A Bilingual Pali-Dai Pātimokkha from Yunnan: Language, Exegesis, and Power at the Edge of the Theravada World

Bilingual Pali-vernacular versions of the Vinaya, including the core Pātimokkha rules and their ritual framework for fortnightly recitation, are some of the most widespread forms of monastic exegesis in the Theravada world, found from the Mekong Delta to the upper Irrawaddy. These bilingual compositions, also known as bitexts, typically follow an interphrasal _nissaya_ format, in which Pali words or short phrases are followed by expanded glosses in a local vernacular (Herngseng 2023). As part of a broader inquiry into how bitexts shaped Buddhist translation across mainland Southeast Asia between 1550 and 1950, this paper focuses on a single Pali-Dai example of the Pātimokkha from Xishuangbanna Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan province, China. This paper compares this text—preserved in facsimile form as part of the massive _Zhongguo beiyejing quanji_ 中国贝叶经全集 project (Beijing, 2006–2010)—with other manuscripts in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand to reveal how the translation choices made by Dai scholars—into Dai as well as into Chinese—made the Pātimokkha respond to local conceptions of scriptural authority and temporal power.

Why focus on a classical Theravada text in China? The traditional texts of Dai Buddhism, very few of which have been translated into English, mirror the complexities of the geographic location where they were composed and circulated. The Yunnan region, seated at the encounter of many of the key rivers, trade routes, language families, and religious institutions of Asia, offers many avenues to pursue the study of Buddhism, past and present. This paper focuses on a corner of this wider landscape, namely the southern tip of Yunnan province, where the borders of China meet those of Laos and Myanmar. In this area, locally known as Sipsongpanna (Chinese: Xishuangbanna 西双版纳), Buddhists of the Dai ethnic group have long staked out one edge of the Pali Buddhist world, surrounded by Han and other ethnic groups to the north and various Southeast Asian communities to the east, south, and west.

The linguistic patterns of Sipsongpanna reflect this geographic situation as well the complex interactions between Theravada Buddhists and the Chinese state, as described by Thomas Borchert (2017). Lay and monastic communities of the area generally speak the Dai Le 傣仂 (a.w. Dai Lue, Tai Lue, or Tai Lü) language alongside Southwestern Mandarin and Standard Chinese. Since the 1950s, the Dai Le language, rewritten in a reformed version of the Dai Le script promoted by the PRC, has enjoyed a co-official status with written Chinese in Sipsongpanna. Within monastic communities, however, there is still a preference for the traditional Dai variant of Tham (Dhamma) script, sometimes known as Tham Lue. Pali-Dai versions of the Pātimokkha, like most other Buddhist texts in Yunnan, are exclusively transmitted in Tham Lue.

The Tham Lue system is broadly consonant with the script still used by the Tai Khün of Shan State, Myanmar, as well as the traditional script of the majority Tai Yuan people of Lanna or northern Thailand. Together with Lao speakers from Laos and northeastern Thailand, these groups are part of a broader region that Volker Grabowsky (2017) calls the “Dhamma script domain,” within which many textual, literary, and codicological practices continue to be shared relatively easily. Each variant of the Tham script can record both Indic languages as well as local vernaculars. In Sipsongpanna, monastics and scribes use Tham Lue script to record vernacular Dai texts, Pali chants and scriptures, and bilingual Pali-Dai sermons and treatises.

Tham Lue script thus sits conveniently at the fulcrum between Pali and vernacular textual worlds, facilitating the circulation of Buddhist texts, ideas, and narratives in and out of Yunnan. The inter-linguistic dynamics that Pali-Dai translations afford have not yet been explored in depth, however. Research on Dai Buddhist texts in Thai and English has largely focused on issues such as paleography (Apiradee 2003), local historiography (Liew-Herres et al. 2012), Buddhist economies (Grabowsky 2019), and manuscript cultures (Apiradee 2019).

By centering an important Pali-Dai version of the Pātimokkha (titled _Săpº kammavācā_), this paper shows how Dai intellectuals worked within the constraints and possibilities of the Tham-script sphere to produce a linguistically and politically relevant version of a key Vinaya text. Comparisons with other Pali-vernacular bitexts based on the Pātimokkha, composed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries by Dai, Khün, Lao, Lanna, and Siamese authors—as well as a well-studied Pali-Burmese example (Pruitt 1994)—reveal the distinct choices made by the Dai redactor to produce a scripturally grounded yet locally cogent treatise for understanding the monastic rules. Rhetorical shifts are temporal power are evident in well; the Dai manuscript is question was likely adopted from a Tai Khün example from Shan State, yet the Chinese translation in the _Zhongguo beiyejing quanji_—produced by a team of Dai scholars in the PRC—conveniently elides this fact, replacing references to Tai Khün toponyms in Myanmar with Dai ones in Yunnan in a nod to local political authority.

While most of the _Zhongguo beiyejing quanji_ collection contains narrative texts used in traditional sermons and story recitation, the Pali-Dai _Săpº kammavācā_ is one of a group of bitexts that transmit core concepts and practices for Pali Buddhist identity in a frontier region. Rather than being intended for public instruction or recitation for a lay audience, like most of the Dai corpus, the _Săpº kammavācā_ and its sister bitexts share an exegetical purpose. Crafted for private, murmured reading or for monastic instruction, they provided essential tools for Dai monastics to not only memorize the Pali sounds but also internalize the vernacular meanings of some of the sangha’s most prized texts. At the same time, the _Săpº kammavācā_ and related compositions respond to Dai notions of political authority in Yunnan. Writing at the edges of the Theravada world, far from the traditional centers of Pali education in Southeast Asia, these bitexts made the exegetical heritage of Buddhist intellectuals accessible those living under Dai and Chinese power structures.