wichaa › Subjects › Chang (elephant) — the animal that carries the state
The horse's page on this site opens with a concession: in Lanna the elephant is the animal everyone can name. It carries the relic up the mountain, it names the northern gate of Chiang Mai, it is the animal the greatest monks are burned in, and it sits in the twelfth slot of the Lanna year-cycle where everyone else's calendar keeps a pig. That page argued the horse holds a different job — the elephant carries the state, the horse carries the spirit (the horse — and the zebra). This is the elephant's own page.
ช้าง chang /cháang/ is a Tai word, not a borrowing — Lao ຊ້າງ, Shan ၸၢင်ႉ, the same syllable down the whole family. The learned words are Indic: คช khot /khót/ ← Skt gaja; หัตถี hatthi /hàt-thǐi/ ← Pali hatthī ← hattha "hand" — the animal with a hand, which is what a trunk is; กุญชร kunchon /kun-chɔɔn/ ← kuñjara; ไอยรา aiyara and เอราวัณ erawan ← Skt Airāvata / Pali Erāvaṇa, Indra's elephant. And one word that is not a name at all but a grammar: a kept elephant is counted in เชือก chueak /chʉ̂ak/, "rope" — one rope, two ropes of elephants — while a wild one is counted in ตัว tua like any other body. The language remembers that a working elephant is an elephant with a rope on it.
Terms are given four ways where it helps: script — RTGS — /precise, with tone and vowel length/ — then the root or the morpheme split. Tone: à low, á high, â falling, ǎ rising, unmarked mid; doubled vowels are long.
The catalogue holds 31 witnesses for the elephant — more than any other animal on this site (the chicken has 5, the horse none), and almost all of them are stories. The palm leaf keeps the elephant as a jataka hero first, as the subject of a rite second, and as the subject of a treatise third. That order is the shape of this page.
A nun in the Buddha's order is listening to him preach, and laughs out loud. Then she weeps. Asked why, she says she has just remembered who she was: the consort of an elephant king, and the woman who had him killed.
Tradition holds — the story the Buddha then tells is the Chaddanta Jātaka, and the Lanna scribes copied it under the title ช้างฉทัน / ช้างสัททันตะ — this collection holds four copies: two from Phrae, Cang satan and its twin at Wat Sung Men; one from Nan, Phanya cang sattanta; and a Lamphun bundle, Cang satanta tang kao, "the Chaddanta elephants, all nine", dated CS 1256 (1894). A fifth, from Wat Lai Hin Luang in Lampang, is not the tale but a discourse on it: Wohan thamma phanya cang phueak kaeo satanta, "the dhamma discourse of the white elephant-jewel Chaddanta", CS 1278 (1916). The printed manual Mind-current secrets of saiyasat retells it at pp. 44–48 as the frame for the ฉัททันต์ปริตร, the protective chant, and that retelling is the one below.
In the Himavanta forest the Bodhisatta is born an elephant, white, with tusks that give off light in six colours — the name means six-tusked, and the tradition reads it as six rays rather than six teeth. He is king of eight thousand elephants and has two consorts, จุลสุภัททา Cūḷasubhaddā and มหาสุภัททา Mahāsubhaddā. One day he shakes a sal tree in flower. The wind carries the blossom and the pollen onto one wife; the dry side of the tree — the twigs, the red ants — falls on the other. Later he finds a great lotus and gives it to the wife who had the flowers. The slighted one makes a vow: to be reborn where she can have him killed. She starves herself, dies, and is reborn as the queen of the king of Madda. When she is grown she feigns a sickness and tells her husband the one cure: "I saw a white elephant, whose tusks have rays of six colours. I must have those two tusks."
The hunter โสณุตตระ Sonuttara is sent. The manual keeps the arithmetic of his journey — seven years, seven months and seven days — into the mountains. He digs a pit on the path the king walks, covers it, and, because a monk is not to be harmed, puts on the saffron robe. From the pit he shoots the elephant through the navel. The king trumpets three times in his agony and turns to crush the man — and sees the robe. He stops. He asks the hunter why, and on being told the queen wants the tusks, he has the hunter saw them off himself, or, in the telling where the saw will not bite, takes the saw in his own trunk and cuts them, and dies giving them. The queen receives the tusks and, the manual says, dies of the grief of what she has done — to be reborn, many lives later, as the nun who laughed and wept.
The paritta that follows is the part that is used: the verses beginning กาสาวะมัททักขิ ธะชัง อีสิงัง — "seeing the saffron banner of the seers" — are chanted, the manual says, for protection from wild beasts when one sleeps in the forest. A monk's robe, in the logic of the tale, is what an elephant will not trample; the chant borrows that. Inference — the four Lanna copies and the Lampang discourse are the same text doing the same two jobs it does in the printed manual: a night-time recitation against animals, and the most-told reason an ordinary elephant is owed the respect the Bodhisatta was.
The second story is a chronicle, and Chiang Mai walks past its ending every day.
