Peter Skilling
EFEO
In the form of citations from canonical texts, the Buddha’s word was put to a variety of uses in early Southeast Asia. I classify what I regard as the two primary uses as “empowerment” and “display.”
“Empowerment” involves the installation and inscription of excerpted scriptural passages, usually short. The most common text is the ye dharmā stanza, which, engraved on metal, stone, or brick, or stamped with moulds on clay, was inserted within stupas or inscribed on the surfaces of stupas and Buddha images. Similar practices were widespread across Asia; by comparing them, we can trace regional and transregional patterns of ritual practice. In the absence of any indigenous or contemporary Southeast Asian texts to explain the practices of empowerment, we are obliged to consult, with due caution, relevant Indian texts, whether in Indic languages or in classical translations into Chinese and Tibetan. For Southeast Asia, we need to assess the degree of localization in terms of variant practices, relations to the built environment, and association with iconographic forms.
“Display” also involves the inscription of excerpted scriptural passages. Since the texts are often the same as or cognate to those used in empowerment, my categories should be used as provisional interpretive tools rather than seen as mutually exclusive artefacts. In the case of Pali inscriptions, those intended for display show more textual variety, and are often longer than those intended for empowerment. A major difference is that display inscriptions are public documents; the letters are often large and carefully if not calligraphically inscribed. Here the Buddha’s words are meant to be seen and read; at the same time they reflect the power and blessing derived from writing down the Master’s word. As far as I know, there are no contemporary South or Southeast Asian texts that explicitly or implicitly explain the practice.
With a very few exceptions in South and Central Asia, the production of public display inscriptions seems unique to Southeast Asia, where they are found largely in the Pali epigraphic zones, but also in the Indonesian archipelago. The languages of the regions in question belong to the Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer, and Austronesian families; that is, none are Indic-speaking areas. Part of the authority of the inscriptions may be that they are inscribed in classical “Buddhist” languages.
Both practices, “empowerment” and “display”, are found, in varying degrees, across mainland and insular Southeast Asia, although the practice of display is much more widespread in Siam, and to a degree in lower Burma, than elsewhere. Siam and Burma belong epigraphically to what I have called the Pali zone: they preserved by far the largest number of Pali inscriptions anywhere (in fact, there are no others to speak of anywhere else). Elsewhere in the region, the Buddha’s word is recorded in Sanskrit, and, in a very few of cases, in Prakrit.
None of the inscriptions preserves a date, and many are surface finds. Nonetheless, they can give us a general mapping of the spread of the Buddha’s word in mainland Southeast Asia in the fifth to eight centuries of the first millennium CE. The inscriptions help us to understand the diffusion and evolution of ritual practice across the region, and possible interactions and exchanges with contemporary Buddhist cultures across Asia.
(Presented in the 2012 Chulalongkorn-EFEO International Conference on Buddhist Studies : Imagination, Narrative, and Localization, 6-7 January 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, organized by Faculty of Arts and Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University In conjunction with The Buddhist Studies Group, EFEO)