Pagoda

3:00am

Laying in our bed

waiting for the alarm ring

set for 3:15.

 

Vannac will take us to temple at 4 am so that we can ward off evil spirits, as part of the Buddhist Chhum Ben celebrations taking place over two weeks. This will be the first of five temples we visit during these holy days and each of these visits involves catering - serious catering. On this visit, we will offer food to the evil spirits lurking in the dark to distract them and, with their attention diverted, the monks will drive them away. On other days, we will feed and protect our dead ancestors.

There are no pictures of this excursion. We walk through the streets just prior to dawn in order to be at the pagoda at 4am. As we near it the streets increasingly become lively. There are women selling us plates of beautifully arranged spheres of sticky rice nestled atop the petals of banana flowers, each petal folded into a new flower shape. Others sell us sticks of tiny white flowers—skewered like shish-ka-bob—and paper cut using the same method of folding and cutting that children at home use to make paper snowflakes, but these resemble fish and are hooked on tiny poles. Both of these are impaled into our rice balls. Next we add bundles of incense bound at the bare wood ends. These will be lit en masse in the temple, producing enough smoke and scent to remind one of rock concerts years ago, when you could still make smoke and smells. Finally, at the gates to the temple Vannac buys each of us a bottle of water and a small bundle of 100 riel notes. Later these will be placed in bowls around and within the temple as offerings to specific deities and icon. As the sun comes up, the temple will look quite rich, until I do the conversion; 100 riel is two and half cents. There are of course larger notes, as large as 10,000 riel, but given the clean up the monks will have to do it looks like a hard way to make money.

At the temple, we remove our shoes. Small children at each door gather the shoes into neat stacks. On leaving at the end of the ceremony, each child knows which shoes belong to whom.

The temple is standard construction, a rectangle, with many pairs of doors on three sides. The inside walls and ceilings are covered in frescoes depicting the life and enlightenment of the Buddha. At the end wall is a shrine, with a tall seated buddha and a reclining buddha in front of him. The whole is a mix of gold, real and artificial candles, blinking “Christmas” lights, and an electric swirling mandala behind the seated Buddha’s head.

At the back is the band: roneat thung and roneat ek (low and high pitched marimbas), sralai (a multi-reeded relative of the oboe), khong-vong thom (large gong chimes) and khong-vong torch (small gong chimes), skor thom (two large barrel drums struck with beaters), samphor (a horizontal barrel drum played with hands) and the ching (metal clappers). The sralai has a hauntingly human sound, juxtaposed to and standing out from the gamelan cacophony of the percussion. For the next hour the sounds in the temple alternate between chanting monks and the music. While the band plays, and the monks rest, one monk, just in front of me, can’t keep from yawning.

The burning of incense in an ongoing part of life in Cambodia, the streets filled with whiffs of sweet and pungent incense, drifting on alternate currents with wood smoke cooking. But in the temple this morning we ratchet up the combustibles. In the late 1970s I, with several friends, went to a bingo hall in London, Ont. The hall, down the street, called out to us each evening, inviting us to discover the blue-collar camaraderie and the thrill of the win. Before the days of cigarette bans, I spent most of the evening fanning my “bingo eyes” in the parking lot. There is no easy escape from the temple. Several hundred of the devout surround me as we sit on the floor, me with tears wetting my cheeks, desperately trying to discretely fan my eyes, the whole while hoping the water bottles will be soon opened and, as part of an ancient Buddhist tradition, splashed on our eyes. In vain I wait, with incense eyes. But the ceremony is quite brief. Within an hour we do open our water bottles. We then rise, with rice and water in hand, and exit the rear of the temple.

The rice fight begins.

Surrounding the temple are stations, comprised either of existing stupas or large aluminum bowls set up on chairs for the morning’s event. We are to toss a ball of rice at a stupa or into a bowl and follow this with a splash of water. As the rice is quite sticky, aiming and directing the release of the ball are two disconnected events. Rice flies. The children take some mischievous delight in misguiding rice. Very quickly the soles of our feet are covered in a sticky goo. Inside the monks somberly drive away evil.

Vannac jokingly complains about the urbanization of the ceremony. Traditionally, we should make three circuits of the temple, but we only complete one. As dawn is fully upon us, everyone, it seems, must hurry off to work.