The Golden Lining

In Thailand every cloud, even one so dark as the ill-omened Year of the Goat, has a silver--and sometimes a gold--lining. Just as the astronomers had predicted, the Year of the Goat was bad. Day after day it plunged Thailand into gloom with the revelation of one misfortune after another: two solar eclipses in one year, a holiday bus crash in which 22 people died, the deaths of a number of prominent Thais. Only last week, on the very eve of the goat's departure, a live bomb accidentally fell from an air force plane and killed 27 Thais.

All this made frolicksome old Kamthorn Visuthiphol stop and think. Merchant, banker and millionaire many times over, Kamthorn was rich in more ways than one. He had six wives, 25 children and, as an extra bonus from nature, eleven fingers. But, what with the astrologers and all, even Kamthorn could never be quite confident, so that it was in the Year of the Goat that he first began to listen attentively when the local priest, Abbot Phra Viradhammuni of the Trai Mitra monastery, begged him for the thousandth time to help build a temple.

Trai Mitra was a poor parish, its only material blessing a nondescript Buddha which stood under an old tin shed, and for years the abbot had been trying in vain to get old Kamthorn to do something about it. The Year of the Goat turned the trick. Kamthorn donated $35,000. A new temple was built, and workmen set about moving the statue into its new home. But the goat was still at work, and in the midst of the heavy task the workmen's cable broke, and the Buddha crashed to the ground, badly cracked. To the priests' surprise, the plaster was only a shell; beneath it shone the glint of metal. Trai Mitra's old plaster Buddha was a mere mummy case concealing a beautiful sculptured image wrought of 60% gold. Though to the pious Buddhist one divine image is as valuable as another, regardless of intrinsic worth, it was nice to know that infidels estimated the worth of Trai Mitra's prize at close to $3,000,000.

By last week donations and sightseers alike were pouring into the newly wealthy temple. But in his diabolical way the goat was still busy. In forgotten temples all over the land, to the consternation of the devout, Buddhists were hacking away hopefully and irreverently at any plaster Buddhas they could find.

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