Vietnamese Buddhist Art

by Nguyen Ngoc Vinh | 2009 | 60,338 words

This essay studies Vietnamese Buddhist Art in South and South East Asia Context.—In the early spread of Buddhism to Vietnam, three primary sources are investigated: Chinese histories, Sanskrit and Pali literature and local inscriptions and art: Initially Buddhist sculptures were carried from India to Vietnam by monks and traders. The research are o...

Thai Buddhist art can be separated into two distinct periods. The first, shaped by Mon peoples and called Mon or Dvaravati, emerged by the fifth century and lasted until the Khmer invasions five hundred years later. For the next two hundred years, the Khmer exercised authority over the region, until the continuing build-up of migrating peoples from south China, aided by Mongol pressure from the north, resulted in a fresh mix of peoples and finally in the formation of a new state. From that point the modern Thai nation emerged, with the most important of the early capitals at Sukhothai, and the primary influence upon its dominant Theravada Buddhism coming from Sri lankan monks, evident from the early monuments at Sukhothai.

The Dvaravati Period (7th -10th century)

“The cultural history of the area encompassed by the borders of present-day Thailand, centred on the basin of the Chao Phraya, is far more complex than that of the valleys of the Irrawaddy, Salween, Sittang, Mekong and other major southward-flowing rivers of mainland Southeast Asia.”[1]

The traditional reliance upon wooden materials has precluded the survival of most Dvaravati structures, although excavations have revealed foundations of laterite–a material that is clay-like when freshly dug but alters to near stone hardness upon exposure to the air. Stupas and temples were made also like that of Cham and funan’s structure by laterite and brick, laid with vegetable glue mortar, with stucco and carved stone added for decoration that G. Coedes had also been admit that:

“Indian cultural influence penetrated into the south and east of the peninsula with the founding of Funan and Champa,”[2]

A comparison between small votive stupas, which generally repeat Indian forms, and the ruins of Dvaravati stupas, frequently rebuilt over the years, indicates an early preference for towering spires and square, multi-storey bases faced with rows of niches containing terracotta figures. Comparable styles can also be found among the later Burmese stupas at Pagan. Dvaravati stone Foundations also suggest similarity with Burmese temples-simple, square stone structures, with a porch on one side and a pyramidal roof, a style originally used in Indian Hindu sanctuaries. Excavations indicate that viharas, the Buddhist assembly halls, were of wood or brick and close in style to examples in Sri lanka, the primary source for most of the later thai architectural styles. Two of the Dvaravati sites with the most notable Buddhist architecture were U Thong and Nakhon Pathom.[3] As early trading centers, both cities had had the means to support viable Buddhist communities. Isolated Amaravati finds evidence the presence of Indian Buddhist in the early centuries AD, and the city moats and Dharmacakra testify to their continuing political and religious prosperity in the seventh century. The U Thong buildings, located both within and outside the city moats, are now in extremely ruinous condition–only the bases survive–but they are numerous and provide some meager evidence of their original appearance. The scattered remains include the bases of what appear to have been rectangular assembly halls, squarish image houses, and stupas. The bases of U Thong’s stupas bases were round, square, octagonal, or hexagonal, and while the original appearance of the hollow buildings is undetectable, that of the stupas can be deduced from a few small votive stupas and depictions on contemporaneous votive tablets. The shapes of the stupas, like the Dharmacakra, appear to have derived from northern India. stupas at Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda as well as those in Sri lanka included a hemispherical dome that was surmounted by a spire, or yasti, which was composed of superimposed umbrellas, symbols of both royalty and Buddhism. A rectangular fence symbolically enclosed a sacred space around the spire (yasti). In contrast, Dvaravati stupas, like those in northern India[4], were devoid of harmika, and their domes–ovoid, globular, sometimes in the shape of upturned tureens lacked the perfectly hemispherical shape that typified south Indian and Sinhalese examples.

