This ceremony centres on the recitation—usually by Buddhist monks—of extracts fron the Pali Canon, collected in a text called the Gatubhāṇavārapāli, Paritta or in Siahala Piruvānāpotvahanse. Its objective is to ward off danger, ensure protection and bless the sponsors. It is prevalent in other Theravada Buddhist countries such as Burma and Thailand as well, but this work is confined to a study of the tradition preserved in Sri Lanka.

Translators of short Buddhist chants in Southeast Asia, including Hộ Tông and his Siamese and Khmer predecessors, tend to follow three unstated principles:

1. the translation may be longer than its source, but rarely vice versa
2. even when translated into the vernacular, the Pali source ought to be retained, and
3. the resulting bilingual Pali-vernacular chant should bring its performance practices—gestures, melodies, and rhythms—into harmony.

These principles are crucial for understanding the historical processes that made the transmission of Theravada Buddhism across Southeast Asia possible.

The bilingual character of Theravāda Buddhism is no accident. It emerges from deliberate cultivation by Buddhist intellectuals in these regions over the past two millennia. The Theravāda transmission of texts is notably bilingual; scriptures in Pāli are often accompanied by vernacular translations and Pāli-vernacular bilingual texts, or “bitexts.”

Another interesting source of ‘slavery’ in Buddhist temples in historic Sri Lanka was donating oneself voluntarily as a slave to gain merit attached to the deed…

Temples in medieval Sri Lanka had a range of laborers from volunteers to serfs to prisoners of war who laborered under conditions that ranged from the purely symbolic to the truly harsh.

These commentaries, known as sūtra sannayas, and/or as sūtra vistara sannayas, were composed in large numbers beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century. In what follows, I present the historical context for this change in Buddhist textual practices…

The revival of the Bhikkhu Saṅgha in eighteenth century Sri Lanka was accompanied by a renewed focus on study of the Pāli Suttas and Vinaya. This necessitated (and, eventually, facilitated) the creation of a large corpus of vernacular commentaries aimed at educating novice monks.

Orientations of temples at Ayutthaya seem to have been determined by magnetic compass

By correlating the exact orientations of different historical temples in Thailand and their construction dates to the known drift of the magnetic north pole, scientists have been able to confirm that Thais had the compass centuries earlier than previously thought.

In this unstable balance of power, greater emphasis was placed on the dynastic pedigrees of consorts and wives brought to the island from powerful mainland kingdoms, from which Lanka’s kings could borrow prestige, and on whom they could potentially call on for military support. Once on the island, however, it seems that many of these women were not content to merely be accessories to their husbands’ claims to power. Their inscriptions speak to the considerable economic, political, and religious influence they wielded throughout the interregnal period.

The Jataka may have been deliberately hidden to prevent them from being permanently lost in the year 2000 of the Buddhist Era.

The most striking rock formation at Phū Phra Bāt is locally known as Uṣā’s Tower, named after the stone chamber where the beautiful princess would have been forced to live in isolation. It is a natural rock formation, restructured into a chamber with one door and two side windows standing in the centre of an open space and marked with a circular ring of vertical stones.

Some odd rock formations in Udon Thani have been the focal point of religious practices from prehistory through to modern times.

The Angkor Borei images of Buddha indicate that after the late seventh century, there is a hiatus of nearly 400 years before Buddhist imagery re-appears in the late twelfth to thirteenth century.

In this situation, the king had two alternatives: either to confiscate all religious lands where the evidence for the original endowment was weak, and thereby increase the royal treasury, or to maintain the status quo…

An overview of the history of the Theravāda Saṅgha and its relationship with the state from the medieval period through the 19th century.

a set of correspondences between his/her 32 bodily formations, the 32 consonants of the Pāli syllabary giving origin to those bodily formations, the 32 contemplative mūlakammaṭṭhāna and the 32 marks of a Buddha’s body. The key factor linking those correspondences is mūla-kammaṭṭhāna

How Tantric elements came to inform a premodern, Cambodian meditation practice.

Theravāda Buddhism, once it had anchored itself in Cambodian soil, possessed a remarkable facility for assimilation and accretion.

An introductory overview of the history of Buddhism in Cambodia, from the earliest archeological evidence in 5th c. Funan to its tentative reemergence in the 1980s and ’90s.

the inscriptions of the past refer often to a corpus of women as “nuns”. What are we to make of this?

Ledi Sayadaw was simultaneously a great teacher to his monks and lay disciples, a great Dhamma preacher to large segments of the Burmese population, a founder and organizer of many Buddhist lay organizations, a famous teacher and popularizer of meditation practice, especially Ānāpāna and Vipassanā, and a classical scholar-monk and author of classical work.

