398 Part V: Southeast Asia
spire, all carved and gilded. At sundown the fire is lit and it burns all night with
additions of spices to produce a suitable fragrance. In the morning the royal
family takes small fragments of bones from the ashes to be worn as keepsakes
in golden lockets by the king’s children. The rest of the bones are bundled and
carried in state to the palace to be enshrined as royal relics. The ashes go to a
monastery. In this way, the king’s final transformation into a bodhisattva is
accomplished, and the succession to the reign of the new king is completed.The Buddhist Ramayana
A visitor to Bangkok would be unlikely to miss visiting the royal palace of
the Cakri dynasty on the bank of the Chao Phrya River in the heart of the city.
One of the most important structures in the palace complex is the Temple of
the Emerald Buddha that, as we have already seen, is a central icon of the Thai
kingdom. Along the galleries surrounding the central altar is a set of murals of
astonishing beauty: gilt and polychrome scenes from the Ramayana in a Thai
incarnation. The residences of Rama and Ravana, the evil king who kidnaps
Sita, are multiroofed and flame-tipped Thai palaces. Rama and Hanuman wear
silken Thai clothing and aristocratic Thai headpieces. But what is this Hindu
story doing in such a thoroughly Buddhist kingdom?
One does not need to look far for further evidence of the importance of the
Rama story in Thai culture. The most important king of thirteenth-century
Sukhothai took the name Ramkemheng—Rama the Strong. Every king of the
Cakri dynasty (founded in Bangkok in the late eighteenth century) has taken
the name Rama, from King Rama I through the late King Rama IX. The Cakri
dynasty is named after Rama’s weapon, the discus, because one epithet for
Lord Rama is Phra Cakri, “royal discus,” a name taken by Rama I before he
became king. The central Thai kingdom from the fourteenth through eigh-
teenth centuries named its capital Ayutthaya, after Rama’s capital city Ayod-
hya. Scenes from the Rama story are found in Ayutthaya in the ruins of Wat
Phra Rama.
The earliest known form of a Thai Rama story is Dasaratha Jataka, which
may be nearly as old as the original Indian version by Valmiki (Reynolds 1991).
Indeed, some scholars have argued that the Thai version is older. Nearly as old
is a Laotian version called Phra Lak/Phra Lam (Lak = Lakshman, Lam =
Rama). In these ancient versions, the author is said to be Buddha, and the story
is a jataka, one of a large number of Buddhist stories about events in the life of
Buddha in previous incarnations.
These Buddhist versions played important roles at Sukhothai and Ayut-
thaya, although these periods are not well known. In 1767, Burmese armies
destroyed Ayutthaya and appear to have also destroyed all previous copies of
the text. When Rama I (1782–1809), a devout Buddhist, restored order by
founding a new capital city at Bangkok, his task was to reconstruct the reli-
gious and cultural life of the nation. After defeating the Burmese, he revised the