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  • The Murray Manuscripts and Buddhist Dhammasattha Literature Transmitted in Chittagong and Arakan1
  • Christian Lammerts (bio)

Dedicated to the memory of Andrew Huxley

Very little is known about the nature of Buddhist literary culture in pre-modern Arakan. Inscriptions dated to the second half of the first millennium C.E. testify to the use of Pali as a language of Buddhist ritual and the use of Sanskrit as a public language of politics. But during this early period we have little information concerning the production and circulation of texts.2 A fuller though hardly tapped archive exists for the fifteenth century onward, which sees the development of a vernacular epigraphic corpus and local literary traditions—especially in Arakanese, but at times also in Pali and, in Chittagong and the capital at Mrauk U, Bengali.3 However, scholarship remains very much in the dark as to what Buddhist literature was being copied, written, and read, and to the relationship of this literature with regional (e.g., [End Page 407] central Burmese) textual cultures. A major question concerns the extent to which the shifting horizons of Arakanese power and influence impacted Buddhist literary production. Did Arakanese interaction with Chittagong (Bengal) between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries,4 or central Burmese lordship over Mrauk U from the late eighteenth century, lead to the influx of new Buddhist texts, ideas, and authors, and, if so, to what degree of depth and influence? The problem for research is twofold—first, we are almost entirely ignorant of the current distribution, number, and character of surviving Arakanese manuscripts, and, second, very little of the Buddhist literature from this period in either Arakanese or Pali has been examined by scholarship.5

This paper is an attempt to begin answering some of these preliminary questions through an investigation of a manuscript of a Buddhist dhammasattha6 legal text written in mixed Pali nissaya and Arakanese copied in 1749, probably in the vicinity of Chittagong. Although several different titles are used within the text, I refer to it as the Manu dhammasat (“dhammasat of [the sage] Manu”), or by its abbreviated shelfmark, Add 12254.7 I demonstrate that this text is related to a particular central Burmese legal text, the Dhammavilāsa dhammasat (“dhammasat of [the monk] Dhammavilāsa”), though it also appears to represent a distinctively Arakanese dhammasattha [End Page 408] tradition in circulation in the regions of Chittagong and Sittwe for at least a hundred years between the mideighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. In the course of this discussion I introduce readers to an important, hitherto neglected, collection of eighteenth-century Arakanese manuscripts at the British Library.

I. Prior Sources on Arakanese Dhammasat Texts and Manuscripts

The Mahāpaññā kyau lhyok thuṃḥ (“decisions of Mahāpaññā kyau”), a collection of juridical and other decisions attributed to a minister of Arakan kings in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, refers to the consultation of an unnamed dhammasattha treatise in the deliberation of an inheritance case. Depending on the date that can be assigned to this decision, which in any event is earlier than 1787, this constitutes our earliest witness to the genre in Arakan.8 Early sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travelers in Arakan neglected to comment in detail on the presence of legal literatures. In 1795, Symes refers to “a Persian version of the Arracan code,” quite possibly a reference to the Pertsch manuscript likely translated or abridged from the Arakanese manuscript Add 12254 discussed below.9 In 1799 John Towers published a handwritten copy of a brief extract from (what appears to be) the beginning of a vernacular Arakanese dhammasat text as a specimen accompanying his “Observations on the Alphabetical System of the Language of Awa and [End Page 409] Rac’hain.”10 The first list of titles of Arakan legal texts published in 1808 mentions the “Kewing-khya” (= Kvan khyā, “net”), “Kra’k-ru” (= Krak ruiḥ, “rooster”), “Manu,” and “Krudaing” (possibly Kyok tuiṅ, “stone pillar”) dhammasats.11

Following British annexation, references to the presence of written law in Arakan proliferate. Andrew Huxley’s research has shown that in 1873–74 Burma’s first Judicial Commissioner Douglas Sandford “circulated a request to all Deputy Commissioners...

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