hauntingly beautiful. If in a group, sometimes they would be in unison, sometimes one would be chanting and the others silent. We gave offerings to four monks in total. Once the blessing is finished, the monks continue on, and we put our shoes on and went back inside to buy our breakfast.

Anyway, now that I'm up, I figured I would take the time to do some more research while the day is still young. I'm writing an article on food security in Burma for the annual journal published by NEED and wanted to get the rough draft finished by Wednesday. I don't know if this qualifies as "getting published" because it's not peer reviewed or anything, but it is distributed among a number of networks and is growing in popularity, so at this point I'll take what I can get. This research could also serve as background thesis research, and I was never one to pass up a two-birds-one-stone opportunity like this.

And you can take that to the bank.