Dev Mandir ChiangMai Thailand

Love is Pink

เพิ่มคำอธิบายภาพ

This temple is located at the heart of the city with its prominent gate built on Shikhara style. It is a two story temple. The first floor is used for social events like feast while the second floor is reserved for religious celebration. On the second floor, there are images of different Hindu gods and some other divine figures from Hindu epics like Mahabharata, Ramayana and Puranas along with the images of the Buddha and Mahavira. The front face of the hall was decorated with religious images like Visnu, Siva, Ganesha, Radha -Krishna, Sita Ram, Hanuman, Devi, Buddha, Mahavira, and the walls were punctuated with different religious colorful icons. Like other Hindu temples, this temple is also colorful and the prime color used to glorify the divinity in this temple is yellow color which is, in some way, related to the Vaisnavism. Pilgrims were singing devotional songs when I reached there, and I could observe that most of the visitors were in some way connected with Indian religious tradition, and the devotional songs were in Hindi language. Most of the visitors I met were visiting the temple to get the blessings from the divinity so that they could solve the everyday problem of household affairs. The visitors from Thai origin who could not understand Hindi were also found to be involved in the prayer passionately, it was interesting. There were some visitors from western world who were actively participating in the ceremony. According to one observer, this temple was built with the initiation of Hindu migrants from India to fill up their spiritual void in foreign land.

The conglomeration of all Hindu, the Buddhist and Jain religious images in this temple reminded me of the spirit of coexistence inherent in these religions. In India and Nepal each of these deities has their own specific temple and religious tradition, but in Thailand they all have learned to live together. At the one hand it reminded me of a saying that birds of the same feather flock together, and on the other hand I could understand the compatibility of these different faith systems in a different geographical space.