AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Wat Ya (Wat Yaa, วัดหญ้า) is a Mahanikaya Buddhist monastery set among the rice fields of Na Sai, a quiet agricultural subdistrict just south of Nakhon Si Thammarat town. It is not a tourist spectacle but a living village temple—the spiritual heart of an old farming community—whose very name, according to local tradition, is bound up with the great Phra Borommathat chedi that gives this province its identity.↗↗↗
Visitors come here less for monuments than for atmosphere: a working monastery of ordination hall, sermon hall, vihara and temple school, bordered on three sides by canals, where the rhythm of merit-making still tracks the rhythm of the rice year.↗
How Wat Ya got its name
The temple's own account traces its founding to a telling of devotion gone almost comically right. Around 1900 in the Buddhist era, the story goes, two northern nobles of the rank of Chao Chom Marada travelled down to Nakhon Si Thammarat carrying wealth with which to restore the Phra Borommathat, the province's sacred principal chedi. They put ashore in the coastal area near present-day Tha Sala—and learned that the great chedi had already been restored. With their funds still in hand, they instead raised a temple on the bank of the Tha Ngio canal. The hall built on the north side came to be called Wat Chom Lan and the south side Wat Chom Ya; over generations the villagers compressed the name to "Wat Ya," the temple that stands here today.
