Collaborative project33 Metres of Buddhist Cosmos

24 June 2025

The Museum of Asian Art in Berlin is home to perhaps the most spectacular surviving ‘Traiphum’, a Thai leporello of Buddhist cosmology. CSMC alumnus Peera Panarut explores the rich stories of this manuscript together with Martina Stoye, curator of South and Southeast Asian Arts.

© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss / Martina Stoye

In 1776, King Taksin is at the height of his power. Nine years earlier, the 400-year-old kingdom of Ayutthaya had fallen in a war against the Burmese, almost completely destroying the capital. The country is devastated, politically fragmented, and on the verge of sinking into anarchy. Taksin, a general of Chinese descent, unites the scattered forces into a resistance army, defeats the attackers, and rises to become king himself. In Thonburi, the newly founded capital in what is now the west of Bangkok, he endeavours to revive his country’s culture, which had been devastated by the war, until his own fall in 1782. He arranges for the reconstruction of destroyed Buddhist heritage, summons scholars even from remote provinces to his court, and commissions numerous manuscripts on the culture and religion of the lost kingdom.

One of these manuscripts surpasses all the others: a leporello, 33 meters long when fully unfolded, lavishly illustrated on both sides and enriched by written texts. In 1776, he orders four royal scribes and four royal painters to produce two exemplars of this extraordinary book. It is a ‘Traiphum’, which means ‘three worlds’. A Traiphum shows the cosmos according to Buddhist understanding, consisting of the world of sensual desires, the world of pure form, and the world of formlessness. Manuscripts of this kind are common in this period and writing culture and are often used to teach spiritual ideas and traditions to monks and students. A magnificent copy such as this one, however, was presumably also intended as an object of representation and legitimisation, and to present the king as the guarantor of moral order and cultural continuity.

Around 250 years later, this spectacular manuscript is kept in the Museum of Asian Art (AKu) at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, where it is displayed in a six-meter-long showcase that was specifically designed for the object. Different parts of the leporello are visible at regular intervals. The ‘Berlin Traiphum’ is considered to be the most magnificent and best-preserved Traiphum known to date back from the 18th century; most other surviving manuscripts of this type are more recent. It is accordingly famous and highly valued, especially in Thailand. Although the Traiphum was the object of several scholarly investigations, the scope and complexity of the object still pose enormous challenges: Not only are the accompanying texts written in two different languages (Thai and Pali) and two different scripts (Thai and Khom script); also the relationships between the illustrations and texts leave many open questions.

Curiously, the Berlin Traiphum, for all its opulence and size, is strictly speaking only a subsidiary manuscript.

When Peera Panarut came to AKu for the first time in 2018, he was a PhD student at the CSMC researching writing culture of the Thai royal court since the late 18th century for his doctoral thesis on Ayutthaya Literature in the Hands of Bangkok Scribes and Scholars, which he completed at the CSMC Graduate School in 2019. In 2022, he came back together with his colleagues Volker Grabowsky and Sutheera Satayaphan. They sifted through the complete collection of 70 Thai manuscripts at AKu During  during an intensive week of work together with the museum team, which took photographs of all the manuscript folios. While this visit turned out so fruitful that an informal cooperation was agreed upon, a joint research project remained only a vague idea at this point.

In 2023, however, an opportunity came up: The Collaborative Museum programme (CoMuse), established at the Ethnological Museum and AKu, made it possible to invite partners from the communities of origin to participate in collaborative formats on collection holdings. This allowed Peera to begin working on the Berlin Traiphum together with Martina Stoye, curator of the art collection from South and Southeast Asia. For this pilot project, a six-meter-long section of the leporello was selected and the texts and images were studied together: Peera read the captions, Martina examined the illustrations. Together, they explored the contents through research in Buddhist and other relevant textual traditions. They quickly worked on joint and individual publications and incorporate their findings into the exhibition at AKu. At the end of the pilot project in July 2024, the exhibition received a very special visitor: Thai Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn came to the museum and had the two researchers show and explain the famous leporello to her.

After the completion of CoMuse, Peera joined AKu in January 2025, funded by the CSMC, so that the duo can continue their work and examine further sections of the manuscript. As before, they are proceeding in six-meter sections. By the end of this year, all texts of the Traiphum will be available in English and German translation, and the object will also be extensively digitised. It will be the first time that the manuscript is accessible in full.

Chanikan Charoensri

Despite all the care with which the leporello was prepared, it contains several scribal errors. These are often of particular scholarly interest: ‘Errors are suitable starting points for textual criticism because they allow comparisons with parallel manuscripts and provide important clues to the history of transmission’, says Peera. Curiously, the Berlin Traiphum, for all its opulence and size, is strictly speaking only a draft or a royal subsidiary manuscript. Indeed, it was the other of the two manuscripts commissioned by Taksin that had the status of royal official manuscript and was lavishly bound in decorated covers, a feature that the Berlin Traiphum lacks – experts including Peera therefore assume that this was the ‘preparatory copy’. The presumed primary Traiphum was exhibited in the Vajirañāṇa Royal Royal Library of Thailand, the precursor of the National Library of Thailand, until the 1930s before it got lost. To this day, no one knows what has become of it.

The Berlin Traiphum had a better fate. The reign of Taksin came to a dramatic end in 1782, when he was overthrown and executed. The leporello presumably ended up in the private possession of a descendant of Taksin who served as a palace lady in the 19th century. During a trip in 1863, the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian, who later became the founding director of the Berlin Ethnological Museum, got the opportunity to see a royal Traiphum manuscript due to his good contacts with the country’s elite, and described it in his travel accounts. Years later, Gerolamo Emilio Gerini, an Italian in the service of the Royal Cadet Academy in Siam, purchased the object from the palace lady and offered it to the Berlin museum in 1894. Since then, the Traiphum has been in Berlin, where it survived the turmoil of the 20th century unscathed. Today, hardly any other Traiphum from the Thonburi period has survived in such good condition.

For this reason in particular, it is a treasure for research, which, even if everything goes according to plan for Peera and Martina, will not be exhausted by the end of this year. There continues to be great interest in this manuscript, not only in Germany and Thailand. Across its 33 meters, the Berlin Traiphum tells many stories. The time has come to understand its own.