Indic-Vernacular Bitexts from Thailand: Bilingual Modes of Philology, Exegetics, Homiletics, and Poetry, 1450-1850.

• Author: Walker, Trent
• Position: Critical essay

INTRODUCTION

The literary culture of second-millennium mainland Southeast Asia, excepting Vietnam, emerges from the encounter between classical Indic languages and local vernacular languages. The leading Indic language of this period in Southeast Asia is Pali, a Middle Indic language closely related to Sanskrit, though Sanskrit itself maintained a secondary role in the region. The Southeast Asian vernaculars that Pali and Sanskrit intertwine with include the Tibeto-Burman tongue of Burmese; the Austroasiatic languages of Mon and Khmer; and the Southwestern Tai dialects of Siamese (or Central Thai), Lanna (or Northern Thai), Lao, Shan, Tai Khun, and Tai Lu (Dai Lue). At the crux of this meeting between Indic and local vernaculars are Indic-vernacular bitexts.

I define bitexts as texts that are presented bilingually, with portions in one language mixed together with portions in another, typically in an interphrasal or interlinear arrangement. Indic-vernacular bitexts may be structured in various ways, and need not contain equal proportions of Indic and Southeast Asian material. In most cases, the vernacular portions of a bitext provide an analytic reading of the Pali or Sanskrit portions, sometimes accompanied by an interpretive or literary commentary. Such bitexts, known by diverse names in local languages, form a significant portion of all extant written material produced between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries in what is now Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. (1)

There have been very few sustained studies of Southeast Asian Indic-vernacular bitexts to date. William Pruitt, building on earlier work by Tin Lwin and John Okell, meticulously demonstrates the extraordinary range of grammatical particles and abbreviation systems employed in a single type of Pali-Burmese bitext. (2) Assanee Poolrak explores a number of analogous technical particles found in one Pali-Siamese bitext to show how Indic literary modes were adopted in Central Thailand. (3) Justin McDaniel, based on his readings of Pali-Lao and Pali-Lanna bitexts, claims that such bilingual compositions follow no strict conventions but rather reflect the idiosyncratic approaches of individual teachers. (4)

By contrast, my research on bitexts in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand demonstrates not only that strict conventions were followed, but that many of these conventions were shared across mainland Southeast Asia from the eleventh century onward. Bitexts, in my reading, do not reflect what McDaniel sees as idiosyncrasies of particular local or personal approaches to reading Pali. (5) Nor are the technical features of Indic-vernacular bitexts, as documented by Pruitt and Assanee, particular to Burmese or Siamese contexts. I argue instead that Indic-vernacular bitexts spread across mainland Southeast Asia in the second millennium for three reasons: 1) they facilitated linguistic exchange not only between Indic and Southeast Asian languages but also among different Southeast Asian vernaculars, 2) they structured the vernacular reading and translation of Pali (and occasionally Sanskrit) texts, and 3) they facilitated the emergence of distinctive styles of bilingual literature that served philological, exegetical, homiletic, and poetic ends. This article unpacks the latter two claims. (6)

In this essay, I first provide a brief overview of how intellectuals in mainland Southeast Asia created sophisticated techniques to accurately and efficiently render Pali and Sanskrit into local vernaculars. Some of these techniques parallel various approaches for reading Latin in medieval Europe and for reading Literary Sinitic in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. (7) Following the work of John Whitman and Peter Kornicki on East Asia, we might classify Indic-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia under the heading of "vernacular reading." (8) However, the techniques developed in Southeast Asia for the production of bitexts differ from their European and East Asia counterparts in that they supported a wide variety of textual genres, including linguistic study, scholastic commentary, public sermons, and versified belles-lettres.

To demonstrate these different techniques of presentation, this article focuses on selected Pali-vernacular texts from Thailand, including Pali-Siamese and Pali-Lanna examples, dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. The examples I selected come from a range of contexts within this period; I chose them for the clarity with which they illustrate philological, exegetical, homiletic, and poetic modes of presentation. To make the broader context for these examples clear, I first address the common features and diffusion history of Indic-vernacular bitexts in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. Since I deal with these themes elsewhere, the remainder of this section takes the form of a brief summary. (9)

Indic-vernacular bitexts across Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia rely on a common model for their composition. Whether they emerged in Burmese, Khmer, Lanna, Lao, Mon, Siamese, or Sinhalese contexts, bitexts in second-millennium contexts, including fifteenth-to nineteenth-century Siam (Central Thailand) and Lanna (Northern Thailand), are created through three required steps: selection, analysis, and presentation. The first step of selection has two possible options, the second of analysis encompasses five techniques, and the third of presentation has four primary modes, as shown in Table 1 below.

