Re: Romanization, East vs. West

navako,
I don't think you can say you and fillizot are the
only who are reading leaves.filiozat (the french
lady?) found saddaniti tika but she can't come out
with an edition of it.what is the point of cataloguing
those leaves if no edition will be out?
many scholars will come out writing books if they have
money and time.please don't think that you are the
only one who  are studying pali



  --- navako <navako@...> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Jim,
>
>  I haven't had any time to write lately.  My
> relocation to Laos seems to be
> looming ever nearer; but, recently, I have been
> caught up in my paid
> employment.
>
>  I should just generally note that I did not have
> any hard feelings over the
> interchange with Rett --and, indeed, he and I
> continue to carry on cordial
> e-mail (off-list) to this day.  I suppose one of the
> most disturbing things
> about me is that I actually do compose such
> invectives with a completely
> cool head!  I do apologise if Rett was upset, i.e.,
> regarding Laos and
> Camdbodia, etc.; however, it is unbecoming to ignore
> the facts of history
> where the deaths of 3.2 million people are involved.
>  I think it was a bit
> of a revelation to him (late in the discussion,
> off-list) that my argument
> was not purely theoretical, but rather I do actually
> work with native
> editions, and I don't own anything published by the
> PTS, relying almost
> entirely upon almost made-in-Asia resources.  And,
> as you know, I am hoping
> to contribute to the sum of made-in-asia resources
> with my little edition of
> Kaccayana & Mason.  Perhaps the "People's Democratic
> Press" in Vientiane
> will be interested?  The State publishes both
> Buddhist materials and
> language resources, so it would be a rather quaint
> option (albeit with
> limited distribution!).
>
>  I would reiterate that one of the central problems
> of Romanization is that
> most scholars in the west simply do not know the
> enormous value of the
> resources that are produced in Asia.  It is
> "needless to say" that the
> intellectual production (in Pali studies) of
> countries like Burma, Sri
> Lanka, and Thailand, where the majority of people
> are Buddhist, are
> incomparably greater than a country like England,
> where Buddhists are less
> than 0.001% of the population.  Except, of course,
> it is not "needless to
> say" at all, but very necessary: works from other
> lands are undervalued and
> dismissed on various ill-thought-out grounds, and,
> in most cases, the real
> reason is that Westerners cannot be bothered to
> learn to read in the native
> script.  The blanket judgement that many academics
> offer that all Asian
> editions are "full of errors" is really prejudicial
> and false: just as with
> the western presses, some publishers do poor work,
> and some do excellent
> work.  There are various highly esteemed editions of
> the suttapitaka from
> S.E.A., and to lump them in with cheap Indian
> editions from private presses
> of the 1970s is absurd; further, in most cases, the
> western impression that
> Asian editions are full of errors is based precisely
> on the use of Romanized
> materials (e.g., old Motilal Banarsidass editions)
> rather than indigenous
> script.
>
> In any case, there are voices from the East who
> prefer Western editions,
> too, so the dichotomy is not absolute.  Bhante
> Pandita's blog and messages
> (both of which I enjoy) have mentioned the
> disparaging attitude toward the
> PTS common among Burmese monks; in Sri Lanka, one
> can very often find the
> opposite extreme among laypeople of the upper
> classes, who prefer the
> "Scientistic" version of Theravada Buddhism produced
> by western presses to
> the living tradition --encrusted as it is by ritual
> and many adopted Hindu
> superstitions.
>
>  At any rate, it seems that Filiozat and I will be
> the only ones reading
> manuscripts in the 21st century!  If the rest of the
> world prefers
> Romanization, it can only be to the impoverishment
> of the literature
>  --including the looming extinction of various texts
> (known and unknown) that
> are extant only in manuscript form.
>
> E.M.
>
>
> --
> A saying of the Buddha from http://metta.lk/
> Get your Dhamma Books from http://books.metta.lk/
>
> Random Dhammapada Verse
>
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