Phra Patham Chedi, Nakhon Pathom

When an astrologer told him that one day his son would kill him he had his son put out into the forest where he was found by a woman who brought him up. As a young man the son, called Phya Pan, entered the service of the King of Ratchaburi, who was a vassal of the king of the neighboring kingdom Nakhon Chaisi. Phya Pan's great wisdom and prudence brought him to the attention of the king, who adopted him. Phya Pan persuaded him to wage war against his feudal lord and during the ensuing battle killed his own father. As was the custom, after the victory he married the queen, his mother, but then learnt the story of his origins. The dagoba he built as an act of atonement was the predecessor of the Phra Pathom Chedi and is today concealed within it.The great chedi stands on a circular terrace in the middle of a square park, surrounded by a lattice-work wall, with the main entrance on the north side. The broad flight of steps leading up to the first terrace is edged by stone banisters inlaid with faience and richly decorated with ornamentation and seven-headed nagas. The bot, one of the buildings on the terrace, holds a very fine Buddha of clear quartzite, overlaid with lacquer and gold leaf. This Dvaravati-style figure shows the Buddha seated in the European pose, "the Buddha of the future". There are three replicas of this statue, all of which used to belong to Nakhon Pathom's Wat Na Phra Men, of which only a few bricks are left. One copy now stands in the Wat Phra Men in Ayutthaya and the other two are in the National Museum in Bangkok.On its circular base the massive dome (98 m (322 ft) in diameter), shaped like a bell or a monk's begging bowl, stands on a series of tapering orange-glazed, curved cornices, and is topped by a square platform, symbolizing the shrine standing on the top of the world. The conical spire is made up of a number of overlapping rings, the ceremonial canopy symbolizing the solemn dignity of the Buddha. The colonnade round the base of the chedi is broken up by four wiharns at symmetrical intervals.The four wiharns consist of an open lobby and an inner room. The lobby of the northern wiharn has an 8 m (26 ft)-high statue of a standing Buddha in the Sukhothai style, with the hands and feet of a stone figure found at Sawankhalok, Sukhothai, around 1915. The body was cast in bronze in Bangkok. The Phra Ruang Rojanarit, as the statue is called, is gilded and highly revered. An inscription on the wall of the wiharn says that the ashes of King Mongkut are interred in the plinth. The groups of figures on display in the wiharn depict the scene where two princesses show their reverence for the newborn Siddharta (Buddha), and, one of the most important scenes from the life of the Buddha, how after forty days of fasting the beasts of the jungle brought him food. The southern wiharn has some beautiful stone carvings and, in a little niche in the wall, the figure of Phya Pan (6th/7th c., see Legend above). The lobby of the western wiharn holds a 9-m (30-ft) long reclining Buddha, with another, smaller one in the inner room.