In the Serenity of the Himavanta Forest – What the Berlin Traiphum (a Thai illuminated manuscript on Buddhist cosmology) discloses:
The ‘Book of the Three Worlds’ (‘Traiphum’; inv. no. II 650, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin) is one of the most beautiful, oldest and magnificent manuscripts on Buddhist cosmology from Thailand. The thirty-three-metre long leporello manuscript was commissioned by King Taksin of Thonburi in 1776 from four royal painters and four royal scribes. In 2023, the Berlin museum programme CoMuse allowed collaborative research to be carried out of its images and texts. It focused on a six-metre-long section of the manuscript: the idyllic and secluded world of the Himavanta forest with its beautiful lakes, animals and plants, the course of the southern stream from the Himavanta forest to the human world and the many Jātakas (pre-birth stories of the Buddha) situated therein. The collaborative team (Dr. Peera Panarut, philologist with specialisation in Thai philology and manuscriptology, and Martina Stoye, curator of South and South East Asian Art as art historian in the field of Buddhist art) not only analysed the interplay of text and image in the manuscript, but also explored the connections between what is depicted here and other textual traditions of Thailand.