Temples and the Ruins of Time in Sunthorn Phu’s Nirat to Golden Mountain Temple

Abstract

One of the most well-regarded poems of Sunthorn Phu (1786–1855), a long-serving but unwilling Buddhist monk who is considered the “Shakespeare of Thailand,” is his nirat poetic journey to the Golden Mountain Temple of Ayutthaya in 1828. This article argues that a travel poem such as Sunthorn’s can show us how an account of the local landscape itself, inflected by Buddhist temporality and morality, could be used rhetorically as well as providing a framework for understanding how literature more broadly could be used to understand the affective power of place. The article begins with a brief introduction to the nirat genre using the early example of Klong Haripunchai from early sixteenth-century Lanna. This classical nirat does not merely describe the landscape but works to imply that the object of the poet’s pilgrimage is like the perfect kingdoms described in Pāli texts. Sunthorn’s nineteenth-century nirat presents us with something more layered. Read with insights from landscape theory, Sunthorn’s poem offers us not a mere description of the landscape but can allow us to understand how he and his contemporaries landscaped the Buddhist kingdom of early Bangkok.