Born in 1846, known for his deep meditation practice and devotion to the Abhidhamma, Ledi Sayadaw played a pivotal role in the revival of Theravāda Buddhism in Burma and beyond.

That women cannot be bodhisattas was not a carefully considered doctrine designed to exclude women. It did, however, result in a great inequality, despite widespread recognition that women were capable of achieving arahatship. If one’s sex is no obstacle to arahatship, and this is the mainstream goal of Theravāda, does it even matter that a tradition developed declaring women unable to be bodhisattas?

Cambodia is strewn with places of national, local or, most frequently, village importance, considered as potent places, that is to say, places that are said to have agency and a positive or negative power of interaction with human beings. This paper emphasises the constituent principles of potency using case studies based on ethnographic research conducted between 2007 and 2015 in Pursat province, western Cambodia.

Beginning with the analysis of the sanctuary of a powerful land guardian spirit called Khleang Muang, the author progressively guides the reader to all the potent places that form a network which spatially tells the legend of the sixteenth-century Khmer King Ang Chan who passed by Pursat, coming from Angkor and settled in Lovek (south of Tonle Sap Lake). Violent death and sacrifices, rituals, spiritual energy called paramī, old buildings, monasteries, precious tableware kept in the soil, trees, stones, termite mounds … all those constituents of the potency of the places are analysed. The author’s discussion of the core of potency (pāramī) enables her to show how Buddhism and land guardian spirit cults are entangled in a single still hierarchical religious system.

This article presents an overview of various ways in which Buddhists and Muslims have lived together in Indonesia since the arrival of Islam about 1200. It tells how Buddhism has slowly disappeared and become a religion for mainly the Chinese who, until the late 19th century, have often converted to Islam.

This article analyzes the role of three key figures in the recent government–supported revival of Buddhism. These figures are the Chinese–Indonesian monk Ashin Jinarakkhita, the Balinese lay devotee and government official Oka Diputhera, and the Chinese–Indonesian businesswoman Sri Hartati Murdaya. They have tried to accommodate Buddhism to the Muslim–dominated nationalism of modern Indonesia. The result of the past five decades is that Buddhism has obtained a modest but safe position in independent Indonesia.

I present here a preliminary report on selected engraved or inscribed objects, most of them recently found in Southeast Asia. Foremost among them are those indited with the single word apramāda: ‘careful’, ‘heedful’, ‘aware’.

A few Buddhist talismans used to ward off danger in medieval Southeast Asia.

From the point of view of both language and contents, I conclude that the Pāli inscriptions of Burma and Siam give firm evidence for a Theravādin presence in the Irrawaddy and Chao Phraya basins, from about the fifth century CE onwards.

To see the image strictly as something to be seen is, in Skilling’s Buddhologist eyes, nothing less than to manifest ignorance…

This book chapter examines the concept of “icons” within Theravāda Buddhism, drawing on narrative depictions. It argues that debates in art history regarding insider (emic) and outsider (etic) interpretations are crucial for understanding Southeast Asian perspectives on the Buddha. These perspectives grapple with the Buddha as both a historical figure and a representation of transcendent ideals.

We should bear in mind that jātaka is not an inflexible category. The same narrative can fulfill different functions, at one and the same time or at different times, as a jātaka, a deśanā, an ānisaṃsa, a paritta, or a sūtra.

This article begins with a brief history of jātakas, from the Pāli canon in India to the spread of the tales through all of Asia. Skilling then goes on to classify and elaborate on the jātakas as classical (tales found within the Khuddaka-nikya) and non-classical (transmitted outside of the canon and only in certain regions). Throughout the study, Skilling brings various jātaka stories into conversation, as well as various places in Asia where jātaka tales have played an important role in the region’s form of Buddhism.

Other kings have victories; he has dhamma victories. Other kings go on hunting expeditions; he gets much more pleasure out of dhamma expeditions, on which he makes gifts to brahmins and renouncers and senior citizens, tours the country and finds instruction in the dhamma. Other kings have officials; he has dhamma officials…

The Aśoka of his inscriptions and of the Theravāda texts compared.

The number of works preserved from this era attests not only to the relative magnitude of literary production but also to the fact that these works have long been preserved as key authorities for the Theravāda Buddhist tradition throughout Southern Asia.

The productivity and orthodoxy of pre-modern Sri Lanka was not due to political stability but rather to the political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Gornall shows that monastic reforms led to new forms of Pali literature, which, in turn, preserved the Buddhist tradition and expanded it.

