Payap University Exchange Students Visit Dhamma Park Project
By Cheryl Wheeler, Chiang Mai Mail, Vol.II No.15, Saturday 12 April - 18 April 2003
On the twenty first of February, a group of twenty foreign exchange students from the United States, Germany and France visited The Dhamma Park Gallery and Heritage Gardens in Pasang, Lumphun Province.
The students from Payap University’s Thai and South-east Asian Studies Program were welcomed to Dhamma Park by its director, Venetia Walkey (Vanida Wongsam), an expatriate English artist and peace builder, wife of National Thai Artist, Khun Inson Wongsam. They are both sculptors.
The students were introduced to Walkey’s contemporary Buddhist sculptures, which present the epic psycho-physical journey from Ignorance to Enlightenment with both humor and satire. They are arranged round an eight meter high Fountain of Wisdom in the center of the gallery. There the students were offered an opportunity to meditate and reflect on the meaning and purpose of life.
In the garden the students also encountered and played on many colorful sculptures that Khun Inson created as imaginary machines to clean up environmental pollution under the sea, on land, and in the air.
The students helped to build a mud brick house and to spin and weave cotton grown in Heritage Gardens. This cotton is part of the project to bring back its cultivation to this region and re-link the younger generation to their ancestral traditions, traditional tools, natural dyes, organic fertilizers and natural pesticides.
The students also tried their hand at weaving grass thatch, another traditional skill that is in danger of dying out. These are survival skills which are essential for villagers around the world.
Mahatma Gandhi was chosen as an icon for Dhamma Park’s Cotton Field Project. He led India peacefully to freedom from British rule in the early twentieth century. He taught these skills as part of the Buddhist philosophy of sustainable self-reliance. Gandhi emphasized the development of right conduct for those who wished to change society.
Gandhi’s philosophy is in accordance with His Majesty The King’s speech on December 5th 1997, urging the Thai people to become more self reliant through sustainable living. Barry Wheeler, a Thai Studies professor of appropriate technology for sustainable rural development and Mary Griep, an associate professor of art from Saint Olaf College, Minnesota, U.S.A., guided the student’s experiences at Dhamma Park.
One of the main goals of Dhamma Park is to serve as a center for Socially Engaged Buddhism and the Arts. This goal can be achieved by raising the level of spiritual and environmental consciousness of visitors and to rekindle personal interest and pride in traditional skills that are both useful and environmentally appropriate, in addition to being beautiful.
Dhamma Park’s staff and local experts were present to demonstrate and assist the students in weaving, spinning, mud brick making, and grass thatching. The Cotton Field Project (in which students from five primary and secondary schools in the districts of Pasang and Lumphun took part) is supported by the funding committee for the Development of Community Projects for the Province of Lumphun. This project is part of the committee’s policy to bring back local wisdom.