Bai sema

Photo 1: Bai sema at Wat Mahathat, Sukhothai Historical Park

Bai sema (Thai: ใบเสมา, pronounced [bāj sěː.māː]) are boundary stones which mark sacred ground in a Thai Buddhist temple (wat), most often the area of a phra ubosot (ordination hall); otherwise called sema hin (เสมาหิน). The stones mark the baddhasīmā, the area within which monks perform the formal acts of the order, which the Vinaya Pitaka requires to hold twenty-one seated monks, or twenty-four on a Cambodian summary of the commentaries. Eight are set over buried stones called luk nimit at the cardinal points of a new ordination hall. Their leaf shape gives them their Thai name, and doubled or tripled sets mark a rebuilding, a shared use by more than one order, or a royal connection.

The oldest stone examples in Thailand come from the northeast and belong to the Dvaravati period. Their chronology is disputed, with datings ranging from the seventh century to the tenth. Whether their spread marks the extent of Dvaravati or the movement of monks and artisans is disputed as well. A stupa raised on a vessel-shaped base recurs on the early group, and some of the northeastern stones carry narrative scenes.

History

Ritual boundary and its markers

The baddhasīmā is the area in which monks perform the Sanghakamma, or Buddhist sacred ceremonies. The Vinaya Pitaka requires it to hold 21 seated monks, with a space the length of a forearm between each. A Cambodian summary of the Vinaya commentaries, published in 1932, gives the requirement as twenty-four seated monks. It adds that the ground should be no larger than the rite needs, and that the markers must be clearly set and not interrupted by another structure. A procedure exists for laying a sīmā over an earlier one. The area should also not be larger than three yojana which is about 48 kilometres (30 mi).

The baddhasīmā may also be marked by other nimitta (border markers), among them hills, rock formations, forests, trees, ant hills, streets, rivers, and other waters such as the sea or a pond. The type of nimitta mainly used in Thailand is a stone. The canonical text does not say what the nimitta should be. That silence has been read as leaving the form of the marker to regional practice. The oldest stone bai sema in Thailand were found in northeast Thailand (Isan) and are from the Dvaravati period (6th–9th century CE). Three sources have been suggested for the practice. They are a megalithic tradition of venerating ancestral spirits, the Buddhist requirement for a marked ritual boundary, and the use of the stones as objects of veneration in their own right.

Dating and distribution

The chronology of these early stones is disputed. The first sets of ritual boundary stones have been dated generally to about 600–750. The numerous stones at Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang in Kalasin province have been put in about the 9th century, and several of the figural stones from that site in the 10th. A dating of the northeastern corpus as a whole to the 9th and 10th centuries rests on the post-Pallava script and Old Mon language of the inscribed examples. A further reading separates the two kinds, putting non-figurative sema as early as the seventh century and the pictorial ones slightly later, on their Cham and pre-Angkorian Khmer headdresses and costumes, perhaps continuing into the eleventh century.

The review that reports the first three of these datings observes that the analysis of costume and coiffure on the narrative stones has not been undertaken. That analysis might establish a firmer chronology. It concludes that the Fa Daet stones cannot on their own demonstrate that an urban centre stood in that region in the 8th century. Two sets of boundary stones on Phnom Kulen in Cambodia were once proposed as foundations of the polity known from Tang Chinese records as Wen Dan. That proposal was later called incautious, since the stones cannot be dated closely enough to show whether they precede or follow the accession of Jayavarman II in 802. The same view of the Phnom Kulen stones has been stated more strongly, holding that they record the spread of Buddhism rather than of Dvaravati political power. Scholarly consensus has treated the spread of sema stones across the Khorat Plateau as marking the extent of Dvaravati, or at least of a political presence there. That spread has instead been held more likely to record the movement of monks, Brahmins, and artisans, who could carry religion and style across political lines. Against the political reading stands a count. Only one dharmacakra is known from the whole of the plateau, against more than forty recorded in central Thailand. On that account it is hard to argue for a strong or meaningful Dvaravati political presence on the plateau apart from at Mueang Sema. An earlier reading ran the other way. The stones of Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang were taken for a local civilisation de stèles, reported as "apparently largely independent of Dvaravati or Khmer political influences and only slightly and lately Khmerized". The plateau's material has also been grouped by river system, distinguishing the Chi, the Mun, and the middle Mekong, with the Mekong group as the tradition's most easterly extent. In the Mun valley the markers are few, and relatively isolated in their placement. The scarcity there has been read as indicating less Dvaravati influence, and much stronger Chenla and later Khmer influence reaching the valley along the Mekong from the area around Sambor Prei Kuk. Boundary stones at Thaton in Myanmar resemble those of northeastern Thailand, and the similarity has been read as contact between the two regions in the late first millennium AD.

Motifs, scenes and settings

A recurring motif on stones of this early group is the kumbha stupa, a stupa raised on a vessel-shaped base. The form is recorded on boundary stones from Hin Khon (หินขอน) in Pak Thong Chai district, Nakhon Ratchasima province. It occurs again near Muang Bon (เมืองบน) in Nakhon Sawan province, at Ban Tat Thong (บ้านตาดทอง) in Yasothon province, and at Phnom Kulen. It occurs also on related objects, among them a bronze reliquary from Na Dun district and a silver repoussé sheet from Kantharawichai district, both in Maha Sarakham province. A terracotta kumbha from Thap Chumphon (ทัพชุมพล) in Nakhon Sawan carries an inscription in characters of the 9th or 10th century. It records in Mon that the offering was made by the ancestors near the vihāra, and carries the Pali ye dhammā formula.

