Lecture: "Southeast Asia’s Bitextual Age: Erudition and Invention in Buddhist Translation, 1500–1700"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a remarkable transition took place in the Buddhist scholastic cultures of mainland Southeast Asia. Fewer treatises were being composed in Pali by 1550, yet complete vernacular translations of the Tipiṭaka were still centuries away. The manuscript record from Laos and northern Thailand reveals that Pali-only writing was replaced by several sophisticated genres of Pali-vernacular bilingual texts, or bitexts. These new genres—some adopted from neighboring Burma, others developed locally—brought the exegetical acumen of the Pali tradition into direct contact with the vernacular. The oldest bitextual manuscripts belie these scholastic roots; they were composed as erudite commentaries on existing Pali works. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, a new bitextual genre emerged: Pali-vernacular narrative sermons in which the Pali portions were invented rather than borrowed. Such compositions opened bitexts to a wider audience and dominated Buddhist prose until the rise of vernacular-only translations in the middle of the nineteenth century. In tracing this history through manuscript examples, this talk places mainland Southeast Asia’s bitextual age in conversation with other historical moments in which bitexts rose to prominence, including medieval Europe and East Asia, the early modern Malay world, and the contemporary rise of LLMs.
Trent Walker is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Thai Professor of Theravada Buddhism in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. His publications include Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (winner of the 2024 Khyentse Foundation Prize for Outstanding Translation) and several dozen articles, translations, and essays on Khmer, Thai, Lao, Pali, and Vietnamese Buddhist texts, histories, and recitation practices. He shares his work at www.trentwalker.org.
For questions and the reading group materials, please contact Christoph Emmrich at christoph.emmrich@utoronto.ca.
Zoom Passcode 989442
Associated reading group, April 9: “Unpacking the Glossary: How Selection Defined Buddhist Scholasticism in Early Modern Southeast Asia”
Full 2025-26 SCHEDULE OF EVENTS FOR YEHAN NUMATA PROGRAM IN BUDDHIST STUDIES