The Role of Pāli Grammar in Burmese Buddhism

This paper approaches Pali grammatical text from the point of view of scholastic literature, and thus argues that what we call grammar includes branches of philosophy that have been considered absent in Theravada Buddhism. As is well known, Burmese Buddhist scholars have been strong in Pali grammar since the Pagan period. A large number of Pali works written in Burma deal with grammatical or philological issues. Most of these texts have not been studied in the West. For this reason modern scholars have thought that these treatises were merely ancillary books. A deep reading of these texts however reveals that they contain much more than grammatical rules. They contain philosophical discussions that stem from the great Indian debates on logic, epistemology and the authority of scriptures, among other topics.