Emerald Buddha

The Emerald Buddha, Phra Kaeo Morakot in Thai, is the palladium of Thailand: a small seated Buddha image, about 66 centimetres high, carved from a single block of deep green semi-precious stone and enthroned high on a gilded pedestal in the ordination hall of Wat Phra Kaew, the royal chapel within the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Despite its English name the stone is not emerald but jade or green jasper; the name refers to the colour. The image depicts the Buddha in meditation and is dressed in one of three gold seasonal costumes, changed by the reigning monarch at the turn of the hot, rainy and cool seasons in a ceremony believed to bring the country good fortune.

No one but the King of Thailand may touch the image. As the dynastic talisman of the ruling Chakri house and the most venerated Buddha figure in the kingdom, the Emerald Buddha carries a political weight comparable to that of the Sacred Tooth in Sri Lanka: possession has long been bound up with legitimate sovereignty. The object's identity is not in question; what is legendary is the story the tradition tells of where it came from.

The traditional history, set down in the northern Thai chronicle known as the Ratanapanna or Jinakalamali tradition, has the image fashioned in India by a sage or a god, carried to Sri Lanka for safekeeping, and then dispatched toward Cambodia, from which it entered the world of the Thai and Lao kingdoms. Documented history begins in 1434, when a lightning strike cracked open a stupa at Chiang Rai and exposed a plain stucco image; as the covering flaked away it revealed the green-stone Buddha hidden inside, a common medieval practice for protecting precious images.

From Chiang Rai the Emerald Buddha travelled the courts of the north, Lampang, then Chiang Mai, the Lan Na capital. In the mid-sixteenth century the Lao king Setthathirath, who had ruled Lan Na, took it to Luang Prabang and later to Vientiane, where it stayed for more than two hundred years. In 1779 the Thai general Chao Phraya Chakri captured Vientiane and carried the image back to Thonburi; when he became King Rama I and founded Bangkok, he enshrined it in the newly built Wat Phra Kaew in 1784. It has remained there as the palladium of the Chakri dynasty and of the Thai nation ever since.

There is no dispute that the object at Wat Phra Kaew is the historic Emerald Buddha; it is one of the best-documented sacred images in Southeast Asia, its movements traceable through chronicles and royal records from 1434 onward, which is why its status here is attested. The open questions concern origin and material. The tradition holds that the image was made in ancient India and sanctified in Sri Lanka; art historians, judging by its style and iconography, place its manufacture much later, generally in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and locate it in the northern Thai or Lan Na cultural sphere rather than India. On this reading the Indian and Sinhalese episodes are pious prehistory attached to the image to deepen its prestige.

The stone itself has been described variously as jadeite, nephrite or green jasper; it has not been the subject of published destructive analysis, and the temple's sanctity makes close scientific study impractical, so the exact identification remains loosely stated. None of this touches the image's authenticity as the venerated Emerald Buddha. The honest summary is that the object is genuine and its recent history secure, while its legendary journey from India is unverifiable and, on stylistic grounds, probably later folklore, a legendary origin resting on a real and continuously documented image.

The Emerald Buddha stands at the centre of Thai religious and royal life. It is the palladium of the kingdom, and its custody has historically signified the right to rule: King Rama I's installation of the image in his new capital was as much an act of state as of piety. The seasonal robe-changing ceremony, performed by the reigning monarch three times a year, is a public rite in which the well-being of the nation is felt to be renewed; the used robes and the ritual are treated with great reverence.

Pilgrims and visitors venerate the image from the floor of the ordination hall, far below its high pedestal, and the prohibition on anyone but the king touching it underlines its status as royal property held in trust for the whole people. Because the image is a national symbol as well as a devotional one, its treatment is governed by protocol as much as by ritual, and its home at Wat Phra Kaew is the ceremonial heart of the Thai state.