Pilgrimage is a well-known topic in religious studies, but seems not to be much discussed in the context of Buddhist sites in Thailand itself. This is partly because considering Thailand’s overall size, people going to any religious site within this country do not need to go very far to arrive at any destination, so the journey is not much to remark on. However, the notion of pilgrimage does come up when Thais consider going to sites in India connected to Buddhist history. The most famous such place is Bodhgaya, where the Buddha was said to have attained full enlightenment while sitting under a peepal tree. I myself have been to Bodhgaya, which has many places for visitors to stay because it has become such an attraction for pilgrims, not to mention tourists, interested in Buddhism. Establishments for visitors are definitely oriented towards the expectation of religious activity. For instance, each country now identified with Buddhism has set up one or more representatives places in Bodhgaya where pilgrims from those countries can stay, although not limited to those coming from these countries. I myself previously stayed in a Burmese pilgrims’ rest house in that area. Beyond that, I also stayed for some days at a Sri Lankan rest house for pilgrims near Sanchi, a well-preserved site of ancient Buddhist structures found in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
However, shrines for Hindu folk deities elsewhere in India have been important for my own research. These sites typically attract great crowds of Indians at certain times of the year deemed cosmologically auspicious, with fewer coming at other times. For the most part, sites of interest to me are located in the northern part of the state of Rajasthan, which have also attracted the patronage of various merchants descended from the area who believe that supporting these shrines will win continued favor for prosperity and wellbeing from those deities. A diverse range of such local deities have become popular, among them being various manifestations of the Hindu god Hanuman. Taken as a scriptural deity, Hanuman is of course known in Thailand from the Ramayana story, rewritten in Thai as the Ramakian. But in actuality, while that epic is at least as famous in India, people in India revere Hanuman as a major deity in his own right at any number of shrines found locally in villages and even cities throughout that country. Thus, when devotees think of Hanuman, or even go on pilgrimage to a Hanuman shrine, they are in fact journeying to a specific location where its particular local manifestation of Hanuman is sought because it has the power to grant miracles of virtually any sort, according to the devotee’s need. In this sense, pilgrimage related to Hanuman has a much higher of level of importance for most Indians than would be the case for Thais, for whom Hanuman is just a figure in a famous epic.
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