Present: Celeste Holland,
James Bogle, Carol & Bob Stratton, John Thomson, Fran Decoster, Bill Feetham,
Pallop Changkaocha, Sarunya
Dhamagul, Carol Grodzins,
Patricia Cheesman, Jody & Dale Harcourt, Duenpen Chaladlam, Maria Piotrowski, Donna Durbin, Layle
Wood, Spencer Wood, Sebastien Tayac, Mark & Dianne Barber-Riley, Mike
& Rose Dean, Christine Mougne, Ricky
Ward, Hans Bänziger, Peter Kunstadter,
Patricia Rishi, Bodil Blokker, Rebecca
Hall, Winnie Tan. An audience of 31 plus a few more.
Summary of her
presentation prepared by Bonnie
Isan's traditional Buddhist
murals are little known to art historians and even to many people in
the Northeast. Most are found in village monasteries outside of and
often far from provincial capital cities. My research is focused on
those in what I call "the Isan heartland"
of Khon Kaen,
Maha Sarakham,
Roi Et, and Kalasin provinces, an area that was less
impacted by external influences than were other parts of the region.
These murals are truly folk art in that they were sponsored and
created, not by the elite, but by ordinary folk whose primary
occupation was rice farming; consequently
they are markedly different from the murals one usually sees in Bangkok and even
in other parts of Isan.
The folk in this case
were the Thai of Lao ethnicity, whose cultural forms were long devalued
and even ridiculed by central government administrators. As a result,
local people often failed to see the value of their work and many
traditional unique temple buildings were torn down and replaced by
standardized ("Mc Wat") models designed in Bangkok.
Isan murals are painted
on the exterior walls of ordination halls known in the Lao language as sim, a word derived from the Pali "sima," the boundary markers used to delineate
the hall's sacred space. (Ordination halls in other parts of Thailand
are known as ubosoth or bot). External murals are a distinctive feature
of the Isan heartland and are not found
elsewhere in Thailand.
Some sim have interior murals as well. Sim
come in diverse architectural styles, but Isan
heartland sim all have several features in
common, the most distinctive being a wide gabled roof, extending
outward to shelter the murals on the walls below.
Isan heartland murals are
filled with myriad forms of local plant and animal life-wild and
domesticated, real and mythical, food source and friend. Banana,
bamboo, banyan, bodhi, palm, papaya,
jackfruit, tamarind, and other types of real and imaginary trees
provide the background to many scenes. Jungle-dwelling deer, tigers,
hogs, monkeys, peacocks, owls, and vultures are found alongside royal
elephants and horses as well as village dogs, ducks, chickens, and
water buffalo.
Extraordinary
creatures derived from Hindu-Buddhist cosmology include the naga, the kinnari,; the singha, and
the khotchasi. An amazing botanical
species is the nari phon
tree, whose fruits are nubile young maidens who emerge from the flowers
feet-first and sway delicately from its branches.
For the most part, Isan mural compositions are tightly packed with
details, but at two of the wats I have studied, the use of space is
open and uncluttered. At all wats humans and animals are drawn as flat,
outlined figures with no concern for realistic proportion or scale, but
disproportionately large in comparison to their background. Horses and
elephants resemble carousel figures ridden by toy soldiers; palaces
look like doll houses, and forests are clusters of bonsai plants. Most
of the characters depicted, whatever their species or status, have a
benign quality to them. Spiritually evolved characters such as gods,
heroes, and heroines (including bodhisattvas and their families) are
especially sweet and gentle. Even villainous and demonic characters are
not entirely intimidating. Scenes depicting their battles with heroes
are iconographic and stylized, with no evidence of blood and gore.
The stories depicted
most frequently are the Vessantara Jataka, Sin Sai, Phra
Lak Phra
Ram (the Lao version of the Rama epic) and three key events in the life
of the Buddha (leaving the palace, victory over Mara, and parinirvana). The Totsachat,
or last ten Jatakas, are seen less
frequently in the Isan heartland than in
other parts of the country. Hell scenes, with or without the arhat Phra Malai, appear at most wats.
The Vessantara Jataka
is in many ways the most important story in Theravada Buddhist
Southeast Asia and Sri
Lanka. It tells of Prince Vessantara, who gave away not only his royal
belongings, but also his children and wife. It exemplifies generosity,
which can also be construed as non-attachment, the ultimate Buddhist
value. Listening to the Jataka's
recitation is considered a way of making sufficient merit to enable one
to be reborn during the era of the next Buddha, Maitreya,
and thereby have a better opportunity to attain nirvana. This teaching
is one of the main points of the Phra Malai sutta (in the
local version, Malai Muen
Malai Saen) which is read
before the Vessantara Jataka.
