Illuminating the Life of the Buddha: an Illustrated Chanting Book from Eighteenth-Century Siam by Naomi Appleton, Sarah Shaw and Toshiya Unebe

BSRV 30.2 (2013) 277–282 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (print) 0256-2897 doi: 10.1558/bsrv.v30i2.277 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (online) 1747-9681

Illuminating the Life of the Buddha: An Illustrated Chanting Book from Eighteenth-century Siam by Naomi Appleton, Sarah Shaw and Toshiya Unebe. Oxford: Bodleian Library, and University of Chicago Press, 2013. 160pp, 86 colour plates. Hb. £35/$65. ISBN-13: 9781851242832 Justin Thomas McDaniel, Chair, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] This seemingly straightforward study of one Thai illuminated manuscript is in fact the best resource for the study of pre-modern Siamese Buddhist art and literature to come out in over a decade, and one of the most significant publica- tions in the history of Thai Buddhism. This is not hyperbole. I believe that this book will become a model for future manuscript studies in Southeast Asia and inspire codicologists, art historians, paleographers, and scholars of the history of the book in Europe, the Islamic World, and East and South Asia. It is also an ideal book to use in introducing students to Siamese Buddhism and manuscript studies. While there are a few points in the book that need clarification and a wider range of examples could have been used to show the diversity of Siamese Buddhist manuscripts, this book will become the standard introduction to the field for many years. Below, I will highlight just a few of this book’s merits and make a few clarifications. Naomi Appleton, Sarah Shaw, and Toshiya Unebe formed a great team in creating a book that describes a single late eighteenth century Siamese manuscript (samut khoi) held in Oxford’s Bodleian library (MS.Pali a. 27 [R]). This is a manuscript which includes the illustrations of parts of the last ten jātakas followed by the life of the Buddha. Manuscript illustrations of the life of the Buddha are extremely rare even though they are common on monastery murals. This alone makes this manuscript a rare find. The text of the manuscript contains excerpts from the Vinaya, the Brahmajāla Sutta, the Abhidhamma, the Sahassanaya, the Mahābuddhaguṇa, the Mahābuddhaguṇavaṇṇanā, and the Uṇhissavijaya. This is also rare as in most Siamese illuminated manuscripts of this style are either the Abhidhamma Chet Kamphi or the Phra Malai story. There are also very few examples of this size and condition from this period. This is a large liturgical text anthology that would have guided chanters. Shaw wrote the introduction and the last chapter and Appleton and Unebe each wrote one chapter. The work was divided well. The text is clearly written and the book has over 80 full color figures which are strategically placed throughout the text to illuminate the explanations of the manuscript. There was no need to flip constantly back and forth to groups of photos in inserts or to a figure list, which made reading the text a pleasure. The authors made the book even more user friendly with a glossary, bibliography of resources for the study of Southeast Asian manuscripts, and included a facsimile of every illuminated folio of the manuscript on two pages of the book so the reader could see all the illustrations in one place. They also had the really clever idea of putting a ‘map of the manuscript’ at the very beginning. This clearly shows folio by folio where the text and the illustrations are in the manuscript. It also shows clearly how the text and the illustrations do not go together. This might be surprising to a scholar of other manuscript cultures, but this was standard practice in Thailand. Illustrators and scribes did

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF 278 Book Reviews not often work with each other and the illustrations generally do not serve the text or vice-versa. The ‘map of the manuscript’ tool should become the standard practice for scholars publishing editions of manuscripts in the region. Another useful tool in the book is the fact that they abandoned the use of the European pagination conventions. In the past, experts in Siamese manuscripts followed the European model for describing vellum and parchment codices. Namely, they referred to the front and backs of each page — recto and verso. This works well for the codex, but not for concertina or folding-style manuscripts used in Siam. Therefore, Appleton, Shaw, and Unebe use the simple ‘A side’ and ‘B side’ because Siamese manuscripts are long accordion style manuscripts that when pulled out can stretch over 30 feet. The text should be read down the one side first and then the entire manuscript flipped over and the back side read as one long text. In essence, the reader only turns the page (meaning the entire manuscript) once, not every folio. One unfolds or stretches a Siamese samut khoi often, but only turns