Beiträge von Himmelsbaum im Thema „Thai-Buddhismus: Rituale, Zeremonien, Bräuche“

Sai sin is a common feature in Thai rituals, but its use is taken especially seriously among healers in Chiang Mai. It has multiple functions that are directly relevant to controlling spirits and energies: it can be used to delineate a protected space, as an implement for binding beneficial influences

to the patient’s body, as a vehicle for trapping and removing evil influences, or as a conduit to direct or channel the powers generated through rituals ( palang). (Salguero, C. Pierce (2017): Honoring the Teachers, Constructing the Lineage: A Wai Khru Ritual among Healers in Chiang Mai, Thailand, S. 295-318. In: Hans Pols, Michele Thompson, and John Harley Warner (eds.), Shaping Practitioners and Fashioning Health Citizenship: Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia, Singapore: National University of Singapore Press., 2017)

And, finally, villagers must perform the ceremony of seeing if the leikpya (butterfly soul) has indeed left the body. This is done by putting a mirror before the mouth of the deceased and calling out to the leikpya. Then, with a bit of white string, the invisible leikpya is drawn onto a branch of a tree. In this way it will be carried carefully to the cemetery and set free when it sees that it needs a new material embodiment. It is this butterfly soul essence that goes on from existence to existence, and for the villager it is a material thing, the vehicle of metempsychosis, the carrier of continuous kan. It is the butterfly soul that can be misdirected or lost in transit between existences, to fall in the highly undesirable category of lost and wandering souls.

The ceremony of the leikpya soul is carried out just before the body leaves the compound and sometime after the monks have arrived. The death watchers know what a butterfly soul looks like. It is a small, circular luminosity and can be seen glowing at night if it should escape It is called butterfly because it makes a noise like the fluttering of an excited, trapped butterfly's wings. It may, during the course of the death watch, come out and circle the house three times and then return to the body. It is in a state of uncertainty and worry about reincarnation.

This view of the soul, of the trouble of transit, of the weighing up of the next form of existence, expresses the villagers' chief concern at a funeral. It is not sorrow for a life ended, a consciousness cut off, but rather a desire to guide the nucleus of kan to its proper destination, to help a soul over the blank spots between existences, to insure speedy transfer, and to keep the chain of being intact, without anomalies like wandering souls or lost spirits that may trouble the village and even bring it calamity. (Nash, Manning (1965): The Golden Road to Modernity. Village Life in Contemporary Burma, S. 154), deutsche Google-Übersetzung