A Field Trip to a Bizarre, Religious Disneyland

[rug]

THE FATE OF RURAL HELL
BENEDICT ANDERSON
(SEAGULL)
US: OCT 2016

BY MEGAN VOLPERT
4 October 2016

There’s a 70,000 square foot creationism museum somewhere in Kentucky that I have no plans to visit. As a sometimes-Buddhist who lives in the South, I would never be of the opinion that all religious Southerners are backward. Still, that creationism museum gives me the willies, even just as an idea—it somehow contains all that irks me about Americans. If it was located in New Jersey instead of Kentucky, I’d feel the same way. I confess that a lot of distinctly American religious ideology gives me an icky feeling; my spiritual moments tend to veer eastward rather than westward.

Lest we forget, however, that Eastern traditions also have their grand monuments to the absurd, Benedict Anderson is here to remind us with The Fate of Rural Hell. Through this wonderfully detailed essay, complete with dozens of color photographs, readers get to indulge in a field trip to Thailand to visit a temple, Wat Phai Rong Wua, that is at least as weird as that museum in Kentucky.

Anderson reflects that his “first reaction was simply astonishment at the sheer scale of the wat, and its spic-and-span look. The second was the strange feeling that I had wandered into a sort of religious Disneyland” (4).

When it comes to religious symbols, we learn that size really does matter. This place boasts the world’s largest Buddha statue. In fact, in the middle of constructing it, the abbot realized there was one in Japan that stood about 12 inches taller. He immediately altered his own plans, stretching out the head a little bit, to ensure that his own temple’s icon would be a few inches more monumental than the Japanese monument. Photos of the giant black silhouette outlined against the bright blue sky are indeed a marvel to behold.

http://www.popmatters.com/review/the-fate-of-rural-hell-by-benedict-anderson-field-trip-bizarre-religious-di/



http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/wat-phai-rong-wua-thai-hell-on-earth.html