In it, the arhat Phra
Malai travels first to
the Buddhist hells and then to Tavatimsa
Heaven, where he meets the future Buddha Maitreya,
who gives him a message to take back to the human realm: those who wish
to be born when he is born in the human realm should follow the Five
Precepts, practice generosity, and listen to the entire Vessantara Jataka
in one day and one night. The significance of this story and its
relevance to Isan murals can be seen in
the relationship between mural composition and celebration of the Vessantara Jataka
merit-making festival in Isan.
Regarding the murals'
composition, most walls are divided into a series of registers or rows,
each comprised of human figures and animals moving in a direction
opposite to those in the registers above and below. Compared to those
in other parts of Thailand,
Isan heartland murals are
freer, more spontaneous, and less predicable. Each sim
is unique in terms of the location of stories and themes, individual
renderings of certain characters, and artistic skill. Yet, at the same
time, Isan painters shared a vision of the
world that differed significantly from that of painters in and around Bangkok.
In Central Region
murals there is a spatial hierarchy dividing the walls into registers,
from upper to lower, with celestial beings at the very top, high-born
humans in the middle, and servants and other lower class humans at the
bottom. Isan heartland murals, by
contrast, portray not only religious stories, but also the
participation of the Buddhist faithful in the reenactment of these
stories. Ordinary people are found at all levels of the composition and
their role in rituals is an integral part of the composition.
It is at first
difficult to decipher the relationship between one register and
another. While the component parts of a mural can be identified,
fitting them together into a comprehensible whole is at first
difficult. The key to decoding central Isan
murals lies in seeing the movement of the horizontal panels or
registers around the exterior of the sim.
This can be seen by comparing the murals with the horizontal cloth
scrolls (pha phra
wet) on which are painted scenes from each chapter of the Vessantara Jataka.
The scrolls are carried in annual Vessantara
Jataka (known as Bun Pha Wet) processions by laypeople to the local
wat; in this ritual they are inviting Vessantara
to return to the city after his long exile in the forest. When the
procession reaches the wat, the scrolls are hung around the interior of
the preaching hall, where the story is recited later. The scrolls and
murals resemble each iconographically and
stylistically.
Both replicate the
movement of the congregation during Vessantara
Jataka processions.
Virtually every Isan wat holds an annual
festival at some time between February and April. The scrolls' final
scene depicts Vessantara's triumphant
procession back to the capital after performing ultimate acts of
nonattachment. At the same time it reflects fertility and rain-making
rituals: figure after figure of musicians, palace officials, and
merry-makers dance, play music, drink local brew, and flirt with
abandon. Murals are filled with similar scenes, and both reflect the
actual celebration of the Bun Pha Wet
festival in thousands of wats throughout the region. In this way the
murals, the scrolls, and the ritual re-enactment of this Buddhist story
- because of its indigenous magical efficacy - occupy a place integral
to the lives of the local people and their belief system.
Most Isan mural painters will never be identified
because their names were usually not recorded; those who are remembered
are known only by their first names and titles, which indicates that they included both laypeople and
monks. Sponsorship was generally a community effort and villagers
contributed to the extent that they could, either in cash, kind, or
labor.
Insight into the
contributions of donors can be found in a rare list of names on the
walls of Wat Udom Pracha
Ratchadon, in Kalasin that provides the names of twenty-five
individuals who contributed a total of twenty-seven baht for the
creation of the murals. This extraordinary list provides a valuable
record of both the dynamics of communal support and the value of the
Thai baht when the building was completed in 1938.
Artists in the Isan heartland, like all those throughout South
and Southeast Asia, used not only
their imagination but also their personal experience in creating scenes
from Buddhist narratives. While the stories depicted are based on
classic Indic models, they are set within the context of local terrain,
foliage, architecture, social behavior, and material culture.
Consequently murals serve as ethnographic catalogues of various aspects
of Lao/Isan village life in the early
twentieth century, including the activities and antics of ordinary
people, their dress, rituals, celebrations, and forms of livelihood.
Sex is a topic of
interest to people of all cultures of the world, and no less so to the
peoples of Thailand.
A considerable part of folk literature throughout the country includes
references to sexual activity. Nidhi Eoseewong, a well-known Thai scholar, notes that
various forms of singing which accompany ordinary activities like
harvesting and boating are filled with sexual innuendoes; he suggests
that they once may have been connected with fertility rites. Thai court
poetry is also famous for its references to sexual encounters, ranging
from rather explicit descriptions to narrative passages referred to as
"wondrous scenes." The latter are poetic descriptions of natural
phenomena, including earthquakes, storms at sea, lightning, rainfall,
and the interactions of bees and flowers, as codified metaphors for
erotic activity.
