When my boatman beached our tiny vessel, several giddy kids emerged from the shady jungle to greet me. A couple of them were selling silk scarves and hand-made jewelry while others were just twirling about excited to interact with the big white foreigner. They led me to a little whiskey still that had been set up on the beach and showed me how they distill rice into brain-bending alcohol, using an oil drum and a series of rubber hoses. An old woman tended to the process. Naturally, I had to sample the cocktail –- imagine the taste of sugar-infused gasoline and you’ll have a sense of it. But also throw in just a hint of scorpion, because each bottle of whiskey always has some arachnid or invertebrate floating inside. The pickled creepy-crawlies are believed to have medicinal qualities, good for whatever ails you. Ever since eating a chicken fetus and drinking turtle blood in Beijing a few years ago, I’ve felt compelled to sample the local culinary weirdness of my various travel destinations. I bought a bottle complete with a ten-inch centipede suspended in the booze.
I had come ashore off the Mekong River in northern Laos to eat lunch and give my boatman, Amphay, a rest. Amphay and I had been making our way slowly up the river from the quaint town of Luang Prabang in northern Laos. I stayed several days in Luang Prabang because the charm of the place and the availability of good food and reasonable accommodations had enticed me to soak up some creature comforts. Many nights in a roach-infested dump in Cambodia had earned me the right to relish some bourgeois pleasures.
Starting in the 14th century, Luang Prabang was the original capital of the Lao Kingdom. It sits almost dead center in the northern region, where Laos is sandwiched between China, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, and it acts as a peninsula between the Mekong to the west and the Nam Khan River to the east. This unique geography, both on the main artery of trade and nestled among mountains, is home to several different ethnic groups including Hmong, Mien, and tribal Thai (many Lao ethnic groups are designated by their altitude range).
While I was staying in Luang Prabang, I visited some beautiful Buddhist wats (temples). In fact, there are so many well-preserved wats in such close proximity to each other that UNESCO has declared the city a World Heritage Site. A young monk (bhikkhu), named Kai, approached me at Wat Pha Mahathat one afternoon, and he practiced his English with me while I gleaned cultural info from him. Kai, like many young monks (“novices” range from 8 to 20 years old), came from the poor northern region and took ordination so that he might get an education. Becoming a monk is a good way for poor boys to move beyond the precarious life of subsistence farming, and Kai hoped to save enough money to one day leave the monastery and go to college. Laos is second only to Cambodia for poor literacy rates -– only 60 percent of Laos can read, whereas 94 percent of neighboring Thais are literate.
Kai told me that if he can ever save enough to enroll in formal education, he will have to “give back” his ordination vows. He will stand before a senior monk and respectfully renounce his previous vow of avoiding females. Only by leaving the monkhood will he be allowed to attend school with girls. For now, his life is difficult. He has not seen his parents and family for several years because he cannot afford to visit them, so he fills his days with a rigorous curriculum of Buddhist scriptures, English, math, and history.
"They are worn-out or damaged devotional icons that have been brought here by local Lao Buddhists. Many of them are missing arms or legs or they’re dramatically cracked. But they are still very holy figures and the local people come to offer them a quiet retirement in a place of great reverence."
Every morning Kai and the other saffron-robed monks quietly parade down the main street with their begging bowls, stopping at storefronts and family homes to receive gifts of food. It is worth getting up early and heading down to Luang Prabang’s main street just to witness this remarkable custom. According to the tradition of Theravada Buddhism, the monk owns nothing but the robe on his back, an alms bowl, a razor for shaving his head, and sometimes an umbrella (some Theravada monks are not even allowed to touch money). The lay community provides monks with their daily meal every morning (often left-over food) and by making this offering they win karmic merit for future good fortune. The monks, in turn, live very Spartan lifestyles (usually prohibited from eating after noon), and they provide the community with spiritual and earthly guidance (wats often form the educational, legal, and even medicinal centers of the local communities).
Luang Prabang is saturated with Buddhism; monks are ubiquitous, wats appear every one hundred yards, chanting pours out of temple buildings, statues and devotional items decorate every surface, incense joss-sticks curl smoke from household shrines, and lotus flowers grow pervasively as a symbolic reminder of Buddhist emancipation from the muck and mire of desires.
All this Eastern exoticism is also infused with French colonialism. As early as the 1850s France had its hands deep in Southern Vietnam and Cambodia, and by the 1890s Laos was a part of French Indochina as well. Luang Prabang is a remarkable fusion of indigenous aesthetics and French architecture and culture -–French bread, croissants and coffee are staples, and French provincial storefronts and homes sit shoulder to shoulder with traditional Lao lintels and Siamese rooftops.
