From Tradition to Innovation: Sino-Thai Buddhist Plant Motifs in Art, Philosophy, and Cross Cultural Design Exchange

Abstract

This manuscript examines the historical development, philosophical meanings, and contemporary design potential of Sino-Thai Buddhist plant motifs. It argues that plant ornament in Buddhist visual culture should not be understood merely as decorative embellishment but as a dense symbolic language through which religious teachings, aesthetic values, and intercultural relationships are materialized. Focusing on lotus, peony, baoxiang, vine-scroll, and related floral forms, the study traces how Buddhist plant imagery moved across Chinese and Thai artistic systems and how it was transformed through local interpretation rather than passively imitated. The manuscript further proposes that the encounter between Chinese and Thai visual vocabularies produced a hybrid field of design exchange shaped by trade, temple culture, elite taste, mural practice, ceramics, and contemporary heritage-based design.

Methodologically, the manuscript synthesizes historical, comparative, art-historical, and design-oriented scholarship, with particular attention to studies on Bangkok-period Thai Buddhist ornament, Chinese floral symbolism, Buddhist mural comparison, and the adaptation of traditional motifs in contemporary design. The discussion demonstrates that Chinese Buddhist floral systems entered Thailand not as isolated patterns but as philosophically charged ornamental structures already linked to purity, enlightenment, auspiciousness, hierarchy, and harmony. In Thailand, these motifs were reworked within an existing visual culture in which lotus symbolism, temple ornament, and cosmological interpretation were already deeply embedded in religious and social life.

The study concludes that the most productive way to understand Sino-Thai Buddhist plant motifs is through the concept of adaptive continuity. In this model, tradition is neither frozen nor discarded; instead, inherited motifs are selectively translated across media, contexts, and cultural frameworks. This perspective helps explain historical transformation and also offers a foundation for contemporary cross-cultural design practice that is both innovative and ethically grounded in heritage knowledge.