Like stupas in most areas of India, north and south, however, the U Thong stupas were topped by a yasti of superimposed disks representing ceremonial parasols. As in India, the yasti were sometime surmounted by a jewel-shaped pinnacle. Beside U Thong, Dvaravati’s most elaborate architecture was constructed at Nakhon Pathom, the Phra Pathom Chedi, located west of Nakhon Pathom’s old moated city, is now encased in a mammoth stupa built in the nineteenth century and it is impossible to know the design of the original structure. A stupa known today as Phra Men, however, located not far south of Phra Pathom is recognizable as a relative of the famed Indian temple at Paharpur, located not far from the mouth of the Ganges and along with Nalanda. The Paharpur stupa was distinctive, for its base was composed of three tiers of cruciform terraces with recessed projecting corners, a design unique among known India temples.

And G. Coedes also judged:

“In Phra Pathom were also found large stone wheels, often in association with statues of stags, recalling Mrigavana where the Buddha set the wheel of the law in motion. These wheels are probably contemporary with the Buddhist statues and basreliefs in the Gupta style.”

[5] Another Nakhon Pathom monument, Chedi Chula Pathon, located near the center of the moated city, perhaps in the vicinity of a royal palace, also evidences inspiration from the holy sites of the Ganges region. Chedi Chula Pathon is most strong stylistic connections with the Gaya’s most renowned temple, the Mahabodhi, and with its close relative, the Sariputra Caitya (stupa III) at Nalanda. The Chula Pathon stupa, the Mahabodi, and the Nalanda stupas belong to a class sometimes referred to as caitya, a form of stupas unrelated to the more common domed type that was the normin both India and in the Central Plains. Caitya were composed of a solid rectangular brick core indented on each side with horizontal rows of superimposed arched niches, each niche containing an image of the Buddha. On the Nalanda building, there were also low stucco reliefs depicting rounded windows from which human faces gazed, a motif replicated in a stone relief found near Nakhon Pathom’s Phara Pathom stupa and in a terracotta example from U Thong. The motif was an ancient one–examples can be found at the second–century BC north-central Indian site Bharhut, and it was replicated at Ajanta. Like the Ajanta-related three-dimensional accordionpleated design on the Dvaravati Dharmacakra, it may have spread from western India to Nalanda and then onward to the Central Plains. Chedi Chula Pathon in its first stage of construction is notable also for its variety of sculptural reliefs: elegant volute, lozenge, and lotus motifs, and in alternating panels, a marvelous array of mythological creatures. Pairs of lions flanked the axial stairs.

The Dvaravati presence here was short-lived. Although small votive tablets dating from the seventh and eighth centuries are remarkably similar to those produced in the Dvaravati heartland, their themes are primarily Mahayana.

The Khmer Period

During the next six hundred years, the Khmer would make intermittent encroachments of varying degrees of intensity into the land that is now Thailand, and many Khmer would become permanent residents of both the Plateau and the Central Plains. At times the Khmer–both the foreigners with a home base in the Mekong region and those who had taken up residence in what had previously been primarily Mon people territories–would dominate much of mainland South East Asia. In the beginning, the Khmer and the Mon had not been so different from one another. Both had arrived in South East Asia in prehistoric times from southern China with a common language, and in the later centuries BC, after they had become linguistically distinct, both Mon and Khmer communities began to cluster in small chiefdoms in western Mainland Southeast Asia that over time coalesced into widespread networks like those in the Central Plains.

By the early centuries A.D, U Thong (in the Central Plains) and Oc Eo (in the south Vietnam) are the places for famous Buddhist monuments.

“In addition, after the fall of Dvaravati, there was an interim period during which a composite form of art combining features of Dvaravati and Khmer art was practiced in the cultural sphere of former Dvaravati chiefly in and around the central region of U Thong during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”[6]

