A Buddhist Comment

Stanley Koh
Popularly known as the Heavenly City, Nakhon Sawan, about 240km north of Bangkok, is a favourite midway stop for tourists heading further north to Chiengmai.

It was in Nakhon Sawan in 1978 that I had my first encounter with a ghost. I had just begun my spiritual apprenticeship as a Buddhist monk at a temple called Wat Kiriwong.

After that encounter, I had many more weird experiences through these 32 years, including the time when I was under the guidance of Taoist masters belonging to the ancient and legendary sects of the Golden Eagle School and White Lotus.

My ghostly experiences were in fact part of my spiritual training.

As a Buddhist monk, I was taught many esoteric lessons about the human spirit and the evolutionary stage at which the spirit becomes what we call a ghost. This learning has had a tremendous impact on my outlook on life.

I spent two years at Wat Kiriwong in strict discipline, following the daily monastic routine of meditation and occult studies.

Wat Kiriwong is famous for its 600-year-old pagoda, built in the 19th century. It is located at the foot of the low-lying Bawa Dung Hills, a cluster that stretches further than the eye can see.

But let us return to 1978.

I arrived in Nakhon Sawan late in the night on April 9 after a six-hour bus ride from Bangkok, where I had touched down from an afternoon flight from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

A week later, I realised I had fallen in love with the temple and its surroundings. The monastery’s premises stretched over more than a hundred acres of undulating land, hosting numerous buildings for worship and temple administration.

Next to a cemetery was a secluded area for meditation training, reserved for forest monks donning dark saffron robes that looked almost brown. This was where I had my residence.

Quiet and secluded, the area had eight small individual wooden huts. Each of these kuti, as the locals called them, could accommodate only one monk. It had a simple bathroom and a floor that was just wide and long enough for one to sleep on.

The huts were arranged in a circle around a large bodhi tree. Bodhi, in the Pali language, means tree of wisdom. It got the name after the historical Gautama Buddha, having attained his spiritual enlightenment, paid it his respect and gratitude for sheltering him throughout his struggle for the Truth.

The Encounter

The night of Aug 17, 1978, began like any ordinary night. I had sat in meditation with my spiritual master in his kuti, which was adjacent to mine.

The night was still and humid, and moonlight illuminated the area. It was the dry season in Nakhon Sawan, and there had been hardly any rain for days. In the distance, crickets and other insects sang in chorus.

We emerged from meditation at about 8pm. We had some tea and decided to check for small scorpions wandering around inside the master’s hut, particularly around the mattresses. We had to use a torchlight because a small light bulb was the only electrical supply available for all the huts. It was not bright enough for anyone to trace the small light brown insects known for their painful stings.

We had to put the scorpions we caught in small plastic bags and release them at a distance away from the huts since the first Buddhist precept is the prohibition of killing.

We then decided to look for scorpions inside my own hut.

I opened my kuti’s flimsy wooden door, and as I walked in with my master following, we both saw in the dimly lighted room a young woman sleeping on my mattress. She wore a long flowing dress of yellowish white.

My jaw opened wide and my whole body felt like it was rooted to the ground. My heart probably stopped a second but instantly started to race through several beats. I also lost my voice, but I darted a look of shock in the direction of my master, who stood beside me with an incredibly calm expression.

There was this instant disbelief inside me, but the woman was real and there, lying on her back with both arms resting on my pillow, which supported her head. She was probably in her early 20s and had an oval face and a look of calmness about her.

She vanished out of sight moments later, but stayed long enough for us to know that our eyes were not playing tricks on us.

Her body floated with ease and flew out through the window of the hut.

As I stood there frozen with my feet unwilling to move despite signals from my brain, my master smiled at me, gesturing with his hand that I should follow him back to his kuti.

I could not comprehend how my master could be so calm. As we sat together, my mind was blank, but I wanted an answer from my master.

From my diary recording of this episode, the conversation between us went like this:

“What happened? Was it a ghost?” I asked, expecting an affirmative answer.

“I am not sure. It could be a deity testing your courage and guts or probably urging you to study occultism,” my master replied.

I knew that it was not the real answer, as spiritual masters are sometimes known for their strange ways of teaching. Sometimes they deliberately say the stupidest things or just play dumb to provoke critical thinking.

Impatience was getting the better of me. But before I could utter another question, my master asked, “Could it be a mountain spirit?”

I stared at my master, probably with bloodshot eyes, and thought to myself, “Come on, you must be joking, a lady mountain spirit dressed in yellowish white?”

“Do you have any relative who recently passed away?” my master asked.

“No,” I replied.

I also searched my conscience and cleared it, for I had not caused anyone’s death to justify a ghostly revenge.

Lessons to learn

Years later, I learnt that this was how some spiritual masters would teach their disciples. Hardship and experience are your teachers, but you often realise your lessons only much later.

In my younger days, I was sceptical of the existence of spirits and ghosts despite my wide reading on paranormal existence.

Years later, I learnt of two security guards of a high-rise building who had resigned abruptly due to a frightening encounter with a female ghost in the wee hours.

The guards insisted that they heard noises of children playing football along a corridor of an office building and water running from closed faucets after midnight, when nobody was around.

The lesson learnt from my Taoist masters was simple. Man is a multidimensional being, composed of earth, air, water, fire and metal. Man and animals are constantly generating electromagnetic vibrations in which the character, personality, mentality, psyche, thoughts, feelings, impulses and different types of consciousness come into being.

All cultures and civilisations speak of the existence of ghosts in folklore as well as formal records. We celebrate Halloween, All Souls’ Day and other occasions to affirm our belief in the world beyond the physical. We enjoy comedies like Happy Ghost, Casper the Friendly Ghost and the Ghost Whisperer, but know -- or suspect -- that the belief in the existence of ghosts is no laughing matter.

“Ghost stories have probably been around as long as humans have had a language,” says an article posted on science.hoestuffworks.com. “A person’s spirit continues to exist in some form after the physical body has died.”

According to enthusiasts, ghosts exist because these beings refuse to leave the physical world for the spirit world in the process of evolution because they have unfinished business. They say some places are haunted if they are the location of violent or traumatic deaths or if some dead persons have strong attachments to those places or people living there.

Advanced technology and scientific progress have made it possible for unmanned spacecrafts to explore faraway frontiers of the galaxy. In decades to come, perhaps, paranormal scientists will be able to explain in scientific terms how hauntings take place and why ghosts exist. More than likely, these explanations will be in the language of complexities relating to man’s spiritual existence and layers of consciousness.

Stanley Koh is a political observer who use to head the MCA's research unit.