This will make you a man

Om with Oat just after helping Oat to dress as a monk for the first time.

When I was 13 and at school, we had the army cadets and the idea was that being in the cadets would teach you discipline and make a man of you.  I am not sure it achieved that purpose in my case as I just took it as something you had to do and never enjoyed it.  I can still hear the brother, who was a Colonel in the corps, yelling at me for not being able to march in step. 

Well, in Thailand, while the army may be big and there is conscription, no one I know wants to go into the military.  Here, if any institution serves the purpose of initiation into manhood and of teaching boys disciplne and moral values it is the monkhood. 

I saw this firsthand this past week when I went with my mate, Om, to see his 13 year old nephew, Oat, become a monk.  Yes, at the age of 13, he became a Buddhist monk but only for two weeks during the school holidays. 

For us, this may seem a strange practice but this is part of life, religion and culture in Thai society.  It is the way it is here.  Still, even after living here so long, I had to ask myself what this was all about.  I found I could give a rational explanation but still it seemed different.  It was in going to the temple for myself that I gained an insight into what this was all about.  My first eye opening experience was on my arrival at the temple and seeing that Oat was one of over 200 boys doing the same thing.  So many of them!

I saw that temple was in a totally different part of Bangkok and that it was a big temple with a big school in a simple and out of the way street.  My question of how this temple was chosen as the one was answered on meeting a friendly monk there, whom Om told me was from their village and a monk to be admired.  There was the connection. 

As my time at the temple progressed, I was just amazed at the number of people there.  They were the families of the over 200 boys hovering to see the whole process of their sons' initiation into the monkhood unfold.  The boys were dressed in white and set apart as a big group.  Monks gave talks.  There was chanting and times of just sitting and being quiet for them.  They ate separately and in a big group, being watched by their families.  That was the Saturday. 

I returned on the Sunday to see the big event - the boys being robed as monks.  I wondered how they would do that and discovered that it was quite simple.  They were each given a set of robes and all were sent upstairs to the dormitories to change into their new robes.  They were accompanied by their fathers and monks to help them robe for the first time.  As Oat is here in Bangkok away from his family, he had Om and me to help him.  I found sharing this experience to be enlightening and a great honour as I was watching something special happen in Oat's life and a part of it. 

Oat went up as the young boy and came back down as part of the whole group as a monk. 

To make sense of this, Oat is fully a monk as is any monk while he is a monk.  You can be a monk for a life time or a short time.  It all depends on why.  You could become a monk because someone close to you has died, as part of growing up, as part of initation into society or as pure commitment to the ideal of being monk.  For Oat and the other 200 boys, it was something they wanted and their families wanted.  It was taken on proudly and with a sense of this is part of being a Buddhist.  There was also the sense of the army cadets for me when I was a boy.  It was about learning disciplne and good values and becoming a man, about growing up.  It is part of a programme of life in Thai society that happens in a boy's life.

I wonder what happens in a girl's life?   



Oat, the proud monk.