Scholars and lay enthusiasts of Southeast Asian Theravada Buddhist art and material culture will delight in Ralph Isaacs's large-format, elegantly designed monograph on sazigyo, long Burmese tablet-woven binding tapes. With fine-grained detail, Isaacs analyzes these tapes used to wrap manuscripts of sacred Buddhist texts, usually commissioned as donations to individual monks. The book reproduces hundreds of sazigyo in part or whole and includes contextual photographs and illustrations of Burmese Buddhist life, documenting sazigyo as intimate in identifying the manuscript's donors, yet quite public in proclaiming acts of giving.
Following a brief introduction to Theravada Buddhism, the palm-leaf manuscript and its accessories, and practices of dana, in short chapters Isaacs analyzes the woven sazigyo bands as both textiles and texts. As textiles, sazigyo vary in width from 13 to 30 millimeters and in length from 3 to over 5 meters. Isaacs describes the craft of sazigyo weaving, thread and dyes, and even issues of damage and repair. As its essential function, the sazigyo binds the entire manuscript package (palm leaf pages, cloth wrapper, a manuscript knife) for storage. Relating to its function, its length also provides a canvas upon which weavers elaborate texts and images announcing, and, Isaacs argues, enhancing the act of donation and its resulting merit.
As the outermost piece of the package, the sazigyo serves as a colophon, announcing the names of the donors, their occupation or status or address, information about the intended recipient, and an invocation summoning all sentient beings (including household pets and Nats, powerful Burmese spirits) to witness and share in the merit of the donation. The woven texts, many of which are translated here, are frequently bracketed or punctuated with delightful birds and animal motifs, as well as Buddhist symbols that relate to the ritual of donation.
As one of its strongest features, the book analyzes these many motifs and their sequencing: animals and birds, mythical beasts, abstract designs with religious significance, symbols of the Buddha (the Bo tree, a parasol, an empty throne), visual references to monks and pagodas, and symbols of the donation itself, especially the parasol that usually accompanies Burmese pagoda donations. Weavers often include images of the donor's specific birthday beast and astrological signs, as well as additional celestial forces, such as Thagya Min, King of the Nats, and symbols of the Four Great Elements (the Mahabok).
Chapter 11 provides translations, and several reproductions, of some of the longer texts. They document the spiritual trajectories, career accomplishments, and political concerns of those commissioning the sazigyo, as well as specific formulae calling for witnesses to validate and share in the merit of the donation. Weavers often include signatures and information about themselves, even including the cost of the piece.
Despite some attempts to revive the craft, sazigyo weaving died out in the 1970s as printed books replaced the hand-inscribed or printed palm leaf manuscripts. Isaacs was unable to document sazigyo production from the weavers themselves, but this work does enhance our understanding of women's roles in everyday Buddhist practice. Having lived in Burma and as an avid collector of sazigyo (a collection now donated to the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery), Isaacs relies on his own observations and on previously published work, notably Mi Gyi's collection of sazigyo texts and Peter Collingwood's technical documentation of sazigyo tablet weaving. The latter, reproduced as chapter 5, explains, with helpful diagrams, tablet-weaving techniques and provides a sample analysis of a single 598-centimeter-long sazigyo, complemented with Isaacs's interpretation of its imagery. The publishers have included a woven tape, with popular sazigyo images, to serve as a bookmark.
Its focus on the sagizyo, deeply implicated in the quotidian activities of merit-making that undergird relations between laity and monks, sets this book firmly among the growing body of works concerning material religion in Southeast Asia. Written for a wide audience, the book does not address theoretical issues concerning Southeast Asian manuscript cultures, but does provide ample evidence that woven sazigyo texts strengthen the manuscripts’ karmic power as objects of merit as well as their discursive significance in preserving the Dhamma. The information a sazigyo contains could have appeared inside the manuscript; that it lies outside underscores the donation's public significance, not merely a wish for merit but a claim to status, wealth, and spiritual position. Isaacs stresses this, the very public nature of the act of donation, through his observation that many motifs, especially noisy bells, frogs, and parrots, amplify the sonority of the oft-rhyming sazigyo verses.
Sazigyo do not merely represent merit-making but instantiate the concept of dana, uniting the material and the sociospiritual in a single object. With this wonderful monograph, Isaacs richly documents an element of older Burmese religious belief and practice that dissolves any conceptual division of an object from its social context, of matter from its meanings, or of persons from the things they make.
