François Lagirarde
EFEO, Bangkok, Thailand
Even if the corpus of Northern Thai “chronicles” or tamnan has not yet been fully documented or catalogued, it is safe to state that most tamnan tell and retell, reformulate, reframe and recycle, Buddhist narratives with different degrees of fact and fiction. Traditional chronicles, as a relatively “free” or open genre, have actively exploited ancient formulas, templates and recipes from mainstream and regional Buddhist literature together with Thai/Tai folklore to bring new and multiple meanings into evolving historical situations. This is especially true for what are called the tham tamnan and puttha tamnan, but it also holds, at least in some aspects, to the phuen or tamnan mueang. The first type was especially constructed in the form of (not so) simple stories for a Northern-Thai speaking lay audience; because the tamnan were also delivered and transmitted orally, they were more subject to evolution and transformation. The tamnan, when presenting series of plots or mythos designed in a narrative structure, usually seek to convey a clear moral teaching.
This paper will firstly provide examples of different ways of using narrative structures, or themes, from a vast selection of tamnan (most of them recently digitalized by the EFEO-Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre project in various monasteries of the Northern provinces and still unpublished).
In the second part of the paper we will discuss the actual function of the tamnan. Should tamnan be seen as an effective way of constructing history and cultural references at specific times and places? Did tamnan also function as models or guidelines for individual and community practise, adapting and localizing Buddhist principles at the temple and village level, but at the same time regionally and even trans-regionally? Could tamnan fulfill its role as a ritual act in itself – writing, reading, and listening – sustaining a continual Buddhist education of the society? If these functions eventually became obsolete, along with the tamnan as a living genre, is it possible to determine when and why this happened?
(Presented in the International Conference – Buddhist Narrative in Asia and Beyond, 9-11 August 2010, Imperial Queen's Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University with support from The Thailand Research Fund (TRF), in co-operation with Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Institute of Asian Studies, The Confucius Institute, Chulalongkorn University and l’École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO))