A Khmer-Thai Tradition

For the past 4 days I’ve been utterly engrossed in Wan San Dton Dta. It’s the Khmer holiday I touched a bit on in an earlier entry. This festival is bigger than New Years, Christmas, and your birthday combined. It loosely translates from Khmer as “a day of reverence”. I don’t know if words can do it justice. It’s a very special local tradition for only those people with Khmer heritage. It happens in the 3 provinces of Thailand closest to Cambodia and only within select communities. The only thing I can really equate it to is Day of the Dead in Mexico. The whole point is to honor your ancestors and the spirit world. The climax is the one day out of the year in which you’re ancestors are believed to come back to Earth and dine/ drink in celebration and give blessings to living relatives. In every household, office, and building, people arrange these huge shrines of mattresses decorated with food, beverages, bedding, candles, incense, etc. In each household, the family gathers to hold a special prayer and ask for blessings together. Each person places 7 pieces of sticky rice on the shrine. The significance of 7 is—as I understand it—the seven levels of life and forms of living (whether it be as a spirit or rebirth in to an inanimate object, insect, animal, etc.) Ensuing is a decent amount of drinking, dancing, and singing. If you’re going to have a party and celebrate the lives of the deceased, you must go all out. And they do.
At the beginning of San Dton Dta, there was a huge parade and festival in the District town in which 22 sub-districts participated. I was elected to lead our float all decked out in Thai/Khmer costume—headdress and all. Quite the sight. I think I smiled for 3 hours straight! Including that day, I’ve been getting up absurdly early to partake in the festivities at around 3:30 AM. Today (Saturday), is the last day and by the end of today alone, I will have gone to the temple 4 times. Intense! One of the things I find most interesting about the Dton Dta observance is it’s interconnectedness to Buddhism. A little history: In the Thirteenth Century, the last great Khmer emperor practiced Buddhism and constructed some of the most beautiful and significant Buddhist temples in present-day Thailand and Cambodia. The emperors before had practiced a mix of Animist, Hindu, and Brahman beliefs. SEE ALSO: Khmer Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_empire
Present-day ethnic Khmers practice varying degrees of all these beliefs. Obviously, the temple is Buddhist and when we went, the monks did the same Sanskrit chants they do at any regular gathering. It was primarily the same as observing a Buddhist holiday but, if this makes sense, the monks were chanting for different, more inclusive reasons—those tied to Khmer animist and Brahman beliefs and customs. In the Buddhist waning moon ceremony that I attended before, people walked around the temple three time, holding candles. As part of the Khmer ceremony, people walked around the temple for a 5-minute period lifting their platters of spirit offerings to the sky while (quite literally) hooting and yelping, as if to summon up the spirit world. Then, when the morning ceremony was over and we were walking away from the temple, people were throwing random foodstuff at the meen’s (Buddhist gravestones). My neighbor explained that this was to offer food to those spirits that may have arisen from the graves inside the temple grounds during the summons ritual. Fascinating.
I don’t think my description can really do this experience justice, which is why I took some videos. This whole whirlwind experience had been incredibly intriguing and fun. I feel special in a way to be so intimately tied to the cultural activities, invited to go places that foreigners don’t normally go, and experience so many unique, sacred things. It’s an Anthropological mecca! That was one of my Undergraduate Degrees.