Tracing Thoughts through Things
Seventh Gonda Lecture by Professor Janice Stargardt
On Friday 12 November 1999, Professor Janice Stargardt held the seventh Gonda lecture in the building of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Kloveniersburgwal 29, Amsterdam, under the title 'Tracing Thoughts through Things: Early Buddhist Archaeology in India and Burma.'
By GERBRAND MULLER
Professor Stargardt is Senior Research Fellow in Archaeology and Historical Geography and Director of the Cambridge Project on Ancient Civilization inSouth East Asia, Department of Geography of the University of Cambridge. She is also Directeur d'Etudes étranger for life in South East Asian Archaeology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne.In her lecture Janice Stargardt showed that only archaeological evidence throws light on the economic and social conditions of the middle Ganges Valley in the period preceeding the development of Buddhism, Jainism and important new stages of Hindu thought there. Through the art and archaeology of the Northern Deccan and especially of Andhra, she demonstrated that a rich, continuous and datable record of Buddhist thought is contained in the archaeological remains of North and South India. The Andhra region provides the background to the spread of Buddhist culture to Burma.
In the second half of her lecture, she dwelt upon a relic chamber belonging to the 5th-6th century AD at Sri Ksetra in Central Burma. This contained the largest sacred treasure of gold and silver Buddhist objects so far known in India or South East Asia, among them the oldest texts in pure Pali in the world, and some of the earliest Buddhist art found outside India. Tracing the ceremony of merit-making involved in the inscription of the Golden Pali Text of the Pyu, she pinpointed a major omission in one of the eight excerpts contained in this text, which made it a ritually imperfect object and thus not suitable to become the principal relic in the sacred deposit.
She then presented the Great Silver Reliquary which was found at the centre of the same relic chamber, and, by presenting a reading of the inscription around its lid rim, she showed that the last part of that inscription contained the very passage which had been omitted from the Golden Pali Text. Together these two objects formed a ritually perfect deposit. The fact that they are, at one and the same time, the oldest surviving samples of pure canonical Pali and represent two texts in which one corrects the other, makes them of quite exceptional importance. In tracing the thought behind this sacred deposit, she concluded, one needs both the things and the texts. *
Drs Gerbrand Muller, Secretary for the Arts, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
E-mail: Gerbrand.Muller@knaw.nl