One of Luang Prabang’s most distinctive traits is its superabundance of wats — Buddhist monastery-temples. The wats themselves create the ritual of morning alms, one of the most popular “sights” in the city.
At promptly 6:30 a.m. each day, orange-clad monks leave the wats and process around town to collect alms of sticky rice. The alms-givers wait by the side of the road, most kneeling on small mats and resting their bamboo baskets of rice on matching bamboo stands. When the monks pass by, each person flicks a small ball of rice into the bowl of every passing monk. No one touches the monks, and the women are careful to remain on their knees. Conducted in silence, it is a beautiful ceremony.
Left out from that description, however, are the hordes of tourists that hover close to the monks, eyes glued to their camera viewfinders. Or others who buy sticky rice and fruit from street vendors and attempt to participate in the ceremony themselves, without any sense of tradition or spirituality. Travel literature about Luang Prabang says that the monks and residents are not happy about the intrusion of tourists into their religious practices. But the public nature of the alms seems to strip everyone of their sense of decorum. I doubt that any of the Westerners snapping flash photos of the ceremony would do the same in a church, or that they would attempt to take Catholic communion if they hadn’t been properly baptized.
But the alms are a fascinating ceremony, and the fact that they take place in public and on many different streets means that it is possible to find a quiet way to observe, without disrupting. On Monday morning, my friend and I perched on a set of steps on a side street, where we knew the monks would pass by but we were a road’s-width away from anyone giving alms. Away from the tourist scrum, we were able to see how the alms fitted into people’s daily lives. Next door to where we were sitting, an elderly woman finished doling out rice to the monks and moved right onto her next morning task: dispensing water to the profusion of houseplants outside her front door.
Written from Luang Prabang, Laos.
Related posts:
Add to your RSS Reader
Subscribe by e-mail
Follow me on Twitter
Flickr photostream