Prayer Houses

Recently, I went to an exhibit at the Thailand Center for Design. (It’s conveniently located on the top floor of the Emporium shopping center, next to a really good grocery store and several good restaurants. You gotta love the commitment to one-stop shopping – style and substance.)

The current exhibit is called “Spirits in the Modern World” and is about how ancient beliefs have survived in slightly different, and often commercialized, ways.

The focus was mainly on how ancient people feared “the spirits” and the actions they took to appease them. But the point was that those core fears – of ghosts, death, the afterlife, etc – survive today, either in straightforward worship or in transmuted ways, like Halloween and horror movies.

One of the items in the exhibit was of a prayer house –

I see these all over Bangkok so today I asked Noon, my Thai instructor, about them. She said that people build prayer houses outside homes, office buildings, hotels, etc – any place where there was a previous building on the same property. The idea is that the prayer house gives the spirit of the previous owner a place to live, so they will be pleased and won’t haunt the new building. Often, people leave offerings – fruit, water, drinks – for the spirit. I have also noticed that people leave small toy animals – elephants, zebras, lions, etc. – to further appease the spirit.
Typically, you see these prayer houses at the entrances to buildings. Also, many people “wai” as they go past a prayer house. “Wai” is the Thai term for pressing your palms together in a praying gesture and then bowing forward. Not everyone does, but most do.

So, I decided to pay attention to them today and to notice how different each one is. Here are a few photos of several in my neighborhood.

And a few detailed images --