Thursday 19 December 2024
The Labyrinth at Wat Jedlin

I walk by Wat Jedlin almost every day when going to Wild Rose Yoga or to Pump Fitness 2.0 for strength training with PT Ning. Every holiday season there is a labyrinth set up in the parking area of Wat Jedlin. And every year a different labyrinth is built. Walking back from a workout with Ning, I stopped to see this year’s labyrinth. I’ll cover more of the details of Wat Jedlin in another post, for now, I am focusing on the labyrinth.

Labyrinth at Wat Jedlin

A photo of the front of the labyrinth at Wat Jedlin

Here I am, struggling to master the art of a selfie, and then what I saw when I entered the labyrinth:

Once inside, I negotiated the path and found an alcove with a thewada (angelic beings that live in the heavenly realms), with a sign that translated to “Angel Hall.” A thewada has no gender, but can appear male or female depending on the context and/or the artist. Another few turns and I was at another alcove with another thewada signed as “Phraya Indra Tower.”

Continuing on, I came to the third alcove with a thewada signed as “The Four Towers” and then a fourth signed as “Mother Earth Shrine.”

I arrived at the center, an alcove with a small Buddha image, then found the exit.

At the ercently rebuild temple entrance are two large gongs. All of these type of gongs are hand-hammered steel or brass made in about 50 “manufactories” along the “Gong Highway,” a 30 kilometer stretch of Highway 2222 from outside Ubon Ratchathani to the Mekong River in the south of the Issan area of Thailand. I love these gongs with their low, mesmerizing sound. Here is a photo of one of the gongs at the entrance to Wat Jedlin and then me striking the gong.

I am getting farther and farther behind on posting to this blog. I am trying to catch up a little, but there is so much interesting to see and experience I am having difficulty keeping up. My blog post for Wat Pa DaraPhirom and the DaraPhirom Palace Museum should be next, but that will take a good bit of research to give Princess Dararasmee just honor. So next will be a few shorter posts to show a few other things I saw in Chiang Mai.