Now, what we can say is that, it is within these spaces of practices of mental cultivation that poetry, in the Buddhist world, takes its place, as well as being part of literary culture; as well as being part of religious culture. But, it has a central place in the practice of mental cultivation. 

In this lecture, Professor Charles Hallisey describes how Buddhism has historically used poetry as a vehicle for its teachings. Further, through various examples, he offers the idea that, in the Buddhist world, scholatiscism and poetry are forms of mental cultivation as much as meditation and ritual and have always been so. 

…importation of an ordination—an act of using trans-regional monastic intermediaries to enable local initiators of reordination to start a new monastic lineage—did not necessarily entail the transplantation of the lineage of the intermediary or any features associated with that lineage in its location of origin.

This book chapter explains transregional ordination lineages in early modern Southern Asia. It does this by following the movements of the monk Sāralaṅkā, an eighteenth-century Thai monk who traveled to Kandy and then to Burma. The overall study attempts to show that, even in a short period of time, imported ordination developed its own independent identity within its new surroundings, and how even trans-regional monks adapted to local conditions.

An accused who was able to flee to the nearest monastery would be protected from such mob justice. Sanctuary would give the person an opportunity to explain himself and allow his accusers to calm down so the facts could be examined more objectively.

The Pali terms equivalent to sanctuary would be abhayatthana or pujjatthana. Sanctuary in Buddhist monasteries had a long history in Sri Lanka lasting for at least 1,000 years.

The oldest known copy of this text at the present time, and possibly also the oldest extant book written in a Thai language, is a palm leaf manuscript with a Chula Sakkarad date corresponding to 1516 A.D. Written in the Tham script, the treatise employs a dual language format consisting of Pali passages followed by their Lan Na Thai equivalents

This dissertation is a scholarly study of the story of the Arhat Maliyadeva, found in its oldest Thai rescension. This story is traditionaly found in the Vessantara Jātaka. Looking at two other later editions, the study examines various meaning and uses of the story in different contexts for different purposes. Also included is a translation of the highly literary Kham Luang (royal version) of the story.

Brown divides his presentation into three periods. First is the Indiegenous Bronze Age, around 2000 BCE; second, Indian contact, 2nd century CE to 5th century CE; third, Indian-related art, 5th century onward. While showcasing the art of early Southeast Asia and its history, Brown explores topics such as the lack of diety images in pre-Indian art and the miraculously sudden transition to such anthropomorphic images.

1. The Pali Literature of Ceylon by G. P. Malalasekera
2. The Pali Literature of Burma by Mabel Haynes Bode
3. The Pali Literature of South-East Asia by H. Saddhātissa

All three works, previously published independently, are here compiled into a single volume.

The prince (Asoka) fitted out a great army consisting of the four parts, and then went forth, taking with him a branch of the Bo tree of the Tathagata.
Having passed through three kingdoms and the Vinjha range, having passed through the great forest, the prince came to the ocean.
The great four-fold army with the Bhikkhuni congregation at its head, proceeded to the great sea, carrying the excellent Bo tree.

A few scenes from the oldest history of Sri Lanka highlighting the contributions of and attitudes towards the Buddhist nuns taken from Oldenberg’s (public domain) 1879 translation.

Not just a catalog of sculptures, the included essays by leading scholars explain much of what is known about the early history of Southeast Asian polities and their Indic religions.

medieval Pāli literary culture can be viewed as a form of qualified cosmopolitanism: one that advanced many of the cosmopolitan literary ideals of its time but also staunchly protected its exclusively Buddhist identity.

On how Pāli literature in medieval Sri Lanka responded to Sanskrit’s regional hegemony.

A study of the distribution of sema stones also provides evidence for the spread of Buddhism, while Buddha images carved into rock faces on mountaintops and evidence for rock shelters illustrate that the tradition of forest monks was functioning alongside the more established urban monasticism.

The Kandy episode reflects Chulalongkorn’s self-image both as a Buddhist leader—a “defender of the faith”—and as a champion of rationalism. This dual self-fashioning remained an extremely strenuous exercise.

How some British-discovered relics made their way to Thailand.

Attitudes of the Thai embedded in the myths offer insight into the mechanism through which Buddhism was able to be integrated into the indigenous belief system.

Despite the Buddha’s teachings on the arbitrary nature of language, the commentarial and grammatical traditions developed a sophisticated theoretical framework to analyse, explicate and reinforce some of the key Buddhist doctrinal terms. Also, an elaborate classification system of different types of names was developed to show that the language of the Buddha was firmly grounded in the highest truth and that some terms were spontaneously arisen, even though such a concept—that words by themselves could arise spontaneously and directly embody ultimate truth—was quite foreign to their Founder.

