The Buddha In The Jungle

[camerata]

Has anyone read The Buddha in the Jungle by Kamala Tiyavanich? I flipped through it in Asia Books and it looked pretty good. It's stories of monks in the late 1800s and early 1900s together with the reactions of foreign travellers to what they encountered in Old Siam.

One story was about the "barbaric practice" of sky burials (as I believe Tibetans call them) at Wat Saket, where vultures ate the corpses. I had never heard of this before but my Thai friends tell me many of the ghost stories they heard as kids were related to this temple.

The same author has also written Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand.

[wayfarer]

Has anyone read The Buddha in the Jungle by Kamala Tiyavanich? I flipped through it in Asia Books and it looked pretty good. It's stories of monks in the late 1800s and early 1900s together with the reactions of foreign travellers to what they encountered in Old Siam.

One story was about the "barbaric practice" of sky burials (as I believe Tibetans call them) at Wat Saket, where vultures ate the corpses. I had never heard of this before but my Thai friends tell me many of the ghost stories they heard as kids were related to this temple.

The same author has also written Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I have both of the aforementioned titles, and have read parts of them, very interesting stuff, esp The Buddha in the Jungle.