Merit

[ZZZ]

I'm not sure how much is spent by the average Thai in making merit each year but in all it much be a sizable amount. Someone said each Thai give 1/3 to the wife 1/3 to Buddha and 1/3 is spent on gambling and beer Chang. 1/3 of all the money in Thailand is a lot of money.

There is a lot of money spent on gold leaf and other donations to temples or monks for merit making or for services during marriage, funerals, grand openings, anniversaries and others.

There is a Buddha tree everywhere with money stapled to it, around pay day there is always pre addressed donation envelopes around.

Wherever I look there is money going in to this. What I was wondering was where does it all end up?

Does Buddhism have a centralized body here in Thailand, is there some kind of international Buddhist headquarters like the Vatican?

I’m sure there are a lot of charitable things run by the temples it’s just that in all the years here I have not really seen any. What you do see, at least in Pattaya, are hundreds of charity organizations donating money to just about every need you can think of.

I do live in Pattaya which is very prosperous so maybe what’s collected here is spent somewhere else where there is more need for it.

[chownah]

I don't know about where ALL the money goes but in my village they are building a new main building to house the big Buddha statue and it is going to cost probably between 5 and 10 million baht (my estimate) and it will take alot of those little trees covered with money to get a million baht.

As for the gold leaf...well it mostly just stays on the statue....it doesn't go anywhere.

[bankei]

Most of the money that is collected at the temple just stays with the temple. There are large running costs for electricity, phones, sometime staff etc. Temples need to hire things sometimes, such as cars or buses to take monks around, tents maybe for big events, then there are the repairs and endless buidling maintencance works.

When monks get individual donations, they usually keep this money themselves. This money is used to buy cigarettes, mobile phone credits, mobile phones evem, travel etc. Monks usually get these donations at funerals, ordiation ceremonies, lunch invitations (for death anniversaries etc), and sometimes someone pops a few baht in their bowls on almsround.

When I spent a short time as a monk, I received more money than the average Thai worker would have received for working!

Bankei