The Art and Architecture of Thailand: From Prehistoric Times through the Thirteenth Century.

Brown, Robert L.

The Art and Architecture of Thailand: From Prehistoric Times through the Thirteenth Century. By HIRAM WOODWARD. Handbook of Oriental Studies, section 3: South-East Asia, vol. 14. Leiden: BRILL, 2003. Pp. xix + 275, plates, figures, maps.

Hiram Woodward notes in his preface that he has been working on this book on and off for about twenty-five years. It shows. It is a book that really only Woodward could write. The book demonstrates a complete mastery of an enormous corpus of art and architecture, and the use of an extensive corpus of scholarly references and often abstruse and rare textual sources. This is not to say that this will be the last word on the topic of art and architecture in Thailand. Quite the opposite, as it is better to see it as setting up something of a reconsidered beginning for future scholars.

Woodward's topic is the art and architecture found in what is today Thailand up until around A.D. 1300. The Thai first appear in history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the art found in Thailand before this date is associated with non-Thai ethnic and linguistic groups, two of the most important being the Khmer and the Mon. Thus, the book deals with material and cultures associated with non-Thai ethnic groups that cut across modern nation-state borders. Considering the cultural sensitivity and political implications of what is and is not part of the national identity of Southeast Asian states today, an awareness of the complex interplay of ancient cultures across mainland Southeast Asia cannot be stressed enough.

The book is organized into four chapters: (1) the prehistoric period, (2) the first millennium A.D., (3) Cambodian expansion (tenth to twelfth centuries), and (4) creating a new order, focusing on Jayavarman VII's reign (r. 1181-ca. 1210) and what followed in the thirteenth century leading up to the coming of the Thai. The book attempts to create what might be called a stylistic geography. Woodward believes, correctly I think, that each art object participates in a stylistic lineage, so that an object can be traced back to other objects with which it shares stylistic features, creating a web of interrelationships. His job is to recreate this web. Because art objects, and obviously architecture, have a geographical character--they are made in a specific place by someone who usually lives in that place--geographical sites become nodes on the stylistic web: a style and a place usually simply overlap. The third element is time, the diachronic consideration that gives the web its third dimension.

Woodward carefully sorts through sites and objects, attempting to stitch together their various relationships, dating objects using stylistic relationships and sites by their inscriptional or textual relationships. It is a tour de force, as the scraps of evidence for much of the material are slight and spotty and scattered over an array of sources. Whole centuries can be mostly empty of clear evidence of one kind or another, forcing Woodward to often cautious, although frequent, speculation ("... may or may not ..." becomes almost a mantra in the book).

The book is, therefore, a quintessential work of art history, which deals with the placing of art objects into a chronology. That this needs to be done today in the study of art from Thailand may surprise colleagues in related fields. Indeed, the controversy that surrounds the chronology, and the explanation for why an object or monument looks as it does at a certain point in time, are more contentious issues today than ever before.

How then will art historians receive the book? Much will depend on how much they know. For the student, even one fairly advanced in Southeast Asian art history, the book will be difficult to use. Each page bristles with notes and references. A single paragraph can refer in footnotes to four or five comparative objects. The reader needs to know and be able to recall (at least some of) the images being referenced, as looking them up would make reading the book an impractical undertaking. Also, many of the references are, as would perhaps be expected, to publications in Thai, a language that few western art historians know, even those who deal with art from Thailand.

For the more knowledgeable students, there are concerns as well. One is how far to accept Woodward's keen eye. Woodward looks at objects with a nuance that is often difficult to follow. He finds, for example, in worn figures only a few cm. tall on a small clay votive tablet from Thailand stylistic connections with sculptures almost two meters tall. He compares them even with large stone sculptures from India (pp. 64-67). The relationships can also at times become overwhelming in number: one Buddha figure is compared to objects from Burma (Pagan), Pala-period India, Dvaravati, T'angperiod China, Champa, and the local Sichon area (p. 191). Actually seeing what Woodward sees can be a challenge.

The book will be of interest to scholars other than art historians, particularly to students of religion. Woodward, for example, proposes several interesting ideas concerning the development of Buddhism in Thailand and Cambodia of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, a period when Khmer culture and political power dominated much of present-day Thailand. His evidence, lacking texts, resides in artistic iconography. The crowned Buddha image and tantric deities were introduced at the end of the eleventh/beginning of the twelfth at an enormous stone temple complex built by Khmer royalty at Phimai in northeastern Thailand. Some fifty years later, the Angkorian king Jayavarman VII patronized a type of Mahayana Buddhism in which the Buddha sitting on the snake was the central deity, with the bodhisattva Lokesvara and the goddess Prajnaparamita as flanking images in a triad.

Jayavarman's Mahayana orientation appears to have shifted toward Hinayana Buddhism at the end of his reign, and Woodward proposes a type of Hinayana Buddhism that he calls "Ariya" (= noble) developing after Jayavarman's death. Ariya Buddhism dominated Thailand during the thirteenth century up until the coming of Sinhalese Theravada around the middle of the fourteenth century (the term "Ariya Buddhism" was introduced by Woodward in earlier publications, e.g., his The Sacred Sculpture of Thailand [Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1997], 115-16). As it is his own term, for which there is no actual textual or inscriptional evidence, I suspect Buddhologists may take issue with a new name. It is characterized by a set of iconographical traits, including these associated with the Buddha image: seated Buddhas in earth-touching gesture (called maravijaya in Thailand), crowned Buddhas, standing Buddhas with their right hands in front of the chest, three identical Buddhas as a triad, and interest in Buddhas of the past.

The book, therefore, shows the fruits of an already long and distinguished career that has demonstrated respect for the art object, imagination, and hard work. It will provide scholars with new ideas and reinterpreted artistic and religious interconnections. Hopefully the book will inspire students, even if it will not be an easy read.

ROBERT L. BROWN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES