7 - The text and the world

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In 1455, King Tilokaraja of Chiang Mai, a northern kingdom in what we now know as Thailand, began to build a new Buddhist temple in imitation of the Maha Bodhi temple at Bodh Gaya (India), which marks the site of Sakyamuni Buddha‘s enlightenment. After first installing a bodhi tree – a devotional reminder of the Buddha‘s enlightenment – transferred from one of Chiang Mai's most powerful existing Buddhist sites, Tilokaraja continued to sponsor work at the new temple for years to come. Spaces for the veneration of Sakyamuni Buddha were constructed, along with a pavilion for the recitation of Buddhist texts and a monastic library. This temple in Chiang Mai, the Seven Spires Monastery, later housed a large gathering of Buddhist monks invited by the king to purify and recite the contents of canonical Buddhist texts.

The labor, wealth, and royal support required for this temple and its editorial assembly, as well as the importance of both to subsequent Thai Buddhist memory, remind us that the texts central to religious traditions and communities of practitioners are – and long have been – alive in the world. Such texts are performed in liturgy and ritual. They are references used in sophisticated intellectual debate, as well as tools for basic education. Celebrated within religious communities, texts also shape the world of material culture, guiding the creation of statues and paintings and providing descriptive models for the construction of spaces for ritual and devotion. Those books or manuscripts deemed transformatively powerful are drawn into the work of magic and protective ritual. To possess religious texts, or to support their production, is often (especially in a manuscript culture) a display of wealth and power.