Life is Suffering - The Buddhist way of Life

The Thai people are deeply devoted to their Buddhist faith, a religion I have respected and felt somewhat drawn to for a long time. I started noticing this right away. First, these colorful, exotic mini-temples are all over – on car hoods, on every street corner, and many food stalls, in stores, etc. I have seen several occasions when people stop before the shrine, kneel and pray. Monks can be seen everywhere. In any given day I must lay my eyes on at least 15 of these bald men of all ages, with their long orange robes. At the bus station I saw a monk leading a prayer with a shop keeper, sort of like you’d see inside a church between a priest and a congregation member. What is different though is that here, the faith seems to carry into the streets and become part of the hectic day.  I noticed amongst the many market shop stalls these tables selling small wreaths of flowers. There were so many of these and at first I wondered what they were for. I finally realized that people use them as offerings to the shrine, or Buddha figure that adorns each one. What I find so cool about that is the way people seem to be rushing around through their busy day and they will take the time to stop and buy one and bring it to a shrine and take that 5 minutes out of their day to make an offering to their God. I’ve been learning little things about Buddhism, and one of them is that there are different poses that the Buddha can take and each pose has its own meaning. There are so many different statues, large and small of the Buddha image and many have these different poses. It is these little lessons that I receive through being here that is so special to me and I can’t wait to find out more and share them with you.