「タム文字写本文化圏」におけるクーバー・スィーウィチャイについての覚書

抄録

Khuba Siwichai (1878–1938) was a celebrated monk from what is now northern Thailand, who happened to become a national figure because of the conflict between his local Lan Na (Yuan) Buddhist practices and the regulations newly set up by the modern Siamese (Thai) state sangha in the early twentieth century. Almost 80 years since Khuba Siwichai’s death, his reputation as a ton bun (holy man) is still prevalent in the midst of the proliferation of contemporary khrubas, who often hold Khuba Siwichai in high esteem as the primogenitor of their respectable tradition.
In the eyes of contemporary devotees, Khuba Siwichai may seem primarily an activist best remembered for his monumental building projects. Following a careful reading of a number of biographical writings on Khuba Siwichai, however, this paper is an examination of another significant field of his activities—the palm-leaf manuscripts he preserved. From 1926 to 1928, while engaged in the five-year-long renovation and reconstruction of Wat Phra Sing in Chiang Mai, he collected manuscripts in disrepair, sorted them, and had them copied in order to create new collections. The colophons of some of these manuscripts, in which Khuba Siwichai revealed his fervent desire and determination to achieve Buddhahood in his own handwriting, indicate that he produced some of these manuscripts himself.
Khuba Siwichai’s deep involvement in the manuscript production are reminiscent of one of his great predecessors in the region, Khuba Kancana, who established a library for Wat Sung Men in Phrae in 1830s and is said to be the greatest single preserver of manuscripts in the history of Buddhism in Laos, Thailand, and adjacent areas. It is most interesting that the mentoring relationships relating to Khuba Siwichai can be traced back to Khuba Kancana, who had also visited Wat Phra Sing in Chiang Mai at some time in life. It is therefore quite possible that Khuba Siwichai consciously emulated Khuba Kancana’s example. In this light, Khuba Siwichai should be considered as a successor of Khuba Kancana, whose work belongs to “the cultural region of Tham script manuscripts.” This important feature of Khuba Siwichai’s legacy is rarely remembered today, mostly because reverence for Tham script manuscripts themselves has diminished considerably since the division of the region into the modern nations of Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and China.