Cosmologies and Biologies: Siamese Manuscripts of Death, Time and the Body
EVENT
10:30 am - Friday, April 3
Dr. Justin McDaniel will be lecturing in person on Siamese Manuscripts: Collections, Collectors and Connections.
Siamese Buddhist Manuscripts are portable, beautiful, and informative. Unfortunately, despite the large number of manuscripts available in museum, library, and private collections abroad, they have been understudied.
Moreover, we know little about the foreigners that acquired them, traded them, collected them, or stole them. Most were produced between the late fifteenth and early twentieth centuries on palm-leaf (bailan), streblus asper bark (khoi) paper, mulberry leaf paper (Broussonetia papyrifera), cotton, and silk and include rare pigments like Prussian blue, chrome yellow, and red led, vermilion, and gamboge.
The languages on the manuscript include the Indic classical Sanskrit and Pali languages, as well as Khmer, Thai, Lao, Mon, Shan, Tai Leu, Tai Khoen, Tamil, and Siamese/Thai. The contents of the manuscripts include the earliest legal codes in the region, chronicles of the lives of famous nuns, monks, and royal family members, cosmological maps, stories of the previous lives of the Buddha (jātaka), funerary sermons, great battles and royal coronations, and ethical codes.
There are guides for classical dancers and musicians replete with paintings of instruments and costumes. Many texts contain recipes for magical elixirs and herbal medicine. Some manuscripts are early liturgical prayer books most often contain sets of paritta. Paritta are protective texts that keep the chanter safe from evil spells, menacing other-worldly creatures and the very real dangers of knives, disease, betrayal, fire and poison. There are even an entire collection of manuscripts which contain illustrated manuals on how to care for elephants, cats, and horses.
Tracing the history of these collections and collectors provides a different perspective on orientalism, as well as economic, religious, and diplomatic history. This is a study not of political leaders, famous monks, or kings, but of thieves, adventurers, amateur art historians, and Buddhist wanderers. It is often these small interactions, these subtle cultural exchanges, and these eccentric go-betweens that get ignored by historians.
Samsung Hall
Prof. Justin McDaniel’s lecture is part of the Society for Asian Art’s Spring 2026 Arts of Asia lecture series, Asia Reimagined: Mapping Cultures Beyond Borders
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Cosmologies and Biologies: Siamese Manuscripts of Death, Time and the Body
This is an important and ground-breaking study of rare Siamese manuscripts of two kinds, biological and cosmological.
Beautiful in themselves, they are produced under unusual conditions and no one of these manuscripts is like another, though they draw on a common pool of rituals, actions and stories. This fascinating publication closely examines and contextualizes a collection of 30 of the most striking and visually unique manuscripts of this kind known, in or outside Thailand.
These manuscripts are religious in nature, containing several genres of Buddhist texts including liturgical, narrative, historical, grammatical, psychological, ritual, and magical material, but, compared to other Thai and other Southeast Asian examples they are particularly strong in the realms of medical, biological and cosmological Thai thought. A recurrent feature is the story of Phra Malai, a monk whose travels to various heavens and hells are described and illustrated. Several rare medical manuscripts serve to reveal how mythology, biology, astrology, physiognomy and pharmacology are blended in the pre-modern Siamese/Thai tradition.
These and other such illuminated manuscripts were produced in 18th- and 19th-century Siam (as Thailand was then known) and are richly illustrated both with delightful and evocative depictions of the Buddha, Hindu deities, Bodhisattvas, nuns, monks, and laypeople, and with some grotesque and
terrifying ones – they attest to a particular interest in corpses and their implications among some of their readers.
The author, who has both lived the Buddhist life in Thailand and researched in Thai monasteries, has extensive knowledge not only of the history but of the dynamic of Thai religion, studying not just older texts but continuing rituals and contemporary media. He was inspired to write this book by the very great value he saw in these particular manuscripts, a most unusual collection amassed with a discriminating eye.
The book consists both of an explanation and a detailed catalogue of this collection of exemplary manuscripts and of a fascinating introductory essay discussing the belief systems and activities they represent.
About the Author
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Justin McDaniel is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Professor of the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania He is the author of the award-winning books Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words and The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk, and has published and edited on a wide variety of subjects, such as Asian Manuscripts, Buddhist Studies, Material Culture and Religious Studies.
- Hardcover
- 216 pages
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Dimensions : 9.45 x 0.67 x 11.06 inches
- Item Weight : 2.15 pounds
