Ask a เซียน about an amulet and the answer starts with เนื้อ — the body of the thing. Not what it is for, not what lives in it: what it is. A พระรอด that is not fired clay is not a พระรอด, whatever else is true about it. Each material below carries what its surface can tell a patient reader — the crust on a paste, the red rust on tin-lead, the way herb paste draws back from its mould as it dries.
The quiet number is the interesting one. A seller who can name the alloy almost always does, so the listings that name nothing are the measure of how much of this market is not yet written down anywhere.
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Where the two corpora meet
Material is the axis on which this archive's halves speak the same words. A treatise names the sheet to inscribe; the market, centuries later, sells the metal it named. Sixteen of the materials here occur in both — marked both corpora below.
The clearest case is ผงใบลาน, amulets of burnt palm-leaf ash. The recipe is not inferred; it is written down in this collection:
ท่านให้ลงใบลาน ๕ ใบ ใบละพระคาถา เผาเป็นสมุกผสมกับขี้รักปั้นเป็นลูกประคำ
inscribe five palm leaves, one formula to each; burn them to ash, mix with lacquer, roll into rosary beads
The ใบลาน this archive catalogues as text and the ผงใบลาน the market sells as material are one object at two moments of its life.
What these counts say — and all they say
A listing or a page is counted when the emic term occurs verbatim in its text. That is the whole claim. Nothing here reads a photograph, nothing here dates an object, and nothing here calls a piece genuine — this archive records what a source said, and who said it. Where a material is described as asking a careful eye, that is a note about a whole category, never about any one object.
The vocabulary is kept in the project vault (), where every term carries its own confidence and the unverified ones say so out loud.
No shop here — listing links go to their sellers. Data: materials.json