1830 - 1832
Buddhist cosmology
room Myanmar
These images, from a parabeik thought to have been painted sometime during the reign of King Thibaw before Mandalay was conquered by the British in 1885, provide a detailed description – in text and images – of Buddhist cosmology.
The map shows Mount Meru, which sits at the centre of the Buddhist universe and is encircled by concentric rings of mountains and rivers. Mount Meru is surrounded by a vast ocean with four great island continents, each named after the trees that grow on them. Human beings inhabit only the southern island of Jambudipa (on the right in this image) as the other islands are not accessible to humans.
The same parabeik depicts the 31 planes of existence. Of these, the lowest planes are the eight levels of Buddhist hell to which the parabeik devotes a generous 16 folds, or 32 pages. It is hard not to imagine that the original artist/s relished creating the excruciating detail of these grim scenes – with only one exception every spread contains an image of a group of humans being boiled alive in a giant cauldron.
The full manuscript depicting the various levels of heaven and hell and the realms in between is available for online viewing at the British Library’s Digitised Manuscript Viewer.
This alternative representation of Buddhist cosmology below (also held at the British Library) shows all the various possible incarnations a being can assume. It is one of a set of drawings that depicts the Buddhist universe. It is thought that these drawings, which are annotated in European handwriting, may have been commissioned by Henry Burney, a diplomat for the East India Company who lived in Burma in 1830-32.
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