Living Sacred Landscape

Abstract

Abstract This chapter offers a spatial point of view of the religious living space within Buddhist temples in Northern Thailand. The concept of religious space often connects to notions of sacredness and a rigid, statically oriented place that people only utilize for specific spiritual or large-scale social activities (e.g., harvesting, natural disasters, and such), reflecting ideas that any supernatural being associated with the space should not be disturbed often and is unequal to people. However, in Northern Thailand, the temples are much more than merely such rigidly sacred places. People go to the temple for personal matters, ask for blessings, exchange goods, consult about personal matters, gather for social events, and the like. These phenomena reflect a balanced, engaged, and horizontal relationship between the community and their sacred place, highlighting a hybridized version of a cosmological worldview and communal living religious space.