Wat Saket (Golden Mount Temple)

Before it bore its present name, the monastery was called WatBuddhist monastic complex that brings together, within a single enclosure, several religious buildings, monks’ quarters and ancillary buildings; the word does not refer to a single building. Sakae. It was an old temple, already in existence in the Ayutthaya periodEra of Siamese history during which the kingdom had Ayutthaya as its capital, from 1351 until the fall of the city in 1767.. It stood apart from what would become the royal city. This location weighs on its entire history: outside the fortified walls, alongside the canals, the monastery would remain both close to power and on the margins of the city.³

The first king of the Chakri dynasty, Rama I, transformed this temple. He had it restored, so extensively that one may speak of a refounding of the whole monastery, and had canals dug around it. In 1783 the KhlongCanal or waterway, natural or man-made, which long played a major role in transport, irrigation and the organisation of settlements and territories in Thailand. Maha Nak was opened; the monastery stood on the banks of this canal and of the Khlong Rop Krung, the encircling canal. During the season of high water, this area was then used for sung contests and sakrawaImprovised, sung Thai poetic contest, traditionally performed from boats during the high-water season, in which participants answer one another in verse., duels of improvised poetry, in imitation of Ayutthaya. The monastery thus became part of a landscape of riverside pastimes conceived as a reminder of the old capital.¹

It was after the digging of the Khlong Maha Nak that the temple took the name Wat Saket. The word means ‘washing the hair’, implicitly the royal hair. Tradition links the name to an episode predating the founding of the dynasty. General Chakri was returning from a campaign in Cambodia to put down the unrest troubling Thonburi, then the capital. He is said to have stopped at Wat Sakae to take a ritual bath, the phra krayasananRoyal ritual bath in Thai court ceremonial, performed as an act of purification., before going on to the city where he was to be raised to the throne in 1782 as Rama I.³

This account belongs to the tradition of origins, and it is handed down as such.

This link with the Crown can still be read in the monastery’s status. Wat Saket (Golden Mount Temple) is a royal templeIn Thailand, a Buddhist temple founded, restored or patronised by the king or the royal family, and graded according to an official hierarchy of ranks and categories., a phra aram luang, that is, a monastery placed under the patronage of the sovereign. It belongs to the second class of these temples and holds the rank of ratchaworamahawihanCategory of royal temple: a major wat with extensive buildings, built or restored by the sovereign in a personal capacity., hence its full name, Wat Saket Ratchawora Mahawihan. Its monks belong to the Maha Nikaya monastic order.³

Located outside the fortified walls, the monastery became a frequent place for funerals. Wat Saket thus became one of the places to which the capital entrusted its dead.⁴

This function took on dramatic proportions under King Rama II. In 1820 a cholera epidemic that had come from Penang, on the Malay Peninsula, struck the capital and claimed tens of thousands of lives. The bodies were carried outside the walls, to Wat Saket, but also to Wat Sangwet and Wat Choeng Lane, today Wat Bophit Phimuk. The monastery then became the main place where the victims were deposited.⁴

The epidemic of 1820 was not an isolated episode. Cholera returned every dry season, and this cycle repeated itself for decades, until the beginning of the reign of King Chulalongkorn, Rama V.⁴

Unable to cremate all the bodies, people left some of them in the open air within the monastery grounds. The corpses attracted vultures, which settled on the site for good. A photograph taken around 1900 still shows a nearby cement crematorium with vultures perched on its top: the scene did not belong only to the great epidemics; it was part of the monastery’s landscape at the turn of the twentieth century.⁴

This reality passed into the language. The expression ‘Raeng Wat Saket’, ‘the vultures of Wat Saket’, entered everyday speech, and it is often paired with ‘Pret Wat Suthat’, ‘the hungry ghosts of Wat Suthat’, named after another great royal monasteryIn Thailand, a Buddhist monastery founded, restored or placed under the patronage of the king or the royal family, and holding a particular rank. in Bangkok.⁴

In the course of the nineteenth century, the same monastery became the setting for a great royal building project. King Rama III had work begun there on a monument of very great size. He entrusted its direction to a high dignitary of the court, Somdet Chao Phraya Borom Maha Phichai Yat, whose personal name was Tat Bunnag. The project envisaged a prangTower-sanctuary rooted in Khmer architectural tradition, later adopted and transformed in Siamese and Thai architecture; depending on the context, it serves a religious function or acts as a reliquary., a tower-sanctuary with a slender silhouette, set on an indented base ‘with twelve angles’, that is, one in which each corner is cut into successive recesses that multiply the edges.⁷

The project ran up against the nature of the ground. Bangkok’s soft soil, saturated by the nearby canals, could not bear the weight of the construction. The foundations subsided several times, and the monument eventually collapsed while work was still under way. All that remained was a great heap of bricks and materials, which local people began to call ‘phu khao’, ‘the mountain’.⁴

This nickname lies at the origin of all that followed. What should have been a tower became a hill, and it was this hill, not the planned prang, that subsequent reigns would develop. The technical failure of Rama III’s reign thus fixed, without anyone intending it, the form of the monument that can be seen today.

