Thai Buddhism

I managed to break the inertia and leave my cousin's house today, taking the Bangkok subway for the first time. It was a clean and easy system with two thumbs up on my international public transportation scale. In every single stop the stations are announced in both Thai and English. I got off at the central train station where I obtained some time tables for trips I am sure to make in the near future including by the beach and mountains. I spoke to someone from the IRC (International Rescue Committee) who is hopefully helping me find interesting work/internship at a place in the north that deals with Migrant worker policies in Thailand. That would be da bomb diggity. Bangkok is a big, polluted, yet fairly well organized and nice city. I was determined to ride a boat down the Mae Nam Chao Phraya, which earned Bangkok its name as the Venice of the East. So I made my way over to the little port, walking from the train station. I was having a moment of "woe is me, it is more fun to travel with someone than travelling alone," but I knew that if I went home I would consider the day a failure, so I jumped on the next boat and hoped for the best. (Wasn't sure where it was going!)Things turned out smashing though, since I met two nice Canadians almost right away who knew where there were attractions to see and which stop to get off. I spent the day with them visiting the Grand Palace and the reclining Buddha. I had tried to investigate which attractions I wanted to see in Bangkok the day before, but it was all looking the same to me. I blame it on the inertia and being way too comfortable at my cousin's house to care about the outside world. So now onto my new favorite topic: religion. I thought I'd use this blog as an excuse to explore the different types of Buddhism. When I grew up, I thought that Buddha was the fat guy with the rolls of his belly exposed. Here in Thailand Buddha is extremely slender and is sometimes dancing in angular postures. According to the site About.com, which once gave my computer a virus but now seems pretty safe, the Chinese fat laughing Buddha is called Pu-tai. He is an incarnation of "the future Buddha, Maitreya". I saw depictions of this same incarnation of Buddha in Japan, where he is called Hotei but he looked slightly different. Apparently, there was one historical Buddha, whose name was Siddhartha (yeah, it's a great book by Herman Hess). He left his home and family at the age of 29 to find enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Some religious texts say that there were six Buddhas before Siddhartha, and then the Buddha that is still yet to come (we in Judaism call it the Messiah!) So...that's 8 Buddhas in total. It is also possible to become a Bodhisattva, someone on the path to Buddhahood. There are at least two types of Buddhism: Theravada and Mahayana. In Thailand they practice Theravada Buddhism, which Wikipedia says is the oldest surviving Buddha school. Tibetan Buddhism is apparently of the Mahayana tradition, but slightly different. It's interesting that Buddha was Hindu, and Jesus was a Jew and look what happened.