Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
指導教授
Collins, Steven
畢業年度
2002
附註項
330p
關鍵詞
Spreading; Written word; Premodern; Thailand; Dhamma; Pali; Buddhism
摘要
This dissertation focuses on the transmission of the Tipitaka and related Pāli texts through the written word in the northern Thai kingdom of Lan Na during its Golden Age in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It assesses the complex relationship of this medium to the oral tradition, and locates the literate culture of Lan Na in relation to that of both geographically and chronologically proximate polities. The dissertation aims both to present a picture of the role that Pāli writing, chiefly on palm-leaf manuscripts, played in northern Thailand during the period under study, and also to assess the attitudes that were held towards writing by different social groups.
Written Pāli literature was a site of contestation that various groups saw alternatively as a vehicle for textual communication, an instrument of political power and a threat to cultural hegemony. Of the three main northern Thai monastic orders at the time, the newest one, an araññavāsī or forest-dwelling order that was brought from Sri Lanka in 1425 CE, was most interested in using writing both to communicate and to store Pāli texts. Monarchs, too, for some time had been inclined to employ writing for the administration of the kingdom, for legal texts and for inter-regnal communication. This type of usage may have acclimatized them to writing, enticing them to use it for religious purposes as well. Once they began to sponsor manuscripts, they realized that these projects and the texts that proceeded from them could be used to cultivate strong ties to the Dhamma and thus increase their prestige in the eyes of their subjects. Many of the monks, on the other hand, were somewhat resistant to the use of writing to transmit Pāli texts because it impeded on their status as sole guardians of the oral texts.
