Wat Phra Sri Sanphet is situated on the city island in Ayutthaya’s World Heritage Park in Pratu Chai sub-district. It has been registered as a national historic site by the Fine Arts Department since 5 March 1935. This monastery was the most important temple of Ayutthaya and situated within the Royal Palace grounds. It served as a model for the Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok. In 1350 Prince U-Thong ordered a palace built in an area called Nong Sano, actual the area in the vicinity of Bung Phra Ram. The palace contained three wooden buildings named "Phaithun Maha Prasat", "Phaichayon Maha Prasat", and "Aisawan Maha Prasat". Upon finalization of the palace in 1351, he established Ayutthaya as his capital and was bestowed the title of King Ramathibodi I. The original size of the old palace compound is believed to be the same as the area of Wat Phra Sri Sanphet today. King Borom Trailokanat, the eighth king of Ayutthaya, built a new palace just north of the area, adjacent to the old Lopburi River, the actual Khlong Muang, serving that time as the northern city moat. He converted in 1448 the royal pavilions of his predecessors into a Putthawat or sacred religious zone.
Although it is not at all that clear. The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya mention that King Boromracha II, after invading Cambodia in 1431, removed a large number of sacred images of oxen, lions and other animal creatures from Angkor and on return to Ayutthaya presented all the images as offerings, some at Wat Maha That and some at the Phra Sri Sanphet Monastery. [1] This indicates that at the fall of Angkor, Wat Phra Sri Sanphet was already in existence and occupied a prominent place. King Ramathibodi II’s first act after his throne ascendance in 1491 was to cremate the remains of his father King Borom Trailokanat (r. 1448-1488) and his elder brother King King Boromracha III (r. 1488-1491). In 1492 King Ramathibodi II built two chedi: the chedi to the east was to store the ashes of his father; the chedi to the west (the actual middle one) was for his older brother.
“In 861, a year of the goat, the holy Preaching hall of the Phra Si Sanphet Monastery was founded.” In 1499 a hall of worship called “Vihara Luang” (Royal Chapel) was built on the grounds. The next year King Ramathibodi II gave orders for a gigantic image, of Buddha to be cast, and installed in Wat Sri Sanphet. This image, representing Buddha in a standing posture, was 16 meter high, and the pedestal was 8 meter in length. The statue was named after the temple. The head was 2 m long and 1.5 m wide, while its chest was 5.5 m wide. The bronze core weighted close to 64 ton while its surface was covered with 343 Kg of gold and took more than three years to complete. It was said that it was the largest and nicest standing image of Buddha recorded as having ever existed in the world. This statue, called “Phra Sri Sanphetdayan”, became the main object of veneration in the royal chapel.
On Friday, the eleventh day of the waxing moon of the eighth month, in 865, a year of the boar, the Holy and Glorious Omniscient One, the image of the lord Buddha, was dedicated. The dimensions of that image of the Lord Buddha were eight wa in height from the feet to the tip of the flame, four sok in length for the face by three sok in width, and eleven sok in width at the chest. The bronze for casting the image of the Lord Buddha weighed fifty-three thousand chang, and the pure gold for gilding weighed two hundred and eighty-six chang. For the front of the image the gold was of seven nam and two kha quality, and for the back of six nam and two kha.
I would like to let history speak with two accounts of visits to Wat Sri Sanphet: one account by Nicolas Gervaise and another by the French Jesuit Guy Tachard during his
stay in Ayutthaya in 1685.
I would like to let history speak with two accounts of visits to Wat Sri Sanphet: one account by Nicolas Gervaise and another by the French Jesuit Guy Tachard during his
stay in Ayutthaya in 1685.
Wat Phra Sri Sanphet, being part of the royal palace, was exclusively used by the Ayutthayan Kings. No clergy was allowed to reside on the grounds, with exception of an occasionally invitation to pray and to perform ceremonies such as the taking of an oath of allegiance for royal officers and for preaching and merit-making by the King. The expansion of the temple caused the moving of the Buddhist center from Wat Maha That to Wat Phra Sri Sanphet.
The temple enshrined also the Phra Buddha Lokanat (Protector of the World) and the Phra Buddha Palelai. Ashes of the members of the royal family were placed in small chedi constructed at the site.
The third chedi was built by King Boromracha IV (r. 1529-1533) to house the remains of King Ramathibodi II.
The Greek cross-shaped viharn at the west side of the temple was added during the reign of King Narai. It is not clear if the square mondop structures adjacent to the chedi were built around this time or later.
On the eve of the Burmese invasion, the central portion of the temple included three gilded chedis, three gilded mondops (square buildings adjacent to the chedis that held objects of worship), and two very large viharns.
When Ayutthaya fell in April 1767, the Burmese sacked and burned the monastery to the ground. All but the chedis were completely destroyed. Buddha images were taken away and from the larger ones, the gold was melted. The Buddha image Phra Palelai in the southern chapel was completely destroyed.
The partially restored ruin includes all the buildings that survived the sack of 1767. In the early twentieth century only the eastern chedi was still standing. The rest was restored, although the two main vihara were not reconstructed. Little more but portions of the base, remain of the mandapas.
The Burmese melted the gold coating from the statue of Phra Sri Sanphetdayan, leaving the bronze core of the image badly damaged. King Rama I of the Chakri dynasty removed the statue to Bangkok in pieces for restoration, together with the remaining Phra Lokanat image which was kept in the northern chapel. The statue was however too seriously damaged to be recast into its former state. He installed the bronze core of Phra Sri Sanphetdayan in a chedi at the time of the founding of Wat Phra Chetupon better known as Wat Pho. The 45 meter high chedi has been called “Phra Chedi Sri Sanphetdayan”. Phra Buddha Lokanat was placed inside the eastern chapel at the same temple. Both of them remain in Bangkok up to this day.
References:[1] The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya – Richard D. Cushman (2006) - page 15 / Source: Luang Prasoet, Phan Canthanumat, British Museum, Reverend Phonnarat & Royal Autograph.
credit to: History of Ayutthaya
သမိုင္းေၾကာင္းထဲမွာ ရွင္းျပထားတဲ့ ေစတီ သံုးဆူ
အယုဒၶသမိုင္းမွာ ျမန္မာ-ထိုင္းစစ္ပဲြက မပါမျဖစ္ပါေနၾကပါ။ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသားေတြလာတိုင္း ရွင္းျပေနသံ နားေထာင္ရင္း ျမန္မာေတြ ထိုင္းကို စစ္ပဲြေအာင္ႏိုင္ခဲ့တဲ့ သမိုင္းကို ကမၻာသိေအာင္ ခဏခဏေျပာသလုိမ်ား ျဖစ္ေနမလားလို႔ ေတြးမိတာပါ။ သမိုင္းေၾကာင္းကို ခဏထားျပီး ေစတီေတြရဲ႕ လက္ရာကို ၾကည့္ရင္ တစ္မူထူးျခားေနပါတယ္။ ဒီအေၾကာင္းကပဲ ဒီေစတီေတြကို ေလ့လာဖို႔ စိတ္ဝင္စားမႈ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ သမိုင္းကို လိုက္ရွာဖတ္ရေတာ့တာေပါ့ :)
သက္တမ္းၾကာရင့္မႈေၾကာင့္လည္းေကာင္း၊ မၾကာေသးခင္က ေရၾကီးထားမႈေၾကာင့္ လည္းေကာင္း
ေစတီေတာ္မ်ားအနားကို အနီးကပ္ေလ့လာဖို႔ ခြင့္မျပဳေတာ့ပါဘူး။
ေစတီေတာ္မ်ားအနားကို အနီးကပ္ေလ့လာဖို႔ ခြင့္မျပဳေတာ့ပါဘူး။
ဘာသာေရးနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္တဲ့ အထင္ကရေနရာေတြမွာ ေညာင္ပင္ေတြ စိုက္ထားတာ ေတြ႕ရတတ္ပါတယ္။
ျမန္မာျပည္မွာေတာ့ ဇီးပင္ရိပ္ထက္ ထေနာင္းရိပ္က ပိုမ်ားမလားပဲေနာ္။ အယုဒၶယမွာေတာ့ ပူျပင္းတဲ့ ေႏြရာသီမွာ ဇီးပင္ရိပ္ေအာက္ ေခတၱခိုလံႈရင္း ဘုရားပုထိုးေစတီမ်ားကို ေလ့လာၾကပါတယ္။
ဘုရားဝင္းအျပင္မွာ သရက္သီးေတြလည္း သီးေနတယ္
ဟိုးတုန္းက တည္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေစတီ ပံုစံ
ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံသားေတြ အယုဒၶယကို ဘုရားဖူး အလာမ်ားၾကတယ္။
အယုဒၶယကို ေရာက္ရင္ သမိုင္းေတြထဲက အထင္ကရေနရာေတြကို ေလ့လာၾကည့္ရွဳႏိုင္ဖို႔ မွ်ေဝလိုက္ပါတယ္။
ေလးစားစြာျဖင့္
bliss of us
ဘုရားဝင္းအျပင္မွာ သရက္သီးေတြလည္း သီးေနတယ္
အယုဒၶယကို ေရာက္ရင္ သမိုင္းေတြထဲက အထင္ကရေနရာေတြကို ေလ့လာၾကည့္ရွဳႏိုင္ဖို႔ မွ်ေဝလိုက္ပါတယ္။
ေလးစားစြာျဖင့္
bliss of us