By the seventh century the Khmer had begun to build temples to house their Shiva and Vishnu images, their linga, and their inscriptions. Even more than the movable objects, the temples played a central role in identifying major Khmer political settlements. Representing the sacred mountain of the gods, the Khmer temples proclaimed the close connection between the natural universe, the supernatural world of the gods, and the earthly rulers who were intimately associated with their cosmic counterparts. The earliest Khmer temples exhibited direct connection with India that bypassed the Peninsula and the Plains. The most essential iconographic feature of the Indian temple was a tall conical roof, or Sikhara, which according to Indian texts represented Mount Kailasa or Mount Meru.[7] In India, the mountain-like roof, which consisted of gradually decreasing tiers of layered stones, is thought to have derived from flat-roofed structures on top of which stone slabs of decreasing size were stacked to form a step pyramid. By the sixth century, however, pyramidal roofs were being constructed so that there was soaring interior space, and the Khmer adopted the same hollow design. The earliest Indian temples, such as the cave temples at Ajanta, had been carved from solid rock, and the rock-cut motifs were later incorporated in the country’s free-standing temples. The indigenous architecture of the Khmer, on the other hand, had consisted of simple rectangular huts constructed with upright posts and lateral beams that supported roofs of palm leaves or thatch, and the Indian–inspired temple designs retained some of the old post-and-lintel components. What had once been unobtrusive wooden supports over doorways and windows were transformed in the Indian-related buildings as conspicuous rectangular stone slabs that provided visual focal points above the major entryways of the cella. Not only functional, the lintels provided a fixed, demarcated space that could be filled with elaborate carvings of complexly arranged ornamental and iconographic reliefs.

In the centuries following the introduction of Khmer architecture on the Plateau, Khmer expansion towards Western South East Asia continued. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, the Khmer’s westward expansion in the seventh century was sporadic and disconnected, however, and the Plateau was not totally theirs. In the eighth and ninth centuries, we find Dvaravati-related settlements in various areas. Some of the old round settlements such as Muang Sima were enlarged Dvaravati-style with the addition of peripheral moats rather than concentric rings that had been traditional. One important Dvaravatirelated settlement was Muang Fa Daed, located on the Chi River. Muang Fa Daed originally had been an Iron period site that was, over the centuries, enlarged by means of concentric moats. Sometime during the latter part of the first millennium AD, however, it became home to more than a dozen Dvaravati-style brick or laterite stupas and assembly halls.

An important eleventh-century flatland temple located fifty kilometers east of Muang Sima, was constructed entirely of sandstone rather than brick. Four elaborate gateways surmounted by large towers, or gopura, marked the cardinal points of a gallery that surrounded the temple courtyard, emphasizing the importance of the topographic and ritual center of the temple complex. Reflecting different stages of building, Prasat Phnom wan’s lintels incorporated Angkorean designs of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Although Angkor’s architectural and iconographic influence was significant, some attributes that derived from pre-Angkorean Plateau architecture survived, and the linear layout mixed with Angkor’s concentric one. Prasat Phnom Wan’s linear-cum-centric ground plan would set the stage for future temple building in the region. Soon after its construction, however, significant departures from both the Angkorean and local traditions would have an even greater impact on Thailand’s future temple designs. The late eleventh and early twelfth centuries were a time of political disruption at Angkor with several different rulers contending for power, and for a short period the Upper Mun area was ruled by local Khmer free of Angkorean domination. Upper Mun temples built during this period reflected the area’s political independence. An important element in the development of this independence was the fact that the Thai and Khmer had completely different notion of kingship: for the Khmer, the king was a god and he was honored accordingly. The Sukhothay rulers, on the other hand, were close to the people, and all the subjects took part in the religious feasts and rituals that in the Khmer kingdoms were reserved a small elite. This greater degree of social unity in thai society is clearly reflected in their arts: it is precisely a skillful and harmonious blending different artistic elements and influences (primarily Khmer architecture and the art of the Mon) and the subsequent creation of a few canon of architectural and sculptural forms that characterize the art of the golden age in Thai culture.

