Olivier de Bernon
EFEO, Paris, France
Jetavana monastery is presented, in the Commentaries, as having been Lord Buddhas’abode during nineteen rainy seasons. Situated near the city of Sâvatthi, this place was offered to the Master by one of his wealthy disciples, Anâthapindika, after this one had paid this piece of land with covering its whole surface with gold coins. One knows that if Jetavana monastery did remain active up to the XIIth century, its previous splendor, probably largly allegorical, had faded away even since the VIIth century, at the time of the cinese pilgrim Hiuen-Tsiang visit.
All traces of the Jetavana arama had diapeard for centuries before it was located again thanks to General Alexander Cunnigham excavations in 1863, and before the archeological excavation conducted by the Duch Jean Philippe Vogel could reveal its previous extension and organisation.
Even so, during the many centuries which had followed the decline and the diapearance of the refuge of the Buddha, when it had vanished from all local memories, its souvenir remaind vivid in all Southeast Asia. On the one hand, the name Jetavana has been given to many large religious institutions, either in Ceylon, in Siam or in Cambodia, in such a way that the confusion occurred when a traveller, the japanese pilgrim Shimano Kenryõ, thought that he was actually at Buddha’s Jetuvana, when he visited Angkor Vat in Cambodia, during the XVIIth century. One the other hand, Jetavana became a technical term to designate some items in buddhist architecture.
Moreover, the theme of the « Journey to Jetuvana » inspired some litterary works, during the XVIIIth and the XIXth centuries, in Siam and in Cambodia, without making always possible to separate what amounted to the poetic or symbolic dimension of these works, and what amounted to the self dellusion of their author who thought they had reach the actual Jetuvana.
The presentation and the traduction of a rare khmer manuscript, ‘The history of Jetuvana’ (r‚ön brah jettabun) will illustrate these questions.
(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))