wichaa › Subjects › Phanya In (Indra) — the king of the gods, and his net
Phanya In (พระยาอิน, in Lanna spelling often พยาอิน) is Indra — the old Vedic king of the gods, taken into Buddhism as Sakka (Pali), lord of the Tāvatiṃsa heaven on the summit of Mount Meru. Standard Thai writes him พระอินทร์ (Phra In); the northern leaves drop the silent ทร and write อิน, as it is said. Of the eighteen titles below, only one spells him the Bangkok way.
He is the god who comes down. In the Buddhist story he is a devotee, not a rival: he questions the Buddha, he tests Vessantara, he appears when the virtuous are in trouble. In Chiang Mai he is also the giver of the city pillar. And far from Lanna, in China, his name was hung on one of the most quoted pictures in Buddhist thought — a net with a jewel at every knot. This page follows him through the leaves this archive holds, then out to the net.
The catalogue holds 18 manuscripts whose titles name him, from Chiang Mai, Phrae, Chiang Rai, Lampang, Lamphun and Nan. Ten carry a date; they run from CS 1124 (1762 CE) to CS 1309 (1947 CE). They fall into four kinds.
The questions of Sakka — five witnesses. The Sakkapañha Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 21) is the canonical text in which Sakka comes to the Buddha with questions about envy, craving and peace, and leaves a stream-enterer. The oldest dated Indra witness in the whole catalogue is a copy of it: Sakkapanha, 44 pages, CS 1124 (1762), at Wat Chedi Luang in Chiang Mai. Wat Sung Men in Phrae — the great library temple — holds four more: a twelve-fascicle set copied twice, in CS 1192 (1830) and CS 1204 (1842), an undated Sakkapanha, and a Sakkapanha cadok that frames it as a jataka.
The tamnan of Phanya In — ten witnesses. Tamnan are legends and chronicles. Tamnan Phanya In, sometimes with cao fa (lord of the sky) added, turns up at Wat Chiang Man (CS 1234, 1872), at Wat Sung Men (2029), at Wat Chedi Luang (4512), at Wat Lai Hin Luang in Lampang (4710), and at Wat Klang in Phrae (CS 1309, 1947). At Wat Phra That Chang Kham in Nan it is bound into a volume of old law (CS 1269, 1907). Four more carry longer titles: Phanya Inthathirat — Indra the overlord — at Wat Pa Bong, Chiang Rai (1922) and in a 1942 copy; Phanya In son lokkathat — Phanya In teaching the elements of the world — at Wat Mahawan, Lamphun (1910); and Phanya Inta lokkahini at Wat Phra That Hariphunchai (1935).
His teachings — two witnesses. Owat kham son haeng Phanya In, the admonitions of Phanya In, at Wat Chiang Man and Wat Sung Men.
His sermon — one witness. Tesana Phanya In long ma, the sermon of Phanya In come down, at Wat Huai Khrai Luang, Chiang Rai.
Inference — the catalogue sorts thirteen of the eighteen as didactic or chronicle rather than canonical. Outside the one sutta, Lanna kept Phanya In mostly as a teacher and a figure of story: the god who descends to instruct. The titles alone say this much; what each leaf tells is for the reader who opens it.
Tradition — before Chiang Mai, the Lua people of the valley prayed to Indra, and he sent down a pillar to keep the land — the Sao Inthakhin (เสาอินทขิล), khila being a stake or post. It stood at the city's navel, at what is now Wat Inthakhin Sadue Mueang, until King Kawila moved it in 1800 to Wat Chedi Luang, where the city still honours it every year at the start of the rains. The same temple holds the oldest dated Indra manuscript in this archive, the 1762 Sakkapañha. The city's blessing that honours the pillar is the rite described under the four corners and suep chata; the city's founding is under Mangrai.
He is also on the leaf in the most-copied story in Lanna: in the Vessantara the Sakkaban chapter is his, the god who comes disguised as a brahmin and asks the prince for his wife.
The picture most of the world now attaches to his name did not come from Lanna. In the Chinese Huayan school, working from the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra, the monk Dushun (557–640) described a net hung over Indra's palace, running on in every direction, with a jewel at each knot — each jewel reflecting every other jewel, and each reflection holding all the rest. Two generations on, Fazang built it for Empress Wu out of mirrors: ten of them around a lamp and an image of the Buddha. The point was dependent origination — ปฏิจจสมุปบาท (patitcha-samupbat), the teaching that nothing arises on its own — drawn as a single image.
None of the eighteen Lanna titles names the net, and the Huayan texts are not in this catalogue. Inference — the net is Chinese Mahayana and the Lanna leaves are Theravada; the god crossed between them, the picture stayed where it was made. The teaching under it is common to both, and the Sakkapañha itself is a sermon on how craving and envy arise from other things.
The net has since been read a dozen other ways — as Hindu māyā (in Sanskrit, indrajāla, Indra's net, came to mean a conjuring trick), as Thich Nhat Hanh's interbeing, as Leibniz's living mirrors, as the mathematics of round mirrors reflecting each other. A companion site draws all of it, with the mirror arithmetic running live: Indra's Net, Drawn. Its readings page gives sixteen interpretations side by side, the Thai one among them; its mirror room rebuilds Fazang's demonstration.
The eighteen witnesses are catalogue rows; each link above opens its record. The Sakkapañha: Dīgha Nikāya 21. Sakka in the Traiphum: Reynolds & Reynolds, Three Worlds According to King Ruang (1982). The pillar: Shigeharu Tanabe, "Autochthony and the Inthakhin Cult of Chiang Mai" (2000). The net: Francis H. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (1977).
The live connections graph and any current curiosity-bot findings.