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After enlightenment: Scenes of the Buddha's retreat in the thirteenth-century Murals at Pagan
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.
An investigation is provided on the narration of the Buddha's biography in Burmese murals of the Pagan Period (eleventh to thirteenth century ce ). It detects a development of the complete account on the subject in the oldest murals of the period at the Patho-hta-mya Temple, which probably predate the earliest known literary counterpart in Pāli, the Jinālaṅkāra, which was most likely composed in Sri-Lanka during the mid-twelfth century ce . The comparison is provided between the biographical account of the Buddha illustrated in Pagan murals and those found in the two main groups of much later vernacular texts compiled in Southeast Asia, namely: Malālamkāravatthu-Tathāgataudanadīpanī particularly prevailing in Burma and representing the later Burmese tradition on narrating the Buddha's biography; and, Pathamasambodhi gaining its popularity over several other parts of Southeast Asia (i.e., Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Southwestern China and eastern part of the Shan State). The Pagan narrative on the Buddha's life is shown to be far more associated with the Malālamkāravatthu-Tathāgataudanadīpanī than with the Pathamasambodhi, suggesting the first group of texts to be a later product of the longstanding Buddhist tradition existing in Burma at least since the Pagan Period, and the latter of a separate development.