It was first settled about 800 years ago and being close to China, Laos, and Burma, has an assortment of cultural influences.
One of the stronger influences that is more or less nationally aligned but is very strong up here is Buddhism, and the old city of Chiang Mai (which is a walled city of about three square kilometres in area) has something like a hundred Watts (Buddhist temples) !!
So, in my wanderings about the place I am constantly going past these Watts... Each one built so many years ago by such and such a leader in honour of this great monk or that great event etc... It all seems much of a muchness in many regards. And, just like Catholicism in the West, it seems to me that the vast majority of people here feel that they can get some sort of divine "good will" by making offerings to the temples and praying to the statues and stuppas etc... It seems very much like idolatry to me rather than what Im sure the Buddha in the East or Christ/Moses/Mohamed etc in the West would have sincerely preferred, that people "think about" and more importantly "act on" the ideals of their teaching/preaching!!... But it seems most of us (regardless of what age we live in or our socio-economic status) would in general, much rather be given a simple set of words to recite and some simple rituals to perform in order to gain our eternal salvation/enlightenment... Its far easier that way than the struggle of changing our lives in ways that are difficult!... Oh well, each to their own I guess ... And Im surely not really much different myself ! :)
But, back to my time here in Chiang Mai...
So, while Ive been wandering around, whenever I pass one of these plentiful temples, Ive decided to go in and have a bit of a look-see.
And the thing that Ive noted (well one of the things that seems more apparent this time anyway), is that every one of the temples has numerous statues of assorted sizes of the Buddha... and that each and every one is unique :)
They are of course all stylised representations of the Buddha, but even so, they all have different facial expressions, and I find that I like some more significantly more than others :) ...
Here are just a few of the ones Ive visited:
