Centre of Northern Lao Manuscript Culture: A catalogue of manuscripts from Vat Sisavanthevalok (Vat Sangkhalok), Luang Prabang

Luang Prabang has maintained its fame and status as a centre of Lao Buddhism to this day. The ancient and exceptional manuscript culture of Laos has survived colonial rule, war, and modernization in a globalized world. Unlike in many parts of the world, production of manuscripts did not stop during the twentieth century in Laos, where traditional ways of writing have been preserved by monks and lay scribes until present times. The sacred Dhamma (Tham) script is a special feature of traditional Lao literature. It originated in the neighbouring Northern Thai kingdom of Lan Na – probably as a derivative of the ancient Mon alphabet of Hariphunchai – in the late fourteenth century and made its way south through the Mekong River Basin. As its name indicates, this script was used for the writing of Buddhist scriptures and other religious texts. Lao manuscripts were mostly inscribed with a stylus on rectangular cut and cured palm-leaf sheets of varying length. Each sheet had two holes; a cotton string was passed through the left one, making it possible to bind several palm-leaf sheets together as one fascicle (phuk). Recent research estimates that more than ninety per cent of Lao manuscripts are “palm-leaf books” (nangsü bai lan). According to traditional Buddhist beliefs, no matter whether they were written carefully or not, manuscripts should not be treated disrespectfully or kept in a demeaning place. The texts that Lao manuscripts contain, especially those related to rituals, should not have any insertions or other writing added to them. Any person breaking this rule would lose the respect of devout Buddhists. The corpus of digitized manuscripts kept at the monastic repository of Vat Sangkhalok is one of the important manuscript collections. The impressive collection of palm-leaf manuscripts was the work of senior intellectual monks who appreciated the ancient manuscript culture of Laos. Notably, Somdet Rasakhru Rattanapannya, abbot of Vat Sangkhalok who was the scribe and sponsor of the manuscripts on several subjects. Based on what we know from other Lao, Northern Thai (Lan Na), and Tai Lü manuscripts bearing religious texts, there is little difference in the structure and content of the colophons of the corpus as a whole. That said, the colophons found in these manuscripts reveal a number of interesting features. The vast majority of the manuscripts are dated, and the dates are recorded according to the Lao lunar calendar in a refined and elaborate way, in most cases allowing for a rather precise calculation of the day (and even of the daytime) when the writing of the text was accomplished. The persons figuring most prominently in the colophons are not the scribes, whose names are only occasionally mentioned, but the sponsors or donors who hired the scribes and provided the writing support. They are considered the real “makers” of the manuscripts, and their intentions and wishes are expressed in the colophons. Though the main texts might be written in Pali or bilingual Pali-Lao, the colophons are almost exclusively written in the Lao (or in some cases also Lan Na) vernacular with rather short, standardized Pali phrases at the end. In almost all cases, the scribes were either monks and novices or laymen who had once been ordained in a monastery where they learned to read and write texts written in the religious Dhamma (Tham) script. Sponsors and donors could also have a monastic background but, in most cases, they were ordinary laypeople. In the Lao context, at least in Luang Prabang, the relatively high percentage of women serving as principal lay supporters is astonishing, as is the presence of royalty among the sponsors and donors of manuscripts. Moreover, a closer study of colophons will also sharpen our understanding of the cooperation that took place between scribes and sponsors/donors as well as the involvement of different sponsors/donors in the making of a manuscript. Even though in recent years a number of projects have been carried out to preserve, document, and digitize manuscripts in various parts of Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia, there remains much to be done to identify either physically or culturally endangered manuscript collections, both in monastic repositories and in private collections. The authors hope that this catalogue will raise awareness and speed up research in the diverse manuscript cultures of the Thai and Lao world, which constitute a most precious heritage of the people in the region.