When a Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Mahāyāna Influence on Theravāda Attitudes Towards Writing

Abstract

This article argues that Buddhist attitudes towards the written word in major Therav®da regions of Southeast Asia were strongly influenced by Mah®y®na Buddhism. Writing is not mentioned in the P®li canon of the Therav®da Buddhists, and no emphasis was put on the idea of worshipping books in authoritative Therav®da literature, save a few words in an eleventh-century sub-commentarial text. The early generations of Therav®da Buddhists, not surprisingly, had an ambivalent relationship to writing and there is little evidence to suggest that they revered it. On the other hand, from the earliest times, seminal Mah®y®na texts have reserved their highest praise for the Dharma-bearing written word, and archeological and iconographic evidence as well as accounts of Chinese travelers suggest that st‚pas were indeed made to enshrine texts and that books were the subject of votive cults. From the end of the first millennium CE, however, some Therav®da communities in Southeast Asia did begin to revere the written word in a Buddhist context by constructing beautiful libraries to house the texts, making texts out of gold, enshrining them in st‚pas, and even worshipping them outright. In places such as Burma, Sri Lanka and central Thailand, this change of attitude coincided with the height of Mah®y®na influence. Moreover, in the northern Thai kingdom of Lan Na, there does not appear ever to have been any significant Mah®y®na presence and consequently, the more reverential Mah®y®na attitudes towards writing do not seem to have been imbibed by the culture, even though writing was well-known and fairly widely utilized.

Religious Miniature Books: Introduction and Overview

“…Religious people ritualize both the content and the material form of religious books, which may be perceived to evoke and mediate supernatural powers when the books are used and displayed, resulting in veneration or worship. Even if religious books are rendered as "de-contextualized" with a fixed status detached from a ritual setting, they are sharable across temporal and spatial borders and continually involved in re-contexualizing processes that create new interpretations and meanings (Myrvold 2007(Myrvold , 2010Veidlinger 2006). When religious books are miniaturized to the smallest format, several questions arise related to the intricate relationships between the content and the material form of the books and the religious status and use of them.…”