Bhikkhu Sujato wrote:A recent presentation by Mark Allon on his work with the Tipitaka carved in stone in Myanmar, the “Fifth Council” edition. Mark and his team have been studying, restoring, and publishing.
southeast asian archaeology wrote:Research on the Kuthodaw Pagoda marble-stelae recension of the Pali canon in Mandalay, Myanmar | Mark Allon
23 October 2020
Between 1860-1868 King Mindon (1853-1878), the second last king of Burma/Myanmar, had the complete Theravāda Pali Buddhist canon carved onto 729 marble stelae which were then housed at the specially constructed Kuthodaw Pagoda in Mandalay, Myanmar. Although Myanmar kings, like other Theravāda kings, had long fulfilled one of their religious duties by commissioning sets of the canon to be written on palm leaf manuscripts, this was the first time that the entire canon had been carved on stone. To some extent, Mindon’s doing so may have been prompted by the annexation of lower Myanmar by the British in 1852. These inscriptions preserve a complete and unified recension of the Pali canon which is a unique textual witness of the Theravāda manuscript tradition of Myanmar well outside the reach of Western textual methods and practices. This presentation reports on an ongoing project to conserve, photograph and study these previously underutilised inscriptions in an attempt to clarify how the texts as inscribed relate to earlier manuscript traditions and to subsequent printed versions of the canon from Myanmar.
