Viharn Lai Kham and the Apocryphal Bodhisattva (9)

Created by Sawas Jutharop (1911-1950) and published in 1932 and 1933 in the Siam Rath newspaper, Sang Thong is the first serialized long-form comics in Thailand. In his Sang Thong comics, Sawas Jutharop recreates - with great liberty - his own version of the tale of prince Sang Thong who gained a golden skin complexion in an enchanted pond. Sang Thong is from the ChakChak WongWong repertoire, whose satires are “about adventurous and polygynous life of princely heroes” involving forced exiles, separations, transformations, magical items, conflicts with in-laws and happy endings*

*comicsgrid.com/article/id/3569 called Introduction: Prayoon Chanyawongse, the King of Thai Cartoon

Sawas Jutharop’s third installment of San Thong published in the pages of The SriKrung Daily News on 22 October 1932. The King sends courtiers to dependent cities in order to summon all unmarried princes under 30 to reach his kingdom within 15 nights.*

*The Early Days of Siamese and Thai Comics Art: Local and Transnational Development of the Art Form from 1906 to 1958 by Nicolas Verstappen, Communication Management, International Program, Faculty of Communication Arts, Chulalongkorn University

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Sang Thong (lower right corner) comes upon a royal contest in the Kingdom of King Samon. To marry off his grown-up daughters, the king ordered a selection ceremony to be held for them to choose their husbands. In the ceremony, all the sisters except the youngest one chose their own husbands who were mostly princes of various cities. The king again held a ceremony for his youngest daughter by inviting all the members of the royal family to take part. The ceremony ended in failure as his daughter did not like anyone at all.*

*Fascinating Folktales of Thailand by Thanapol (Lamduan) Chadchaidee

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Viharn Lai Kham and the Apocryphal Bodhisattva (7)

Ogres, Yakshas and Asuras

Ogres hunger after human flesh. They appear in Thai mural painting frequently semi-comically with a prominent under-bite. Despite their fiendish diet they are often portrayed sympathetically as suffering, emotional creatures just like humans, as with Sang Thong’s mother who dies of grief and despair at his rejection of her.

Asuras must not be confused with yakshas, who though rarely more attractive in appearance, are often protective spirits belonging to armies. Yakshas are the Ramakien ogres depicted in huge statues at royal palaces and wat, or as seen below as door guardians to temples.*

Asuras are the divine antagonists to the pantheon of gods (inherited from Hinduism) of Buddhist cosmology.

*Thai Painting by Jean Boisseler

Female Yaksha or Yakshini.

Yaksha and Yakshini are generally benevolent but sometimes mischievous, capricious, sexually rapacious, or even muderous nature spirits who are the custodians of treasures that are hidden in the earth and in the roots of trees. They are powerful magicians and shape-shifters.

(britannica.com)

As with many elements of Buddhism across Asia, the search for origins leads back to India.

Indians in rural areas still worship spirits that represent trees, waterbodies, rivers and mountains. They believe that these benevolent spirits bring them food, good harvest, health, fertility and offspring. Known as Yaksha, the male spirit and Yakshi, the female spirit, sculptures representing them can be seen in temples across India.

A large number of stone statues of Yakshas and Yakshis have been found all over North India testifying to the widespread popularity of this cult. Sometime after 200 BCE, the Yaksha cult began to be subsumed into the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. Yakshas were incorporated into the Hindu mythology as Kubera, the lord of wealth. While Yakshis took different forms as attendant spirits to gods.*

*Yakshis: The Silent Guardians on livehistoryindia.com

Yaksha dancing. Chiang Mai, Thailand.

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Wall section of the first part of Sang Thong narrative. The funeral procession for Sang Thong’s ogre mother is illustrated next to the window frame upper left.

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Detail image of Sang Thong’s ogre mother’s funeral procession. To the left Sang Thong rides off to his next adventure.

Viharn Lai Kham and the Apocryphal Bodhisattva (5)

Sang Thong continued:

Out of curiosity, he put on the shoes and mask and then held the double-edged knife in one hand, at that moment he could fly into the sky. He flies away to a remote mountain-top but is soon found by his ogre mother. He will not return to her so she dies of a broken heart.

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Viharn Lai Kham and the Apocryphal Bodhisattva (4)

The best preserved mural illustrates the local folk story of Sang Thong, (Suvannasangkha Jataka). The celebrated Jataka of the prince of the golden conch has no connection with the canonical Jatakas which mention a conch; but exists in many versions, one of them written by King Rama II:

A queen gives birth to a shell (Sangkha, pronounced Sang). The king has many wives. The rivalries between co-wives are the spark and fire of many plots in asian folktales. The powers and influence of providing a king with an heir are a great temptation to undermine any rivals. When the king’s new wife mysteriously gives birth to a conch shell, the older wife sees an opportunity to undermine her. She convinces the king that giving birth to a conch shell is inauspicious, it is bad luck for the king and the kingdom. When news of this spreads to the world it will destroy his reputation as a leader with good luck. The king must rid himself of her for the good of all concerned.