the page once. These authors respected the medium they were using and didn’t attempt to fit the study of Siamese manuscripts into the conventions of European ones. Finally, the text is extremely user friendly because they not only describe the contents of the text, but the history of collection, reception, and storage of the manuscript to give the reader insight into how a Siamese manuscript came to Oxford. So often scholars only consider the original provenance and socio-historic context in which the manuscript was originally composed. However, this book shows that historical context and provenance are evolving in the life of a text. The Introduction of the book by Sarah Shaw is suited for students and offers a general overview of Siamese manuscripts. It is clear and accessible. There are a few problems that are obvious to experts, but this was not her intended audience and she is not an expert on Siamese Buddhism or manuscript studies. For example, on page 6 she writes that ‘distillations of Buddhist teachings, particu- larly the philosophical Abhidhamma ...’ are found in this manuscript and others. However, this is misleading. The Abhidhamma is almost never included in full in any Siamese manuscript and these are not distillations of a philosophical text here or in other manuscripts (note, in chapter four, Shaw correctly refers to these distillations as sankhepa or abridgements). In this manuscript and most others, the Abhidhamma sections are very short, often one folio for each volume of the seven-volume Abhidhamma. These are not meant for philosophical reflection or instruction. They are not mnemonic triggers for sermons on the Abhidhamma either, as is often assumed. Indeed, these are excerpts of the matika sections of each of the seven volumes. This manuscript is the chanting prompts to the first seven books of theAbhidhamma known as the Abhidhamma Chet Kamphi (or Gambhira) in Thai. Usually the text starts with the standard Namo tassa ... and in these Abhidhamma sections, each folio ends with the title of the volume: and then has the chanting prompts (one folio top and bottom each) for each of the seven books of the Abhidhamma. At the bottom of each of the first seven folios the title of the Abhidhamma chanting prompt is usually given: Phra Saṅgaṇī paripu- ñño, Phra Vibhaṅga paripuñño, Phra Dhātukatha paripuñño, Phra Puggalapaññi paripu- ñño, Phra Kathāvatthu paripuñño, Phra Yamaka paripuñño, and Phra Mahāpaṭṭhāna. Unfortunately, the authors included very few figures which show the text (except for the guide in the beginning, which is a bit too small to be useful), so it is dif-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013 Book Reviews 279 ficult to check. It would have been wonderful to have a full facsimile edition of the text as was seen recently in Pattaratorn Chirapravati’s groundbreaking book Divination au Royaume de Siam: Le Corps, La Guerre, Le Destin: Manuscrit siamois di XIXe siècle (Paris: Foundation Martin Bodmer et Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). However, that would have raised the cost of this book considerably and defeated the purpose of providing a good introduction to students. Regardless, Shaw should have noted more clearly that these are chanting prompts (usually not needed because most seasoned monks know these by heart) for the chanting of these sections at a cremation (she does note this on page 105, but again assumes that these chants are ‘moving’ to the audience at a cremation). They are in Pali, not understood by the vast majority of nuns and monks, not to mention lay people in Thailand, and were not for philosophical reflection, emotional solace, or religious instruction. They are transformative texts used at the time of the cremation to transform the corpse into a new birth. They are not used to arise ‘confidence’ or to ‘reflect’, but to protect and transform. Shaw seems to understand their usage when she describes the text in a bit more detail in chapter four, but even there the explanation is not adequate. She was clearly strug- gling between making this a text for students and the general public and one for experts. She chose the former and it fits the style of the rest of the book. Other parts of the introduction are also a bit unclear. Her description of the Khom script (p. 7) needs to be expanded and clarified. Khom (not to mention the term ‘mul’ script), is often misunderstood to be synonymous with Khmer script. It is not and there are often very clear differences. Moreover, Khom script changed over time in Siam (Central Thailand) and each scribe had their own style of using it and occasionally Siamese script creeps into Khom script. One more curious con- fusing part of the introduction is on the first page. Shaw states that ‘if there is chanting taking place, monks may be present at the front, facing the entrance and the assembly.’ For anyone who has spent time listening to chanting in Thai monasteries, this is an obvious error. The monks usually do not face the assembly or the entrance, they face the Buddha. The Buddha is the primary audience, not the laity or other monks and nuns. For many, it would be insulting to the Buddha to have your back to him while chanting. What is strange is that Shaw includes a photograph of monks chanting on the second page of the introduction and in the photograph the monks are facing the Buddha, not the entrance or the assembly. Therefore, perhaps this is just a typographical error or Shaw meant to write that the sermon giver, a single monk, often the abbot, can face the assembly and the other monks after liturgical chanting while he is giving a sermon in the vernacu- lar (and occasionally interspersed with Pali liturgical chants and for some texts he needs to hold a fan in front of his face while chanting and facing the audience). In either case, there is a problem here. These problems should not take away from the usefulness of the introduction and in chapter four Shaw expands on these top- ics and clarifies some of them. I will discuss the strengths of that chapter below. Overall though, this book’s strengths are not in its description of manuscript culture more broadly, Thai Buddhist liturgical and homiletic practices, or the protective and transformative uses of manuscripts, but in the description of the illustrations by Appleton and Unebe, and in Shaw’s description of the history of the reception of this particular manuscript. Appleton’s takes over in chapter two. She published a very good book on the jātakas as a genre in Buddhism in

2010. Here she focuses on the specific jātakas found in the Bodleian manuscript. She provides a chart and excellent introduction to the last ten canonical jātakas, and then moves on to describe the non-classical/canonical jātakas, with special attention paid to the Paññāsa Jātaka collections that circulate in Southeast Asia. She notes that these local jātakas are often the subject of mural paintings and to a lesser extent illustrations in manuscripts. While this section could have been expanded, for the purpose of an introduction, it is clear and she supplements the description of the jātakas here with the wonderful captions on the images from murals and the Bodleian manuscript. Indeed, a student would learn much just by reading the captions. The section of her chapter that I found most useful though was on page 13 when she discusses the often overlooked role ‘gods’ (usually asso- ciated with Hindu traditions) play in Buddhist stories in South and Southeast Asia and their frequent appearance in manuscript illustrations and mural paintings. She focuses on the role of gods in the Candakumāra Jātaka and the Temiya Jātaka, among others. Then she offers a detailed description alongside images of each of the jātakas in the Bodleian manuscript. It is this balance between general com- ments and detailed description which makes the book so accessible and useful. I plan to use her chapter as the standard reading in the section on jātakas in my course on Buddhist literature. Toshiya Unebe’s chapter is also extremely useful, but unlike the first two chap- ters, his is written not as an introduction, but as a sustained argument. He points out an obvious but, until now, largely unnoticed fact – the life of the Buddha, which is such a common story in sermons, commentaries, histories, reliefs, and murals is almost completely absent in manuscript illustration. Unebe, one of the most qualified and meticulous scholars of Southeast Asian Pali texts and artis- tic traditions, shows the close relation between mural painters and manuscript illustrators. Indeed, it seems from my own research and from insights provided by Unebe, that these might have been the same person often. For example, in a manuscript I recently analyzed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, I noticed that the artist of the manuscript illustrations was probably the exact same artist as the one who who produced the murals in the ubosot of Wat Sommanat in Bangkok, Khrua In Khong. Unebe shows how similar styles and themes move across these two visual mediums. That being the case, then, he asks, why are depictions of the life of the Buddha so rare in manuscripts when other stories are not? Indeed, the Bodleian manuscript is a very rare example. I have found other individual scenes taken from the life of the Buddha in some other manuscripts, but nothing as extensive as the Bodleian example. Another important contribution Unebe makes is his section on the Paṭhamasambodhi. This is an extra-canonical history of the Buddha composed in Pali that circulates throughout Southeast Asia in multiple vernacu- lars. This source, not earlier, often fragmented, biographies of the Buddha composed in Sanskrit or Pali in South Asia, is the actual source of the visual depictions of the Buddha in Southeast Asia, especially Siam/Thailand. Indeed, it is Prince Paramānujit’s 1845 Siamese language version which is the most well-known for late nineteenth century muralists. The Bodleian manuscript illustrator must have been working on one of the many earlier versions of the text Unebe speculates. However, I wish he had considered that the source for the illustrator was not necessarily a text, but simply earlier visual depictions. It is clear that artists were

