BANGKOK: “It was my own choice when I was twelve,” 17-year-old Nehn Aud recalled of his becoming a novice monk in Thailand. “But only because I couldn’t think of any other way out of my desperate situation except by becoming a novice.”
He is from a small village of 300 people in Buriram, a north-eastern province 410km from here, whose residents were only barely surviving. “My family, which was just my father and I, was worse off than most. We could not afford any food so I often survived just by eating lizards, rats, ant’s eggs and insects or just anything I could catch,” he said.
“We did not have money for school, the only clothes I had were old ones that I begged from my friends,” added Nehn Aud, whose story is one of 12 documented in a book on the lives of novice monks published recently in this mainly Buddhist country. The stories in “Little Angels” give a not-so-often glimpse into the lives of novices - “nehn” in Thai - and how they are not totally immune from the pragmatic realities outside the monasteries as well as the human struggles they face as young people in a spiritual setting today.
Written by Phra Peter Pannapadipo, an English monk who has lived in Thai monasteries for nearly 10 years, the book says that spiritual reasons are not the only ones behind young boys’ joining the monkhood.
Official figures show that the number of Buddhist novice monks is rising, the official figures for 2000 was 97,875 novices, and it is easy to think that more young men are being drawn to the religious life. But Phra Peter says this is unlikely to be the case in Thailand, 95 per cent of whose people are Buddhists.
“The increase is more likely an indication of the continuing poverty and lack of opportunity among many already disadvantaged Thai families, especially in rural area, and is a sad reflection of the parents’ inability to care for and educate their children,” writes Phra Peter.
Often, he explains, the boys from rural areas of Thailand become novices because there is nowhere else for them to go, or because their impoverished parents cannot afford to feed them or send them to school. “For many boys, ordaining and studying at monastic high schools is the only way they can complete their secular education,” said Phra Peter.
He says some of the reasons for becoming novices sometimes had little to do with commitments to the Buddha’s teachings, although some find fulfilment in staying on in the monkhood. “In fact, in Thailand, religious conviction is more likely to be at the bottom of the list of reasons for a man to be ordained as a monk or a boy to become a novice,” he adds.
Majority of novices are in their early to late teens, but they can be as young as seven to as old as 20. After twenty, a novice is expected to either be ordained as a full monk, or disrobe. In a few monasteries, becoming a novice for a time is a way of testing a man’s spiritual commitment to the monastic life, before he becomes a monk.
While the government pays for basic education, some rural families still find other expenses related to schooling, such as the cost of uniforms and food, a burden. One of the novices recalls that his father earned only 20 baht (less than 50 US cents) doing odd jobs in their neighbour’s rice paddies. —Dawn/InterPress Service.
