Abstract
A book I was looking forward to reading for several years, though with some initial scepticism, was finally published in 2015. From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls: New Approaches to the Study of Asian Manuscript Traditions is the result of the Fourth Annual Lawrence J Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, which took place in 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania and the Free Library of Philadelphia. When I first heard about the symposium I was not sure if it was a good idea to join together presentations covering manuscript studies from all over Asia in one such event. My fear was that those parts of the book which are beyond my expertise and interests (in the field of South East Asian manuscript studies) would make me feel like someone who had accidentally sat in the wrong panel at a major conference. However, on the other hand, the title of the book made me curious, and I hoped I would learn facts about the use of mulberry leaves in Asian manuscript traditions that were not yet known to me.
From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls comprises 10 essays dealing with various aspects of Asian manuscript traditions with a focus on history, art, writing techniques, as well as the study, collation and preservation of manuscripts through digital technology. Divided into three parts, the book brings together research by art historians, Buddhist scholars, linguists, mathematicians, as well as museum and library curators from Asian, European and North American countries.
In the introduction, co-editor Justin McDaniel not only gives an overview of the authors and their research presented in the book, but also describes his discovery of an unusual and very rare illustrated Thai folding book in the collections of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. McDaniel uses this manuscript to illustrate the struggles and questions that a scholar working with manuscripts might face.
The first part of the From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls is dedicated to ‘The art of the book’ and looks at different types of manuscripts from the South East Asian mainland – a field of study in which I have a keen interest. Hiram Woodward, a highly respected art historian, examines in his essay ‘The characteristics of elephants: A Thai manuscript and its context’ one particular genre of Thai folding books: elephant treatises. By analysing the symbolism in one particular manuscript held at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, he shows that creators of such manuscripts did not draw a clear line between the divine/mythological and the natural worlds, and that there was a close interconnectedness between mythology, literature, religion and science. This fact makes the classification of manuscripts difficult – something I have experienced many times in my career as a library curator.
The next essay, by Alexandra Green, is on ‘Representations of space and place in a Burmese cosmology manuscript at the British Museum’. Green looks at how literature, history, Buddhist mythology, folklore and science are mixed together in the Burmese manuscript tradition. Her extensive explanations of the imagery in this Burmese manuscript helped me to better understand Thai cosmology manuscripts, which to some extent are similar. Sinéad Ward continues with the Burmese manuscript tradition in her contribution ‘Stories steeped in gold: Narrative scenes of the decorative Kammavācā manuscripts of Burma’. Narrative scenes in Burmese Kammavācā manuscripts, which contained purely monastic texts and were intended exclusively for use by members of the Buddhist Sangha, are very rare. Asking what might be the purpose of such narrative scenes, Ward suggests that they may have been added as symbolic references to Buddha’s teachings and the path of enlightenment, and that adding such scenes would have increased a donor’s accumulation of merit which is an important aspect of manuscript production.
Part Two of the book, ‘Inscribing religious practice and belief’, moves from the material manuscript culture to the role of manuscripts in religious practice in Northern Thai and ancient Chinese traditions. Angela Chiu looks at Northern Thai legends on Buddha’s relics in her essay ‘Drawn to an “extremely loathsome” place: The Buddha and the power of the Northern Thai landscape’. She examines the connection between Buddha and concepts of place as represented in chronicles, and provides comparisons with concepts of place in Buddhist canonical scriptures as well as in manuscripts from the Lankan and Burmese-Mon traditions. Ori Travor, in his article on ‘Shifting modes of religiosity: Remapping early Chinese religion in light of recently excavated manuscripts’, takes up the difficult subject of the need to review previously held theories and convictions when new primary sources are discovered. Better and easier access to manuscripts in recent years has enabled researchers to unearth primary sources that were previously not taken into consideration when histories were written. By examining bamboo strip manuscripts from the Warring States period in the collections of the Shanghai Museum, Travor illustrates the co-existence of a newly emerged imperial/elite religion of the Han Dynasty and the practical theology of the natural experts of the Warring States period. The co-existence of the high or moral theologies of the elite and the local cults which continued to be practised by commoners has long been neglected in Chinese religious discourse, but the study of primary manuscript sources can help to understand the co-existence of religious traditions in history. Daniel Sou – complementing Travor’s research – offers an insight into diverse methods of exorcism in the Qin State in his essay on ‘Living with ghosts and deities in the Qin State: Methods of exorcism from “Jie” in the Shuihudi manuscript’. Sou’s work is based on bamboo strip manuscripts that were found in newly excavated tombs, offering a new perspective on the religious practices of common people, and the role of such practices and related texts in the larger socio-political context.
