Place · early Buddhist city · Thailand
Nakhon Pathom
Also known as Nakhon Pathom — Dvāravatī
The principal city of Dvaravati, the Mon Buddhist culture of the Chao Phraya basin from about the sixth century — the earliest substantial Buddhist state in what is now Thailand, with Pali inscriptions, dharmachakra pillars and Gupta-derived sculpture.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 13.820, 100.060
Worth knowing
Its name is a Sanskrit compound and the Dvaravati inscriptions are in Pali, Mon and Sanskrit at once. The great stupa there, rebuilt in the nineteenth century, is the tallest in the world; the sixth-century one underneath it is what matters.
Connections (2)
- Sacred transplantSārnāth
Dvaravati's characteristic monument is the dharmachakra on a pillar, set up in the open — a wheel of the law on a shaft, which is the Sarnath and Sanchi iconography of the first teaching, transplanted whole into the Chao Phraya basin in the sixth and seventh centuries. Over a hundred of them survive. Nothing comparable was being put up in India by then, so Dvaravati preserved an Indian Buddhist form after India had moved on from it.
- AnalogueŚrī Kṣetra
Dvaravati in the Chao Phraya and the Pyu cities of the Irrawaddy are the two earliest Buddhist urban cultures of mainland Southeast Asia, both Mon or Pyu speaking, both using Pali and Sanskrit, and both writing in scripts derived from south Indian Brahmi. Both were absorbed by Tai and Burman arrivals from the north who took their religion, their writing and their kingship and kept almost nothing else.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Nakhon Pathom”. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Hermann Kulke et al., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa.
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