Photo Inventory

Instructor : Dr Leanna WolfeAnthropology 121

Photo and Prepared by - Madelen Hem

Date compeletion – June 23rd, 2013

Buddhist Beliefs!

This is the main hall of the temples and how it looks from the front. The main temples is decorated with unique cultural design ideas and colored in gold, red and white. There are two clone giant sculptures stood side by side of the temple gate, with demon facial expression, said that it’s the symbol to protect all the evil spirit away from the temples.

This is also known as a sacred place inside the temples. The sacred place here is called ‘God Jatukarm Ramathep’. He was the legend.

• “Guan Shi Yin / Guanyin” statues as sacred places.

• Guan Yin was a Chinese-God-Woman, she was a symbol of luck, beauty and kind. She known as ‘The God of Mercy’

• This is a very unique tree I found around the area of the temple. Beneath the tree, there were many small statues of Buddha, while the trunk of the tree were wrapped around a cloth that was colored in gold.

• Inside the main temple, on the altar; in the middle, there was a giant gold Buddha and surrounded him were other statues of Buddha too. They were all colored in gold. It is a sacred place where natives come to pray and monks do their sermon here.

• Natives and visitors need to sit with legs and knees bend behind their back as they bowed thrice to show their respects to his Buddha.

• As you can see, there are 5 silver bowl were placed there.

• Each silver bowl is like a donation box, where people whose comes can donate, each silver bowl has different purposes.

• And just right behind there, you can see ‘Holy Water’, the water symbolize luck. You can use the water to wash your face/hair just so to bring lucks into your life.

• The native kids also visited the temples to study, participate and practiced their very own religion ritual. They were wearing normal/casual clothes.

• The boxes that were placed there was like boxes of donation including various merchandise that the monks could use.

• I was told that we could pay at any amount for the box and the money would go to the temples’ donation box and the box itself will be given to the monks.

• This is a religious practices, the monks will later perform the sermon as they dedicated all these stuffs to the relatives that already passed away.

• As i came out, I also saw people paid respect to this another sacred place inside the temples as well. The statues represents god and beside there, His Buddha’s head.

• In front of this little sacred place, there placed two lions figure, which represents as the protector of the god, chase away all the evil spirits.

• This is recognized as pile of white dust, they were used as for place where people can stick their incenses on it after praying and bowing to the Buddha. Natives usually uses 3 stick of incenses, which in Thai religious practice, had it said that, one of the incense is for those who passed away, another one is for everybody and another one is for themselves. Sticking up incense in the white dust usually meaning the end of ritual performance. Some would do this in the beginning. Its all fine. Lit up incense is for the purpose of praying and paying respect to the Buddha.

Thank you for your attention!

BY : Madelen Hem

For original quality picture, you can visit or download it here - http://www.mediafire.com/folder/455t61i0kusb8/photo_field_observation_(10)