Canasapura

Canasapura or Canāśa, Śri Canāśa (Thai: จนาศปุระ, จานาศปุระ, ศรีจนาศะ, Chinese: 迦羅舍), possibly the Jiā Luó Shě Fú (迦逻舍佛, Kalasapura) of the Cefu Yuangui, is an ancient kingdom of what is now Thailand, known from two inscriptions and, on one reading, from the Chinese annals as well. The two stones are the Bo Ika inscription (K. 400), found at Muang Sema in Nakhon Ratchasima Province, and the Śri Canāśa inscription, found at Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya and dated 937, which names four of its rulers.

Where the kingdom lay is not agreed. It is usually placed in the upper valley of the Mun River in present-day Isan, around Muang Sema, while Tatsuo Hoshino identifies it with the Ge Luo She Fen of the Chinese records and reads those records as showing its core in the northern Chao Phraya plain and the Pasak valley after it lost the Nakhon Ratchasima area to Dvaravati. Peter Skilling cautions that the evidential base is unusually narrow, Canāśa being attested in the two inscriptions and in no literary source.

Inscriptions

K. 400, the Bo Ika inscription, records a donation to a Buddhist community by a king of Canāśa. It is dated to about 790 CE in the database of the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre, whereas George Cœdès, who published it, took it for a seventh-century text. The passage has been rendered in English as:

Twenty female buffalos with pendant udders (lambastanyaḥ) and having baby calves, and fifty milch cows, heavy with the burden of their udders, followed by their well-nourished calves, ten female and male slaves, happy in their minds, and four elephants were given to the [Buddhist] community by the king of Canāśa, whose mind was fixed upon awakening.

Nicolas Revire gives the donor's title on this face as śrīcanāśeśvara, the glorious lord of Canāśa, and the gift as made in hope of bodhi. Face B of the same stone is dated 790 śaka (868 CE).