History
Chinese chronicles describe yantra tattooing among the Thai cultures of southwestern China and northwestern Vietnam at least 2000 years ago. Over the centuries the tradition spread to what is now Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and parts of Myanmar.
The script used for yantra designs varies according to cultural and geographic factors. In Cambodia and central Thailand, Khmer script is used, while in northern Thailand one sees yantra tattoos bearing Shan, Northern Thai or Tai Lu scripts, and in Laos the Lao Tham script is employed. The script spells out abbreviated syllables from Pali incantations. Different masters have added to these designs over the centuries through visions received in their meditations. Some yantra designs have been adapted from pre-Buddhist Shamanism and the belief in animal spirits that was found in the Southeast Asian sub-continent and incorporated into the Thai tradition and cultures. Today it is most popular in Thailand, whereas in Cambodia and Laos the tradition has almost completely vanished.
Read more about this topic: Yantra Tattooing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“It’s nice to be a part of history but people should get it right. I may not be perfect, but I’m bloody close.”
—John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)