But I had left all that charm to work my way 25 kilometers up the Mekong to the ancient Pak Ou caves. In this region of the river, rock cliffs rise above the churning water and form sheer walls of striated limestone. At the juncture where the Ou River joins the Mekong, a giant cave burrows into the rock wall near the water level. Inside this venerated cave (called Tham Ting), and another cave that’s reached after a short hike (called Tham Phoum), one finds hundreds of Buddha statues. The Buddha is posed in every imaginable manner, but following a popular Theravada stance he is mostly seen standing with hands symbolically raised to quiet and calm arguments and obstreperous passions. All these statues, which recede into the darkness of the cave, are “retired” Buddhas. They are worn-out or damaged devotional icons that have been brought here by local Lao Buddhists. Many of them are missing arms or legs or they’re dramatically cracked. But they are still very holy figures and the local people come to offer them a quiet retirement in a place of great reverence -- a tradition that’s been going on for hundreds of years. During the Lao New Year holidays, many Lao people make a lengthy pilgrimage up the Mekong to clean the statues, and thereby acquire good karma merit.
I stood in the mouth of the cave and lit some incense as an offering. I carefully unpacked a folded document from my bag and spread it out before me. It was a reproduction of a 100-year-old drawing of this same cave. Here in my hand was the same scene before my eyes.
In the 1860's a small group of five French explorers made their way along this same river route. Francis Garnier, an artist named Louis Delaporte, and three other French Navy men, comprised the Mekong Exploration Commission. Their goal was to explore the possibility of profitable trade lines by following the Mekong from South Vietnam (then called Cochin China) up through Cambodia, Laos, and ultimately into China. They produced an expansive report in the 1870's, complete with beautiful etchings, and while it was a popular success it was also historically and politically significant as groundwork data for the European colonial interests of the following generation. Standing there in the cave, a century and a half later, I felt a slight frisson of historical import -- with a little Buddhist metaphysics of interconnectedness thrown in as well.
In Delaporte’s drawing of the cave there are fewer Buddhas than one finds nowadays, but the general features are identical. “Climbing a staircase from the river,” Garnier reports, “we entered a sacred cave. Pious persons have erected altars with Buddhas therein and have placed many statues and ex-voto objects of all kinds. These ornaments accord with the cuts in the rocks and produce a striking impression.” The impression has only grown more striking since the French explorers climbed into the cave, because the broken Buddhas have multiplied and their colors have faded so they seem to grow out of the cave itself. It is a haunting and beautiful place.
The next day Amphay drove me back down the Mekong to Luang Prabang and he insisted we visit the night market. Ethnic minorities like the Hmong trek into town from the provinces to hawk their wares here. There were hand-woven silk scarves, Buddha amulets, paper lanterns, paintings, hand carved bracelets, stone Buddha heads, traditional musical instruments, and sundry other products.
I had assumed that the night market tradition was a response to the recent development of a small tourism industry. But while Amphay and I ate dinner at an ersatz bench table, I was surprised to locate an etching of the night market in the 1870s French Commission Report. Long before any tourists came to Luang Prabang, the locals had been doing this nightly pilgrimage, haggling deals and bartering goods. Like the etching of the Buddha statue cave, the old French drawing of the market shows a less populated event, but it forged for me a palpable sense of the stability and continuity of local Laotian culture.
After dinner I bargained for a carved Buddha statue --like those that inhabited the cave, and the girl who sold it to me attached a small tag. The tag was provided as proof for airport security officials that I had not been pilfering sacred sites –- that I had not been pinching retired Buddhas from their comfortable caves. Amphay purchased a small bottle of rice whiskey. I shivered when I recalled the taste of the corrosive booze, and I asked him if he had a sudden thirst for it. No, he explained, it wasn’t for him. He would place small glasses of the potent brew, that night, in front of his family’s spirit shrine to appease the ghosts. It was especially important tonight, he explained, because the full moon would lead the spirits to disturb his children’s dreams if he did not make the whiskey offering.
Having traveled throughout Southeast Asia, I knew well of this common tradition. That night I made my own offering to the spirits. I poured out a liberal dose of my centipede whiskey into a hotel tumbler, and then the Buddha and I leafed through the Mekong Exploration Commission Report for new adventures. I made a promise to my new statuette that I would return him one day to Laos and retire him in style.
Stephen T. Asma is a professor of philosophy at Columbia College in Chicago. His books include The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha. Copyright by Stephen T. Asma, 2007.
Photo by Brian Wingert