Buddhist Bilingualism: Pali-Vernacular Sermons, Exegesis, and Literature in Early Modern Thailand

This workshop is a part of the T. T. & W. F. Chao Conferences and Workshops.
Many of the manuscripts circulated between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries in Theravada temples in the kingdom of Siam (today’s central Thailand) are bilingual, with portions in Pali mixed together with portions in vernacular Thai. Carved on palm-leaf and inked on bark-paper manuscripts, such Pali-Thai bilingual compositions or bitexts challenge the boundaries between Indic and vernacular worlds. This workshop brings together dynamic new work by young scholars of Thai Buddhism and literature who are opening new doors to the study of these works and their place in early modern Siamese Buddhist culture. Panelists will focus on short passages to reveal some of the many aesthetic and doctrinal layers at work in bilingual sermons, exegetical treatises, and Buddhist court literature from the Ayutthaya and early Rattanakosin eras. What does the interaction between Pali and Thai in these bitexts teach us about the nature of Buddhist translation writ large? How might we place these Siamese innovations in a broader regional context? What is “Buddhist” about the specific modes of textuality and bilingualism displayed in this material?