Merit Making

The large drum can be heard throughout the village.  It calls the villagers to the temple.

Our students wearing the clothing of Mae Chaem

The money tree that held the merit-making gifts

The parade through town.  The money tree is ahead of the crowd.

The following is a description of "merit-making" from my perspective.  There are a variety of ways that a person can earn merit in the Buddhist tradition.  For our ceremony in the village, we constructed a money tree.  The trunk of the tree was actually from a banana plant and enhanced to look like a tree with a branch from a tamarind tree.  We loaded "skewers" with money and poked the skewers into the banana stalk.  We also stuck many empty skewers in the stalk.  When the heat of the day died down a bit, we dressed up in traditional village clothes and paraded around the village making an immense amount of noise (cymbals, drums, yelling) to attract other villagers to add Bahts to the empty branches of the tree.  The parade wound its way back to the temple where the head monk blessed the gifts from the money tree.  Payap would have paid the monks at the temple for the use of the temple as our classroom throughout the week.  But by turning the donation into a celebration, the actual amount of money collected was more than twice what Payap donated.  There are very pragmatic reasons to make merit-making a celebration.  Where Buddhism and animism co-exist, there may be a variety of reasons to do "merit-making".  From a Buddhist tradition, the purpose for merit making is to "purchase" good kharma (I apologize to Buddhists for the blunt interpretation) and a better next life.  The animist influence probably uses merit-making to please gods in this life.