Meeting a Monk at Work

I once had an office job in Bangkok helping to edit an English-language textbook. The job didn’t last very long, or rather I didn’t last very long in the job. I blame it on a co-worker, a man from Australia who had been working his way around the world for years. In his time in Thailand, he’d become interested in the language, and also in Buddhism, so he had decided to take the simple vows of a novice monk and to live in a monastery. After a year, and in command of fairly good spoken Thai, he left the monastery and proceeded to walk around the country as a monk. He walked all the way from north to south, and from east to west. He even went from island to island. With his alms bowl and black umbrella, the two possessions of a monk, wherever he was he would appear on the street at dawn each morning and be given food, eating only once each day. If he was on a small island where there weren’t any monks, he would often be asked to perform ritual services.