Details

Subjects:

Heaven -- Buddhism.
Heaven.
Buddhism.
Hell -- Buddhism.
Illumination of books and manuscripts, Thai -- Specimens.
Illumination of books and manuscripts, Thai.

Form/Genre:

Facsimiles.
Folded books.
Illuminations (visual works)
Manuscripts, Thai.
Manuscripts.
Specimens.

Language:

In Thai with shorter texts in Pali (Khom).

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web
text file

Summary:

The popular story of Phra Malai (a monk who visits heaven and hell), preceded by 3 short texts illustrated with portraits, mostly of deities but also of monks and devotees.

Contents:

1. f.A03-A05: Unahisavijaya
2. f.A05-A10: Bhojana
3. f.A10-A12: Paramathadharma
4. f.A13-B50: Phra Malai.

Notes:

Title for manuscript from title for predominant work supplied by cataloger (viewed on December 8, 2015)
Written in 5 lines per segment.
Written on khoi paper, with 2 folios written in gold ink on black (f. A03, A06); folded concertina- or accordion-style.
16 illustrated folios (11 on Side A, 5 on Side B) with images of monks (f. A03), deities (f. A06-A11), devotees (f. A12), and Phra Malai episodes (f. A13, A30, A42, B11, B26, B36-B37, B44).
Covers attached, simply lacquered, with a border formed of additional layers of heavy paper.
Written in Thailand, probably in the 1860s or 1870s (Justin McDaniel).
Dimensions of original manuscript: 13.25 x 63.5 cm.
Reproduced from the original with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.
Electronic reproduction. Philadelphia, Pa. : University of Pennsylvania Libraries, 2015.

Penn Provenance:

Undated colophon by a writer referring to himself without naming himself, his wife Jai, his grandmother Pien, and a man with the surname Kiew and his four sons, who together donated the manuscript to a monastery, probably for a funeral.
Formerly owned by Ethel S. Jordan (signature inside upper cover; possibly a relative of the donor).
Gift of Mrs. Guy G. Gabrielson, Jr. (Nancy Jordan Gabrielson), 1983

Cited as:

University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 83-23-1.

Contributor:

Jordan, Ethel S., former owner.
Gabrielson, Nancy Jordan, former owner.