That was also Ananda K. C, suggested as:

“Later, and quite definitely by the tenth and eleventh centuries the classical Siamese (Thai) type emerges and asserts itself.”[8]

The religious heart of the kingdom was undoubtedly the wat Mahathat in Sukhothay, a temple complex surrounded by an artificial watercourse and a wall–an allegory of the cosmic ocean and the boundary wall of the universe. The temple for the relics of the Buddha (a hair and a bone from the neck), which according to tradition came from Ceylon (Sri lanka), was completed in 1345 by king Lo Thai. Adorned with nine stupas and crowned by the unique Lotus chedi, this sacred complex expresses the political superiority of Sukhothay by means of an elegance and refinement that draws on several artistic traditions. The central tower is surrounded by four smaller chedis in the Srivijaya (Sumatra) style. The inner peak of the Wat is an allegory of the mythical Mount Meru, which stands at the center of the Universe.

That so why Frederic, L. has found many different styles of Thai art in central Thailand:

“During the period subsequent to the thirteenth century, the composite art of U Thong gave birth to works of many different styles in central Thailand, including combinations of Lopburi art and Sukhothai art and of Sukhothai art and Srivijayan art.”[9]

Most temples and stupas in South East Asia were representing in the cosmological role of Meru, the sacred mountain. This Indian ideal of the temple as the centre of the universe appeared early in the first millennium, in Funan (south Vietnam) and came to direct the arrangements of complex religious monuments, Hindu and Buddhist, resulting in some of the grandest architectural displays in the Asian world. With the main shrine at the centre, the temple complex was oriented to the cardinal directions, with various other components used to express the linkage between the human world and that of gods, between heaven and earth as in Cambodia the builders placed serpent balustrades along the bridges that crossed the surrounding moats, for as water symbols, serpents linked heaven and earth. This illusion of passing from one world to another was also repeated with arched entrance gates, the passage through which indicated transit between the two worlds. Heaven’s blessings then flowed outward from the temple, the centre of the universe or world of the gods, through the arched gate and across the serpent-railed bridge, to the benefit of humankind. Likewise, in Thailand the central tower dominated the temple complex, reaching high into the sky, and in Java, Funan, Champa and Cambodia the concept of the sacred mountain was so pervasive that not only temples but even villages were organized as microcosms of this universal vision.

Another important regional feature was the cult of the god–king, the identification of a ruler with the deity, which served to elevate the king to semi-divine or even divine status. Although known in India, it was developed in South East Asia to ever more sophisticated levels, especially in Cambodia, Java, Thailand and South Vietnam.

That Dietrich Seckel had said:

“It is to be noted that Buddhist art also had to serve a cult which, although it had first developed in India during the Gupta period, was particularly characteristic of Indonesia and Indochina–the cult of the deified ruler, who was identified with one of the great gods and regarded as his incarnation.”[10]

The South East Asia region was representing two schools that are Dvaravati remarkably in mainland while Srivijaya, a maritime Kingdom with strongholds in island South East Asia. Srivijaya was not merely a network of loosely affiliated chiefdoms such as those on the mainland, but rather a large kingdom with a royal capital located at Palambang[11], in southeastern Sumatra. Srivijaya’s political power was based not only on the ability of local chieftains to establish personal ties with their neighbors, but on maritime links with Malay and Chinese merchants who were then the major transporters of foreign goods throughout the southern seas. From the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Srivijaya was able to control maritime trade between China and the west, and its area of influence included most of the old monuments that had been established along the existing trade routes–in South Vietnam (Sa Huynh) Java, Cambodia. Srivijaya had intimate contact with Nalanda, which was now devoted primarily to the practice and teaching of sanskritic Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism. As early as the seventh century, Chinese pilgrims en route to Nalanda had stopped at Palembang, and it too had become a major center of Mahayana Buddhist learning. From there, it was an easy step to the Peninsula.

The Peninsula most outstanding art was produced in the ninth century and resulted from long-distance contacts with Nalanda by way of Java, which now had intimate dynastic ties with Palembang. Java’s Nalanda-inspired Mahayana art was unrivaled elsewhere in South East Asia. Along mainland Srivijaya’s art represented at Nakhon Si Thammarat, with a Buddhist temple near the old Dvaravati center in the Kra area, and an important temple with strong Cham characteristics known as Wat Kaeo at Chaiya in Thailand.[12]

The last major period of South East Asia between tenth and fifteenth centuries, marks the peak and then decline of Cambodian power, the waning of Javanese influence and the end of Cham independence, the latter due largely to wars with Cambodia and pressure from Vietnam to the north. From their beginnings in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, following the decline of the earlier Dvaravati, the Thais emerged to prominence and assumed an increased regional role. By the end of the fifteenth century, Thailand and Burma were often at war, and Cambodia was losing most of its political influence and some of its territory to stronger neighbours. In modern times, Thailand and Burma have remained the most viable Buddhist areas; Cambodia and southern Vietnam are still actively Buddhist, but their relative lack of political strength in the face of more powerful neighbours limited artistic development.

