Sharing about the opportunity to build a cool house and a tower house, Mai Huyen said: When he was young, his parents sent him to a pagoda to practice and learn Khmer. Later, even though he returned to secular life, during his free time, he always studied Buddhist scriptures.
In 2000, Mr. Huyen determined to realize the teachings in Buddhist scriptures by building a cool house as a resting place for travelers and a tower house for villagers to deposit the ashes of their loved ones.
The cool house is 3m wide, 4m long, 5m high, decorated with many Buddhist reliefs around, and inside there are stone benches for passersby to rest.
"The Bung Coc hamlet area has inter-hamlet and inter-commune roads leading to the district and town centers. There is a lot of traffic. People here grow vegetables and rice, so they spend most of their days in the fields. I built a cool house so that people who are traveling or working in the fields have a place to stop when they are tired," said Mr. Huyen.
Passing through the cool house is the tower house, about 100 square meters wide, inside which Buddha is worshiped and ashes are placed. Inside the house are arranged more than 300 Buddha statues of various sizes. The Buddha statues are placed according to careful calculations, each statue is a different image. The reliefs placed one after another all tell stories in Buddhist scriptures.
The roof is decorated with thousands of small towers and four-faced Buddha statues weighing more than 200 kg. All of them were moved onto the roof by Mr. Huyen alone.
According to Mr. Huyen, Khmer people have the custom of becoming monks to show filial piety and building tower houses to worship the deceased. From then on, he built the structure so that people would have a place to keep the remains of their loved ones.
Mr. Huyen said that he received wholehearted support from the villagers when he built the cool house and the tower house. Many people even came to contribute money and materials. Some people offered to help build the house together, but Mr. Huyen refused because he wanted to do it himself.
"I want to do the project myself to ensure its meaning and to reflect the scriptures. I have been working on it for more than 20 years but there are still many unfinished items," said Mr. Huyen.
Besides the tower house, Mr. Huyen also built a 3-room house for his family to live in. The house has a unique architecture, painted mainly in yellow. The walls and ceiling are decorated with many paintings with different stories and meanings.
In recent times, many domestic and foreign tourists have come to visit this unique tower house. Currently, Mr. Huyen uses the 3-room house as a place to serve visitors who come to stay overnight, helping visitors enjoy the feeling of living in the traditional cultural space of the Khmer people in the South.
Below are some pictures of 2 projects that Mai Huyen has done over the past 20 years:
