Vietnamese Buddhist Art
by Nguyen Ngoc Vinh | 2009 | 60,338 words
This essay studies Vietnamese Buddhist Art in South and South East Asia Context.—In the early spread of Buddhism to Vietnam, three primary sources are investigated: Chinese histories, Sanskrit and Pali literature and local inscriptions and art: Initially Buddhist sculptures were carried from India to Vietnam by monks and traders. The research are o...
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1. History of Champa
Champa appears in Chinese texts as of the second century. It spread over territories that stretched from north to south, from the Gate of Annam (old vietnam) practically to Ho Chi Minh City between the eighth and tenth centuries, and it reached west as far as the Mekong.
The history of the Champa, its beginnings remaining incompletely understood, is made of victories and defeats but also of an inexorable destiny that, of a brilliant and complex civilisation, left only crumbling temples-structures of great originality that are difficult to apprehend-and a decimated and dispersed people. According to some historians admitted that the Chinese Annals report an uprising in 192 A.D.[1], of people living south of the Chinese command post in Renam (Nhat Nam in Vietnamese), today’s Hue, who founded a state called Lin Yi that began by enlarging toward the north to the Gate of Annam and later encompassed Hindu principalities toward the south. From 192 to 785 the texts always used the term Lin Yi; only in 758 did the name “Huan Wang� come into use. in 875, the entity was designated as “Chiem Thanh�[2], the Sino-Vietnamese transcription of Champapura or “City of the Chams�.
Epigraphy offers two inscriptions in Sanskrit, one dated to 658 that was found in central Vietnam in Quang Nam (C96, stele found near My Son E6), the other dated to 668 that was found in Cambodia (the Kdei Ang inscription), that use the term “Champa� for the first time. A description of primitive Lin Yi, its religion, its languages, its inhabitants–this all remains under study.
In the eighth century, then, Champa stretched from the Gate of Annam in the north to the Dong Nai basin in the south. Probably organised as a confederate state, it was divided into what seem to be principalities, consisting of alluvial plains scored by mountain chains plunging into the sea, called, from north to south, Indrapura, Amaravati, Vijaya, Kauthara and Panduranga. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries Cham civilisation was influenced by Hindu, special in eighth to ninth and beginning of the tenth centuries influenced by Buddhism.[3]
The Cham language belongs to the Malayan-Polynesian languages, in comparison to the Vietnamese language, which belongs to the AustroAsiatic languages. The fall of the Champa kingdoms and Cham culture is a tragedy that has continued into the present. This decline was partly caused by the great “migration south� (Nam Tien) of the Vietnamese, a move brought about not only by changing social conditions, but also by attacks on the Viet by neighboring kingdoms. The migration south began in the 11th century A.D., when the king ordered the conquered land to be immediately settled by peasants and soldiers. The decline of the Champa kingdom was linked to the defeat of Vijaya (now Binh Dinh) in 1471 by the Dai Viet from North Vietnam.[4]
After 1471 the Cham were pushed even further south; in 1611 they reached the border around the town of Nha Trang, and in 1653 the border around the town of Phan Rang after a war in which the king Po Nraup committed suicide; only a single of the five original provinces, Panduranga, remained Cham. It was progressively broken up: the Nguyen[5], beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, took over a part of what still was at that time the Khmer delta; in 1958 the region that today is Bien Hoa was occupied and for the first time the Viet dangers thus came from the south as well, meaning that any attempt by the Champs at reconquest ran the risk of being strangled. In 1692 an endeavour to win back what had been Kauthara by the king Po Saut was severely repressed by the Nguyen: Panduranga was turned into a Viet county named Binh Thuan of which, cleverly, the administration was entrusted to the brother of the defeated king though with a Viet mandarin title. This therefore marked the end of Champa as an independent country.[6] However, following a Cham revolt the next year, the Nguyen lord re-established Panduranga with full rights. The monarchy was restored, with a nominated king. Po Saktiraydaputih, who owed an annual tribute to the Nguyens. This slowly but surely progressively rubbed out Champa or what was left of it; judicial exception was granted to the Viets who lived in the country.
From the end of the eighteenth century until 1832, the Chams withered away more and more quickly, and in 1832 Champa was as its definitive end. The Chams were dispersed in hamlets belonging to Viet villages and only later identified as one of the 54 minorities of the Viet country.
Footnotes and references:
[1]:
Vien. Nguyen Khac, Vietnam: A Long History, Hanoi: 1993, p. 58.
[2]:
Ibid, 63.
[3]:
Dietrich Seckel, The Art of Buddhism, trans by Ann. E. Keep, London: 1964, p. 55.
[4]:
McGraw-hill, Southeast Asia: Its Historical Development, USA: 1964, p. 105.
[5]:
Vien. Nguyen Khac, Vietnam: A Long History, Hanoi: 1993, p. 62.
[6]:
Ibid, p. 98.