The monuments in South Vietnam, and South East Asia had been flowering in historical records. We know as Angkor, Borobudur, Cham’s Stupas, or Dvaravati period, followers of the Mahayana Buddhism. And we know they were in contact with great Buddhist centres in India. All most of them were called Stupas, they crowning dome is actually far too small in relation to the supporting mass to be a Stupa as normally understood, yet the scale and ubiquitously fine carving show it was clearly a site of superlative importance: “The Cosmic Mandala”. These Stupas set atop a vast stepped pyramid of a base. This base was probably built by Hindus as the foundation of a gigantic pyramidal temple; then under the wave of Buddhist fervour that swept South East Asia in beginning of A.D, centuries. The structures combining the supreme emblem of the Buddhist dharma in its newly expanded Mahayana form, with the stepped mountain, ancient symbol of the abode of the ancestors. These Mandalas, depicting the hierarchical levels of material reality that emanate from, and return to, the radiant divine consciousness the Mahayana calls ‘The Unboundedness’ (Shunyata). For the pilgrim, to circumambulate and ascend the mountain-Stupa is symbolically to transcend the realms of matter and, transfigured by the apotheosis of the summit, to return, re-born, to a new life in the world. As such, it stands as a physical analogue of both the Buddhist’s daily practice of meditation and his lifelong pilgrimage. As we can see Borobudua, Angkor, Cham’s Stupas, are the symbolic of Mandalas, the type of cosmological diagram used by Hindus and Buddhists as the visualization device to help practitioners in their search for spiritual enlightenment. In Mahayana it is a model or a map of a perfected universe in which a deity or many deities reside.

These South East Asia Mandalas are believed to represent the sacred abodes or universes of single Buddhas, bodhisattvas, or other deities, or even of groups of deities. The Kings of South East Asia based on these Mandalas to attempt to attain the type of enlightenment associated with particular deities. They concentrate on the Mandala of a particular deity, striving to visualize every detail of the architecture and environment of the Mandala. With enough effort and concentration, they are able to visualize themselves within the realm of the deity. Once inside the perfected universe of the deity, the practitioner can move a step closer towards spiritual enlightenment.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Frederic. L, The Art of Southeast Asia: Temple and Sculpture, New York: 1965, p. 66.

[2]:

G. Cóedes, The making of South East Asia, tr by H. M. Wright, California press 1983, p. 68.

[3]:

Cultural Interface of India with Asia, ed by A. Pande & P. P. Dhar, Delhi: 2004, p. 220.

[4]:

Ibid p. 201.

[5]:

G. Cóedès The Making of South East Asia, st by H. M. Wright, California press 1983, p. 30.

[6]:

Frederic. L, The Art of Southeast Asia: Temple and Sculpture, New York: 1965, p. 67.

[7]:

R. Ranjan Das, Art Traditions of Cambodia, Calcutta: 1974, p. 109.

[8]:

Ananda K. C, History of Indian and Indonesian Art, New Delhi: 1972, p. 176.

[9]:

Frederic, L, The Art of Southeast Asia: Temple and Sculpture, New York: 1965, p. 67.

[10]:

Dietrich Seckel, The Art of Buddhism, trans by Ann E. Keep, London: 1974, p. 49.

[11]:

The Art of Srivijaya, ed by M. C. Subhadradis Diskul, Oxford Unesco: 1980, p. 2.

[12]:

The Art of Srivijaya, ed by M. C. Subhadradis Diskul, Oxford Unesco: 1980, p. 12

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