The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

REVIEW ARTICLE 349
- When Buddhism had spread in the yonaka area as much as
Taoism, the people must have started using the term "Buddha"
for bra~1ya bcmdhanati.
- Thus this so-called Buddhist era, which, according to Manit's
calculations would have begun in 17 A.D., and is not attested in
any other source, would have been a Taoist era established at
the death of a king of Chiang Saen.
In connection with this and with Manit's du!iya era it should be
noted that in at least one other version of northern history, Notton's
translation of the Chiang Mai Chronicle, there occurs a bandhumatti era
in conjunction with a date equivalent to A.D. 17.
Thus in Notton III,
p. 11, it says, "En 560 de cet tee re [Buddhist era] B'iindhumattidhammikaraja
de Lanka supprima cette ere 560 et en fonda une nouvelle ...."
There,
however, the poraJ! and Buddhist eras are accepted as I have presented
them above and the era following Bandhumatti's and established in its
622nd year, equivalent to A.D. 639, is the normal cula era. We thus find
some of the same elements of Manit's revision arranged in a different way
and dating from the 19th century or earlier. In fact, this older revision
is better than Manit's for it involves no arbitrary historical assumptions.
Just as in Manit's case, though, enough is known about early South Asian
time reckoning to be certain that the Bandhumatti era of 17 A.D. is
fictitious and the only problem is to discover how it got into the
chronicles.
My own conjecture is that at some stage in the descent of the
manuscripts from copy to copy the figures 622 and 560, the usual
conversion factors for, respectively, Buddhist to saka and saka to cui a eras
were simply transposed. The next step, possibly by a later scribe, was
then to invent a designation for the "new" era. In this system, though,
the saka era has disappeared and the two Pagan rulers, Tricakkhu, who
in TS founded the saka, and Anuruddha, who established the cula era,
have been fused into one, the latter.ss This arrangement might be
particularly easy for a scribe in the north where saka was never m
current use, and who therefore might have ignored its importance.
58) Notton,IJI, p. 12.