It's been a bad week for monks. I have a nightly radio show and in the space of three days we had three separate stories about wayward monks. On Monday it was a report about two ascetics in Pathum Thani who by day wore saffron robes, chanted upon request and maintained an air of solemnity as they went about their daily tasks with mindfulness.
By night they were equally as mindful as they changed into street clothes and stole motorbikes in the vicinity of their austere temple. If that wasn't bad enough,when the cops asked why they engaged in such criminal activities, they replied they needed the money to maintain their methamphetamine habit.Monks on methamphetamine ... now there's a B-grade action flick starring Steven Seagal if ever I heard one!
Tuesday's story was of a monk who text-messaged a woman constantly asking for sex. Then on Wednesday police raided a temple after villagers complained that the abbot was perpetually drunk. When they arrived they found beer and whisky bottles strewn about the monk's quarters amid an overwhelming stench of garlic.
Garlic? The abbot had stuffed his mouth full of garlic to kill the smell of alcohol, then stood there proclaiming:"I'm not drunk! I'm not drunk!"(Say that out loud after quickly consuming six screwdrivers,gesturing and pointing wildly, and you'll get an idea of his manner).Holding their noses and dryreaching, the men in clingy brown took him down to the station where he registered a blood alcohol reading of 110 millilitres - more than twice the legal limit for driving,and about four times the legal limit for preaching.
Three days in a row of wayward monk stories. My radio show cohost, the affable Krissana who is a bit of a spiritual soul himself, had to ask:"We seem to have so many stories like these nowadays. Tell me ... do you ever have problems with wayward priests in the Christian religion?"
Oh God. Live radio and he asks me that question?I momentarily bit my lip. My initial knee-jerk reaction was to defend my hallowed western culture, as we all do whenever somebody dares to criticise or question one's own culture.
"No, of course not. The Christian religion is faultless like western society," I could have said live on air. But it's such a terrible lie. It's like those weary old men who grace the Letters to the Editor pages of the Bangkok Post , damning and complaining and sending fireballs of spite and fury onto Thai society,sitting in their high chair of ivory,coming from a western country where by God we don't have any damn social or cultural problems.Problems with priests? How dare you even ask, Krissana! We're not like your dirty little monks leading double lives! We're farangs!
But knee-jerk soon drifts into solemn sensibility. With the exception of our ageing letter-writing fraternity, I think most of us can see that in the end we human beings are all bloody well the same. Including men of the cloth, regardless of whether that cloth is saffron or back-to-front white collar.
I was brutally honest and up front."Yes,we have terrible problems with priests," I told Krissana, and our listening public."We have problems with alcohol; too many priests are drunkards. Most disturbing is the problem of paedophilia, which emotionally scars children for life. Even the Pope had to apologise for it."
Such an answer comes as a relief to the likes of Krissana, who understands that monks and priests who engage in such activities are in the minority and if you choose to have a religion, then it should not be compromised by a guy who uses saffron to get chicks or a white collar to crack onto under-aged boys.
"And have you ever witnessed bad monks or priests first hand?" Krissana then asked, as I gave him my one-questiontoo-many look.
Thankfully as a child growing up in suburban Sunnybank, a satellite suburb of Brisbane verging on Queensland hick yet ultimately survivable, we had a lovely local priest named Father John, who only ever fondled the tassels on his robes midsermon. But I did once experience a wayward monk, and it was with my father of all people.
It was 2005, and while driving my father to see Phanom Rung, I pulled my back out in a far-flung gas station between Sa Kaew and Buri Ram.
(And what a scene that was. Me, standing by the car having just jumped out of the driver's seat screaming in pain because I couldn't move, with my father shouting "what's wrong? What"s wrong?", a gas station groupie asking "aren't you the bald guy who teaches English on TV?" and the gas station kid demanding, despite my screams of pain:"480 baht - do you want a receipt?")
My father had to drive me back to a hospital in Sa Kaew where I was wheeled into the emergency room.
I happened to arrive right alongside an unconscious monk, who was assigned the bed next to me.
"Do you mind if I just check him first?"asked the doctor. I had no problem with that thanks to a generous shot of a painkilling drug, the kind I wish I could keep in a vial in my trouser pocket just to take the edge off daily life.
Accompanying the unconscious monk was a temple boy dressed in rags and possessing a look that belied his mental
shortcomings. Through no fault of his own he had to have been the first offspring of the winners of the Mr and Miss Sa Kaew Idiot Pageant 1990.
"Did the abbot eat anything unusual today?" the doctor asked.
Temple boy shook his head slowly, as if such an act too quickly may cause a hollow knocking sound from inside his head."Gor ... no. He ate normally," he said.
"Did he do anything out of the ordinary?" the doctor asked.
"Gor ... there was a novice monk ordination ceremony this morning.In the middle of it he just collapsed,"he said slowly with blank eyes.
"So there was nothing unusual to warrant his collapse?" the doctor asked.
There was another shake of the slow head, then silence. It was a mental stand off. Then a tiny, tiny,dim flicker of a lonely light in the boys eyes.
"There is one thing," he said matter-of-factly."The abbot didn't drink whisky today."
An uncomfortable silence. The doctor looked over to me, who despite my pain was listening to every word.
"He ... didn't drink whisky ...today," the doctor said."Normally he drinks whiskey?"
"Gor ... every morning khrab ,"said temple boy, proud he could be of help."But today he didn't have time because of the ordination ceremony." The doctor patted the temple boy's dull shoulder and thanked him for his help, saying the abbot would be fine as soon as he recovered from his DTs.
Such monks are great fodder for a column such as this. Not so great fodder, sadly, are the majority of P:P monks and priests I have met who have given me such insight into Oance, who never fail to impress me.For those guys we must meet in another column ..."Daily MindfulSness" perhaps? As for Sanook , bring on the drunkards, drug addicts and paedophiles! What else could Steven Seagal possibly do if it weren't for them?
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