12 of themMaking merit

Pouring the water

กรวดน้ำ · หยาดน้ำ (yàat nám)

Pour a thin stream of water while the chanting runs, and say who it is for.

1. Buy or borrow a small jug. Any bottle does.
2. While a monk chants, pour a thread of water — slow, unbroken — into a cup, a bowl, or onto the ground at the foot of a tree.
3. Hold the dead person in mind and name them, silently or aloud.
4. When the chanting stops, tip the rest out at the root of a tree.

Nothing.

อิทัง เม ญาตีนัง โหตุ — let this be for my relatives.

This is the act that moves merit from you to someone dead. Every other act on this page ends with it.

Tan khan khao — the tray of rice

ตานขันข้าว · ตานขันเข้า

A tray of food handed to a monk in a named dead person's name.

1. Make up or buy a tray: rice, a savoury dish, a sweet, water, sometimes a flower, a candle and incense.
2. Write the dead person's name on a slip and put it on the tray, or tell the monk.
3. Hand it over in the morning, before the monks eat — before about 11 a.m.
4. The monk chants; you pour the water.

50–200 ฿ for a tray bought at the wat gate. Made at home it costs what the food costs.

When: Any morning. Most households do it at Pi Mai Mueang (Songkran), at Ok Phansa, and on the anniversary of a death.

The Lanna form. In the north this, not the incense stick, is what people mean by making merit for the dead.

Offering a tung

ตานตุง · ตุง

A long narrow banner, raised at the wat, offered in a dead person's name.

1. Buy a tung at the wat or at Ton Lam Yai market — paper, cloth, or metal.
2. Write the name on the tail.
3. Hand it to the wat to be hung, or hang it on the pole yourself where the wat puts them.

20–150 ฿ paper or cloth. A metal one runs higher.

The northern telling is that the banner hangs down far enough for the dead to take hold of and climb.

Lighting a pang pratip

ผางประทีป

A small clay saucer with a wick, lit at the base of a chedi.

1. Buy a handful at the wat or at any market in the weeks before Yi Peng.
2. Fill with wax or oil if it is not already filled; light it; set it down on the terrace, the wall, or the chedi's base.
3. Do not leave it where it can catch.

5–20 ฿ each.

When: Any time. In quantity at Yi Peng, on the full moon of the twelfth northern month.

The lamps are for the dark, and the dark is where the dead are said to be.

Pha bangsukun — the cloth

ผ้าบังสุกุล

A length of cloth laid out for a monk to take up, on behalf of someone dead.

1. Ask at the wat office for บังสุกุล. Bring a robe-length of cloth, or buy one there.
2. Lay it where the monk directs — over a coffin, a photograph, a reliquary, or a bare mat.
3. The monk takes it up and chants the four lines about what is impermanent.

150–500 ฿ for the cloth.

The oldest of these acts and the plainest: a rag picked up off the ground, which is what the word means.

Khan tang — the tray for a spirit

ขันตั้ง · ขันห้า / ขันแปด

Paired flowers and candles on a tray, set down in front of a spirit or a teacher.

1. Count in pairs. Five pairs of flowers and five pairs of candles is the small tray; eight pairs is the larger one.
2. Add betel, a little rice, a coin.
3. Set it down, kneel, say what you came for. Take the tray away with you or leave it, as the shrine keeper directs.

30–150 ฿ ready-made at the shrine. Less if you assemble it.

This one is not Buddhist merit. It is what you hand a spirit who was here before the wats were, and it is what the shrines on this route are actually set up to receive.

Sai khan dok — flowers in the bowl

ใส่ขันดอก

Drop flowers into each of the bowls set out around the pillar.

1. Take a bunch from the sellers at the gate.
2. Walk the row of bowls and put a few blooms in each.
3. Some bowls carry a name — a guardian, a direction, a year of birth. Read the labels.

20–50 ฿ a bunch.

When: The eight days of Bun Inthakhin, ending on the full moon of the eighth northern month (late May). Outside those days the bowls are not out.

For the city pillar, not for a person.

Suep chata — extending the thread

สืบชะตา

A rite that lengthens a life, a house, a river or a town.

1. Arranged with the wat in advance, not walked into.
2. A tripod of poles, banana stems, a thread that runs from the chanting down to whoever is sitting under it.

By arrangement with the wat.

Listed here because two of the stops on this route are places where the rite is done for the whole city, not for a person.

Song khro — sending it away

ส่งเคราะห์

Misfortune loaded onto a raft or a tray and carried out of the house.

1. A tray or a small raft, a scrap of the person's clothing or hair, rice, a figure standing in for them.
2. Set down at a crossroads, a river, or outside the wall — outward, always.
3. Done by a spirit doctor or a lay elder rather than by a monk.

By arrangement.

The old city gates were the outward. Suan Prung was the one the dead went through.

Paying for the unclaimed dead

ทำบุญศพไร้ญาติ

Money to the rescue foundation that collects bodies nobody claims, and buries or burns them.

1. Chiang Mai's foundations keep a donation box at their stations and take transfers.
2. Ask for ศพไร้ญาติ — the unclaimed.
3. Some years a foundation holds a mass cremation for the year's accumulated dead and takes names then.

Whatever you put in.

For a route about people who died without anyone to light a lamp for them, this is the act that matches.

Sweeping

กวาดลานวัด

Pick up a broom that is already leaning there and sweep.

1. Brooms sit against the wall at most of these wats.
2. Sweep the terrace, the path, the leaf fall under the bodhi tree. Put the broom back.

Nothing.

Counts. Nobody will stop you, and at the quiet wats on this route it is the most useful thing a visitor does all day.

Buying a tile

ทำบุญกระเบื้อง

Write a name on a roof tile that goes onto a building.

1. Where a wat is re-roofing there is a stack of tiles and a marker pen.
2. Write the dead person's name, your own, or both.
3. Pay what the sign asks and set the tile on the pile.

Usually 50–100 ฿ a tile; the sign says.

Only available where there is work going on. Two or three of these stops have a stack out at any given time.