In the same vein,
Buddhist murals in every part of the country usually include scenes of
flirting, courting, and more-or-less explicit depictions of love-making
that take place on the periphery of the drama being enacted. In Central Thailand such activities are generally
confined to the lower registers, where genre scenes of the common
people, usually depicted as dark-skinned bumpkins, are found. However,
minor deities are sometimes seen cavorting in the heavens.
In Isan heartland murals such activities are not
confined to the lower registers but can be found at any level, and
sometimes even on the sim's interior wall
directly behind the main Buddha image. Moreover, while candid, they are
not so much erotic or pornographic as they are bawdy, fun-loving, and
aimed at communicating certain attitudes toward the subjects depicted.
Bawdy details can frequently be found in portrayals of the
enlightenment scene. The future Buddha, seated beneath the bodhi tree, is besieged by Mara, the lord of
delusion, and his warriors. Below, the earth goddess Nang Thorani wrings
out her hair into a torrent that sweeps away Mara's demonic-looking
warriors who are gobbled up, head-first by gigantic ravenous fish. A
particularly robust example can be seen at Wat Khon
Kaen Nua,
Roi Et province, where
the warriors are being consumed head-first, while their lower bodies,
drawn with exaggerated genitalia, protrude from the mouths of the fish.
This sort of bawdiness is a ubiquitous part of Isan
village entertainment, celebrations, and festivals. Traditional molam singing and shadow plays are laced with
earthy humor in the form of word play and ribald interchange.
The dry season rocket
festival, which includes processions of dancers, naga-shaped
floats, and villagers carrying pairs of copulating dolls with
exaggerated genitalia, is a prime example of an agricultural fertility
rite based on sexual symbolism intended to bring rain. On this occasion
and at processions for ordinations and other religious merit-making
festivities, participants (mostly male, but some female as well)
generally drink home brew or cheap commercial whiskey as they dance and
sway, with fluid hip and hand movements, to the rhythm of drums and
gongs.
Scenes like this
appear in countless murals. They often exhibit sexually bold behavior
that would be unacceptable in everyday life-the men sometimes wrapping
their legs around the women or fondling their breasts-with the women
resisting, acquiescing, or sometimes reciprocating. Do such portrayals
represent actual behavior, as inversions of customary inhibitions that
actually occur during certain merit-making occasions? Or are they the
hyperbolic expression of the full fun and joy that participants feel
during these times of exuberant celebration as they experience relief
from the drudgery of everyday life and hope in the effect of their
merit-making? What is certain is that these spirited scenes are
attention-getters that sustain the viewer's interest. The element of
surprise is always present; when perusing a mural, one is never sure
when such details might occur.
Bawdy scenes occur in
numerous other contexts as well. An example is related to the
relationship between Chuchok and Amittada. The old Brahmin truly loves his lovely
young wife and treats her so well that their conjugal bliss evokes envy
and disharmony among neighboring couples. The tensions come to a head
when the other wives retaliate by taunting Amittada.
While in Central Region murals the neighbors' antics are limited to
pinching the unfortunate young woman, in Isan
they go much further. At Wat Ban Yang they insult her by "mooning" her,
lifting their phasin (skirts) to expose
their bare buttocks. At Wat Sanuan Wari they not only lift their skirts, but even
urinate at her. Such portrayals evoke sympathy toward Amittada and Chuchok,
who rather than being monochromatic icons of good or evil, are tinged
with a range of moral, human hues.
On the other hand, Chuchok's demise is often depicted with great
fun and gusto. Isan painters seem to
relish portraying how his uncontrolled craving leads him to consume
such a huge amount of food that his stomach bursts open, causing him to
die. One way to do this is to draw a bystander pointing to the Brahmin
and his bulging midriff. A clever caption can add even more emphasis to
this crucial incident, as seen in the enthusiastic use of alliteration
at Wat Sanuan Wari.
It reads: "...thong phram tuum taeg taai," a rough
approximation of which might be, "and the Brahmin, his belly bursting
open with a bang, bit the dust."
The examples above
illustrate the Lao/Isan love of bawdy,
slapstick humor in every aspect of life, including the teaching of
Buddhist stories and ideals. I hope that some of you will be interested
in visiting these wats in the future and experiencing these robustly
expressive murals first hand.
In addition to the
energy that she put into enthusiastically delivering a presentation
that was both informative and entertaining, we must also express our
gratitude to Bonnie for spending most of the afternoon and evening, up
until minutes before her talk began, working with computer technicians
to persuade her laptop to work with the Alliance's LCD projector to
show the images in all their true glory. Many thanks
Bonnie for your dedication.