After some preliminary considerations concerning orality and writing in India and the date of the Buddha, this article re-examines the questions of where and when a version of the Pali Canon was first set to writing and what were the contents of that collection. It then goes on to examine the origin and evolution of the Māgadha language we now call Pali, seeing it as derived from a written language

The recent split between the Christian Karen National Union and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Organization is a dramatic expression of the political role of religion. Religion, religious movements, and prophetic leaders are important elements in Karen identification and their relationship with neighboring peoples, states, and colonizers. Religious cosmology and rituals are not merely the essentials of their world view but also constitute modes of empowerment

A compelling look at how small tribes in the Southeast Asian hills adopt new religious ideas.

Two of these carry extracts from the Abhidhamma; the third gives a syllabary followed by the recollection formulas of the Three Gems. The other two epigraphs are written not on stone slabs but are inscribed on small gold leaves; they contain the heart formulas of the books of the Tipiṭaka and the qualities of the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha.

I suggest that they are the products of widespread and enduring Buddhist cultures of inscription, installation, and consecration, as well as of customs of condensation and abbreviation that have have been intrinsic to Thai liturgical and manuscript practices up to the present.

In this essay, I examine the intertwining concepts of merit, power, Buddhist virtue, and the moral rendering of the physical universe apparent in late nineteenth-century Khmer vernacular texts.

This article looks at Buddhist literature in nineteenth-century Khmer. It argues that the literature of this period was a direct response to French colonialism, and though modern Cambodians questioned religious traditions and cosmologies, the law of karma and the framework of a moral universe persisted.

May the Buddha not be hot or cold, nor be bothered by flies …

Shortly after the Buddha’s awakening, Nāga Mucalinda protects him from a storm—a striking image that would inspire artists for thousands of years.

Assavavirulhakarn pulls together a variety of epigraphical and other arguments to show that all these religious strands coexisted in Southeast Asia well before Anawrahta the Great—as, of course, they continue to today.

Abstaining from perceptions of sensuality,
overcoming all fetters,
having totally ended delight in becoming,
one doesn’t sink
into the deep.

The Buddha explains to a yakkha how one crosses over the flood.

The more convincing position taken in Sarvāstivāda exegesis sees the three types of wisdom as interrelated activities that can rely on mindfulness, thereby testifying to the flexibility and broad compass of mindfulness in Buddhist thought as something not limited to a rigid division between theory and practice.

At an early stage during the formation of Pāli, genuine Middle Indic forms began to be converted into artificial words under the growing influence of Sanskrit on Buddhist Middle Indic.

I am not confident that a convincing narrative history of “Theravāda” is even possible.

… a third century CE inscription [is dedicated] ‘to the Theriya teachers, followers of the Vibhajjavāda, bringers of the faith to the Kashmiri, Gandhāran, Bactrian and Vanavāsan peoples and to the island of Ceylon, dwellers in the Mahāvihāra’

A reevaluation of the Indian lineage behind the Theravāda.

This article offers further support for Lance Cousins’ thesis that the Pāli canon, written down in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka, was based largely on a Theriya manuscript tradition from South India.

Attention is also given to some of Cousins’ related arguments, in particular, that this textual transmission occurred within a Vibhajjavādin framework; that it occurred in a form of ‘proto-Pali’ close to the Standard Epigraphical Prakrit of the first century BCE; and that the distinct Sinhalese nikāyas emerged perhaps as late as the third century CE.

Please, O Lord, may all the boons
for which I fervently pray
come true at once and come to be
from now until nirvana’s time!

… highlights of the Cambodian Dharma song tradition. Many of the most popular songs are included, along with others of exceptional interest or literary merit. All of the major themes of the genre are covered: the life of the Buddha, gratitude to parents, the impermanence of the body, and [the] aspiration for nirvana.

Listen to an interview with the author on the New Books Network or hear him perform a few of the songs from this book on Shambhala’s website. And for the author’s previous translations and performances, see his open-access album “Stirring and Stilling” (2011).

The book also contains a number of original essays on the history of Cambodian Buddhism and its poetry, alongside a thorough bibliography for the author’s sources.

Here, monastics, for the donor there are three factors, and for the receivers there are three factors.

… together with its commentary interleaved, […] it should give the student an idea of how the word commentaries work

… in sketching out what the councils were, I hope to indicate how they might be fruitfully studied

The relationship between Cambodians and Angkor still persists as a place of ancestors, worship, and religious rituals. We believe that Angkor is the most sacred place in Cambodia.

… this self-effacing, almost anonymous commentator’s proneness to being loved or hated, exalted or reviled, is certainly one of the least expected outcomes of Buddhist history.

