In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Seven Weeks:A 19th-Century Burmese Palm-Leaf Manuscript
  • Catherine Raymond (bio)

The Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University (NIU) includes certain unique treasures amongst the palm-leaf manuscripts (peisa) in the Rare Books and Special Collections Department, Founders Memorial Library. Particularly noteworthy is a 110-page folio (made up of 55 leaves each inscribed and incised on both sides), comprising an illustrated, decorated, and annotated treatise on Burmese Buddhist cosmology that appears on the cover of this issue of The Journal of Burma Studies. The leaves are stitched in such a way as to allow the folio to unfold vertically into a continuous document: an aggregate, complex rendering of the Buddhist universe and its Three Realms.1

One complete face of the folio is devoted to a sequence from the highest heavens to deepest hells; while the obverse face depicts a Buddhapada, the origins of the Four Great Rivers, a cross section of the Four Islands, a symbolic geography of the Sixteen Sacred Lands, and the life of the Buddha before and after his enlightenment; showing particularly, the Satthasahana, or the "Seven Weeks Following Enlightenment." Of this assemblage, seven leaves only (out of the 55) unfold into elaborate illustrations of the Satthasahana. [End Page 255]

As noted by Patricia Herbert (2002, 92), typically Burmese Buddhist cosmological manuscripts conclude with an illustration of the Buddha seated in the maravijaya posture, emblematic of his victory over Mara in combination with "spokes" from the central Buddha image radiating to textual evocations of the "Sixteen Sacred Lands." But our seven-leaf cover page (as it appears on the cover of this issue) sequence appears to be unique in that the maravijaya Buddha appears at the hub of a circular plan that not only includes the Sixteen Sacred Lands, but also encompasses representations of the Satthasahana events and sites. It is on this peculiar diagram that I would focus our attention.

Powerful visual depictions of Buddhist cosmology were found in Burmese art — especially on wall paintings2 and architecture3 — since the Pagan period, and have continued to be popular at least until the end of the 19th century, as evidenced by this palm-leaf manuscript, which quite exceptionally, is dated by inscription from BE 1256 (1894). However, as Herbert also explains in her article, such palm-leaf manuscripts "combining short texts and illustrations of a complex subject matter, constitute a rare and little-studied category" (2002, 77). Very few manuscripts of this type have survived complete, which is due in large part to both the physical fragility and the biodegradability of the palm-leaves. Therefore, it is rather difficult to accurately compare ours with other similarly categorized manuscripts.

Indeed, while part of the Sixteen Sacred Lands are otherwise quite commonly illustrated on wall paintings in the temples of Pagan,4 and on andagu associated with the [End Page 256] Eight Great Events (the Nativity, the Enlightenment, the First Sermon, the Parileyyaka, the Taming of Nalagiri, the Descent from Tavatimsa, the Twin Miracles of Savathi, and the Mahaparinirvana), this theme appears rarely in Burmese peisa cosmological folios.5 And in those former media — as with the diagram in the manuscript under discussion here — the Seven Weeks scenes are usually distributed around a central image of the Buddha seated in the maravijaya posture.

Sources

The canonical biographies of the Buddha lead us to believe that the Buddha spent seven weeks following the enlighten-ment meditating under and nearby to the Mahabodhi tree. Amongst the numerous biographies of Buddha, two that are well known in Burma would seem to provide a detailed account of the events that inspired the artists(s) of this diagrammatic illustration of the Seven Weeks: the Nidanakatha6 (the Story of Gotama Buddha found in the Jataka commentary) and the more detailed Tatha-gatha-udana-dipani (The Life or Legend of Gaudama the Buddha of the Burmese).7 The latter enumerates the key events during the 49 days of meditation around the Bodhi [End Page 257] tree. Both texts lend a grand importance to the scene of the enlightenment. In order to examine the correlation between text and images, we will look first at the Sixteen Sacred Lands, and then...

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