Preah Bot

These delightful, beautiful and sought-after paintings depict scenes from Buddha's life or the Jataka tale. With lavish illustrations throughout, the authors study both the religious meaning of the paintings as well as their artistic merit.

This title documents the remnants of the rich Buddhist cultural heritage of Cambodia after centuries of wars and destruction culminating with the genocide and cultural annihilation of the Khmer Rouge.

The 547 Buddhist jatakas, or verse parables, recount the Buddha's lives in previous incarnations. In his penultimate and most famous incarnation, he appears as the Prince Vessantara, perfecting the virtue of generosity by giving away all his possessions, his wife, and his children to the beggar Jujaka. Taking an anthropological approach to this two-thousand-year-old morality tale, Katherine A. Bowie highlights significant local variations in its interpretations and public performances across three regions of Thailand over 150 years. The Vessantara Jataka has served both monastic and royal interests, encouraging parents to give their sons to religious orders and intimating that kings are future Buddhas. But, as Bowie shows, characterizations of the beggar Jujaka in various regions and eras have also brought ribald humor and sly antiroyalist themes to the story. Historically, these subversive performances appealed to popular audiences even as they worried the conservative Bangkok court. The monarchy sporadically sought to suppress the comedic recitations. As Thailand has changed from a feudal to a capitalist society, this famous story about giving away possessions is paradoxically being employed to promote tourism and wealth.

Buddhist temples in Southeast Asia are centers for the preservation of local artistic traditions. Chief among these are manuscripts, a vital source for our understanding of Buddhist ideas and practices in the region. They are also a beautiful art form, too little understood in the West. The British Library has one of the richest collections of Southeast Asian manuscripts, principally from Thailand and Burma, anywhere in the world. It includes finely painted copies of Buddhist scriptures, literary works, historical narratives, and works on traditional medicine, law, cosmology, and fortune-telling. Buddhism Illuminated includes over one hundred examples of Buddhist art from the Library’s collection, relating each manuscript to Theravada tradition and beliefs, and introducing the historical, artistic, and religious contexts of their production. It is the first book in English to showcase the beauty and variety of Buddhist manuscript art and reproduces many works that have never before been photographed.

Catalog of paintings from the collection of Joel Montague exhibited in "Framing the sacred: Cambodian Buddhist painting" November 20th 2013-March 20th 2014, Insitute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Zeitschrift für Krypotgamenkunde.