The hill remained unfinished under King Mongkut, Rama IV, and was completed only under Chulalongkorn.⁵

The project thus stretched over three reigns. The monument finally received an official name, Phra Borommabanphot, set by a royal proclamation published in the Royal Gazette (Ratchakitchanubeksa). But to local people it remains the Phu Khao Thong, the ‘Golden Mount’.⁵

A hill crowned by a chediA bell-shaped reliquary monument, the Thai version of the Indian stupa., a solid reliquaryA container intended to hold and protect one or more relics. monument, was waiting for relics. It was King Chulalongkorn who provided them. In 1878 he had relics of the Buddha kept at the Grand Palace transferred and deposited at the summit of the mount. Twenty years later, in 1898, a second deposit placed relics from India there. These two acts changed the meaning of the place: the monument born of a collapse became the monastery’s reliquary, an object of veneration for the whole city.¹

The transformation is all the more striking because, in those same decades, the monastery was still associated with epidemics and vultures. From then on, Wat Saket (Golden Mount Temple) wore two faces: that of a place of death outside the walls and that of a sanctuary raised, quite literally, above the city.

The relics gave rise to a festival. Its origin goes back to the deposit of 1878. The Ngan Phu Khao Thong, the Golden Mount Festival, is held every year in November, at the time of Loy KrathongThai festival held at the full moon of the twelfth lunar month, usually in November, when small floating offerings are placed on the water., the full-moon festival when small floating offerings are set on the water. It lasts around seven to ten days.⁵

Its opening is religious. A candlelit procession climbs the hill to the chedi, which is wrapped in a long red cloth carried in procession. The gesture recalls the Hae Pha Khuen ThatThai rite in which a long cloth is carried in procession and taken up to a reliquary to wrap it, in homage to relics of the Buddha. at Wat Phra Mahathat in Nakhon Si Thammarat, in the south of the country, where a cloth is likewise carried up to the reliquary. At the foot of the mount, the festival then takes a secular turn, with its stalls, traditional games and fairground rides.⁴

The relationship between the monastery and the Crown also runs through a tree. In 1814 a Bodhi tree, of the species under which, according to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha attained AwakeningIn Buddhism, the state of understanding and clarity reached at the end of the spiritual path, which frees one from ignorance and suffering., was planted in the monastery by a king’s own hand. The sovereign watered it with lustral water, water consecrated by monks, at SongkranTraditional Thai New Year, celebrated in mid-April, marked by water-sprinkling rites and merit-making., the Thai New Year, and this gesture became a royal tradition.²

The devotion of the faithful, for its part, is concentrated at the summit. Those who climb the mount come to venerate the relics and apply gold leaf there, a common act of offering in Thai temples. The Golden Mount is thus, day to day, as much a place of practice as a landmark in the urban landscape.¹⁰

The Phu Khao Thong takes the form of a steep-sided artificial hill, raised within the monastery grounds and crowned by a chedi. Photographs from the end of Chulalongkorn’s reign, including a colour postcard, already show it, with the encircling canal and the canal that branches off from it.⁴

Its present appearance dates from 1966. That year, the Ministry of the Interior had the chedi clad in gold mosaic and four small chedis built around it. It is this state that can still be seen today. The monument as we see it is thus the product of three distinct moments: Rama III’s collapsed project, completion and consecration through the relics in the nineteenth century, and then the 1966 restoration.¹

The mount is only one part of the monastery. At ground level, Wat Saket (Golden Mount Temple) has its ubosotConsecrated ordination hall of a wat: the ritually central building, marked out by sacred boundary stones, where monastic ordinations take place., the ordinationCeremony by which a layperson is admitted as a novice or as a monk into the Buddhist community. hall where monks receive their ordination and carry out the ritual acts of the community. It houses Buddha images, that is, statues, as well as mural paintings.¹⁰

The monastery’s gateways, the sumOrnamental entrance gateway set in the enclosure wall of a Thai monastery, often topped by a decorated crowning element., caught the attention of a high religious authority. The Supreme PatriarchHead of the Buddhist monastic community of Thailand, appointed by the king. Somdet Phra Maha Samana Chao Krom Phraya Vajirananavarorasa, head of the kingdom’s monastic community, considered them of great beauty and worthy of serving as a model.⁷

The Phu Khao Thong has become one of the symbols of Bangkok and one of its most visited places. It is the best-known site in Pom Prap Sattru Phai district, and the monastery is regarded as an important temple, linked to the origins of the city. This renown rests on a history in which Rama I’s founding act, the memory of the epidemics, the failure of a royal building project and the consecration through relics are layered one upon another. All of it remains legible in the landscape: the canals of 1783, the hill born of the collapse, the golden summit of 1966.⁴