BiblioVault - Books about Southeast Asia

Of Beggars and Buddhas

The Politics of Humor in the Vessantara Jataka in Thailand

Katherine A. Bowie

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

The 547 Buddhist jatakas, or verse parables, recount the Buddha’s lives in previous incarnations. In his penultimate and most famous incarnation, he appears as the Prince Vessantara, perfecting the virtue of generosity by giving away all his possessions, his wife, and his children to the beggar Jujaka. Taking an anthropological approach to this two-thousand-year-old morality tale, Katherine A. Bowie highlights significant local variations in its interpretations and public performances across three regions of Thailand over 150 years.
The Vessantara Jataka has served both monastic and royal interests, encouraging parents to give their sons to religious orders and intimating that kings are future Buddhas. But, as Bowie shows, characterizations of the beggar Jujaka in various regions and eras have also brought ribald humor and sly antiroyalist themes to the story. Historically, these subversive performances appealed to popular audiences even as they worried the conservative Bangkok court. The monarchy sporadically sought to suppress the comedic recitations. As Thailand has changed from a feudal to a capitalist society, this famous story about giving away possessions is paradoxically being employed to promote tourism and wealth.

[more]

On The Ho Chi Minh Trail

The Blood Road, The Women Who Defended It, The Legacy

Sherry Buchanan

Asia Ink, 2020

A mix of travelogue, history, and mediation on a journey through the Ho Chi Minh Trail that reveals the critical role women played in defending it.

Offering both a personal and historical exploration of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this book highlights the critical role the Trail and the young women soldiers who helped build and defend it played in the Vietnam War. Accompanied by two traveling companions, Sherry Buchanan winds her way from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in the south. Driving through the spectacular scenery of Vietnam and Laos, she encounters locations from the Truong Son mountains, the Phong Nha Caves, ancient citadels, and Confucian temples to the Khmer Temple of Wat Phu at the western-most point of the Trail in Laos.

Buchanan records her interactions—both scheduled and spontaneous—with those who experienced the Vietnam War firsthand. She listens to the women who defended the Trail roads against the greatest bombing campaign in modern times, walks through minefields with the demolition teams hunting for unexploded ordnance, and meets American veterans who have returned to Vietnam with an urge to “do something.” Buchanan weaves informative, and often humorous, tales from her journey with excerpts from the accounts of others, situating the locations she visits in their historical and political context. On the Ho Chi Minh Trail brings together geography, history, and personal accounts to reveal the scale of the tragedy, its harmful legacies, and our memory of it. Buchanan challenges American exceptionalism and calls for redress for those harmed by US military actions during the Vietnam War and America’s subsequent wars.

[more]

The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal

Edited by Willem Remmelink

Leiden University Press, 2018

Between 1966 and 1980, the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan (now the Center for Military History of the National Institute for Defense Studies) published the 102-volume Senshi Sōsho (War History Series). These volumes give a detailed account of the operations of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War.
The present volume, The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal, volume 26 of the series, describes the Japanese Navy’s role in the campaign to gain control over the Indonesian archipelago—at that time the largest transoceanic landing operation in the military history of the world. It includes, among others, the first complete Japanese analysis of the Battle of the Java Sea, a much-debated battle that ended disastrously for the Allies and opened the way to Java for the Japanese.

[more]