Buddha Images as Objects of Donation

In 1976, Hans Penth, pioneering scholar of Lanna, published a catalogue of over three hundred Buddha statues bearing inscriptions and dating from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries found in central Chiang Mai monasteries. This invaluable record is here analyzed in depth as a whole for the first time. It provides further insight into the relationship between Buddha images and donors. Statues were often sponsored through collaboration, reflecting the image’s role in materializing sociokarmic groupings seen as extending through the future. Donor resolutions reflect the significance of producing Buddha statues for Buddhism’s future prosperity as well as for donors’ individual spiritual and material aspirations. Images are often described by material and size, reflecting the relation between financial donation and merit generated. Also, refurbishments to statues indicate how they were never seen as finished, nor their appearance seen as sacrosanct; a statue is a palimpsest of its interactions with devotees through time.

Buddha Images and Relics

Images and bodily relics are often categorized together as representations making the Buddha ‘present’ for his worshippers. At the same time, due to their physical form, relics have often been viewed as more immediately channeling his presence. Nonetheless, as Robert Sharf has remarked, fragments and ash require reliquaries as frames to indicate their sacred status. Lanna and Burmese chronicles also provide frames by describing a particular visual imagery for relics. This emphasizes the significance of visuality for Buddhist devotion, raising the question of whether relics were always understood as more direct representations of the Buddha than images. Chronicles also indicate how Lanna devotees distinguished relics and statues. Stories of relics inevitably highlight the connection between Buddha and place, and relics did not journey like the travelling images. This theme of place was shared by Burmese stories but less so by Lankan accounts, which emphasize a social hierarchy of relic handling.

Introduction

Statues of the Buddha proliferate in Thailand. Every town and province honors its own special Buddha image. The Emerald Buddha, housed on the grounds of the royal Grand Palace, is the country’s palladium. Typically, Buddha images have been defined as devotional reminders or doctrinal symbols, but these explanations fail to account for the complex and deep relationships between Buddha images and their communities. In order to understand Buddha statues, we must consider them as the productions of living societies. The Buddha image is an object that represents not only the Buddha himself but also channels the sometimes divergent interests of the lay devotees and monks who build, consecrate and venerate it. This understanding of the Buddha image as a participant in the social world of its worshippers is strikingly depicted in monastic chronicles, tamnan, from the Lanna region centered in northern Thailand.

Buddha Images as Objects of Transferrable Power

Modern scholars explain the development of Thai Buddhist art as driven by a long-standing tradition of copying revered models. Nonetheless, how people of the past determined which models to copy has been deliberated by only by a handful of scholars. The work of A. B. Griswold, M.L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Piriya Krariksh and Stanley Tambiah indicates the interplay of doctrine, politics and prestige which influenced which Buddha images were most revered and copied. Evidence from chronicles shows that powerful statues were not visually distinctive, a positive characteristic that facilitated copying. Images were usually described by their material, weight and size, which reflect the donor’s financial outlay and therefore merit-generating potential of the image. The limited set of iconographies facilitated the comparison of statues in this monastic ‘economy’ of donation and merit exchange. Though the Buddha image was ‘singularized’ by its enshrinement, it was still understood as a ‘commoditized’ object.

Buddha Images and the Monkhood

The Mūlasāsanā chronicles narrate the history of two monastic sects, the Flower Garden (Suan Dok) and the Redwood Grove (Pa Daeng), in Lanna. The texts describe a furious feud between the orders in the sixteenth century. The accounts contradict Weberian conceptions of monks as withdrawn from the wider secular world. The orders deliberately drew the laity into the feud by emphasizing that patronizing the wrong order carried mortal risks. The monks deployed Buddha statues and stories about them; as images arise from the agencies of monks and lay devotees, they are connected to both and thus the ideal means for the monkhood to embroil the laity in the dispute. Accounts of Buddha statues from the Burmese Glass Palace Chronicle likewise reflect this conception of the image as both the Buddha himself and as an object subject to human manipulation, and therefore as an object whose agencies must be managed.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the main findings of each chapter.

Buddha Images and Place

Certain Lanna chronicles recount that the Buddha visited southeast Asia during his lifetime. He left strands of his hair and imprints of his feet for his devotees and made predictions about the future greatness of Lanna cities. These accounts depict Lanna places not as sites of Buddhist conquest or reform but as special places that through the ages have been sources of attraction and inspiration to multiple Buddhas. Lanna’s towns, lakes and hills play a distinctive role in Buddhist history as the channels that enable the ongoing agency of Buddhas. Buddha statues were created in these places to mark these channels that are crucial to the prosperity of the world. The relationship of Buddha to place echoes that depicted in classical Buddhist texts and is also found in the story of the Burmese Mahāmuni image. A Lanna story from Lampang also distinctively casts light on gender relations in Buddhism.

Buddha Images and Devotees

The fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries have been remembered as the “golden age” of Lanna. Royal support for Buddhism expanded on an unprecedented scale. Buddha statues such as the Emerald, Sihing, Sikhi, Sandalwood and Setangkhamani became famous at this time. Monastic chronicles were written narrating the ‘biography’ of each of these ‘travelling images,’ which journeyed around Asia over many hundreds of years. These chronicles, not without humor and entertainment, drew lineages of revered persons, mainly kings, who honored each statue through time. Lanna’s kings were positioned as the heirs to great Buddhist leaders of the past. The histories of the Lanna monarchy and a wider world of Buddhism were thus intertwined and materialized by a Buddha image. These accounts were probably not merely political messages but efforts by the monkhood to educate and encourage ambitious rulers to economically support the monasteries.