Over one hundred stones have been recorded at Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang, where local people said in 1954 that there had once been more than two thousand. One of the figural stones from Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang, called the Ramphan Philap sema (ใบเสมารำพันพิลาป), has been read as showing a warrior with a sword carried on his back standing at a city gate. The Mon sīmā stones of northeastern Thailand of the 8th and 9th centuries illustrate scenes from the Jātakas but carry no glosses, bearing instead inscriptions relating to the donor. At Pagan, by contrast, Jātaka illustrations of the 11th and 12th centuries carry Old Mon glosses giving the title of the story and the identity of the Bodhisatta.

During the Dvaravati period, such stones were not confined to ordination halls. At Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang, they were excavated around a Dvaravati ubosot and found on three sides of a stupa, while at Phu Phra Bat, prehistoric rock shelters were encircled by them. An inscription from Chaiyaphum has been read as recording a Buddha image set up inside a boundary of this kind. The style of the carvings is also in question. It has usually been taken for provincial Dvaravati, but three readings have taken the stones instead as objects of their own, drawing together characteristics of Dvaravati, pre-Angkorian Cambodia, and Champa into an indigenous form. The modern division between the mahāsīmā, the monastery as a whole, and the khaṇḍasīmā, the precinct within it, cannot be shown for the period, and no mahāsīmā has been identified on the ground.

The numbers used and the shapes made varied. The range for directional settings is given as four to sixteen stones, placed singly, in pairs, or in threes. Excavations at Ban Nong Kluem and Ban Pailom in Ban Phue district found rectangles of twenty-two and twenty-four stones, the second set in three concentric rows. At Ban Na Ngam in Kalasin and at Ban Ilai in Vientiane, the stones stand in a circle instead. No structure was found at the centre of any of these settings, which has been read as perishable building material or as no building at all. It has been suggested that, in some cases, the ceremonies were held in the open air.

Placing of the bai sema

Luk nimit beside their pits, awaiting the burial ceremony

A luk nimit in an open pit, not yet covered

Before work starts on a new phra ubosot, nine holes are dug, eight at the cardinal points and the ninth beneath the place of the principal Buddha image. Luk nimit (Thai: ลูกนิมิต), round stones the size of a cannonball, are placed into these holes during a religious ceremony. Eight sema stones are then placed over the luk nimit situated at the cardinal points. Luk nimit have never been found with Dvaravati-period sema on the Khorat Plateau. The practice has been taken to be later, perhaps beginning in the Sukhothai period, and possibly a Thai addition to the way sacred ground is marked. Nor was eight the only number used. Nineteenth-century manuscripts from Wat Suthat Thepwararam in Bangkok show sema set up in groups of three, four, and seven.

Double (or even triple) bai sema signify that the phra ubosot has been rebuilt, or consecrated for use by more than one monastic order, or that the temple has a royal connection (photo 1).

Description of the bai sema

The Thai words bai sema mean "sema leaves", from the resemblance of the flat stones to the leaves of the Bodhi tree, under which the Buddha attained enlightenment (photo 1). The name has instead been derived from the shape of the flat slab type, which predominates from the Ayutthaya period onwards. Thai sema is a vulgarisation of Pali sīmā, boundary. The Dvaravati-period stones have been divided into four types, slab, pillar, octagonal, and unfashioned, on a typology taken from earlier work. Form and dimensions are what allow stones with no secure archaeological context to be identified, and Dvaravati work to be told apart from the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya forms, which changed considerably.

A lithological and geochemical study of sema and other worked stone at sites in Khon Kaen Geopark matched each piece to the formation on which its site stands. Some samples carry two geochemical signatures and may mix material from more than one source. The material follows the local geology, with sandstone on the Khorat Plateau, phyllite and volcanic rock in Nakhon Sawan, and slate and phyllite in Sukhothai.

Parts of a bai sema are described in Thailand as being body parts: "neck", "shoulders", "chest", "hips" and "stomach". During the Ayutthaya kingdom and the following Rattanakosin era, bai sema would sometimes be decorated with eyes (photo 2) and princely crowns (photo 3). The Thammayut order, which was founded by Prince Mongkut in 1833, developed a three-dimensional form of bai sema (photo 4).

Gallery

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  Photo 2: Bai Sema with "eyes", Wat Phra Kaeo, Bangkok
• 
  Photo 3: "crowned" Bai Sema, Wat Ratchanadda, Bangkok
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  Photo 4: four sided Bai Sema, Wat Mahanaparam, Bangkok
• 
  Two sets of Bai Sema surround the ubosot and a chedi at Wat Chet Yot, Chiang Mai
• 
  Mold for a Bai Sema, found at Wat Umong in the Umong subdistrict of Lamphun
• 
  A triple Bai Sema in Sukhothai
• 
  Gilding, Lumbini, Nepal

See also

• Cetiya
• Uposatha
• Patimokkha
• Upasampadā
• Ordination hall
• Vihara
• Visungkhamsima
• Kyaung
• Wat

Sources

• No Na Paknam: The Buddhist Boundary Markers of Thailand. Muang Boran Press, Bangkok 1981 (No ISBN, only to be had from used bookstores)
• No Na Paknam: Sima Gattha, Samut Khoi Wat Suthat Thepwararam ("Manuscript of Sima of Wat Suthat Dhepvararam"). Muang Boran Press, Bangkok 1997, ISBN 974-7367-82-3

External links

• Ancient Thai History: Sacred sema stones in Isan^{[link removed]}
• Media related to Bai Sema at Wikimedia Commons