When a person dies, all the good and all the evil he has done are added up, and a kind of balance is struck. The happiness or misery of the person in his next life depends on whether he has a good or a bad balance. There are many things that we may do in this life that go to the good side of the account. To do these things is to "make merit." Some actions only make a little merit; others make a great deal of merit. One of the best ways of getting a big figure on the right side of the account is, according to the priests, to build a temple. Hence, when a man is rich enough, he builds a house for the Buddha, where his image may be seen, his lessons learned, and his praises sung. But once the temple is built, the matter is finished, and there is no need to repair it. The Buddhist says that though the temples will crumble away, yet his children will build others, so that there will always be plenty of churches, and many opportunities of making merit in this way. [Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF WAT POH. _Chapter IX._] The Siamese word _wat_ means all the buildings enclosed in the sacred wall, and includes the houses where the priests live, the holy buildings where the images are kept, and numerous spiral ornaments that cover relics. The most sacred of these buildings is the _bawt_. Near the four corners, north, south, east, and west, there are four stones, carved in the shape of the leaf of the Bo-tree, the tree under which Gautama became Buddha. When the _bawt_ is erected, consecrated water is poured over these stones, and evil spirits are thus for ever prevented from entering. In the temple grounds there are always a number of graceful tapering structures, which cover relics, or supposed relics. You will see some of these in several of the pictures in this book. They sometimes stand directly on the ground, but at other times the slender spires will be found over the doorways, or even on the tops of the buildings. There is a story which says that after Buddha's death one of his disciples gave away all the property of the Teacher to the other followers. He meant to keep nothing at all for himself, but on finding one of Buddha's teeth, he looked longingly upon it, and then took it and quietly hid it in the coil of hair which many Hindus wear upon the top of the head. One of the gods in the heavens saw the deed, flew swiftly down to earth, snatched the precious relic from its hiding-place, and buried it under a great mound, which he built in a tapering fashion to resemble the tuft of hair in which the tooth had been concealed. Others, however, say that the shape of these relic mounds is due to the fact that Buddha told his disciples, as he lay on his death-bed, to bury his bones under a mound shaped like a heap of rice.