Spirit House

The logic of the san phra phum begins with an acknowledgment: the ground a house stands on already had an occupant. The guardian spirit of the plot, the phra phum or chao thi, must be housed honorably or the household risks misfortune, and so a dwelling is built for it, raised on a pillar to eye level or above, in the form of a miniature temple or traditional house. Figures of the guardian and attendants stand inside; offerings of rice, sweets, water, red soft drinks, flower garlands and incense are set on its platform, most carefully when something in the household is changing. Installation is a rite in itself. A specialist determines the auspicious position, classically a spot the shadow of the main building will never touch, and the auspicious day and hour for raising the post. If the plot changes, the spirit house may need to be moved or replaced, and retired spirit houses are not discarded casually: they accumulate at temple walls and sacred trees, left where the displaced spirits will be safe.

The practice sits comfortably beside Theravada Buddhism without being of it; monks may be invited to chant at a blessing, but the spirit house belongs to an older stratum of the religion of place. Anthropologists of Thai religion treat it as a standing negotiation between the household and the unseen owners of the land it occupies.

Nothing shows the vitality of the spirit house like its indifference to modernity. Bangkok's office towers, shopping malls, gas stations and condominiums keep spirit houses as a matter of course, often a grand pair serving the guardian of the land and other resident spirits. Corporate openings include their consecration; offerings appear daily at the base of glass skyscrapers, placed by staff whose employers budget for garlands.

The most famous public example, the Erawan Shrine at a central Bangkok intersection, began in 1956 as a remedy for construction misfortunes during the building of a hotel and grew into one of the city's busiest devotional sites, its four-faced Brahma image drawing petitioners and commissioned dance troupes around the clock. It is not a household spirit house, but it runs on the same grammar: place spirits acknowledged, housed and paid.

Justin McDaniel and other scholars of Thai Buddhism point to such sites as evidence against any neat separation of spirit religion from Buddhism in practice; the same people who keep precepts and give alms to monks also feed the lord of the land. Even the disposal problem has modern forms, with pickup trucks delivering superseded spirit houses to the banyan trees and temple boundaries where the city's retired shrines gather in weathered, respectful crowds.