Wat Si Chum

You see the face first. Through a tall, narrow slit in the brick wall, a calm gaze meets you while you are still on the path, before you reach the doorway. The eyes seem half closed, turned slightly downward. Step closer, and the gap widens to reveal a giant seated Buddha filling the space within. This is Phra Achana, and it has watched over this corner of Sukhothai for more than seven hundred years.

Wat Si Chum stands just outside the northern wall of the old city. The plan of the temple could not be simpler. A single square building, called a mondop, holds one enormous image and almost nothing else. The brick walls are thick, more than three meters in places, and they rise high on every side. The roof is gone now, fallen away long ago, so the room is open to the sky and daylight pours straight down onto the statue.

The Buddha sits in the earth-touching pose. The right hand reaches over the right knee, the fingers pointing down toward the ground. This gesture marks the moment, in the story of his life, when the Buddha called the earth itself to witness his awakening. The figure measures about fifteen meters from base to crown. Seated cross-legged, it nearly fills the narrow room, the knees almost brushing the side walls.

Look closely at the hand. The long, slender fingers are bright with gold leaf. Visitors press small squares of thin gold onto the skin as an act of devotion, and over many years the hand has turned warm and glowing against the darker stone of the body. The fingertips are smooth where countless palms have touched them. The great face above remains still, patient, and unbothered by the crowd below.

The name Phra Achana is often translated as the one who is not frightened, or simply the steadfast one. Sitting alone in the bare, open mondop, lit only by the sky, the image truly does seem unshaken by anything around it. Visitors tend to lower their voices here without being asked. Children grow quiet. The sheer scale of the figure does that work on its own.

There is a secret hidden in the wall. Inside the thick left side of the mondop, a tight stairway climbs upward in the dark toward the vanished roof. The passage is barely wide enough for one person, and most of it is closed to visitors today. Along the underside of the stair, carved slate slabs were once set into the ceiling, low above the heads of anyone climbing through.

Those slabs are carved with scenes from the Jataka tales, the many stories of the Buddha's earlier lives. Setting such fine carvings into the ceiling of a dark, hidden stair was a strange and deliberate choice. Scholars still debate why so much skill was spent on images that almost no one would ever climb up to see in the gloom.

The hidden passage also feeds a long-told legend. The story says that a voice once seemed to rise from the statue itself, speaking down to soldiers gathered in the room below. Most likely a person hidden in the inner stair could call out through a gap, so the great Buddha appeared to speak. The tale is passed down as legend, not as proven history, but it suits the strange power of the place.

Whatever the truth of that story, the effect of the building is real and carefully made. The opening in the front wall is kept narrow on purpose. As you walk slowly toward it, the face of the Buddha is revealed a little at a time, first the eyes, then the mouth, then the whole calm figure, until at last you stand inside and look straight up at it.

Wat Si Chum was built during the Sukhothai period, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when this city ruled as the heart of a young and growing kingdom. The builders raised the image in brick and stucco, then finished the surface in smooth plaster and, in places, gold. Much of that outer skin has weathered away with time, leaving the honest core of the material on view.

Around the mondop, the grounds are quiet and green. A few low foundation stones in the grass mark older buildings that have otherwise vanished. Birds cross the open square of sky above the Buddha's head, and their calls echo off the high walls. The sharp contrast between the small, dim entrance and the vast, bright figure within is the whole heart of the design, and it still works on everyone who comes.

Stand a moment before you leave. The gold glowing on the fingers, the steady downward gaze, the patient silence of the roofless room. Wat Si Chum was made to be felt slowly, one quiet step at a time, and in the end it asks nothing of you at all but a little stillness of your own.