Buddhist life in Thailand extends far beyond meditation

Brooke Schedneck, Rhodes College

I recently returned from leading a program in Thailand focused on how Buddhists practice religion. The participants – Buddhist practitioners from North America and Europe – wanted to deepen their understanding and practice.

Many Western Buddhists center their practice on meditation. As a scholar of contemporary Thai Buddhism, I have taught students in the United States who share this understanding.

Although meditation can be important, as I show in my 2023 book, “Living Theravada,” Buddhism is more than a tradition focused on the mind. In countries with Buddhist-majority populations, such as Thailand, practice involves rituals, offerings to monks and temple visits.

A central part of practice is rituals associated with merit-making. To make merit means doing something good that will generate good karma – actions believed to affect this life and future ones. The simplest way is to donate money to a temple.

Temples offer merit-making activities to engage participants. Worshippers may place a sheet of gold leaf on the part of a Buddha statue where they seek help or healing – the mouth if they use their voice professionally, for example, or an injured ankle.

Another activity involves ritually purifying a “chedi,” a monument containing sacred relics. Buddhists fill a container with blessed water and use a pulley to raise it to the chedi’s upper section. The container empties at the top, allowing participants to make merit by symbolically cleansing the monument.

Offerings to Buddha statues representing zodiac signs or days of birth are common. Thai temples often display eight Buddha statues in different poses, one for each day, with Wednesday divided into morning and evening. Worshippers may direct donations toward the zodiac animal associated with their birth year. Merit-making can therefore reflect personal circumstances, relationships and aspirations while encouraging generosity.

Another foundational feature of Theravada Buddhism is the relationship between monastics and laypeople. The laity offer alms, while monks provide spiritual wisdom and guidance. Because monks dedicate their lives to Buddhism, they are believed to accumulate merit that can be transferred to those making offerings.

These bonds can be tested. During COVID-19, laypeople avoided temples, making it difficult for monks to obtain food and maintain community connections. Faith can suffer when monks violate vows by drinking alcohol or having sex. In 2022, revelations that a prominent monk had an affair with a model caused disappointment and raised questions about whether young monks could take celibacy seriously.

The ultimate Buddhist goal is enlightenment, or nirvana – freedom from suffering and the cycle of birth and death. Most Buddhists, however, consider this unattainable in their lifetime and also seek worldly benefits, such as employment, lottery winnings or a spouse.

Thai temples often contain images of Hindu gods, including Ganesha and Brahma, who are believed to grant such wishes, as well as shrines to indigenous gods or local spirits. People pray to them for wealth, promotion, romance or fertility.

These rituals involve an exchange: Worshippers promise to return with offerings the god or spirit is believed to enjoy – perhaps hard-boiled eggs, elephant figurines or flower garlands – if their wish is granted.

Buddhism in Thailand is embedded in everyday life and collective concerns. After 10 days, my participants understood the value of merit-making and rituals. They saw how Buddhism extends beyond meditation and the individual pursuit of mental transformation.

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