Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand

7 From Manuscript to Television

7 From Manuscript to Television If one were to walk into most any Thai bookstore, look at most any Thai Buddhist-themed Web site, scan most any Thai Buddhist curriculum, or examine most any Thai manuscript archive, one would see the Dhammapada . Laos, although lacking in its number of Web sites, universities, bookstores , and curricula, is also a place where the Dhammapada is ubiquitous. Some form of the Dhammapada has been widespread for at least five hundred years. If one looks at Thai, Mon, and Khmer epigraphic evidence, some form of the text goes back another thousand years. Still, all Dhammapada are not created equally. Despite its importance for students and teachers in Laos and Thailand, the nature of the “text” of the Dhammapada and how it has been read, summarized, anthologized, and transformed through various pedagogical methods and mediums have not been explored.1 At first glance it would seem that the Dhammapada in modern Laos and Thailand is radically different from its premodern antecedent. Several key changes have been made in the text and the manner in which it has been conveyed over the past five centuries. First, a pre-twentieth-century emphasis on narrative commentarial sections as a pedagogical subject has been replaced by a valorization of canonical Dhammapada verses. Prior to the twentieth century, the verses as a separate or complete collection had little commerce among teachers and students. In the premodern period the Dhammapada verses were rarely collected as one text. Second, manuscripts of some form of the Dhammapada are most often in the vernacular, not in Pali. The most common way to render and teach the Dhammapada prior to 207 n the modern period was the nissaya method, which is a vernacular gloss and explanation of Pali words and phrases from the source. Third, the manuscripts of the Pali Dhammapada and vernacular Dhammapada commentaries and glosses nearly always include extra-canonical material and are anthologies of local and canonical material. The Dhammapada changed over time in Thailand , until the advent of the printing press slowed, but did not put an end to, its expansion. Fourth, the mediums for teaching the Dhammapada have changed in response to technological advances, colonial and royal reform, the influence of Western ideas of the Buddhist “original canon,” the rise of the primacy of Pali over vernacular commentarial texts, and changing social concerns; however, these changes need to be qualified based on the audience and the manner of the instruction. These primitivist, textual, cultural, and moralist biases have been well documented in the study of Buddhism in Sri Lanka.2 In more recent years, the Dhammapada’s role in education has expanded into television programs, popular anthologies, bilingual editions, handbooks, Web sites, and avant-garde dramas. In Laos, even though the printing of the text has not been common, the Dhammapada is one of the primary sources for sermons and monastic school lectures. Stories from the Dhammapada-atthakath1 are also the subject of temple murals. In Thailand there are abundant copies of the complete Pali Dhammapada (verses and commentarial narratives) thanks to the efforts of the Thai royal family and to Sri Lankan and British Buddhist scholars who brought copies to Thailand in the late nineteenth century. Although the mediums and content have changed significantly, the methods used to instruct the Dhammapada have remained largely the same since the sixteenth century. Instruction still operates on a system of drawing selected Pali words from the text and offering expanded creative glosses and analogies to contemporary issues. Reading, it seems, still involves looking for the terms, themes, and narratives that best convey a point orally. Moreover, commentarial narratives on the Dhammapada are still the primary content for lecturers and sermon givers. Seeing how the Dhammapada is taught in an oral context is essential in avoiding convenient and facile reification of unrealistic barriers between the past and the present and the East and the West. Many scholars have identified how the “Western scholarly interpretation of Buddhism” was subsequently adopted by Sinhalese and Thai Buddhists and 208 from manuscript to television became the official view of Buddhism locally.3 However, as Blackburn emphasizes , this monolithic aping of the West can be overemphasized and may remove the multivocal, inconsistent, and dynamic agency of colonized Buddhists .4 It is wise not to overemphasize this change lest one become blind to some fundamental continuities in the various ways Buddhism has been taught to Buddhists by...