Deep Forest Monklets’ Sticky Rice Cake

One day I went on an excursion up the Dokhtawaddy River from Hsipaw with several other travelers. An hour brought us to a small landing stage overhung with vines. We walked past fields of pineapple and along a path to a Buddhist monastery called Lwe Yung, the Deep Forest Monastery. The main temple was a beautiful place, built of wood and up on stilts, so it caught the breezes. The young monklets, from five to twelve years old, were hanging out in the temple under the benign, distracted supe