Thailand's White Temple: My Journey To Enlightenment

The summer of 2017, I had the opportunity of a lifetime to travel to Thailand with my best friend on a program through Rustic Pathways. To say that this trip changed my life is an understatement- there is not one day where I don't think about the beautiful land and culture I was able to experience. I fell in love with the people, the lifestyle, the food (of course), the landmarks, the language, the traditions, and the immense beauty every corner of the country has to offer. My friends constantly joke that people don't truly know me if they didn't know that I went to Thailand and that my favorite animal is an elephant, and they are correct.

My favorite site that we visited on this journey was Wat Rong Khun in Chiang Rai, translated to the White Temple. A temple that was finished just before the start of the millenium in 1997, quite the opposite of a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple, it challenged me to face death incarnate while seeing the beauty of nirvana.

Here is an excerpt from my travel journal, which I wrote when I was 17-years-old. Especially during these past couple of months, when I'm in desparate need of hope and happy memories, I look to my journals to find hidden gems from my past.

"I just went to the White Temple, and it was handsdown the best spectacle I have ever seen. The architect lives on site, and he signed a gorgeous print I bought of Ganesha floating in an ink-blue sky. The temple was directly off of the road, which I thought was interesting because it was not the typically secluded holy scene.

The temple looked as if it were made of paper-mache. Each section was covered with dallops of white decorations and ornaments. The entrance was covered with skulls and bones and mangled hands.

I felt like the hands were thrusting through the ground and trying to pull me to the underworld with them.

The stairs were framed with dragons and mirrored tiles. I asked my counselor, Taylor, what was the significance of this extremely morbid entrance. She told me it was supposed to signify the journey we were making from the depths of hell into nirvana, or enlightenment.

The inside was not as big as the other temples I visited, but the ceilings were vaulted high. The most beautiful part was the murals on the walls. Our guide, Koko, said that they are reflections of worldwide events spanning over the past 20 years. There were cartoon characters and different scenes of stories with dark twists. But one mural section stuck out potently to us all: a scene of 9/11 and the fall of the Twin Towers. There was a snake wrapped around the towers and demons screaming in the fire and fueling the destruction. The serpent wrapped around and coiled into another part of the mural. It was feeding oil into a monster's mouth, to continue to feed the fire.

There were different superheroes over the walls as well (and villians and regular people too), like Spiderman, Harry Potter, Michael Jackson, Joker, Elvis, Iron Man, Hello Kitty, and other quintessential statements of pop culture. The door side of the wall was framed with a huge face and a gaping mouth, and above the forehead was a skull. Its eye sockets were circles with one man inside of each. Upon closer examination, inside the right eye sat Osama bin Laden, and inside the left eye was President George W. Bush. Outside of the eyes there was another circle with weapons pointing towards the two men, a true threat.

The reflection of that horrific day drawn into a realm of artistic beauty was brilliant. The other walls were painted with people riding boats shaped into the form of dragons. The dragons had menacing grimaces, but the people were smiling and positioned in prayer. The boats were heading towards the back of the room, towards the buddhas standing tall, to escape the maddness of the present.

So first you enter the temple through a hellish array of hands, up and across a bridge of snow, into the beautiful chaos of our world, and into nirvana.

The altar held a big golden buddha sitting on a golden shimmery goblet. A buddha of white marble sat in front of it on the ground. Sitting at our level was a statue of a monk. He was so realistic- it looked like there was light in his eyes behind his glasses, and we could see the vains and muscles in his arms. Koko told me that this was a representation of the architect's beloved teacher. The monk died a few years ago, but his spirit is preserved in the temple. What a beautiful way to be remembered."

I will never forget the day my concept of beauty truly changed.