Research & Article

This paper provides an ethnographic account of a relatively rare funerary rite held for a senior monk in northern Thailand. The rite that may be Shan in origin is known in Northern Thai as pôi lô (ปอยล้อ), lit. ‘ceremony of the cart or sleigh’. This rite entailed placing the coffin with the corpse of the monk on a sled with an elaborate structure known as a prāsāt, a palace and a model of Mt. Meru. This whole structure with the corpse was taken to a dry field and there for three days the structure was pulled back and forth by large numbers of people. At the conclusion, the structure was pulled to a place where it was burnt. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of the ritual with reference both to Buddhist understandings of death and the theoretical understanding of ‘liminality’