Thursday, August 26, 2010

In Thailand a few hundred years ago someone made a giant Buddha out of gold. It's a good 10 feet tall and, as one might expect from something made out of solid gold, mighty heavy. When the Burmese invaded Thailand in the 1700's someone covered the statue in plaster and moved it to a shed outside a minor temple, at which point everyone forgot that it was there. All of that gold made into all of that statue, hiding in plain sight.

One day in the 1950's the monks in the temple tried to move it and dropped it in the mud, a bad omen that scared everyone away from the site, one that was only reinforced by the flooding storms that showed up shortly after. The next morning someone came creeping back in and noticed the cracks in the plaster and the real statue shining through from underneath. Which must have thrown a major wrench in the whole idea of the accident being bad luck, because if they hadn't dropped it this whole big treasure would have remained hidden and forgotten indefinitely, just this ugly heavy statue that no one was really sure what to do with.

Which, obviously, makes me wonder what else we're missing.

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