These are photos of Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya, Thailand. The first six photos were taken in December 2007, and the last four were taken in April 2011.
This is a personal old story, but I have a very strong memory of Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya. I do not remember the exact year of my first visit, but it was in the early 1990s. Ayutthaya was already a famous tourist spot at that time, but when I visited for the first time, there were no other tourists. I was completely alone.
As you know, there are many Buddha statues without heads in Ayutthaya, and the ones in this ruin are the same. However, at that time I used to travel without any information (the reason is explained in another post), so I did not even know that I was at Wat Mahathat, and I also did not know that Ayutthaya had many headless Buddha statues.
It was a sunny day, but I was alone in a wide and quiet ruin, looking at the group of headless statues. I wondered “Why?” and at the same time the scene started to feel frightening to me.
Then, when I looked down under the shade of a big tree, I saw a Buddha head buried in the tree roots. I was already feeling nervous while walking around, and the Buddha head looked eerie to me. In addition, I felt a strong fear because I imagined that someone had tried to bury the head in the roots on purpose. I was so shocked that I almost lost my nerve, and I quickly left the place.
Several years later, I looked at a guidebook and found that the scene I had seen was introduced as one of the features of this ruin. I did not know that at the time, so I laughed at myself for being so scared during my visit.
