Anne M. Blackburn

Buddhist Connections in the Indian Ocean: Changes in Monastic Mobility, 1000-1500

Since the nineteenth century, Buddhists residing in the present-day nations of Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka have thought of themselves as participants in a shared southern Asian Buddhist world characterized by a long and continuous history of integration across the Bay of Bengal region, dating at least to the third century bcereign of the Indic King Asoka. Recently, scholars of Buddhism and historians of the region have begun to develop a more historically variegated account of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, using epigraphic, art historical, and archaeological evidence, as well as new interpretations of Buddhist chronicle texts. 1 This paper examines three historical episodes in the eleventh- to fifteenth-century history of Sri Lankan-Southeast Asian Buddhist connections attested by epigraphic and Buddhist chronicle accounts. These indicate changes in regional Buddhist monastic connectivity during the period 1000-1500, which were due to new patterns of mobility related to changing conditions of trade and to an altered political ecosystem in maritime southern Asia.

Buddha-Relics in the Lives of Southern Asian Polities

Drawing on literary and inscriptional evidence from Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia, this essay examines the place of Buddha-relics — potent traces of a Buddha — in the life cycle of southern Asian political formations. In the formation of new polities and/or new dynasties, relics were drawn into the physical landscape and literary memory of the state, in order to provide protection and to claim desirable lineage and authority. At times of heightened military and political activity, when kingdoms were at risk, the protection and deployment of relics, and their ritual engagement, formed part of the states central technologies. During periods of victory and restoration, relic festivals and the enhancement of a landscape embedded with relics, were used to display, affirm, and protect the royal court.

The text and the world

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 Mais 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.