How to work with Pali texts?

Pali Texts are the literary heritage of Theravāda Buddhism, which is a still living Buddhist tradition in South and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Burma, Sri Lanka). Not only the canonical texts, but also commentaries up to the 19th c. and even the correspondence between monastics of different countries is written in Pāli. Till to the introduction of printing, the texts were transmitted on palm leaf manuscripts. Each country had its own style of manuscripts, and its own scripts. Nowadays, in addition to manuscripts and printed editions, digital collections of Pali texts from the various countries’ traditions (Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka) are available. In this lecture I will describe the aspects and difficulties to be considered when working on Pāli texts.

Petra Kieffer-Pülz is an independent scholar in the field of Indology and Buddhist Studies. She holds an MA and a PhD in Indology from the University of Göttingen, Germany. Her primary research interest is the cultural history and literature of the Buddhism of South and South-East Asia with a special focus on Pali literature and Buddhist monastic traditions (Vinaya). Besides co-editing the Journal Buddhism, Law & Society and the Series Studia Indologica Universitatis Halensis, she wrote numerous scholarly articles and reviews. Her authored and co-translated works include Die Sīmā (1992), Sīmāvicāraṇa (2011), Verlorene Gaṇṭhipadas (2013), Overcoming Doubts (Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī) (2018), and A Manual of the Adornment of the Monastic Boundary (2021).

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