Since Patrick Jory's article on the Fifth Reign attempts to discourage the popularity of the jātaka tales in Thai Buddhism, it has been more or less assumed that over the twentieth century the jātaka lost their central place in Thai Buddhist practice.Footnote 12 In this book, however, Lefferts, Cate, and Tossa show that the Vessantara Jātaka, the story of the Bodhisatta's penultimate life before being reborn as Siddhattha Gotama, remains crucial to the religious lives of the Thai-Lao living in the Mekong valley.
This book is a study of the pha yao Phra Wet—long, horizontally formatted painted scrolls depicting the Vessantara Jātaka. These scrolls are central objects in the celebration of the Phra Wet festival, and are the material catalysts through which the ritual enacts and localizes the jātaka tale in the present day.
This innovative study consists of scholarly essays on the production and ritual importance of the scrolls, with close visual and linguistic deconstruction of the pha yao Phra Wet painted in 1960 by the artist Sopha Pangcha and now housed at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. The study situates Sopha's scroll in the historical development of Thai-Lao Buddhist scroll-painting tradition. Furthermore, the authors analyze the portion of the Phra Wet festival that mimics the return of Prince Vessantara to his kingdom, in which Buddhist practitioners carry the long painted scrolls out into a designated forested area and enact a ritual procession, returning it unfurled to the confines of the temple.
This book masterfully links the too often separated elements of religious narrative, art, and ritual practice. By dealing with these elements in concert, the authors show the full importance of the Vessantara scrolls in the lives of Thai-Lao Buddhists. This truly interdisciplinary methodology captures how Buddhism, in this corner of Southeast Asia, is a living and active reality.
Chapter 1 is a stunning full-color reproduction of the thirty-one-meter-long scroll running continuously over thirty of the chapter's thirty-one pages, with the jātaka narrative running below the color plates. This reproduction, coupled with the text, provides the rare ability to follow the story while delving into an exceptionally rich visual counterpart.
Chapter 2 discusses the Bun Phra Wet ceremony as an act of storytelling, ritual performance, community engagement, and ethical subjectivity. Engagement in the ritual constructs individual ethical subjectivities through the practice of returning the scroll back to the temple. This temporally telescopic act forges the lives and concerns of the ritual participants with the subjects of Prince Vessantara's kingdom. The authors convincingly show how the material and spatial qualities of the scrolls create a type of imagined space in which religious meaning is produced and accessed.
Chapter 3 investigates the production of scrolls as religious and artistic objects. It discusses the artists who paint scrolls and the effects different modes of production have on the visual qualities of the finished piece. The authors point out that Sopha's scroll shows great attention to detail and innovation in spatial composition that effectively condenses Dhamma teachings through varying perspective focus and nonlinear visual narrative organization. Other more contemporary scrolls are organized in relatively simple schemes, focusing on the human action of the story with little attention to background depiction or spatial composition.
The workbook-like layout of chapter 4 provides a thorough transcription and translation of every shred of text present on Sopha's scroll. The translation and transcription diagrams the location of the Thai-Lao text as it appears on the scroll, and translates this language into both central Thai and English.
Lastly, chapter 5 is a brief set of notes highlighting Sopha's life as an artist, his involvement in scroll painting, and a detailed material description of the scroll at the Asian Civilisations Museum.
The book's high-quality color reproduction of the scroll, complete with thorough transcription and translation in a large-format publication, reminds us of the utility of the codex as a technological tool for scholarly work and as an object of sheer aesthetic pleasure. I could not help wishing, however, that the publication was accompanied by a digital element complete with all of the functions that the codex does not include, such as hyper zoom and the ability to digitally scroll through the scroll in a continuous, uninterrupted swipe. Even without this element, the book remains an elegant object in its own right, made even more valuable by the quality of its scholarship.
