David A. Taylor, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2007; Crystal Q., CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
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| Tough Love Maverick Buddhist monk Khru Ba gives a novice Buddhist monk Thai kickboxing lessons in Northern Thailand, from Buddha's Lost Children. |
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Monk on a Mission
Saving the Orphans of Northern Thailand (full doc)
Buddha's Lost Children: full documentary
Buddha’s Lost Children is a Dutch film about Theravada Buddhist Thailand, directed by Mark Verkerk, EMS Films, 2006.
As the lights go down, the sound of a stream is heard. The first images show a bare-chested man cross-legged on a tall stone spur in the forest, limbering up his arms and neck in what looks like a cross between meditation and martial arts.
His face is calm, but his body wears a wild constellation of tattoos: calligraphy wriggles down his arms, and a winged horse flies across his chest.
The man is a Thai Theravada Buddhist monk. In the next moment, he’s egging on two boys who are kick boxing. “That’s it!” he cries.
“Kick into his neck.”
The documentary Buddha’s Lost Children tells the story of the maverick Buddhist monk and former pro kickboxer Khru Ba and his mission to save forgotten souls at the edge of Thai society — drug-infested communities in the mountainous region of northern Thailand along the Burmese border, near Laos, known as [the drug dealing haven] the Golden Triangle.
“Look at the things they do,” Khru Ba says of the addicted. “Who’ll forgive them? The law of the land doesn’t forgive them, nor does the law of karma....
Only a crazy fool of a monk like me is willing to forgive them.”
The hill-tribe ethnic groups of that region — including the Akha, Karen, Yao, and Lisu — have for much of their history been at the mercy of larger forces: drug barons, corrupt Thai officials, disease, and poverty.
They have always lived at the margins: They dress differently from mainstream Thais, speak in different tongues, and hold animist (rather than Buddhist) beliefs. They don’t fit in.
At Khru Ba’s Golden Horse Monastery, he takes their orphaned and abandoned children under his wing and gives them lessons in, among other things, Buddhist Dharma and Thai kickboxing.
“Thai boxing means having a free heart and body; it means not being enslaved to desire or to drugs,” he tells his novices. “Do you understand?”
The boys shout, “Yes!” The young Buddhist novices ride into a village on horseback, saffron robes flapping in their wake, like a gang in a spaghetti Western.
The ritual of receiving alms food from villagers looks almost like a holdup. Khru Ba shouts out his version of karma: Be good, good things come to you, but “if you’re not good, the [animist] spirits will break your neck.”
Mark Verkerk, the Dutch filmmaker who spent three years making the film, says it is about more than an itinerant monk.
“It was important that the film communicate something universal,” Verkerk said by email, “something people could relate to from other cultures — and there’s nothing more universal than raising kids.”
Khru Ba left his own wife and two children after a close friend’s death and a vivid dream that commanded him to open a Buddhist monastery in the mountains of the far north, where one in five youths who turn up for national service are addicted to cheap Western methamphetamines.
Like a spiritual 007, Khru Ba has special permission from the Supreme Patriarch in Bangkok to use whatever methods he deems necessary to address the problems at the kingdom’s edge.
“He’s the only monk to have found a way to operate in this border region,” says Verkerk.
The film, with cinematography that combines sweeping landscapes and intimate views of the region’s culture, has taken honors at various festivals in Europe and North America, and in August (2007) it had its American theatrical pre-release in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is now available on DVD.
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