by most comparisons, Wat Songdharmakalyani is a modest temple. Just metres from one of Thailand's busiest highways, it has little of the sparkle and glitter that adorn its contemporaries, and its most distinctive feature is a large, fat "laughing Buddha" beaming down at the passing traffic.
That Chinese-influenced import in itself would attract attention in Thailand, where Buddha images are universally slender and sober. But the slightly rundown temple, home to fewer than a dozen permanent residents, including a couple of adopted dogs, is remarkable for another reason: it is home to the country's only female monk.
When Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, 59, was ordained earlier this year, critics claimed it would destroy security in Thailand. "I was proud," she laughs. "How I could do this."
But Dhammananda, who left a husband, three adult sons and a successful career as a professor of religion to take her vows after getting the "call" when she was 55, would like to create a revolution.
So far she's a one-in-300,000 anomaly in a Thai society that reveres monks and sends almost every son to a temple for at least one stint of three-month service, yet gives no social status to Buddhist nuns and technically forbids female monks.
Her first ambition in her new career is to attract five other women to become ordained as female monks, or Bhikkhunis, in her temple at Nakhonpathom, about 50km west of Bangkok.
Such a number would establish the first Bhikkhuni Songha, or community of female monks, in Thailand and close the loophole that Buddhist purists claim makes her ordination irrelevant.
"That's my ambition, my immediate ambition," she says. One other woman has already been ordained as a novice monk - the first step to Bhikkhuni - at her temple, and she encourages women into Buddhism by offering retreats for teenage girls and women.
"I think many women were waiting to see what happened to me," she says, adding that she has turned some would-be converts away.
"For me ordination is not an end, it is a means. You have to want to continue the work of the Buddha. If you want to be ordained just for the glory of the robe, then this is not the place for you."
She insists her path follows that of the Buddha, who declared that women were equally capable of reaching enlightenment. But in accepting female monks, he stipulated that they must be ordained in both male and female Songhas. Since Thailand has no female Songha, Dhammananda travelled to Sri Lanka for her ordination in the Theravada Buddhist sect which also dominates Thailand.
She was not the first. Her mother also chose the saffron robes but was ordained in Taiwan under the larger Mahayana sect which is centred in north Asia and dismissed in Thailand as a foreign religion.
"They left her alone because they said she was Mahayana," Dhammananda said. "If I had also been ordained Mahayana they would have left me alone too, but becoming Theravada was too close."
Dhammananda has attracted derision as well as support. Her ordination has prompted a senate committee's scrutiny and while she is largely left alone to tend to her temple, she has not succeeded in getting the Buddhist Supreme Council to overturn its 70-year ban on female ordination.
"I think they are playing wait and see," she says. "They want to see if society applauds it, they will not go against society. We have to prove we are here to do some good."
Phra Sutheworayan, the deputy rector at Thailand's Buddhist University, is among the vocal opponents. "Women are not suited to being monks because women have periods and have to take care of children and their emotions are not constant," he says. Other senior abbots say they will ignore Dhammananda and hope her campaign dies with her.
So this remains a quiet revolution. It will be at least 10 years before Dhammananda has enough experience to begin ordaining followers. The Supreme Council has, in any case, been embroiled in larger controversies: the increasing tendency for Thailand's 300,000 male monks to make headlines of their own.
Earlier this year infamous abbot Phra Khru Nanthaphiwat was shot dead while surrounded by his four bodyguards after a controversial career during which he allegedly pilfered 100 million baht ($3.3 million) from his temple after encouraging worshippers to "donate" to gain merit and quicken the journey to enlightenment.
The case, along with other dramatic examples of monks accumulating assets and even lovers, has resonated throughout the country where 95 per cent of the population is Buddhist.
"The issue of female monks has become less and less controversial because of the behaviour of male monks," says Sulak Sivaraksa, a social critic and Buddhist scholar who thinks the faith is at a crisis point. "(Thai people) are looking for good male monks, good female monks, anything that is good."
That is also Dhammananda's solution. She claims that whenever she and her community of women walk the streets for the twice-weekly alms round, where they hold out bowls for food donations, "we get so much food, so much".
This year a donor erected a building to house her office and the common eating area on the temple grounds.