Els Slots

The Netherlands - 24-Feb-23 -

Wat Phra Mahathat is the largest Buddhist temple of Southern Thailand. It is also an especially holy one, as it houses the relic of a Tooth of the Buddha. This combined makes it a busy and important pilgrimage site. The temple is located in Nakhon Si Thammarat, one of the oldest towns in Thailand. Not much English is spoken or written here, the beach tourists and backpackers usually don’t make it this far south.

I arrived in the afternoon, after a 6-hour minibus ride from Phuket. Nakhon’s street layout is a bit weird, with parallel streets running north-south with some village-like neigbourhoods in between. The temple is a large structure along one of these north-south oriented streets, its main stupa is so huge it cannot be missed. There’s also a hive of activity in front and near it, as both souvenirs and offerings are sold in large quantities.

There’s no entrance fee to enter via one of the gates, and the site seems to be open all day. First, you arrive in the outer complex, which has a few freestanding structures. The main vihara is fully under scaffolding at the moment. There’s also a building with a two-tiered roof that contains a Buddha footprint shrine. And there are two smaller stupas.

A further gate will then introduce you to the inner complex, which houses the main stupa and 158 little chedis (with the ashes of devotees) around it. This 13th-century stupa is made in Singhalese style, its bell shape inspired by Sri Lankan Buddhist art. In photos that I had seen beforehand, it all looks white, but the painting seems to have been done a while ago as the stupa now is a dirty grey. It makes it look more ancient!

Inside the corridors, you can burn your incense, leave your flowers and plaster your gold leaves, as is common in Thai Buddhist temples. The ‘holiest of the holy’ (the relic) is hidden behind a door, and a lot of people pray in front of the stairs leading up to it. I wonder whether it opens up once in a while, as is the custom at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. There is hardly any explanation in English on site, except for some mysterious signs like “Fabric stretched his relics” (I think this means that the orange cloths that you can buy on the premises have touched the Buddha relic?).

Wat Phra Mahathat is certainly worth visiting for an hour or so when you’re on your way down overland to the border with Malaysia. Like Sri Thep, it has a ‘spread of Theravada Buddhism’ theme, this time from the south (Sri Lanka) instead of the north (Myanmar). The sites in Sri Lanka itself are much older though, so Wat Phra Mahathat’s relevance seems to be mostly in a Thai context only.

Read more from Els Slots here.