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013 Book Reviews 281 not often referring to texts or concerned with textual accuracy or allegiance but, instead, other murals and illustrations were their source. Indeed, I often thought that Unebe concentrated too much on trying to associate each illustration in the manuscript with each chapter in different versions of the Paṭhamasambodhi and that he saw art as derivative of text. But, later on he shows that he actually sees them in relationship by writing: ‘there was interaction between the textual narrative and the visual narrative as they developed’ (pp. 58–59). Sometimes, though, as I have argued elsewhere, there are many illustrations in both murals and manuscripts in Thailand that do not have textual sources and furthermore murals and manuscript illustrations were not designed to be simply a visual narrative or an alternate text for the illiterate, but as a gift to the Buddha, a form of merit-making, and a method of competition, innovation, and communication between artists that has nothing to do with accurately attempting to visualize texts. However, despite this one small issue I have with his chapter, Unebe’s notes and text are the best short introduction to the text I have read and will hope- fully encourage scholars and students outside of Thailand to pay attention to this important source. I appreciate how he describes four scenes from the life of the Buddha which are very important in the visual culture of Siamese/Thai Buddhism that are often neglected in texts; namely, the lesson of the three strings, the gifts of the monkey and the elephant, the gift of the mango, and the return to Kapilavatthu. Unebe shows that these scenes have questionable textual sources, but even without textual authority, were ‘popular subjects for Buddhist art’ (p. 60). I think this could be expanded upon to provide a new way of thinking about the relation between text and art in Thailand. Unebe provides a great introduction to that new avenue of exploration. Finally, Shaw’s chapter four on ‘The Lifestory of a Manuscript’ is what every study of manuscripts should have, but many don’t. She provides a detailed description of the stylistic characteristics of the thick mul script, the use of per- spective, and the limited palette of pigments that was available for this manuscript. This all points to a late-eighteenth century date. More importantly though, she describes in good detail the ‘travels of the manuscript’ from Siam to Kandy (Sri Lanka) to Oxford. She pays close attention to a letter that may refer to the Bodleian manuscript by Rev. Benjamin Clough in response to a request to examine the manuscript by William Carmichael Gibson in Galle (Sri Lanka) in 1819, as well as to an old label attached to the manuscript which could contain the signature of Gibson. She suggests that this manuscript could have been sent to Sri Lanka to help revive Buddhism there in the mid-eighteenth century. This would explain such a strangely comprehensive text. I think she is certainly on to something. She doesn’t explicitly state – perhaps because it is obvious – that the Bodleian manuscript is very odd. It is not an ideal exemplar, but a strange outlier. First, rarely are this many liturgical texts included in samut khoi manuscripts. The Bodleian manuscript is a virtual anthology of texts, when most illuminated manuscripts of this quality and type did not include this variety and are primarily focused on the Phra Malai, last ten jātakas, or the Abhidhamma Chet Kamphi (or a combination of these). Moreover, her reasoning could help answer Unebe’s mystery – the illustrations of the life of the Buddha are usually not in manuscripts, but were included in this one, because religious scholars in Kandy were interested in as much foun- dational material as they could obtain from Siam at that time and while murals

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013 282 Book Reviews are not moveable, manuscripts were. It also explains why only Pali was used in this manuscript, whereas many if not most Siamese manuscripts contain a mix- ture of Pali and Siamese. A Sri Lankan audience would not be able to understand Siamese. Shaw’s research goes a long way to solving the riddle of a wonderful text and a treasure of Thai culture, religion, and history. Shaw’s thorough research tracing the journey of the text, combined with Appleton and Unebe’s respective expertise in texts and art, make this book an absolute essential resource for any student or scholar embarking on the study of the extensive and sophisticated Siamese manuscript culture. It is quite an achievement.