More Musings from Thailand April 2005

Tourism and Spirituality?

I checked out of the hotel early that morning, saying goodbye to my friend who was still quite ill from food poisoning. She was hoping to go on a 30 day Vispassana retreat once she felt better, something that involved no talking, no music, no writing, and no reading, only sitting meditation. From there she would go with Jan, another visitor to Punpun, and travel to India.

Feeling rather bad about leaving her in a dire state, yet more than ready to go home, I threw on my pack and walked down the alleyway towards the large street where the huge markets were held. As I walked, I noticed random puddles of fluid and strategically walk around them, as I was certain it hadn’t rained the night before. I had also seen someone walk out into the street and pour their pee onto the pavement. It cost money to use the bathrooms.

It didn’t matter what time of day it was, there always seemed to be massive numbers of people out having breakfast, lunch, or dinner, drinking at a bar. I walked to my favorite little restaurant, AUM - my little haven in the madness. I maneuvered through people walking on the sidewalk, squeezing through to the entrance of the café, and sat down to have some breakfast, feeling at once relaxed.

Sitting down at the table next to me were three middle aged white men. Not the type I would expect to see at a vegetarian restaurant, but this was Thailand after all. I quietly listened as they talked business - how to boost sales and how certain people weren’t doing their job right. The dichotomy of Thailand was obvious. On the one hand, the country made a lot of money through tourism, so it was extensively geared towards the tourists.[1] On the other hand, Thailand was considered a very spiritual place, a place where one came to find enlightenment. And yet these two, seemingly contradictory aspects of Thailand lived side by side and overlaped. I would attribute this partially to the fact that, in the West at least, spirituality can be bought. All anyone need do to become an expert is go read the books and buy the kits, although we would say they're lacking in real experience, and therefore knowledge. But that’s what places like Thailand were for. And I wondered, would it have been possible for people truly seeking spiritual guidance to come to Thailand had the tourist industry, or capitalism in general, not been in place? Would they have still wanted to come, would they have even known about it, would they have gone somewhere else?

The individual seeking spiritual places perhaps inadvertently took part in capitalism – buying a plane ticket to some noted spiritual country, etc. – when the individual may have been able to practice at home without going anywhere. An idea lurked within the minds of many foreigners, it was obvious in their behavior, my own as well, that there was always something better waiting to be had. Reaching enlightenment in my room back home wasn’t nearly as meaningful as reaching it in a temple in some far away land one only read about in books or brochures. Again, the lure of tourism, the push of capitalism.

Where does this spiritual unrest come from? Capitalism in American society has pushed individuals to continually seek the new – new clothes, new electronic gadgets, new adventures in exotic countries, new spirituality. While capitalism only claims to deal with the marketable world, it’s workings have permeated our inner lives. Spirituality has arguably become a marketable commodity, yet the meaning inherent in it is part of the inner life of the person involved in the transaction.

Thailand was a country where both worlds collided. It was where people came to seek out the spiritual place they'd heard so much about, the one that would carry them to spiritual attainment. In answer to my previous question, would it have been possible for individuals seeking spirituality to come to Thailand had the tourist industry not been in place? Of course, but it would have been purely by accident, intuition, or word of mouth. And yet I would argue that, eventually, word would get out and the tourist industry would creep in, making a nice little home for itself.

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[1] “We have problematized the identity of the native peoples who become the object of the tourist gaze, caught as they are in the paradoxical predicament of encouraging tourism as a route to economic development but realizing at the same time that tourists want to see undeveloped primitive peoples” (Bruner N.D.).