By Lekha Shankar
Indian actor Gagan Malik, who gained international fame when he played Gautama Buddha in a 2014 film shot in Sri Lanka titled Sri Siddhartha Gautama, made waves when he donned Buddhist robes to undertake a two-week-long monkhood at the famed Wat That Thong temple in Bangkok.
The two-week monkhood is behind him, but Malik (now called Asoko) does not seem ready to give it up yet. He plans to go as a Buddhist monk, complete with orange robes and shaven head, to various cities in India, at the end of this month, and share what he has learnt with Buddhist monks there, and then return to Bangkok, for a further extension of his monkhood penances.
“I’ve learnt a lot, but I need to learn a lot more. That’s why I plan to go to the forest to learn Vipassana meditation. I have a long way to go,” he told this writer, when I met him for an…
