Finding the Gold

A love story of an 11,000 pound statue of a solid gold seated Buddha.

I looked up the stairs of a temple in Bangkok with trepidation about whether I'd really get to see the statue I'd thought about for years (and wondered if it was even real.) I held the 40 baht ($1 USD) paper entry ticket and climbed the stairs of Wat Traimit in Bangkok, Thailand. My family stayed back at the hotel pool pleading not to go to 'yet another' wat, the term for a Buddhist monastery or temple throughout Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. I actually encouraged it this time because I wanted to be alone as I came face to face with a love story I'd carried for years.

Wat Traimit is home to a 5.5 ton solid gold seated Buddha statue. I'd heard the history of the Golden Buddha years earlier in a dharma talk (a teaching on Buddhism). The statue is estimated to have been made in the 13th-14th centuries. During a period of invasions in Thailand, the gold statue was covered in plaster and stucco with inlaid colored glass pieces presumably to hide both its sacredness and inestimable value from pillagers. Following the decimation, killings and plundering, any record of the statue's true nature was lost. In the 1800s and centuries later, Thailand's ruling King (Rama I) ordered Buddha images from the ruined temples across the country to be returned to the capital of Bangkok. The stuccoed-over, golden statue was eventually situated at Wat Traimit, an insignificant pagoda at the time, where it sat in the open air under a makeshift tin roof - the solid gold identity forgotten for the prior 2+ centuries and still hidden in its protective covering. Fast forward to the 1950s, the statue was being relocated and accidentally fell during the move. The monastics moving the statue were shocked to find glints of gold as they peered into the broken pieces of plaster. Work was stopped and a careful excavation of the plaster revealed the solid gold Buddha within.

I wondered about the monks whose hands spread the plaster. Were they furtive and rough not knowing how soon the violence would reach their door? Or careful and tender as if bathing a loved one in a final act of sacrament and love. What was the disposition of their heart and state of mind? What words did they whisper together to vow the secrecy of this Buddha? Did they die in the violence soon after, the protective secret leaving with them?

I forgot the rest of that dharma talk because I was haunted by this story. Was it really true? How does something of such an astonishing scale of sacredness, preciousness, value and brilliance get covered over and forgotten? And for so long?

I wanted so much for this story to be true as I climbed the stairs to the wat. It was such a grand metaphor that I couldn't believe it hadn't been a fictionalized event. But it was there. Now its protection was a shin-level rope strung unevenly around the platform and one languid guard. I thought maybe this one is the fake but, then again, who is going to run away with a 5.5 ton Buddha? It was really there. Unequivocally and unapologetically Gold.

Why did it matter to me that it was real? The story true? I realized my preoccupation with this story is that the metaphor it embodies is as real for a sacred gold statue as it is for humans. This strategy of covering over the gold was the very self-protection needed from invaders who would have pillaged or simply destroyed the statue as an act of ignorance and violence. Pirates with hearts 'not yet capable of seeing and loving'* We arrive so brazenly and recklessly unarmored into this world and are ushered onto a stage where the play is already underway - roles, scripts, spoken and unspoken frameworks for the world already built into the surroundings.

While we may or may not be ransacked, we learn subtly and explicitly what is invited out and safe to reveal and what must be covered over, hidden or even disowned as we plop into and learn to navigate family systems and the world beyond.

It's a life's journey to find the way back to the gold and the radical courage to look beyond the stucco and even the beautiful inlaid colored glass. It's most breathtaking when we remember there is gold there.

Professionally, this true story is analagous to how I work with someone one-on-one. We aren't marching towards a 2.0 improved version of themselves, aggressively jettisoning anything that doesn't fit this envisioned mold. Instead, we are carefully and tenderly trusting in the gold that is already there and attentively seeing and removing the plaster, stucco and even the lovely inlaid glass that covers over the gold. This gold is already there and has been there all along. Just forgotten on the journey when so many layers of self-protection were laid to survive with strategies that contort us like people-pleasing, perfecting, performing, pretending and even pillaging. They thought the stucco armor was keeping them safe. However, when they (re-)find the gold, they touch the freedom, peace, contentment, ease, and belonging they have been looking for all along.

I've thought 100 times about sharing the story of the Golden Buddha when people ask me what I do. But I don't. Why? Because one of my shiny inlaid glass pieces is to be the serious MBA business person I'm 'supposed' to be. Dealing with other serious grown-up business people. But really.. we are journeying to do something sacred. To find the gold.

*Poem "Call me by my true names' by Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.