The Legend of Queen Cama: Bodhiramsi's Camadevivamsa, a Translation and Commentary.

• Author: McDaniel, Justin
• Position: Book Review

By DONALD K. SWEARER and SOMMAI PREMCHIT. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1998. Pp. xv + 195.

The king (cakkavattiraja) sent his daughter, Camadevi, to rule the city [of Haripunjaya]. She boarded the boat together with a large retinue of five hundred men and five hundred learned venerable monks who knew the tipitaka. Her journey up the river Ping [to Haripunjaya] took seven months ... Camadevi accumulated incomparable meritorious deeds in the Buddha's religion (buddhasasane) and dedicated merit and righteous offerings (punnanca dhammikasakkaram) to the guardian deities of the city. Because of Camadevi's meritorious splendor (punnanubhavena), a host of devatas brought a powerful elephant to be an auspicious protector (mangalavaranatthaya) (pp. 64-65). The history of Queen Cama's founding of the city of Haripunjaya (modern Lamphun in Northern Thailand) has attracted the attention of three of the twentieth century's most gifted scholars of Southeast Asian Studies. Like George Coedes in 1925, Donald Swearer and Sommai Premchit see the history of Queen Cama as fundamental to understanding medieval Northern Thailand. Their recent study and translation of the Camadevivamsa (CDV) is a welcome and much needed addition to the fields of Southeast Asian Studies and the History of Religion. In their introduction and commentary, Swearer and Sommai seek to expand Coedes's brief, but unsurpassed, harvesting of factual historical detail from the CDV into a full translation of the 1920 edition of the CDV in Thai script (Ru'ang Camadevivamsa Phongsawadan Mu'ang Haribunchai [Bangkok: Wachirayan Library, 1920]). With a long introduction they present the CDV "as it was intended to be read and heard, primarily as a document of religious instruction, presenting the founding of Camdevi's kingdom ... not just as a historical story but as a religious and cosmologically significant event" (p. xxiii). Swearer and Sommai see the possible historical information that could be gleaned from the CDV as of "secondary importance" to the "religio-mythic nature" of the history (p. 21). They emphasize the literary devices, social commentary, and ethical instruction woven through Bodhiramsi's telling of history. In the process they reveal the significance of the CDV as a "living" story that has been the inspiration to artists and has done much to create a cult surrounding the figure of Queen Cama as a protector deity in present day northern Thailand.

After providing a...