The third part of the book bears the title ‘Technologies of writing’ and looks at various techniques of producing written texts from a historical perspective, and at new, IT-based technologies for the study and preservation of manuscripts and their contents. In her essay ‘Spoken text and written symbol: The use of layout and notation in Sanskrit scientific manuscripts’, Kim Plofker investigates the application of traditional Indian Sanskrit writing technology in recording orally and aurally produced texts for the advancement of scientific texts. Using various Sanskrit scientific manuscripts as examples, she explains how solutions were found in order to include non-verbal features like numerals and diagrams in such manuscripts. Interestingly, she also touches on the problem of misreading in the process of copying scientific content. Sergei Tourkin then moves on to the Arabic manuscript tradition in his contribution on ‘Abbreviations in medieval astronomical and astrological manuscripts written in Arabic script’. He discusses the use of abbreviations in Persian and Arabic manuscripts, particularly in almanacs and personal horoscopes which often were arranged in tabular form using numbers and abbreviations as symbols for zodiacal signs, names of planets, types of motions of planets, directions, units of time, etc. These manuscripts illustrate how, in the Arabic writing tradition, the use of the last letter in a word to construct abbreviations has nowadays shifted to the use of the first letter of a word. Susan Whitfield, a colleague of mine from the British Library who has been leading the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) for many years, sheds light on various aspects of palaeography and codicology in the context of the aforementioned project in her essay ‘Creating a codicology of Central Asian manuscripts’. She gives an overview of different manuscript formats that were found within and outside archaeological contexts, and discusses the potential of manuscripts for understanding local, regional and trans-regional developments of manuscript cultures from a historical perspective. One aspect that I found to be of special interest was the use of manuscripts as votive offerings as well as the ‘recycling’ of manuscripts for practical purposes. Now that the IDP has made available digital copies of over 100,000 manuscripts from more than 20 collections worldwide, Whitfield reveals some of her ideas as to how digital data can help to understand historical developments and complex transmissions of Central Asian manuscripts. Finally, Peter M Scharf discusses in his essay ‘Providing access to manuscripts in the digital age’ the obstacles and barriers that make the provision of digital access to Sanskrit manuscripts difficult, such as, for example, information processing technologies that developed primarily in the environment of the Roman alphabet and Western linguistic conventions. Such technologies are of limited use in handling certain features of non-European languages and often result in inadequate finding aids. By using the example of the Sanskrit Library that Scharf is founder and director of, he demonstrates how these obstacles can be overcome through the creation of a comprehensive integrated hypertext catalogue based on the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in combination with software that integrates digital images of manuscript pages with the corresponding machine-readable text. Although some time has passed since this essay was written and many organisations have in the meantime adopted TEI standards and found ways to integrate metadata and digital images, larger organisations sometimes still face obstacles, as described by Scharf, due to rigid structures and inflexible procedures.
My initial fear (of feeling like someone sitting in the wrong panel at a big conference) when reading this book turned out to have been completely unfounded. Each and every essay in this book was a joy to read, with so much detailed information, personal experiences and views of the authors which I found useful in many ways for my own work as a library curator and for my research on South East Asian manuscripts. On various occasions I was surprised by similarities between certain aspects of South East Asian manuscript traditions – which I am very familiar with – and manuscript cultures outside South East Asia where I would not have expected obvious links to exist. Nevertheless, my thirst for knowledge about the use of mulberry leaves in Asian manuscript traditions was not fully quenched. Although some of the articles mention South East Asian paper folding books consisting of one big folded sheet of paper made from the bark of a tree in the mulberry family, none of the authors hints even remotely at the use of mulberry leaves as, in fact, there is no such tradition. The question arises whether excellently written scholarly books such as this one, intended mainly for an academic audience, really need fancy (but potentially misleading) book titles.