All lndic-vernacular bitexts purport to select ( I) an Indic text or texts to analyze passage by passage, whether that text is an existing Pali or Sanskrit treatise (1a) or one invented for the purpose of composing a bitext (1b). Each passage may be quoted in full, in abbreviated form, or not at all. The selected passage is then subjected to an analytical reading and translation (2). The number of specific techniques of analysis used depends on the linguistic and cultural context of the author. In Siamese and Lanna contexts it is not uncommon for all five techniques (2a-2e) to be applied to each passage. (10) Each analyzed passage may be subsequently presented in various modes (3). The four most common are philological (3a), exegetical (3b), homiletic (3c), and poetic (3d), but variants and combinations of these appear as well. Each mode roughly corresponds with a particular intended audience: a philological presentation favors linguistic training, an exegetical approach is suitable for scholastic readers, a homiletic mode is honed for public preaching, and a poetic treatment may be intended for recitation to court circles or other highly literate audiences.

These primary steps and their attendant options, techniques, and modes may have arisen gradually in the first millennium, though our evidence for this period is thin. There are first-millennium inscriptions that include portions in two languages, namely a classical Indic language (Sanskrit or Pali) and a local tongue (Cham, Khmer, Mon, Pyu). However, in most cases, the classical and vernacular sections diverge in form and content; the Indic portion often praises a deity in elaborate verse, while the vernacular documents what was donated to the deity or religious foundation in prose." Notable exceptions include an interphrasal Sanskrit-Pyu inscription tentatively dated to the sixth century and a number of Sanskrit-Khmer inscriptions, largely from the early second millennium, that include parallel content, if divergent form, in the two languages. (12)

There are a handful of reliably dated first-millennium Pali-Sinhala bitexts that include the three primary steps. The earliest surviving mainland Southeast Asian example is a Pali-Mon inscription from the late eleventh or early twelfth century. (13) Pali-Burmese examples are extant from the late thirteenth century, and several Sanskrit-Burmese bitexts are listed in an inscription from 1442. By the middle of the second millennium, the techniques of Indic-vernacular bitexts are witnessed among several Southwestern Tai groups, including those in Siam, Lanna, and Laos. The earliest complete Pali-Siamese bitext is thought to date from 1482 in Ayutthaya. The earliest securely dated Pali-Lanna bitext surviving in manuscript form dates from 1552. (14) A Sanskrit-Lanna example survives from 1578. (15) The oldest extant Pali-Lao bitexts hail from a similar period. (16) Pali-Siamese, Pali-Lanna, and Pali-Lao bitexts almost certainly existed prior to the late fifteenth century, though the extreme paucity of manuscripts before that time precludes firm conclusions.

The examples I draw from in this essay comprise several of the oldest representatives in Thailand for the four modes of bitextual presentation. These include 1) two passages from a mid-nineteenth-century philological Pali-Siamese bitext, 2) two exegetical Pali-Lanna bitexts, one from 1585 and another from 1638, 3) two homiletic Pali-Lanna bitexts, one from 1563 and another from 1666, and 4) a poetic Pali-Siamese bitext from 1482. Each example is among the earliest surviving Indic-Tai bitexts of its type. The philological examples include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam. The Pali-Lanna exegetical and homiletic examples, never analyzed before, are among the few dozen oldest manuscripts surviving in any Tai language. The poetic example is one of the oldest known literary works in Siamese. Taken as a whole, these examples provide detailed evidence for the emergence of Indic-vernacular bitexts in what is now Thailand.

PHILOLOGICAL BITEXTS: INTERLINEAR PALI-SIAMESE EXAMPLES FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Most Pali manuscripts from the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries in Siam and Cambodia are inscribed on palm leaves. Once the leaves have been prepared for writing, the scribe carves the letters into each leaf. The leaves are then washed with ink and wiped clean, leaving the ink behind only in the inscribed letters.

Many...