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This article describes Buddhist murals illustrating some unusual features and surviving in the small brick temple number 36 at Sale, one of the major satellite towns during the Pagan period. The town is located on the east bank of the Irrawady River, 30 miles downstream from Old Pagan. The temple and its principal Buddha image can be stylistically...
Citations
This research explores the temple murals visualizing the Buddha life stories in the medieval context of Southeast Asian Theravāda. Being primarily based on various Pāli sources, the murals of focus – complicatedly arrayed in the shadow of the Pagan civilization, flourishing in the western sphere of the mainland from the mid-11th to the late-13th century – were also symbolically organized for the temple housing them to represent Jambudīpa, centered at Bodhgaya. The phenomenon could thus hint the intrinsic significance of Pagan as a new spiritual center of the Buddhist World. The murals could have belonged to a local variety of Buddhism, embraced within the “Medieval Theravāda” domain prevailing in mainland Southeast Asia during the early second millennium, which also pertained other unique characteristics: the adoption of some unconventional Pāli texts and the laxity in observance of some vinaya rules as allowed in its sangha. The Pagan Buddhism, along with the other variations of the “Medieval Theravāda”, was swept off by the energetic expansion of the new Sīhaḷa order to prevail in most parts of Southeast Asia from the early-14th century but in central Burma from the 16th century onwards; the phenomenon is elucidated in both the historical and art historical contexts.