… one traditional account of Buddhaghosa’s own death has the moribund commentator mentally revising the three meanings of the word ‘death’ while expiring, and it seems clear that this, rather than a parody of pedantic intellectualism, was intended as praise

On modern Theravāda’s ongoing struggle to appraise the legacy of their tradition’s greatest scholar.

… having heard these ten perceptions, venerable Girimānanda’s afliction immediately abated

A profound discourse on Vipassana meditation in an apotropaic frame.

Buddhist literature offers us the only narratives from this period that feature to any great extent the nautical or maritime traveller as hero.

There’s form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. These are the things that, if you cling to them, are going to be suffering. But you have to use them for the path. I think it’s important to realize that when the Buddha talks about “the raft” image, he’s not talking about a yacht: You put together the things you’ve been using in the past in a new way.

In the twelfth century king Parākramabāhu I of Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, instigated a reform of Buddhism […] The works ascribed to Sāriputta have been discussed most recently by Pecenko in his survey of Sāriputta writings and by von Hinüber in his Handbook of Pāli Literature. The purpose of this brief article is to augment the information supplied by them regarding the Vinaya works of Sāriputta.

… central to the process of reform was the production of new forms of Pali literature, which helped create a new conceptual and social coherence within the [Buddhist] community

On the political turmoil of 12th c. Sri Lanka and how it (as much as the unification under Parakramabahu I) was responsible for the century’s prolific writing and reforms which continue to shape Theravāda Buddhism today.

The (possibly tenth century?) epistle had some influence on later summaries of the doctrine. It shows how essential cosmology and ethics has been for the preservation and dissemination of “the True Dhamma.”

This article contains just the translation from Hazlewood’s 1983 Master’s thesis on the text.

I find it reasonable that a period that was characterized by both a low standard in Pāli and indeed Buddhist learning, and a desire to effect a revival of Buddhist thought and practice could provide a fertile context for the acceptance of a work like the Tuṇḍilovāda Sutta. As happened with “apocryphal” Buddhist literature in other contexts, “suspicions concerning the authenticity of a text (may have) paled as its value in explicating Buddhist doctrine and practice became recognized.”

A thought-provoking example of a sutta composed in medieval Sri Lanka and a demonstration of the painstaking work going into the study of old manuscripts.

This sequence of images of cities may lie behind the location of Nibbāna at the pinnacle of a cosmological hierarchy as has been frequently noted in ethnographic studies of contemporary Theravādin Buddhism.

The Nibbānasutta displays, at least in part, the processes through which summaries and new suttas were created in the Theravāda tradition.

A late, apocryphal “sutta” in the Theravāda tradition, building on the famous simile of Nibbāna as a hidden, jungle city.

The Abhayagiri monks were broad-minded in outlook; they maintained contacts with foreign Buddhist schools, and themselves established bases in India and in South-east Asia.

A brief scriptural quote from the elusive Abhayagiri school found in a medieval, Indian treatise.

… while Indians like Mahinda, Buddhaghosa, Dhammapala and Ramachandra Bharati, were able to have a profound influence on Sri Lankan Buddhism, Sri Lankans were able to have equally profound effects on Indian Buddhism

… so many warriors perished on the battlefield. The response of the arahants is truly astounding.

How “motivated reasoning” led ancient Sri Lankan monks to create a problematic theology to justify murder which is still haunting the Theravāda today.

… texts achieve authority through use

An exploration of the canons of the “18” schools, and how they may have thought about textual “authenticity.”

For a critical response to some of Collins’ assertions, see this essay by Bhante Sujato.

This is striking proof of the general reliability with which Buddhist monks transmitted their texts

The amazing story of ancient Pāli texts in Burma, discovered to contain only minor differences from the contemporary canon.

Ostensibly a commentary on a single verse from the Dhammapada, this classic work synthesized the Buddhist Path into a single, comprehensive progression of purification from approaching the path, to purifying ethics, to purifying the mind with meditation and eventually insight. It is from the Visuddhimagga that we get the threefold division of the path into Sīla, Samādhi and Paññā. The ideas of “neighborhood” concentration, the confusion over samatha and vipassana, and much else in the contemporary Theravāda world can all be traced back to this enormously influential tome.

In its day, a landmark of commentarial scholarship and synthesis, today it contains some of the clearest and most detailed descriptions of the advanced stages of meditation that we have from ancient times. Despite, or perhaps even because of, the text’s limitations and subsequent disagreements over their correct interpretation, the Visuddhimagga is certain to remain a vital part of the Buddhist Tradition for centuries to come.

An interview with the first author of the book by the same name.