Robe colour

[Coyote]

In the BMC 2 by Ven. Thanissaro, it states:

Robes of the following colors should not be worn: entirely blue, entirely yellow, entirely blood red,
entirely crimson, entirely black, entirely orange, or entirely beige (according to the
Commentary, this last is the “color of withered leaves”)

Yet I have seen pictures of many monks with robes that I would describe as crimson or red, especially those of Burmese origin. Why is this, and why are there differences in the colour of monk's robes generally?

[Dhammanando]

In the BMC 2 by Ven. Thanissaro, it states:

Robes of the following colors should not be worn: entirely blue, entirely yellow, entirely blood red,
entirely crimson, entirely black, entirely orange, or entirely beige (according to the
Commentary, this last is the “color of withered leaves”)

Yet I have seen pictures of many monks with robes that I would describe as crimson or red, especially those of Burmese origin.

Yes, but the commonest Burmese robes aren't blood red and nor are they crimson ("a rich deep red colour inclining to purple"). They are most often described in English as burgundy ("a deep red colour like that of burgundy wine").

burgundy.jpg (1.97 KiB) Viewed 1324 times

As we can see, the colour is too dark for blood (at least for arterial blood), and doesn't incline to purple. Admittedly one will sometimes see Burmese monks (as well as monks in the North of Thailand) whose robes are most definitely blood-red or crimson; we can put this down to chromatic license (the optical equivalent of poetic license).

Why is this, and why are there differences in the colour of monk's robes generally?

One reason is that the Buddha permitted a variety of materials to be used for robe-dying and these will inevitably generate different colours. Red clay gives a dark pink hue, while the boiled chips from the wood of a giack-fruit tree give a dull ochre. Another possible reason is differing ideas of what the Pali names for colours mean. There are a number of difficulties in translating the Pali names for colours into the languages of SE Asia (or even into English for that matter). There isn't always a perfect match between the chromatic range of a particular colour in Pali and that of a colour in some other language. Pali, for example, has a word for 'blue', while Thai does not. What Thai has is "sky-coloured" (sii faa) and "silver-nitrate-coloured" (sii nam-ngoen), the former for light shades of blue and the latter for dark shades. But unlike in English and Pali, Thai lacks any conception of 'blueness' or any idea of sii faa and sii nam-ngoen being two shades of a single colour. They are not perceived to be so, any more than an English-speaker would perceive yellow and and orange as two shades of a single colour.

[tsurezuregusa]

Hello,

this https://viss.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/w ... red-robes/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; is a nice little post about the changing colors in Burma. It seems to be quite recent too.

Kind regards,
Florian

[Coyote]

My thanks to you both. I guess if the colour is reddish-brown then it would be allowable.