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From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls: New Approaches to the Study of Asian Manuscript Traditions

This is a timely, innovative, and ambitious collection of essays on Asian manuscripts. As the inaugural volume in the Lawrence J. Schoenber Studies in Manuscript Culture series, it aims to explore methodologies that treat manuscripts as “more than the semantic meaning of the words they contain” (5), instead using them to ask larger questions about the material and cultural contexts in which they were produced, circulated, and preserved. In this way it builds on a much larger tradition that is particularly developed in European studies including the interrelated fields of codicology, histoire du livre, and bibliography. Questions related to manuscript and book cultures have recently garnered attention in Asian studies, and Buddhist studies in particular. This edited volume is a welcome addition, and the editors should be praised for initiating the series with Asia, when many would choose the safe route of the better developed field of medieval European manuscripts. In comparison to past publications on Asian and Buddhist manuscripts, this collection is unique in many ways. For one, it takes a pan-Asian and multi-tradition approach. Previous publications have either focused on a single country such as China, or religion such as Buddhism. The essays in this collection detail geographically, linguistically, religiously, and temporally diverse manuscripts. The chapters introduce texts produced in Persia, India, Central Asia, Burma, Thailand, and China over a more than two-thousand-year period. The manuscripts surveyed capture the variety of languages in these regions, from Arabic to Chinese as well as several less commonly studied ones such as Khotanese and Sogdian. Moreover, religious and comparatively secular texts are treated side by side—an approach that I hope other projects will follow. Finally, the volume contains plentiful, gorgeous images. For a book about the importance of the material and visual qualities of manuscripts, it is refreshing to see such a physically attractive volume. The book is organized into three parts. Part one takes a largely art historical approach to examine illustrated and decorative manuscripts. Hiram Woodward’s chapter explores a Thai manuscript, Treatise on the Characteristics of Elephants. He looks at both the structural features of the images and texts to better understand the ways the court systematized their beliefs, and also considers the ways the manuscript functioned in Thai society, pointing out, for example, that it served as a “badge of authority” for those who oversaw elephants. Alexandra Green turns to a Burmese cosmological manuscript, likely from the nineteenth century and currently in the British Museum, to probe the relationship between text and image, highlighting the ways standardization can cause manuscripts to generally follow normative formats, while also using close readings to identify key variants that function to make the Buddha present in a way that connects him to local devotees while simultaneously legitimating royal cities and kings as an integral part of the Buddhist cosmos. The final chapter of this section by Sinéad Ward looks at decorative gold leaf versions of ceremonial Pali texts, known as Kammavācā, from late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Burma. She uses these texts to trace changes in ornamentation techniques during a time of social upheaval coinciding with the start of British colonial governance and to explore how they offered monks and donors “an achievable means to enlightenment” by providing models for practice and sources of merit. The second part focuses on religion, though it must be noted that many of the essays in other sections also address religious issues, an inevitability in an interdisciplinary volume such as this one. Angela Chiu examines the relationship between space and time through a study of tamnan (chronicles) from the Lan Na cultural region centered in northern Thailand but extending into Burma, China, and Laos. She argues that these vernacular texts grant agency to make the Buddha present despite his apparent physical and temporal absence from the periphery. The next chapter, by Ori Tavor, introduces two texts on bamboo strips from the Shanghai Museum manuscript corpus to highlight competing theologies on ritual efficacy: one that was practical, which saw ritual actions as part of a mechanical process, and another competing vision introduced by Material Religion volume 12, issue 4, pp. 522–523