Religious practice in Bangkok is visible before breakfast. Monks walk in the early morning receiving food from householders, and the transaction is understood as merit given to the donor rather than charity given to the monk. Many Thai men ordain temporarily, often for the three months of the rains retreat, and the merit is directed to their parents. Wat Pho, one of the oldest monasteries in the city, holds a reclining Buddha forty six metres long and is also the seat of the traditional medicine and massage school, whose instructional reliefs are inscribed around the compound.
Alongside the monastic institutions runs a much wider field of practice. Amulets blessed by respected monks are collected, valued and traded in a substantial market. Almost every building has a spirit house in its compound, kept supplied with drinks and figures. And at a busy commercial intersection stands the Erawan shrine, built in the 1950s to a four faced form of Brahma after accidents during a hotel's construction, where petitioners who receive what they asked for pay for resident dancers to perform in thanks. A bomb there in 2015 killed twenty people.
Thai Buddhism contains its own arguments about all of this. Forest monastic lineages have criticised urban institutional practice for centuries, reformist voices object to the commerce in amulets and to the fundraising of large modern movements, and disputes over the leadership of the sangha have repeatedly involved the state.