Exploring later Pali texts from Southeast Asia

Lecture by By Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies, Dr. Yukio Yamanaka

Drinks afterwards.

Owing to highly relevant research projects on manuscript-collection over the past 30 years, it became clear that many manuscripts of chronologically later Pāli texts have been passed down to us. They range over various categories, to name just a few examples, lexicon, grammatical treatise, poetry, commentary on Buddhist texts, chronology, narrative literature.

It is obvious that these are important materials for the study of history of culture, ideas, literature and religion in South and Southeast Asia. In other words, these important materials have so far been ignored in research. However, in order to get a detailed and accurate picture of the history of intellectual history of South and Southeast Asia, the research into those Pāli texts is essential. But this research makes very slow progress. This is, because most of those Pāli texts are, may it be diplomatically or critically, not yet edited. Or, some others so far only have been published locally and are difficult to access for the international circle of scholars.

In the lecture the following points are discussed in detail: the history of the Pāli texts in northern Thailand, especially the Pāli commentaries written in Northern Thailand; problems regarding the vocabulary of the later Pāli texts as well as the text editing; new research projects for the later Pāli texts.

Dr Yukio Yamanaka was born in 1969 in Osaka, Japan. He is Numata visiting professor at Leiden University and Research fellow at the Dhammachai Tipitaka Project, Thailand. He received his Ph.D. in Indology at the University of Freiburg, Germany in 2010. His main research fields are the Pāli traditions in Southeast Asia and the middle Indic grammar.

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