Tham Khao Nam Phu

What the official record says

Where Tham Khao Nam Phu (Tham Phra Phothisat) is

When was it founded — and what actually establishes that?

Thai temple histories mix two different kinds of statement, and this guide keeps them apart. What a register, a gazette entry, an inscription or a dated royal act shows is one thing. What the chronicles and the temple itself hold is another, and it is worth telling as what it is.

No dated record establishes when the relief was carved, and the published dating rests entirely on art-historical inference, with a spread of roughly five centuries across five authorities: the register gives the 12th to 16th Buddhist centuries, the research database's archaeology entry the 11th to 14th, and individual scholars anything from the second half of the 11th to the 13th and 14th. A page here should say Dvaravati, say that the date rests on style, and give the range.

The history of Tham Khao Nam Phu (Tham Phra Phothisat)

Begin with what this is not. It is not a temple. The Fine Arts Department registered Tham Khao Nam Phu in B.E. 2508 as an archaeological cave on state land, and the monastery that now surrounds it came later: a monk settled in the cave about B.E. 2509, a monastic dwelling grew up, and because the hill itself is เป็นสมบัติของแผ่นดิน, state property, a lay committee built Wat Tham Phra Photthisat at the foot of the hill instead, in B.E. 2522. Sixteen years after that the department's own survey project was still calling the place a สำนักสงฆ์. The register names two custodians, the department and the monastery. Describe it as a registered monument inside the grounds of a working monastery, and you have it right; call the cave a temple and you do not.

Nor is there a Bodhisattva on the wall, which matters because two state bodies say there is. The Saraburi Provincial Office of Buddhism describes a รูปพระโพธิสัตว์ here and the Ministry of Tourism's directory lists ภาพพระโพธิสัตว์ as a headline feature. The Fine Arts Department identifies no Bodhisattva anywhere, and its 1965 survey considered that reading and set it aside in writing. The error is traceable: the cave is named after a monk's vision of about B.E. 2509, and two agencies have since read the name back into the carving. The monk's own letter explaining the name sits in the department's file.

What is on the wall is better than the misreading. A low-relief panel, roughly 3.3 by 2.1 meters, set between about 3.3 and 5.4 meters above the floor of the first chamber, carved with six figures: a Buddha enthroned with pendant legs and both hands at the chest in the preaching gesture; a seated deity leaning toward him; a four-armed standing figure with a discus and a conch, arms crossed at the chest in deference; two airborne devas; and, low between them, a small prostrate figure about 24 cm high. The identifications are later scholarship, not the record, and they do not agree: the standing figure is read as Vishnu by everyone, the seated one as Shiva by some and as Brahma by Thanit Yupho — the Director-General who signed the registration — and the small figure as a prostrate woman in one research database and as a rishi in another from the same institution.

The 1965 survey memorandum is worth reading for its restraint. Having described the panel, it says the important problem is what figures two and three are; that if they are Bodhisattvas, or Indra, or Brahma in Buddhist doctrine, it is unclear why one holds a conch and has four arms; that it is suspected one means Narayana and the other Brahma or Shiva; and that whether this is right or wrong is a matter that should be investigated further. It also recommended four other things: registration, which happened; help from the province and district in protecting what it called the first Dvaravati carving found in Thailand, which happened; a cast to be kept at the department, of which there is no record; and an excavation, which sixty-one years later has still not taken place. The only prehistoric material from the cave is a 1965 surface collection of seven flaked stone tools and two or three potsherds, with no stratigraphy behind it. And note the drift in the claim: the first such found in 1965 has become, in a department tourism guide of 2018, the oldest in Thailand. Those are different claims and the second will not survive the dating range.

One documented episode deserves to be remembered because it is about survival rather than scholarship. Between B.E. 2534 and 2535 the department's file records a limestone-mining crisis: a private citizen wrote asking it to stop the destruction of a national monument; an inspection found a cement company holding a concession about a kilometer out; the provincial education officer reported six outstanding applications and the local mineral-resources engineer eighteen concession plots within two kilometers; and in January B.E. 2535 the department formally demanded that the Department of Mineral Resources suspend and withhold all concessions within a two-kilometer radius. No document in the file records whether that exclusion was ever granted.

