Situating the Buddha-to-Be in Thai-Lao village performance

Jonathan Walters, presenting a 1995 paper at Drew University titled, “Will the Historic Buddha Please Sit Down,” revealed that concern with the historic Buddha focused on textual teachings interfered with understanding the many appearances of Buddha(s) situated in local time and space. Among the Theravada Buddhist Thai-Lao of Northeast Thailand and Lao of Lowland Laos, the annual, locally initiated and performed Bun Phra Wet celebrates the merit accrued by the Bodhisatta’s previous existences culminating in that accumulated in his penultimate existence as Vessantara. The festival consists of each community’s interpretation of selected, crucial events in the Buddha’s narrative, or jātaka, of this previous life. Community members invite and then escort the Bodhisatta into their community and place his material avatar in its ritual center, celebrating the achievements that ensure his rebirth as Siddhartha, to become the Buddha. These performances and imaginative refigurings require the trans-historical shift of a contemporary, humble community into a future-past nostalgic setting, in which members see their possible rebirths through the lenses of successful past lives. The Jātaka narrative allows villagers to become citizens of a royal city with wealth and abundance descending from Vessantara’s barami, as they also undertake through a circumnavigation of the adjoining landscape a pilgrimage sacralizing the community and its surrounding forest. Configuring this festival as an affirmation of localized ritual and faith allows us, as observers, to see its power as it has grown and prospered as an expression of village cohesion in a globalizing, dynamic world.