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Introduction A few years ago, at a monastery in Laos, I spent some time looking for a key. The monastery, Vat Xainyaphum, sits on the banks of the Mekong River, and on its grounds is the largest monastic school in Laos.1 I wanted the key to open an old wooden cabinet in a small office on the upper floor of the main classroom building, where, I imagined, the textbooks used at the school would be kept. The key was not easy to find. Several of the monks I spoke with claimed they had never seen it. A lay administrator and part-time math teacher swore she had seen it the week before and begged me to wait while she sent a young novice monk to find another teacher, who was in his monastic cell resting and who, she claimed, probably had it. An hour later the novice appeared. No luck. Another young novice suggested we use a knife. A heavyset monk named Suman suggested I come back another day. When I politely told him that I would wait, he responded, “Well, why not come to my class?” The key, he asserted, “would surely turn up.” I stuck out in the class, as I was the only person not wearing saffron-colored robes and my head was not freshly shaven. I was also much older than the students, most of who were in their late teens. However, I could follow the lecture well since it was on the life of the Buddha and seemed to be drawing from the J1taka-nid1na, a biography of the Buddha that introduces a collection of stories describing the Buddha’s past lives. The text was originally composed in the classical Pali language, but the lecture was in vernacular Lao and based on a Lao summary of the Buddha’s life called the Buddhabavat. The teacher used the common practice of yok sab, or “lifting [Pali] words” from the story and then explaining the words in Lao. He often went off on tangents and compared the Buddha’s life to that of famous heroes from Lao folktales or to previous Buddhas. He mentioned a j1taka tale about the impor3 tance of leaving one’s family to ordain and compared it to the Buddha leaving his wife to become an ascetic. (I assume this was the story of Revata.) He also discussed the importance of being aware of one’s desires as the Buddha was aware of the armies of M1ra, the tempter. He skipped long sections of the Buddha’s life from the nid1na, but the outline of the story was intact. The choice of Pali words “to lift” seemed idiosyncratic. For example, he explained the word carati (he walks) in Lao, but not viharati (he resides), and gave a Lao rendering of dhamma (Phra Tham), which surely every novice monk understood, but not of the lesser-known word miga (wild animal). Many students took notes vigorously, trying to copy every word. Sometimes two students would share one notebook. Many doodled; one student whispered to me to borrow a pen. One student was hiding a biology textbook underneath his notebook and studying for another class. After the short lesson the teacher asked students to come up front and recite their notes from the previous class. After each class, he told me, they had to memorize their notes and then recite them to the others. He listened and made corrections as they spoke. After each student recited his notes, usually while fidgeting and constantly readjusting his robe, the teacher sought volunteers to ask the presenter a question. At first the questions were relatively basic—“Where was the Buddha born?” and “Who did the Buddha first teach?”—but as easy questions were exhausted others asked, “How do you say k1ma (desire) in Lao?” “What was the name of the Buddha before Gotama?” and “How do you say anatta (no-self) in Lao?” The teacher helped answer a couple questions, joked that the bad students were embarrassing themselves in front of the falang (foreigner), and then closed his own notebook. After class, I asked to look at this notebook and found that it was a series of Pali words and notes about their meaning in Lao, along with some side notes. He told me that the source of the information came partly from a previous teacher named Sompon, who had died ten years previously, and partly from “ancient” (bol1n) Lao manuscripts of the j1taka. I looked quickly...

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