Ecologically unfriendly festival

In the past few years, I have started to feel uneasy about Loy Kratong festival in Thailand. The latest figure in the news confirmed my gut feeling. This year, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration officials have harvested almost a million Kratong floats from river and canals in Bangkok: 946,838 floats as of 3 a.m. today to be exact. (I am amazed that how exact they could have counted those ! I 'll ignore a possibility that they did not miscount a few.)  And about 12 % of those are made of styrofoam which is not bio-degradable.

For hundreds of year in Thailand, Loy Kratong festival is a beautiful festival on a December 's full-moon night when people, few thousands I guess, would bring their small floats made of banana leaf, with flowers, lit candle, and incensed stick to beg pardon from angle of the river. It 's a rare traditional good chance for boys to meet girls at night.  Nowadays, however, people attending the festival are in the tune of a million, or 3 fold order of magnitude (1000 x) more. So this the the amount of float garbage is now a big environmental burden to the river and needs to be cleaned up by the city within hours after people went home. I often sighed in my thought at this ceremony around this time of the year.

Despite the complain above about it, I have not started complaining of my dislike of another more dangerous floating (into the air) festival yet, called Yipeng floating.

Loy Kratong

It was Loy Kratong day in Thailand yesterday, the full moon (15th waxing moon) night of the twelfth Thai month (yes, it 's November).

I think if one ask young Thais,

Why do millions of people went out in the evening to put down small candle-lit and incensed sticks-lit flower floats along rivers or canals ?

, I guess new generation people might answer that the festival 's just for fun. I think if they did answer like that they would probably be right. For hundreds of years, that how young men had chance to meet young women at a rare night festival like this. Some might say otherwise that it is chance in a year to pay tribute to the river angel (Phra Mae Kongka) for providing life line to peple's living. But I would say that explaination was based on Hinduism belief, not Buddhism's. I 'll put down Buddhists' view point down here, which hopefully would be more useful to Thai Buddhists.

• Firstly for Buddhists, putting the float along the river 's mainly for worshipping the foot print of Lord Buddha who stamped his footprint at a place called Numtanatee (perhaps a river bank or an oceanside somewhere) almost 2.6 millennia ago.




• Secondly, it 's to worship buddha's relics that had been floated at Ganges river in Varanasi by an Indian King after he discovered the relics in an old stupa near Varanasi.




• Thirdly, the 15th waxing moon night almost 2.6 millennia ago was the day a prominent Arahant and Buddha's right hand premier monk, Sariputta (Thais called Phra Saribut), went to Nirvana (died). So this is also a remembrance for him.

Those are the reason why I and people in our group put down floats at the Ganges river at Varanasi 4 days earlier, while we were still in India.