BUDDHIST RITUALS ‘EXTORTION’

Re: “Empty Rituals”, (PostBag, June 9).

I agree with Kuldeep Nagi and his criticisms of Buddhism as it is so often practised in Thailand today, and in particular with the exorbitant cost of accessing Buddhist rituals.

Twelve years ago I assumed the responsibility for the education of the children of a broken Isan family. The youngest boy went to a top high school, then university and has just completed his military service. He now wants to go back to his village in Surin to enter the monkhood for a period to make merit for his family and ancestors.

As I intended to make a substantial contribution to this important event in the young man’s life, I asked his relatives in the village to prepare a budget and was shocked when it came out to 85,000 baht.

Apart from the obvious expectations of the neighbours and villagers that they were going to have a party, with plenty of food and lao khao (homemade whisky), a substantial part of the budget was the purchase of robes as gifts for the officiating monks, payments to the monks for the preparation of the lad, payment to the monastery, and payment for subsequent ceremonies at his ancestral house.

This is way beyond the reach of the lad’s relatives, who are subsistent rice farmers, and without my assistance they would probably end up handing over the deeds of their land to a loan shark to raise the money, paying exorbitant interest rates and risking losing title to their land. In a word, this is a disgrace . David Brown

Rayong