Filed December 8, 2025
Lan Ta Sok: Buddha’s Footprint.
Throughout the Buddhist cultural sphere — stretching from India all the way to the far edges of Southeast and East Asia — the presence of the Buddha lingers. Not as a historical etching into the soil, necessarily, but as atmosphere, as inheritance, as a quiet current moving through daily life. Even so, the Buddha did leave physical signs across the Buddhist world, and nowhere is that felt more deeply than in Thailand, home to the largest Buddhist population on earth. By far.
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In Thailand, where more Buddhists per capita live than anywhere else on earth, that echo becomes something almost tangible. Across the country there are nearly five hundred documented sites where Buddha’s footprint is said to have been found and enshrined — especially here in the Northeast, in Isaan.
One of those shrines rests just a few miles from Noan Tan Lang, one of the region’s earliest settlements near the Cambodian border. Hardly a tourist destination — most locals couldn’t find it if you asked — the shrine isn’t on any map, and the winding dirt roads that lead to it don’t appear on any map either.
Fortunately, Willie’s Chitra knows these trails by heart…
And with the gentle breeze, the ride out there was nothing short of peaceful.
The shrine itself sits on a tiny square of earth, maybe four hundred square feet, tucked into a perfectly still field that stretches out as far as you can see. It’s the kind of place where you stare at nothing yet somehow feel everything.
We spoke with a kathoey who tends cattle in the next field over. She told us she feels the presence of the shrine long before she reaches it, and her cows seem to settle, grow quieter, whenever they graze near this patch of land. One of a handful of land dwellers out here, she’s a fascinating soul — we’re dedicating a whole show about her in an upcoming episode of From The Margins.
Until then, breathe in the quiet of this place. Let the stillness sink in. And feel the gentle, grounding weight of the Buddha’s footprint resting here on the edge of the deep forest.
#Buddhism #NortheastThailand #Issan # Kathoey