Wat Pho Maen Khunaram

Wat Pho Maen Khunaram (วัดโพธิ์แมนคุณาราม) is a Chinese Mahayana temple off Sathu Pradit Road in Yan Nawa, southern Bangkok. Its Chinese name is Pumen Bao’en Si (普门报恩寺). It was built from about 1960 by Pho Chaeng (Pu Jing, 普净), a monk from Guangdong who became head of Thailand’s Chinese Nikaya and was raised in royal rank seven times, an honour MGR Online says no earlier Chinese monk in Thailand had received.

A Chinese biography of Pho Chaeng says that in 1942 he travelled to Xikang (Kham, in eastern Tibet) and spent five years there studying esoteric Buddhism, receiving vajra empowerment. Back in Bangkok from 1948, he gave ordinations and transmitted esoteric teachings. Riwoche Dharma Center in Samut Prakan, which continues his practice line, traces it to Riwoche Monastery in Kham and its Nyingma and Taklung Kagyu teachings.

Pho Chaeng designed the temple himself, and MGR Online describes it as a mix of Chinese, Thai and Tibetan art that is hard to find anywhere else. The front hall carries an inscription in Tibetan script. At each corner of the ordination hall stand two marble boundary stones: one carved with a Tibetan vajra, the other with the Four Heavenly Kings. Inside the hall, the main image, Phra Phuttha Watchara Phothikhun, carries a name given by the King, a thousand Buddha images are set high above, and a mosaic of five hundred arhats covers the side walls. Pho Chaeng’s body is enshrined in a hall behind the ordination hall, near images of Avalokiteshvara and Kshitigarbha.