Buddhist Art Thailand

Buddhist art, Buddhist Buddha, Buddhist monk, Buddhist rituals, Buddhist sculpture, Buddhist sculptures, Buddhist statuary, Thai art, Thai Buddha art.

continuous series of Hinayana Buddha's in Siam or Thailand. In the south, Ayutthaya learned likewise from the Buddhism and art tradition of Sukhothai. The styles which prevailed there in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries were based on an amalgam of the classical Sukhothai style with the fairly strong vestiges of Khmer traditions among a population still predominantly Mon. It is impossible at present, however, to disentangle the architectural and artistic history of the south at all satisfactorily, since the necessary archaeological investigations on the spot have not been done.

It seems probable that the majority of important structures and works surviving at Ayutthaya and all those around Bangkok date from a period subsequent to the wars which the Buddhist king of Burma, conducted against the Thai kingdoms in north and south Siam during the later sixteenth century. He attempted to palliate his gross human cruelty by schematic acts of Buddhist piety – feeding monks, distributing copies of the scriptures, and building pagodas (stupas) and monasteries.

Thus Siamese or Thai art styles in the Thailand central region were subject to a strong Burmese influence, which virtually obliterated old native forms. In the north, especially in Lanna Kingdom and the Thai kingdoms of Laos, which did not suffer so severely from this Burmese incursion, the older styles survived, developing slowly, into modern times.

It must be said that, like the Hinayana art of Burma or Myanmar , the Buddhist art of Siam or Thailand is interesting chiefly in its early formative stages. Once the canonical patterns were laid down, artistic invention virtually ceased. Standard types were repeated again and again, ad nauseam, and architecture made no attempt to organize and articulate space. There was a positive religious reason for this state of affairs.In the Buddhist world there was long a belief, erroneous but potent, that an authorized image of the Buddha had been carved during his lifetime.

Following primitive conceptions which are, strictly speaking, abhorrent to well-educated Buddhists, this image was supposed to have absorbed much of the Buddha's own magical potency. All the major images of Buddhist shrines were supposed to continuing their own share of this magical potency of the original image by virtue of their exact likeness to the great original.

To ensure this likeness, immense care was taken to adhere as closely as human craftsmen could to the iconographic pattern, which was reduced for safety to a series of diagrams, measurements a rid canonical proportions. Such differences of style as do occur between the Buddha's of different times and places are unintentional and unavoidable, the natural consequence of craftsmen working in their own artistic idiom. They were only cultivated intentionally when an attempt was being made to capture the likeness of a famous magical image in a style which had already evolved its idiosyncrasy.

In countries of the Mahayana with vital art traditions, such as China, Japan and even Tibet, the role of creative artistic was admitted to be important in the development of religious imagery. In countries of the Hinayana, art was only to preserve and repeat, old patterns.

The tendency of Hinayana Buddhism is conservative and fundamentalist, sticking so far as possible to the strict letter of ancient canons. Neither in religious literature nor in art was there any incentive to explore the resources of words or for is. The Truth had been expressed once and for all. To change them would be to lose the Truth.

Buddha images in Thailand were popularly meant to be repositories of power; even today the famous Emerald Buddha of Bangkok is one such. Therefore it was of the greatest importance to make the images like each other, avoiding change. Once local rules were established, as close as possible to Indian originals, they were never intentionally altered. Only in the early stages of Hinayana development in Siam or Thailand  was there any scope for adjustment. Even the slight variation in type which appeared early on were themselves perpetual and converted into canonical patterns by Buddhist piety.

As time went on the various great Buddha's of Thailand shrines acquired their own special local prestige, and later patrons commissioned images following the type of one or other of the early masterpieces. It was a work of great merit to commission a Buddha image. The larger and richer the image the greater the merit. So for many centuries Siamese or Thai craftsmen have been hard at work producing replicas, large and small, of most of the old prestigious images. Some were for private use. Some were merely to be stored in shrines as permanent testimony to the piety of the donor. Of all the mass of works thus fabricated only certain pieces in northern Siam are dated. It is therefore impossible to write a true art-history of Siam, for all the different types have been continuously imitated with more or less success, ever since they were first made. The imitations have been preserved without date, context or document.

The classical Sukhothai type of art as we know it follows the limited canon of Hinayana Buddhism. Monasteries seem to have been constructed chiefly of wood, and however beautiful they may have been we know nothing of them. There must have been a substantial tradition of decorative art as well. But the only art of which we really do know anything is the art of the icon – the Buddha image. The Sukhothai type represents an early attempt to establish the Sinhalese icon in Siam. The Mon Buddha's of previous centuries had followed canons derived from the Buddhist art of eastern India – Bihar and Orissa.

