lesson in flowers and Buddhism

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This afternoon we AFSers were invited by Ajahn Jiaranai (that's Teaching Master Jiaranai, seen above in the peach suit) to participate in a lesson in flower-garland making. Toto (Chile) is the uniformed student holding a needle; the others in white uniform are student kibbitzers, always ready to coach us by saying: "Now, another twenty flowers!" With Jiaranai you see YaJing (China) and Julian (Germany), intently threading tiny white buds (dok pud) onto long steel needles. The woman in yellow is the teacher, attentive and helpful.

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A light coating of vaseline on the needle helps the flowers slide along it more easily. The green is banana leaves, useful as flower trays, as platforms and guides in making octagons. In a later step the banana leaves become "petal pushers", helping to pull the arranged flowers onto a plastic thread which holds the garland shape.

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There are three kinds of flowers in each garland; see final picture. It's also possible to add jasmine flowers or colored accent flowers, but for our first project they kept it simple. In the market I've seen really elaborate garlands (quite inexpensively, I'm now convinced).

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They advised us to put twenty tiny flowers on the needle at a time, trim the stems, then arrange the first eight in an evenly-spaced ring, next ring of eight nestled in between the first, and so on. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I discovered that my rings of eight were too randomly arranged, so my garland grew much more slowly than everyone else's. It did go more quickly once I became more strict with my octagons (see demo below). Still, I was not done with step one as my classmates proceeded to steps two, three and four. The Thai girl finished first, Chinese girl second, German boy, then Chilean boy, and still I was threading my twenty flowers at a time onto my needle.

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I was aware of my thought process, from "Wait! They're onto another step! I want to try that, too!" to "Patience, patience; the more I do the more I learn," to gratefully accepting help to finish my garland (more than an hour after we started). That garland truly was an international cooperation project. In the end I was able to try at least a bit of every step, but could not say I made it myself.

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YaJing and Julian took their garlands to their host moms, and I took mine across to Boom. She smiled, silently nodded her chin toward the Buddha shrine in her shop, and I laid the garland at the Buddha's feet.

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