Place · royal monastic town · Laos
Luang Prabang
The old Lao royal capital on the Mekong, a town of some thirty working monasteries whose Theravada practice, Pali canon and daily alms round descend in an unbroken institutional line from the Magadhan sangha by way of Sri Lanka and Thailand.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.887, 102.135
Worth knowing
The town takes its name from the Phra Bang, a gold Buddha image said to have come from Ceylon by way of Angkor. The morning alms procession of several hundred monks is now also the town's main tourist draw, which has strained the practice considerably.
Connections (3)
- Teaching lineageNālandā mahāvihāra
Luang Prabang's thirty-odd monasteries keep a Theravada practice whose Pali canon, ordination lineage and daily alms round descend in an unbroken institutional line from the Magadhan sangha — by way of Sri Lanka, which preserved the canon when north Indian Buddhism collapsed, and then Thailand. Nalanda's Mahayana scholasticism went east and north and did not survive in India either; the Pali tradition went south, survived, and came back only in the twentieth century.
- Teaching lineageSukhothai
Lan Xang took its Theravada establishment and its Pali learning from the Khmer and the Thai in the fourteenth century — Fa Ngum returned from Angkor with monks and the Phra Bang image — so Luang Prabang's monasteries belong to the same ordination line that reached Sukhothai from Sri Lanka. A doctrine that had gone from Magadha to Anuradhapura came back up the Mekong seventeen centuries later by way of Burma, Siam and Cambodia.
- Craft tradition ofPhra Lak Phra Lam
Phra Lak Phra Lam is painted on the monastery walls at Luang Prabang, recited from palm-leaf manuscripts and performed at Pi Mai, the Lao New Year, with masked dancers in the royal palace compound. The geography is relocated entirely to the Mekong — Ayodhya placed in Laos and Lanka downstream — so the epic happens on the river the audience is standing beside.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Luang Prabang”. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Hermann Kulke et al., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa.
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