The "Preecha" Paradox
How a chain-smoking Muay Thai-promoting monk from rural Thailand shattered my faith, again.
At a temple next to a rice field in Thailand, a man dressed in leather skin dipped a paintbrush into a bucket of syrup. He began to lather large tropical leaves with the sticky substance. I didn’t quite yet understand why.
Then night fell.
He fastened the leaves to poles in each of the four corners of the boxing ring. They were used to attract insects buzzing around the white lights illuminating the area. It hardly worked. The canvas was covered in them: crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, weevils, moths, mosquitoes, ants, cockroaches.
They scampered everywhere, trying not to be trampled by the four gigantic feet of the two tiny seven-year-old Thai boxers in the ring. Leaning on the canvas with my Canon, failing to capture a decent photo, I flicked and plucked bugs off my arms and shoulders. One of them landed on my lip. How are the two boxers not distracted by all these insects? I thought.
Bugs were the least of their concern.
This was muay wat, or temple fights, where kids were fighting for a mere five dollars, fighting for a future, fighting for their lives. They also happened to be fighting for a monk named Luang Por Preecha, head of a small temple in the province of Pitchit.
Earlier that day, I had gone with the fighters to Preecha’s temple. The wood-framed stilted structure sat on a dirt lot across the road from an expansive but nearly dead rice field. The rainy season hadn’t arrived yet, so the dirt was dust dry. Clouds of it hovered around us everywhere we walked. Ascending a narrow flight of stairs, we came to the entranceway of the temple.
Inside, a group of villagers sat on the floor, backs hunched, listening to Preecha speak about the importance of doing good deeds and the merit that comes along with it. Eventually, the room cleared and Preecha went outside. The fighters followed him, and I followed them.
We came to a short ledge under a tree and Preecha positioned himself on it cross-legged. We rested on the bare earth beneath him. I looked up at the man in orange robes as he spoke. Above him, the tree branches cast a silhouette of cracks along the blue sky. At the end of the branches, pink and white flowers blossomed. The sun pierced the scene from behind, leaving a God-like halo around Preecha’s head.
He spoke to the fighters more intimately now, giving them advice for their problems. I had secretly wished he had done the same for me, except that Preecha never acknowledged my presence. This was despite me being the only pasty white-skinned human for hours in all directions. Still, to a younger and more impressionable kid from Jersey, this was the closest thing to enlightenment I’d ever experienced.
But at the fights, I saw an entirely different Preecha.
He sat elevated above the ring on a couch propped on a plywood platform constructed earlier that night. Around him, a controlled crowd of locals wagered money on fighters not yet old enough to tie their own shoes. Preecha smoked cigarettes. Lots of them. Every once in a while he’d turn and let out a bellowing laugh with the village elders who sat next to him.
When each fight ended, the fighters – if they hadn’t been rendered unconscious – fell to their knees and bowed to Preecha. As the child boxers tried to transform their lives, Preecha transformed before my eyes.
His once pristine orange robes revealed stains I hadn’t seen earlier that day. His crooked teeth glowed yellow. And his smile? It meant one thing but showed corruption instead. We made eye contact, and it was as if he knew that I knew his true nature. We both knew. But knew what? Only later did I realize that the mutual understanding I felt was purely imagined. I was projecting my own disillusionment onto a man who remained exactly as he always was.
In my conception, monks existed in contemplative silence, not ringside at Muay Thai fights.
But this drew me to Thailand; contradictions wait everywhere you look. Temples share the same roads as whorehouses, mansions share the same neighborhoods as shacks, opportunity shares the same rice field as opportunists. When you start to recognize the contradictions of other societies, you begin to see the contradictions of your own.
When she was still alive, my grandmother devoted her life to the Catholic Church. She once worked as a chef for St. Vincent’s. As a boy, I’d go with her to church after school. My grandmother would prepare vats of red pasta sauce as priests would come and go from the kitchen.
One of them, Father Jack, smoked cigarettes and sipped from a glass of ice bathing in a transparent brown liquid. He’d say words I was instructed never to repeat. Although I was too young to label what I saw, my intuition and his red bulbous nose said it all. At night, from inside the church, I’d watch from the pew as Father Jack spoke to his congregation about refraining from worldly vices.
Talk about contradictions.
Back at the temple fights, I don’t think those fighters cared one bit about the contradictions they might face in their own lives. At least not yet.
These kids weren’t just fighting for a way out, they were fighting for a way up. If they were lucky, they’d win that night. And they’d win again other nights. And eventually they’d win so many times that they’d get to fight for a provincial title.
Some of those fighters might even get recruited by a gym in Bangkok. Once there, they’d compete at the top stadiums. Some would become ranked fighters. Others would compete for a belt. The best of them would win a stadium title. But only a fraction would escape the very system that brought them to the top.
Sad truth is, most fighters begin and end their careers in rice fields just like the one in Pitchit. Ironically, sometimes our beliefs follow the same trajectory.
Father Jack and Luang Por Preecha were separated by 8,458 miles of culture, yet this chain-smoking monk shattered my beliefs about Buddhism the same way Father Jack had swung a sledgehammer through my Catholic faith fourteen years earlier.
Sure, Buddhism teaches detachment, but it also teaches abstinence from causing pain. Preecha, in a wildly twisted way, had done a masterful job at detaching himself from the pain he was orchestrating that night at the fights. Those little fighters carried pain into and out of the ring. The gamblers wore the pain of poverty on their faces.
Had he not felt an ounce of guilt? But then again, who am I to even ask? After all, do I feel any guilt for turning those fighters’ stories into my own?
Maybe it wasn’t the contradictions that drew me to Thailand after all. Maybe it was the fact that this is the only place where my contradictions actually make sense.