Research About Temple Murals And Villagers’ Daily Life Inside In Manzhao Village,Xishuangbanna

Murals in Buddhist Temples of Dai, as a kind of education tool and also architectural ornaments, carry a plenty of cultural information about aesthetics and Theravada, which are regarded as artistic treasures. With a long history, the Theravada murals in Dai area of Xishuangbanna have their own artistic value, social value, and research value.Manzhao village in Xishuangbanna has been chosen for the research which especially focuses on murals in its Buddhist Temple. The theory combining with this paper is about holiness and secularity’s separation and integration. Starting with aesthetic and cultural levels, this paper tries to explore the murals’aesthetical features and cultural connotations by extracting and organizing the constituent elements in the murals. On the basis of these two levels, some regional characteristics of murals are allowed to be showed, as well as the relationship between murals and Dai people’s daily life.The main body of the article is divided into four chapters. The first chapter gives a brief profile about Manzhao Village and its temple, including the temple’s construction situation and clergies in it. The second chapter focuses on which subject each mural belongs to. The third chapter discusses compositions of each piece and skills applied, which are important parts of aesthetic features. Based on the above analysis, the implied cultural significance will be put forward, especially how murals’holiness can be blended in people’s secular lives.The chapter four classifies different parts of Dai people’s social life, and tries to correspond them to murals’content, reflecting the murals’holiness have already permeated the villagers’social lives. The chapter five is based on the method of quota sampling, and then analyzes how familiar the villagers from the sample are with different murals.