Monk Chops off His Own Head for Good Luck in the Afterlife: Report

A Buddhist monk in Thailand chopped off his own head — on his birthday — in hopes the gruesome sacrifice would bring him luck in the afterlife, according to reports.

Thammakorn Wangpreecha, 68, a monk for 11 years, built a guillotine near a religious statue portraying the god Indra doing the same thing, the UK’s Metro reported.

The monk’s nephew, who found the decapitated body, said he had left behind a note. “It stated that chopping his head off was his way of praising Buddha, and he had been planning this for five years now,” Booncherd Boonrod said.

For Buddhists there is no afterlife. There is reincarnation until the soul rids itself of all attachments and then there is Nirvana which is extinction. In Nirvana dead is as dead as dead can be. The goal of Buddhism is to get OFF the wheel of life altogether.

I am very concerned about and am praying for two professing Christians I know, one of whom has a statue of Buddha in the garden and another with one in the living room.

I record a podcast on Southeast Asian history, so I can answer your question. Indian merchants and missionaries converted most of Southeast Asia to both Hinduism and Buddhism around the same time (about 250 B.C.). The only areas not converted were the Philippines and northern Vietnam, because the Philippines were too far away, and northern Vietnam was under Chinese influence. Eastern religions are not as exclusive as the monotheistic religions of the West. Therefore most Southeast Asians accept both Hindu and Buddhist gods, myths and legends as part of their heritage. Indonesia, for example, is officially a Moslem state, but when most Indonesians converted to Islam, they weren’t willing to give up their previous Hindu-Buddhist-animist heritage, so they modified Islam to let it coexist with the other creeds. That is why the whole country celebrated in the 1980s, when they restored the Borobudur temple, an ancient Buddhist monument, from a thousand years of exposure to the jungle. We also saw this syncretism in Thailand a few years back, at the funeral of King Rama IX; he was cremated in a pyre that was made to look like Mt. Meru, the five-peaked home of the gods in Hindu mythology.

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