Bai sema

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

Bai sema (Thai: ใบเสมา, pronounced [bāj sěː.māː]) are boundary stones which designate the sacred area for a phra ubosot (ordination hall) within a Thai Buddhist temple (wat); 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. 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. The disagreement bears on what the stones can be made to show about the towns that produced them. A stupa raised on a vessel-shaped base recurs on the early group, and some of the northeastern stones carry narrative scenes.

History

The Baddhasima 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 by the Buddhist Institute of Phnom Penh 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). That figure is probably a maximum circumference.

It is also written that the Baddhasima can be marked by the following Nimitta (border markers): hills, rock formations, forests, trees, ant hills, streets, rivers and other waters such as the sea or a pond. The type of Nimitta that is mainly used in Thailand is a stone. The canonical text does not say what the nimitta should be, a silence noted by Pinna Indorf and which Stephen Murphy reads 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). Vimoltip Singtuen and colleagues set out three suggested sources for the practice. These 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.

The chronology of these early stones is disputed, and the disagreement bears on the historical questions they have been used to settle. Rungrot Phiromanukun assigns the first sets of ritual boundary stones generally to about 600–750. Jean Boisselier placed the numerous stones at Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang in Kalasin province in about the 9th century. Piriya Krairiksh assigned several of the figural stones from that site to the 10th. Sakchai Saising dates the northeastern corpus as a whole to the 9th and 10th centuries, from the post-Pallava script and Old Mon language of the inscribed examples.

Hiram Woodward, who reports these positions, observes that the analysis of costume and coiffure on the narrative stones has not been undertaken. That analysis might establish a firmer chronology. He concludes that the Fa Daet stones cannot on their own demonstrate that an urban centre stood in that region in the 8th century. Woodward had himself earlier proposed that two sets of boundary stones on Phnom Kulen in Cambodia, first published in 1973, were foundations of the polity known from Tang Chinese records as Wen Dan. He afterwards described that argument as incautious, since the stones cannot be dated closely enough to show whether they precede or follow the accession of Jayavarman II in 802. Stephen A. Murphy takes the same view of the Phnom Kulen stones and states it more strongly, holding that they record the spread of Buddhism rather than of Dvaravati political power. The wider question is what the distribution of the stones shows. Scholarly consensus has treated their spread across the Khorat Plateau as marking the extent of Dvaravati, or at least of a political presence there. Murphy holds it more likely to record the movement of monks, Brahmins and artisans, who could carry religion and style across political lines. He sets against the political reading a count: only one dharmacakra is known from the whole of the plateau, against more than forty recorded in central Thailand. On his account it is hard to argue for a strong or meaningful Dvaravati political presence on the plateau apart from at Mueang Sema. He groups the plateau's material by river system, distinguishing the Chi, the Mun and the middle Mekong, and treats the Mekong group as the tradition's most easterly extent.

A recurring motif on stones of this early group is the kumbha stupa, a stupa raised on a vessel-shaped base. Woodward records the form on boundary stones from Hin Khon in Pak Thong Chai district, Nakhon Ratchasima province, from near Muang Bon in Nakhon Sawan province, from Ban Tat Thong in Yasothon province and from Phnom Kulen. He records it 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 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.

Supitchar Jindawattanaphum reads one of the figural stones from Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang, which she calls the Ramphan Philap sema (ใบเสมารำพันพิลาป), as showing a warrior with a sword carried on his back standing at a city gate.

In the Dvaravati period the stones were not confined to ordination halls. At Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang they were excavated around a Dvaravati ubosot and also found on three sides of a stupa, and at Phu Phra Bat prehistoric rock shelters were ringed with them. An inscription from Chaiyaphum has been read as recording a Buddha image set up inside a boundary of this kind. 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. Singtuen and colleagues give the range for directional settings 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 Murphy reads as perishable building material or as no building at all. Piriya Krairiksh and K. I. Matics have both 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, the ninth beneath where the principal Buddha statue will be placed. 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. Murphy takes the practice 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" due to the shape of the flat sema stones being somewhat akin to the shape of the leaves of the Bodhi tree, the tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment (photo 1). Murphy derives the name instead from the shape of the flat slab type, which predominates from the Ayutthaya period onwards, and notes that Thai sema is a vulgarisation of Pali sīmā, boundary. He divides the Dvaravati-period stones into four types, slab, pillar, octagonal and unfashioned, following Piriya Krairiksh. 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.

The stone itself was local. A lithological and geochemical study of sema and other worked stone at sites in Khon Kaen Geopark, by Vimoltip Singtuen and colleagues, matched each piece to the formation on which its site stands. Those at Ban Ruea are sublitharenite of the Phu Kradung Formation, and the unfinished stone at Tham Phra Kho Khat is quartz arenite to sublitharenite of the Phra Wihan Formation. The authors conclude that each site drew on stone close at hand, while noting that 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 (the later King Rama IV) 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
• 
  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]}