Place · Thai royal capital · Thailand
Sukhothai
The Thai capital of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where the Thai script was devised in 1283 from a Khmer model itself descended from south Indian Pallava writing, and where the walking Buddha image characteristic of Thai art was worked out.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — Sukhothai is an established capital; the authenticity of the Ramkhamhaeng stele and its historical claims remains unresolved.
- Location
- 17.020, 99.700
Worth knowing
The Ramkhamhaeng stele of 1292, which records the script's invention and describes the kingdom, is the founding document of Thai national history and has been argued since the 1980s to be a nineteenth-century forgery. The debate is unresolved and extremely heated.
Connections (3)
- Script continuity withKānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram
The Thai script devised at Sukhothai in 1283 was adapted from Khmer writing, which came from the Pallava Grantha of Kanchipuram. The same south Indian hand is the ancestor of Khmer, Cham, Mon, Burmese, Lao, Javanese, Balinese and the Philippine Baybayin — essentially every indigenous script in Southeast Asia. Nothing about that required Indian rule, or even continuous contact: a script is the cheapest thing a state can import and the hardest to get rid of.
- Teaching lineageAnurādhapura
Sukhothai's kings imported Theravada monks from Sri Lanka — the Sinhalese ordination lineage brought by way of Martaban — and the walking Buddha image they developed is a Sri Lankan-influenced type with no Indian precedent. Ramkhamhaeng's inscription describes a forest-dwelling Sinhalese abbot brought to the capital. The Thai sangha's ordination line still runs back to Anuradhapura, which is why Sri Lanka later re-imported ordination from Siam when its own line failed.
- Teaching lineageLuang Prabang
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.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sukhothai Kingdom”. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Hermann Kulke et al., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa.
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