For this was indeed the true homeland of Buddhism, and its images might have been supposed to adhere most closely to the great original pattern. But by the time the kingdom of Sukhothai was established, the Moslems had obliterated Buddhism in that part of India, destroying monasteries and –according to their religious prejudice – all icons. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the rulers of Sukhothai sought to re-establish their connections with the fountainhead of Buddhism, since Moslem India was closed to them, they had recourse to Ceylon.

The distant prototypes of the Sukhothai images are at Anuradhapura, not Bodhgaya. Characteristically the Sukhothai Buddha is conceived in the full-round, with continuously curved, smoothly developed surfaces. The contours are sinuous elegant. They lack any clear definition of plane. The smooth, oval head has elongated features. Lips, nose and eyebrows are marked by dry, smooth ridges in high loops and curlicues ; the head is crowned by a skull protuberance which has taken on a long pointed shape, like a flame.

The drapery has been reduced to nothing but marks at wrists and ankles, plus a single stole-like fold-pattern, with a decorative tail, running forward over the left shoulder down to the navel. The true Sukhothai image has a vivid, linear life of its own, which many of the copies of all dates entirely fail to capture. The Buddha either sits in the 'earth-touching' attitude, or stands, one foot forward, right hand raised to the middle of the chest; this latter type evolved a boneless sinuosity all its own.

These Sukhothai types of Buddha image were subject to two major stylistic developments, one in the southern region of Siam, the other in the northern region, following the trends of history. Ayutthaya, in the south, took over Sukhothai in 1349, and adopted many aspects of Sukhothai culture; for it was recognized that through Sukhothai link with Ceylon flowed the genuine milk of Buddhist tradition. In the southern region there had survived clear vestiges of Khmer and old Mon traditions, where Buddha types were marked by a strong sense of squared-off design and cubic volume.

The Sukhothai image combined with this type to produce what is known as the U-Tong type. In many ways this is aesthetically the most successful of all the Siamese or Thai types. For the excessive febrile elegance of the Sukhothai type is strengthened by the Mon-Khmer conception. The sinuous linear curves, loops and dry ridges of the pure Sukhothai originals are suppressed, and genuine modeling appears.In the northern region the Sukhothai type was probably first taken over when the brother of King Gulp, in the late fourteenth century, acquired by means of a military campaign

When Tiloka came to the throne of Lanna in 1441, he made his determined effort to purify northern Thai Buddhism, and actually imported monks, texts and art direct from Ceylon. A new image or images straight from Ceylon must have showed clearly how distant from the Sinhalese traditions the Sukhothai type of image had grown. A new pattern was now established, called by Griswold the `Lion type', which is a far more accurate representation of the then current Sinhalese type of Buddha. In it the body loses its sinuous softness and takes on a greater massiveness and cylindrical strength.

The features are not marked by linear ridges and curves but modeled plastically. It seems, however, that the native Thai genius is always for the sinuous curve. And so in the later examples of the Lion type of image the curvilinear patterns of the Sukhothai style reasserted themselves with more or less emphasis. The type persisted between about 147o and 1565. But it must be stressed that, since images in other and earlier styles were already in existence, revered and imitated at the time the Lion type was established, the Lion type cannot be said to have superseded the others entirely. Its imitations may have preponderated in the northern cities, but elsewhere in Siam other types survived, their characteristics imperceptibly blending as the centuries wore on. The Sukhothai type especially became the dominant formula.

One type of early structural monument has survived in the north. This is a brick-built shrine for a Buddha image. For example, Wat Chet Yot, Chiang Mai, consists of a wide rather low chamber with a portico and recessed corners, on the faces of which stand two tiers of identical Buddha figures in low relief. The roof carries at its centre a tall, four-sided pyramidal tower, crowned by a bell stupa. Smaller versions of the tower stand at the corners of the roof. As architecture such a shrine has little serious claim to attention, since the volumes and spaces are not at all articulated or developed. It is quite likely that such structures, some of them quite large, may have been the original shrines at many of the major northern monasteries, But continuous restoration has mostly obliterated them. In the central region there are a number of imposing medieval buildings.