What you actually see

The relief panel on the wall of the first chamber: roughly 3.3 by 2.08 m and set between about 3.27 and 5.35 m above the floor, according to a Fine Arts Department publication of B.E. 2534, with six figures whose individual heights that publication gives as 1.42 m for the Buddha, 1.07 m for the seated deity, 1.82 m for the four-armed standing figure, 0.55 and 0.96 m for the two devas and 0.24 m for the prostrate figure.

The first chamber itself, which the 1965 survey records as about 18 m wide, 22 m long and around 10 m high, with a mouth about 1 m across and a floor some 3 m below it, receiving daylight almost all day — the one chamber a visitor can see without a torch.

A modern gilded chedi on a tiled cement base in the middle of that chamber, a gilt-lacquered Buddha image, and fragments of a sandstone Buddha base recorded in the register.

The flowstone, stalactites and stalagmites the 1965 survey records, with shell encrustations in places and marks of digging in parts of the ceiling — and graffiti, which that survey notes people had been cutting into the cave since at least B.E. 2503.

The climb: the research database records about 257 steps from the monastery to the cave mouth, up a hill whose summit stands about 150 m above mean sea level.

Three further caves on the same hill that the monastery opens to visitors — ถ้ำพระธรรมทัศน์, ถ้ำลุมพินีสวนหิน and ถ้ำสงัดเจดีย์ — none of which is separately registered; a search of the register returns no registered monument in this subdistrict other than this one.

Visiting: hours, admission, dress and photography

This is a working place of worship for millions of people rather than an attraction, and it is treated as one at the gate. Where a figure below is blank, no source we are prepared to cite states it.

What we could not establish

Every temple reference repeats claims nobody has checked. These are the ones we went looking for and could not stand up, listed so you know exactly where this page stops.

• When the relief was carved. No inscription is associated with it, no excavation has ever been done, and the published dates rest entirely on stylistic inference across a span of roughly five centuries, from the second half of the 11th Buddhist century to the 16th.
• Which figures two and three are. The department's 1965 survey put the question in writing and left it open; Vishnu is agreed for the four-armed figure, while the seated one is read as Shiva by some and as Brahma by the Director-General who signed the registration, and the small prostrate figure is described as a woman in one research database and as a rishi in another from the same institution.
• The excavation the department recommended in January B.E. 2508, which has still not been carried out, and the cast it also recommended, of which no record exists. Nor is it recorded where the seven stone tools, the pebble and the potsherds from the 1965 surface collection went.
• Whether the two-kilometer mining exclusion the department demanded in January B.E. 2535 was ever granted. The file records the demand and nothing after it.
• Which wall the panel is on. The 1965 survey says the west wall, on the right as you enter; the boundary plan attached to the same instrument titles its elevation as the left wall; the department's 1991 publication and the research database say the north wall of the first chamber.
• How many chambers the cave has: the 1965 survey counted three, the department's 1991 publication six.
• Which of the department's own two coordinates is right. Its gazette-boundary polygon, whose area matches the declared figure closely, has a centroid about 400 m west of the register's own GPS point for the monument. Both fall inside the subdistrict the record states, and the point is published here.
• The grade and sect of Wat Tham Phra Photthisat, the monastery that is co-custodian. No state body read in this run states either, and the dates for its establishment in B.E. 2522 and its consecrated boundary in B.E. 2528 rest on the research database alone.
• Opening hours, whether the cave is gated, whether any artificial lighting has been installed, a dress rule, a photography rule and any separate rate for foreign visitors. No official source states any of them.

Tham Khao Nam Phu (Tham Phra Phothisat): common questions

Where to go from here

Before you go, read the guide to Buddhism and temple etiquette in Thailand — dress, footwear, where photography is not welcome and how to behave around monks. The rest of Saraburi’s temples are covered here too.

Every temple here sits in a place worth reading about on its own terms. The nationwide temple guide covers the other provinces to the same documentary standard as this page, and says on each one what the record establishes and what it does not.

If you are thinking about more than a visit: work out which Thai visa route fits your situation, and see what is available to rent and buy in residences across Thailand.