Colophons in Lao Manuscripts from Luang Prabang
Exploring Production, Uses, and Interaction Between Sangha and Laity
2023–2025
RFH07
This project studies colophons in Lao manuscripts kept in different collections in the monastic repositories of Luang Prabang (Laos), the ancient royal Lao capital and the centre of Buddhist learning in northern Laos renowned for its long and uninterrupted tradition of manuscript production and circulation. The manuscript research corpus includes circa 10,200 manuscripts from four collections. The manuscripts were produced between the middle of the 16th century and the present. The earliest dated one is entitled Parivāra and was written in 1520 CE (Source: DLLM, code: 06018504078-00, the National Museum, Luang Prabang). This project covers mostly religious manuscripts, as more than 90 percent of Lao manuscripts of the corpus under study contain Buddhist texts. However, for the sake of a comparative perspective, manuscripts containing secular texts (astrological and medical treatises, customary laws, folklore, et cetera) are also examined.
Thousands of manuscripts in Luang Prabang include colophons that reflect the general wishes of sponsors and scribes, for example attaining enlightenment; dedicating merit to their dead relatives; devoting manuscripts to Buddhism; or avoiding sickness and warding off danger. Colophons also reflect the collaboration and interaction between the Sangha, that is, the community of monks and novices, on one side and the laypeople on the other side. Thus, colophons gave scribes and sponsors/donors a platform to freely express their wishes; in contrast, they sometimes do not even mention the titles or the main texts of the manuscripts. These core contents were hardly ever new; sponsors or scribes just copied texts from other extant manuscripts. Consequently, the person(s) who commissioned the production of a particular manuscript can only be identified through colophons. They therefore provide crucial historical and cross-cultural information about social interactions of production agents (sponsors, scribes), agents of use (monks, novices, laypeople, monasteries), and textual transmissions within Luang Prabang. So far, these aspects have not been scholarly investigated. The focus of manuscript research in the Dhamma Script Cultural Domain (DSCD) has been on textual categories, while other issues that require a cross-study of manuscripts of different textual genres have not been addressed. This project investigates the documenting functions of colophons in view of the most recent developments the field of manuscript studies.
The methodological approaches employed in this project are manuscript culture studies, paracontents, codicology, and the Four Key Factors heuristic tool (Wimmer et al: 2015). Social interactions touching upon the plurality of production agents in manuscript productions and textual transmission are expected to be reconstructed through the study. Since numerous colophons were frequently written in different kinds of scripts (Dhamma script, modern Lao script, modern Thai script, and Roman script) and different languages (vernacular Lao or Tai Lü, Pali, Thai, English, and French), verbal patterns dealing with multi-scriptural and multilingual colophons are investigated to reveal foreign influences and international relations with western and neighbouring countries.
People
Project lead: Silpsupa Jaengsawang