Friday May 24 Visakha Bucha -most important Buddhist holiday

[jinks]

Banks and all government offices closed.

Bars may be closed. Alcohol ban for those without a special license.

[billy2bs]

Ok everyone...go back inside. There's nothing to see here. Cross off this day in your calendar...no fun to be had. Go back to bed and start again tomorrow.
:clock:

[netrix]

wow, thanks for that. i was just on my way to the bank.

[arsenal]

For those who are there, X-Boys will almost certainly be open. Perhaps not selling alcohol.

[loke]

Sunnee looked like a ghost town last night .

Everything was closed down , so it was a waste of time.

[painai2]

Like the title of the thread reads, most important Buddhist holiday. I guess it must have been a pretty traumatic day for you if you can't live one day without going to a gay bar.

[corky]

In Bangkok most bars were open. :occasion5:
I met a few guys who had come to Bangkok from Pattaya for the weekend and we went to Silom Soi 4 and Soi Twilight.
No problem.

I googled this to see why it's an important Buddha Day and the Thai consulate in Vancouver site very helpfully explained it as "the worship of the Buddha on the full moon day of the sixth lunar month". This leaves unexplained the common assertions that (1) Buddhism is not a religion (2) Buddha is not god. Or do the Thais have a different perspective?

[Smiles]

I googled this to see why it's an important Buddha Day and the Thai consulate in Vancouver site very helpfully explained it as "the worship of the Buddha on the full moon day of the sixth lunar month". This leaves unexplained the common assertions that (1) Buddhism is not a religion (2) Buddha is not god. Or do the Thais have a different perspective?
You're overly hung up on the Consulate's use of the word 'worship'.
They could have easily have used a phrase like "paying respect to the Buddha" or "spending time thinking about Buddha on the special day". Thais don't get too overwrought about picayune uses of specific words to explain aspects of Buddhism ... unlike fundamentalist Christians (for instance) who do.

Thai Buddhism is also an amalgam, a conglomeration, not a set-in-stone structure: tossed into the mix ~ seemingly willy-nilly ~ in Thai Buddhism you'll find injections of Hinduism, animism, and ~ especially in the countryside, widespread applications of early, partly forgotten, forms of SE Asian local religions (especially ancient Khymer). Although the Buddha is not considered a 'god' in the western sense, there are many god-like and spirit-like and ghost-like aspects to Thai Buddhism ... much of which is not necessarily present in other Asian Buddhist countries.

Examples of this complicated soup of Thai 'belief' structure: the importance of the 'Moon' (and it's phases); the spirit house which adorns a corner of most houses and businesses in Thailand; the attribution of 'spirit-ness' to inanimate objects; ghosts; the quite powerful, and surprising, concepts of Paradise and Hell (stolen from Christianity?); the religious-like use of Buddhist temples to fervently pray for 'luck-in-the-life' (an employment usually thought of as very much non-religious in the West); etc etc. And many other things which are present in the Thai version of Buddhism which you'd be, on examination, hard pressed to find or justified in 'traditional' definitions and manifestations of Buddhism in other countries.