Banished from the kingdom Sang Thong’s mother finds shelter with a hermit. She tends the shell as though it were a child and soon discovers that there is in reality a living child within it. Still in jeopardy, the child is eventually given to a female yakshini (ogre); she brings the child up as a mother, all the while doing her best to hide from him the fact that she eats human flesh. One day while his ogre mother left the city in search of forest animals to eat, Phra Sang sneaked out of the palace to play outside. To his surprise, he saw a big heap of human bones left by this foster-mother. Horrified, he proceeded to the castle and saw a silver and gold pond which was full of pure silver and liquid gold. He also saw a pair of golden shoes, and a mask of Ngor (an aboriginal race found in the jungles of Malaysia and southern Thailand) and a double-edged knife with a handle made of glass. The mask will disguise his beauty, provoking others to behave in ways that are more revealing of their true feelings and intentions.

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Sang Thong appears several times showing different parts of the narrative. His “mother” is pictured in the lower right corner with other ogres. Click on image for larger view

Children’s elementary school reader featuring the story of Sang Thong.

In Asia, there is a group of folktales that shares the same narrative motif, namely, “the transformation of man to snail.” The motif is one where the protagonists hide in a shell, such as a snail or a conch, as they seek protection or camouflage while in danger or experiencing misfortune.

It is inevitable that tales with “transformation of snail to man” and “transformation of man to snail” motifs contain elements of supernatural belief’ the story of transformation is in itself supernatural.

In Sang Thong, the name of the hero signifies “the golden conch”, but the conch shell in this tale has nothing to do with gold. The word “gold” is added only because the hero bathes himself in a pond of gold later in the story. Sang Thong is a tale of inner virtue as the hero’s appearance causes him to be banished from the kingdom. The King only perceives the bizarre appearance of his son so he refuses to look closer and see the potential of his new-born son.*

The motif is doubled when Sang Thong finds and wears a Ngor mask that disguises his beauty.

Paraphrase of text:

*An Analysis of the Prominent Cultural Values of Asian People through Similar Folktales by Onusa Suwanpratest, published in International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, Vol. 6, No. 11, November 2016

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A self-portrait of the artist of the murals huddles on the middle window. The painters of La Na were the most frequent illustrators of the texts of the Pannasa Jataka. The Pannasa Jataka are 50 “birth stories” based on local folk tales and legends. The official Buddhist canon collects 547 “birth stories”, similar to AEsop’s Fables.

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The interior photograph belies the small and intimate feeling of the building. The right and left walls display some of the finest Thai mural paintings in Northern Thailand. They are highly regarded for their illustrated narratives of Buddhist stories set within scenes of the rituals and pastimes of the local peoples of the Lanna kingdom of the north.

The Viharn Lai Kham is famous for its Buddha as well. The Phra Singh Buddha, the Lion Buddha. The statue is carried through the streets of Chiang Mai in April during Songkran so that lay people can sprinkle it with water to make merit.

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The Thai Buddhist temple, or wat, is not a building, but a place, a complex that serves as a community center for religious rites, learning, social life, recreation and even festivals. The wat is also a small community in itself, since almost every wat is also a monastery.

The complex is geographically aligned, starting from the ordination hall, whose entrance side faces east. Next to it are one or more assembly halls, or viharn, housing Buddhist images and murals.*

*Architecture of Thailand by Nithi Sthapitanonda and Brian Mertens

Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross

(Some of) Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani is a series of 14 black and white paintings that many consider to be the pinnacle of Barnett Newman’s artistic achievement. Each canvas measures about 78 x 60 inches, an imposing but not overwhelming size that Newman called “a human scale for the human cry.” Newman painted the Stations over the course of eight years using a palette of only black, raw canvas, and white.

Philadelphia Museum of Art website: philamuseum.org

DeYoung Museum, San Francisco

Detail of mural of the Ramayana - Ravana's death

Mattancherry Dutch Palace

This magnificent wall painting in Kerala is rarely shown in the vast published materials on the Ramayana. 16th century A.D.

Sita’s ordeal by fire.

To learn more about the Ramayana see my gallery: Khon and the Ramayana

Images from Painted Abode of Gods by A. Ramachandran

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See My Gallery about Teochew Opera

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Baci (SuKwan) dancers in Luang Prabang, Laos

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Meanwhile: Meet the Vanaras - Masked performers in Laos dressed as Rama’s monkey soldiers - Younger monkeys wearing simpler masks kneel in front See Gallery Khon and the Ramayana for more images!

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