This research investigates traditional and contemporary approaches of conserving and restoring mural paintings in Buddhist living heritage places in Thailand and Sri Lanka. These highly symbolic paintings enhancing the walls of Buddhist monasteries or stupas are an important aspect of South and South-East Asia’s legacy. Exploring local historical and social contexts highlights how the general epistemological shift that occurred in Thailand and Sri Lanka in the 19th century, acted on the new values associated with ancient monasteries and merged with longstanding social and spiritual relations people maintain toward these recently labeled living heritage sites. Present heritage management in South and South-East Asia has been strongly influenced by concepts of art history, art and science brought into the region with the colonial empires in the 19th century. Nonetheless, meaningful sites were continually maintained, restored and embellished long before the notion of cultural heritage was assimilated. Their maintenance was rooted in a cosmological and political structure where the notion of merit-making defined the moral and societal status of traditional care-takers, ranging from the donors to the artisans and devotees. Hence, the selection of what to conserve and how to conserve material heritage acted on other rules, which were and still are culturally significant. Damaged Buddhist images or paintings are not suitable for worship. When the humid and hot tropical climate deteriorated paintings every quarter of a century, they were often repainted. These practices inherent to the Buddhist realm, where the acceptance of impermanence is subsumed and where material authenticity or integrity is secondary compared to the transmission of spiritual coherence. These approaches are in conflict with Western conservation ethics forming the foundation of conservation practice in international charters and guidelines. The investigation explores how national policies have compromised between continuing intangible values linked to sacred objects and modern conservation exigencies. Currently more familiar reconstitution and reintegration methods of the mural paintings coexist with the traditional approaches. Furthermore the combined records from countries, where Buddhism plays a significant role, reveal a common approach in conservation of wall paintings rooted in the Buddhist legacy and epistemology. This is particularly noteworthy considering the fact that Theravada Buddhism came from Sri Lanka to Thailand in the 12th century and that there has been a mutual influence in religious and artistic expression throughout the following periods.
