Place · Pyu Buddhist city · Myanmar
Śrī Kṣetra
Also known as Śrī Kṣetra — the Pyu cities
The largest of the Pyu city-states of the Irrawaddy, walled with brick over some fourteen square kilometres and occupied from roughly the fourth to the ninth century, with cylindrical stupas that are the ancestors of everything later Burmese. The Pyu wrote a Brahmi-derived script of South Indian type, buried their dead in urns, and left the earliest Pali inscriptions in Southeast Asia — gold plates carrying extracts from the Pali canon. Their silver coinage was struck to Indian-derived weight standards and stamped with the śrīvatsa.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.810, 95.290
Worth knowing
The śrīvatsa on the coins is the auspicious mark of Viṣṇu and Lakshmī, with a rising sun and a svastika on the reverse, and the issues circulated well beyond Pyu territory — so an Indian religious symbol served as the money of mainland Southeast Asia.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueNakhon Pathom
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.
- Teaching lineageAnurādhapura
The twenty gold leaves from Sri Ksetra inscribed with extracts from the Pali canon are the oldest Pali texts found anywhere in Southeast Asia, and the doctrinal line they belong to runs back through Sri Lanka, where the canon had been written down in the first century BCE. Anuradhapura preserved the Theravada when it was disappearing in India, and the Irrawaddy and the Chao Phraya took it from there rather than from the mainland.
- TransmissionGrantha script
The Pyu cities took their writing, their weights and their coin symbols from India. Pyu inscriptions are in a Brahmi-derived script of South Indian type, their silver coins are struck to weight standards derived from Indian practice, and the commonest device on them is the śrīvatsa, the auspicious mark associated with Viṣṇu and Lakshmī, with a rising sun and a svastika on the reverse. The coinage circulated across mainland Southeast Asia and is one of the clearest measures of how far the Indic monetary idiom reached.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sri Ksetra Kingdom” and “Pyu city-states”. Janice Stargardt, The Ancient Pyu of Burma (1990); Elizabeth Moore on the Pyu walled sites; UNESCO inscription documents for the Pyu Ancient Cities (2014).
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