The oldest building to survive in Ayutthaya, from early in the thirteenth century, is the Wat Bhuddai Svarya. This is a towered shrine, approached by a columned hall. But types invented in Sukhothai predominated from the late fourteenth century onward. These included a stupa raised upon a cylindrical shrine as its drum, surrounded by reliquary structures. In the following century it seems that the Thai kings were adapting something of the personal funeral cult of Angkor, for the custom rapidly grew of building, as their own tombs, bell-shaped stupas, each approached by a colonnaded hall and surrounded by smaller stupas or little shrines, raised on a single high plinth and enclosed within a wall. An evolutionary series of such structures can be traced at Ayutthaya, beginning with the

Wat Phra Ram (mid-fourteenth century or later), the Wat Phra Mahathat (c. 1374), through the Wat Rat Burana (1424) to the best and most complete, Wat Sri Sanpet, made about the end of the fifteenth century. The stupas begin to consolidate the Siamese pagoda pattern, with a convex progressive inward curve to the dome. An interesting feature of these structures is that, like some Sinhalese stupas, they each contain hidden within the dome of the stupa a small chamber, decorated inside with wall-paintings, containing a whole collection of votive objects, many of them precious, including arms and jewels. It is said that the style of the painting shows strong influence from China, especially in the landscapes with hills on a high horizon line, palace pavilions that frame views, and animals among natural scenery. Colors are bright, and the contours of the figures are clear and fluent, perhaps also owing something to Khmer painting, of which nothing is known.

The paintings at Wat Rat Burana (c. 1424) consist mainly of overlapped rows of worshippers, with Buddhas enthroned, or, most interesting, in profile. The colors are vermilion, yellow-green and gold. At Wat Mahathat at Ratburi erected about fifty years later there are similar processional scenes. The only precursors of this type of art in Siam or Thailand are some ruined fragments of painting in a cave at Yala, and some incised panels at Wat Si Chum ; at Sukhothai, dated to the late thirteenth century.

The last phase of Siamese or Thailand Buddhist art reached its apogee during the seventeenth century, after the incursions of the Burmese. Burmese art had made its impact, especially on the pattern of the wooden structural halls associated with palaces and monasteries. The roof pattern characteristic in modern Siam emerged. This is a type similar to others found in other countries of Southeast Asia. It has high gables, with long, steep, tiled roofs, and overhanging eaves, the ends of the ridge-pole marked by long, pointed flamboyant finish.

Diminishing sections of hall and roof are stepped-out from under each other, and the roof-slopes themselves are stepped. Similar roofing appears in Khmer monuments. Porticos win similar roofs are articulated into the sides of these roof structures. Walls are of brick and stucco, and may carry quite long stretches of rather monotonous Buddhist wall-painting.

When the capital was moved to Bangkok in 1767, no substantial artistic development took place, though large pagodas were built. A highly ornate reinterpretation of older style. Unfortunate attempts were made to imitate Khmer styles of sculpture. Much gold, lacquer and inlay of shell and glass, were applied to many of the furnishings. The central hall of the pagoda and the area around it contained many Buddha figures, often from plaster and of most inferior quality.

A special hall often housed a large image of the Buddha lying on his right side, his face on his right palm, about to enter Nirvana at his bodily death. This icon plays an important role in the Buddhist scheme of life and death, but no single example has any aesthetic merit. Many of the buildings and their ornament have a strongly Chinese aspect. This is not surprising, in view of the large expatriate Chinese population of Bangkok and its environs. But there was one most important artistic factor involved. Many of the pagodas have glazed tiles. Some are certainly imported from China, but others are descendants of the fine ceramics in Chinese style produced at the kilns of Sawankhalok during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by expatriate Chinese craftsmen.

The Sawankhalok pottery imitates in its own materials Yuan celadons, with underglaze ornament, and grey or brown painted decoration reminiscent of Tzu Chou ware. Some of these pieces are, in their own idiom, as fine as the finest native Chinese work. Among the products of these kilns were architectural ceramic pieces, local versions of types used in China. These, in more garish hues, became very popular during the Bangkok period.
 

The pictures show Buddhist art from northern Thailand with beautiful Thai Images, Sculptures, Bronze, Brass and Woodcarving.

Buddhist Art northern Thailand Thai Images Sculptures Bronze Brass Woodcarving and Mythical Figures. Buddhist Art northern Thailand Thai Images Sculptures Bronze Brass Woodcarving and Mythical Figures

Buddhist Art northern Thailand Thai Image Sculpture    Buddhist Art northern Thailand Thai Buddha Head Sculpture with 
                                                                                                       colored stones

Buddhist Art northern Thailand Thai Bronze Sculpture         Buddhist Art northern Thailand Thai Sculpture with Head Gear

Here is a report from the Bangkok Post March 9.08 to show what others have in mind with Thailand's Ancient Art

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