Abstract: Bilingual Pali-vernacular compositions, or bitexts, achieved regional prominence in mainland Southeast Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While most such manuscript examples are interphrasally arranged, a distinctive minority appear in an interlinear format, with tiny annotations inked or carved between the lines of the Pali. Working within the extremely conservative conventions of the palm-leaf manuscript, Southeast Asian Buddhist exegetes used these annotations to record glosses, grammatical explanations, and citations from other commentarial texts. Based on palm-leaf manuscript sources produced and annotated between the 1630s and 1930s in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, this talk charts four distinct patterns in the creation and accumulation of interlinear commentaries. These innovations in layout, including making use of margins and expanding interlinear space, allowed Southeast Asian readers to transform the palm-leaf manuscript into a vehicle forcumulative commentaries, in which multiple hands and exegetical sources (aṭṭhakathā, ṭīkā, yojanā, and more) left their mark over time. Pushing back against assertions that Pali learning and commentarial practices were in steep decline by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distinctive layout of these bitexts reveals how philological precision and intertextual fluency shaped the intellectual culture of Southeast Asia in the early modern period.
About the speaker: 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. He specializes in Southeast Asian Buddhist music, literature, and manuscripts, and has published widely on Khmer, Lao, Pali, Thai, and Vietnamese Buddhist texts and recitation practices. He is the author of Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (Shambhala Publications, 2022), winner of the 2024 Khyentse Foundation Prize for Outstanding Translation, and the co-editor of Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages (MANOA/University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). His current monograph projects include an intellectual history of Pali-vernacular translation in early modern Southeast Asia and a study of Cambodian chanting manuscripts. He shares his work at www.trentwalker.org.