Tradition holds — in 1383 King กือนา Kue Na received a relic of the Buddha from the monk Sumana, who had brought it up from Sukhothai. The relic divided itself. One half was enshrined at Wat Suan Dok; for the other, the king placed it in a howdah on the back of a white elephant and let the animal walk. It left the city by the north gate, climbed Doi Suthep, trumpeted three times, circled three times, knelt — and died. The reliquary was built on the spot, and the temple is Wat Phra That Doi Suthep. The white elephant figure at the temple remembers the animal.
The north gate is ประตูช้างเผือก pratu chang phueak /pra-tuu cháang phʉ̀ak/ — ประตู pratu "gate" + ช้าง + เผือก phueak "pale, blanched" (the same word as the taro root, เผือก). Tradition holds — the name is not from the relic elephant but from the twin white-elephant monument outside the gate, raised in the reign of Phaya Saen Mueang Ma (late 1300s) for two retainers who carried the king home from a campaign; the gate was earlier the Hua Wiang Gate. Either way the quarter, the market, the hospital and the road took the name, and the city's first temple, Wat Chiang Man, keeps a chedi ringed with half-length stucco elephants bearing the base — the ช้างล้อม chang lom form, "elephants surrounding", shared with Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai. Wat Lam Chang, inside the walls, is ล่ามช้าง — ล่าม lam "to tether" — where tradition puts Mangrai's elephants while the city was being laid out (Mangrai). The directory of the living city keeps all of this, with the camps beside it, at motdang.net/chang.html.
Two more facts the horse page already established and this one should own. The Lanna twelve-year cycle, ปีเปิ้ง pi poeng, ends on ปีใค้ pi khai /pii kái/ — the elephant — where Thai ปีกุน and the Chinese cycle keep a pig; the label is the borrowed pig-branch 亥 hài and the animal under it is a local override (the cycle, in the horse article). And in the ชุธาตุ chu that system that assigns each year-animal a relic-stupa, the elephant-born are sent to Phra That Doi Tung in Chiang Rai (the page) — inside Lanna, an easy pilgrimage, where the horse-born are sent to Shwedagon. The elephant is the animal of staying.
The third story is the one every Lanna temple preaches once a year, and the elephant is the cause of everything that happens in it.
Tradition holds — Prince Vessantara's white elephant ปัจจัยนาเคนทร์ Paccaya-nāgendra was born on the same day as the prince and brought rain wherever it stood. When brahmins from a drought-struck kingdom came to beg for it, Vessantara gave it away — and his own people, robbed of their rain, had him banished. Everything after — the gift of the children, the gift of the wife, the return — follows from an elephant. The Mahāchat is the best-attested text in this whole collection, 85 catalogued witnesses (Vessantara / Mahāchat); the elephant gift is in the second chapter, หิมพานต์ Himaphan. The printed amulet manual Making sacred charms and amulets still reaches for the animal as the measure of a thing beyond price: a rosary "like receiving the elephant-jewel Paccaya-nāgendra — hold a parasol over it" (p. 117), an oil "like receiving a white elephant with black tusks, which nothing can be compared to" (p. 118).
Inference — one Phayao bundle may hold the rain-logic in ritual form: a compendium from Wat Si Khom Kham opens with a rain-asking text, ขอฝน, and lists among its sections แปงช้างเผีก paeng chang phoek — Northern แปง "to make, to build" + the white elephant: "making the white elephant". Nobody has read the leaves; a white-elephant effigy in a rain rite would be exactly what the Vessantara story predicts. It is on the open list at the end.
One manuscript on this site is what the central Thai tradition calls ตำราคชลักษณ์ tamra khachalak /tam-raa ká-chá-lák/ — ตำรา "treatise" + gaja "elephant" + lakṣaṇa "mark, characteristic": the manual for reading an elephant's body. It is an untitled Nan bundle from Wat Pa Mueat, 16 leaves, whose cataloguer lists four things inside: ลักขณะช้าง lakkhana chang "the marks of the elephant", เรียกขวัญช้าง hiak khwan chang "calling the elephant's khwan", a primer for learning Tai Yuan, and a horā almanac. Marks, rite, grammar and calendar in one bundle — a working elephant-keeper's bundle, not a library's.
Tradition holds — the treatise genre sorts elephants by lineage and by auspicious marks. The four lineages are named for the gods who made them: พรหมพงศ์ phromma-phong (Brahmā's), อิศวรพงศ์ itsuan-phong (Śiva's), วิษณุพงศ์ witsanu-phong (Viṣṇu's), อัคนิพงศ์ akkhani-phong (Agni's); a white elephant, ช้างเผือก, is not a white animal but one that carries the marks — read, the tradition says, in the eyes, the palate, the nails, the hair, a skin the colour of new clay, the tail hair, and one more, seven in all. Whether the Nan leaves keep that scheme or a northern one is the open question nobody has yet read.
A second Lampang bundle, from Wat Wiang, is an animal-marks compendium in miniature: its sections are cattle, the rainbow, cat, tiger, lion, otter, elephant, mouse "and others" — the same instinct that produced the Thai cat treatise and the horse treatise, here kept together on one set of leaves.
