Wat Huay Mongkol

Not far from the resort town of Hua Hin, where the royal family has established several palaces over the years, sits a shiny new temple in honor of a long-dead but still revered Thai monk by the name of Luang Phor Tuad.

We turned into the main entrance to this shrine, passing parking lots devoted solely to tour buses, and came face to face with maybe the largest statue of a real human being I’d ever come across. (Think of Lenin in Red Square, only about three times bigger.)

Naturally I got curious what all the fuss was about, and how this destination temple came to be built where it is (the monk himself hailed from a province nearly 1,000 kilometers further south) and at this moment in history.

Chao and Lek’s attempts at answering my questions involved lots of Thai vocabulary I’d never heard, so when we got home I also asked Google. In response to entering the names of the monk and the temple as keywords I got dozens of websites devoted to the sale of amulets, charms, and talismans.

Recently a particular style of amulet known as Jatukham took this country by storm. At one point sales reportedly accounted for about one percent of the gross domestic product. The beliefs surrounding them seem to have more to do with the supernatural than with Buddhism (although those two ways of life are often intertwined here). They’re also linked in some way that I don’t completely follow to a 100-plus-year-old policeman who died earlier in the year.

Folks sports these pocket watch-sized medallions, hung outside clothing from specially designed necklaces, in the belief that they’ll be protected from car crashes or similar mishaps. Jatukham seemed especially plentiful in the south, compared to Bangkok.

Chao has written about them for his newspaper, and seems also to be interested in their investment potential. Wat Huay Mongkhol is apparently an epicenter for their manufacture and trade. No doubt there’s much more to the craze than is dreamt of in my philosophy.