On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 09:52:40 -0000, junet9876 <junet9876@...> wrote:

> Thanks. So how do people who read Chinese, Japanese, Korean, do the
> Theravada chantings?? Or I guess they dont? Do they even study Pali?
> or perhaps yes, but in roman characters?

You're intuition is correct that East Asians don't generally do
Theravada chanting. Their chants and liturgy come from a variety of
other sources; Pure Land Buddhism has a lot of impact in religiosity
among the laity, as well as local traditions (ancestors, spirits,
etc.). The development of Buddhism in China, and their scriptures in
particular, follows a fairly convoluted path, but to make a long story
short, the Chinese Canon is quite large, recorded in Chinese, and
generally translated from Sanskrit. It contains some (but not all) of
the texts that are found in the Tipitaka, sometimes in variant forms
or with additional text added ('frame stories' of a sort, sometimes),
as well as many other scriptures that were found in the Indian and
Central Asian taditions that shaped the development of Buddhism and
China.
I would imagine that any study of Pali among East Asian Buddhists
would be a product of modern scholarship rather than older tradition,
and would probably be conducted either in Roman characters or in a
local Southeast Asian script. I can guess at one possible source of
an exception; I know that some Chinese immigrants to Southeast Asia
(thinking of Thailand here) practice Theravada Buddhism, either in
addition to or in place of the East Asian tradition that their family
followed in China. Not sure if this has resulted in any transcription
of Pali material into Chinese or not; I might try asking my
father-in-law sometime (he is, by coincidence, a Theravada Buddhist
whose parents came to Thailand from China).