Two manuscripts are the rite itself. Sut lae su khwan cang from Wat Si Mongkhon (Kong) in Nan is a chant-text (สูด, sut, to chant) with a สู่ขวัญช้าง su khwan chang /sùu khwǎn cháang/ — the khwan-calling for an elephant — and Su khwan cang, four leaves, is from Wat Phra That Chang Kham in Nan — the temple of the elephant-propped reliquary holds the rite for the elephant. The su khwan is the rite held for people (Su Khwan, 51 witnesses, 45% of them from Nan); here it is held for an animal. Tradition holds — a working elephant's khwan is called back after capture, after a fright, after illness, and on the day it is blessed, and the camps of Chiang Mai still hold one on Thai Elephant Day, 13 March. The rite on the leaf and the rite at the camp are the same rite.
The rest of the palm-leaf witnesses are stories with the elephant in the title, none of them canonical, most of them in several copies — which is how you know they were preached:
Inference — these are the kind of non-canonical, locally composed jataka the region is known for, and the titles alone — seven heads, three tusks, fragrant hair — say that the elephant of Lanna storytelling is a marvel-animal before it is a royal one. Their plots are not written down anywhere digital that this project has found; they are the next thing to read, and the reason this article links every copy.
The title search that found the 31 also found two things that are not elephants, and both are kept out of the count on purpose. ตำนานช้างแส่น tamnan chang saen (Phayao, Wat Mae Suk and a second copy at Wat Photharam) is the chronicle of เชียงแสน Chiang Saen, spelled the old way — ช้างแส่น — and so is the Yonok chronicle whose title ends ศรีช้างแสน. And ประวัติของปู่อ้ายทิพช้าง, "the history of grandfather Ai Thip Chang" (Lampang, Wat Ban Ueam, and inside a kammathan compendium), is a man: Tradition holds — Thip Chang, "divine elephant", was the hunter who drove the Burmese garrison out of Lampang in 1732 and founded the line that later ruled Chiang Mai. A man named elephant, counted among the people and not the animals — the same fence the directory keeps for ลุงช้าง, Uncle Chang, who sells noodles.
The printed manuals in this collection — thirty volumes of katha, yant and amulet-making — hold no treatise on elephants, but they reach for the animal constantly, and a handful of their formulas are about it.
The Lazada market data on this site (14,653 listings) holds 211 elephant items once the strays are fenced — and the fence matters: วัดช้างให้ Wat Chang Hai, the Pattani temple of Luang Pu Thuat, puts ช้าง into over a hundred listings that have nothing to do with the animal, so a bare search for the word overstates the elephant by half. Of the 211, Ganesha is 104 — exactly half — then 84 elephant-figured pieces, 9 ivory, 7 Erawan, 4 elephant-oils, one แหวนขนหางช้าง ring "of Surin, the elephant city", one ว่านช้าง tuber, one bag of elephant keyrings. Prices: median ฿139, against the whole market's ฿130; 89% under ฿500, the top at ฿2,500. The elephant is priced like everything else. (The market.)
Twenty-eight temples in the place gazetteer carry the elephant in their names — Wat Lam Chang, Wat Puak Chang ("the elephant corps", tradition holds the quarter of the royal keepers), Wat Chang Kham (คำ "gold" or ค้ำ "to prop" — two readings, two temples), Wat Pa Chang, Wat Tha Chang "the elephant landing", Wat Nong Chang, Wat Rong Chang "the elephant stable", Tham Pha Chang the "elephant-cliff cave" — and the elephant-year stupa itself, Phra That Doi Tung. Chiang Mai's gazetteer has its own version of the list, every record with ช้าง in the name grouped by what the name remembers — a gate, a quarter, a bathing-pond — on the directory's elephant page.
Tradition holds — the elephants of the north were the elephants of the timber trade until the forests were closed to logging in 1989; the camps of the Mae Taeng, Mae Wang and Mae Chaem valleys are, or descend from, the logging camps that lost their work that year, and many of them are kept by Karen (Pgakenyaw) families who have lived with elephants for generations. What each camp offers today — riding or none, bathing, shows, a hands-off program, how many elephants it keeps, what it posts as the price — is a thing the camp states for itself, and the living directory keeps a register of exactly that, in each camp's own words, with the date it was read and no ranking: motdang.net/chang.html. That page and this one are the two halves of one subject. This side holds the treatise, the rite and the stories; that side holds the gate, the phone number, and the sentence "no riding — stated by the venue." The su khwan a camp holds for its elephants on 13 March is the rite on the Nan leaf above; the white-elephant marks a keeper once read from a treatise are the reason the north gate has the name it has; and the question a visitor asks at the gate — does this camp use the hook? — is asked with the same word, ขอ, that the physiognomy manual turns into the shape of a lucky brow.
Auto-derived from the catalogue and the curiosity bots — refreshed automatically, not hand-written. Each note links to its finding.
The live connections graph and any current curiosity-bot findings.