Re: Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka series in Sri Lanka

 

Hello Chris,

Sri Lanka has its own Pali manuscript tradition on which the Buddha Jayanthi edition is based. The Burmese Chattha Sangayana or Sixth Council edition is, I was told, mostly based on the Burmese Fifth Council edition, which is based on Burmese palm leaf manuscripts. The Sinhalese scholars such as Ananda Maitreya who went to Burma to participate in the Sixth Councel felt that the Burmese were biased towards Burmese readings as found in the Fifth Council edition and ignored Sinhalese readings.
That is why after the Sixth Council a separate Sinhalese edition in Sinhala script was made, based on earlier Sinhalese editions and palm leaf manuscripts. The Burmese Sixth Council edition is in Burmese script and therefore is not used in Sri Lanka, except by those who know Burmese. Now, with the digitalized VRI edition of the  Sixth Council edition being available, which can also be viewed in Sinhala script, some modern monks use it, especially to view the sub-commentaries, which are mostly not available in Sinhala script editions. However, in general the Sinhala Buddha Jayanthi edition is regarded as the authoritative edition and to have a Buddha Jayanthi Tipitaka set is a important asset of Sri Lankan Buddhist monasteries. As far as I know there is no complete, earlier or different edition of the Tipitaka in Sinhala. The Simon Hewawitharana Bequest edition does not contain all the Tipitaka books and is mostly used for its complete edition of the commentaries, the atthakatha.

The readings in Burmese and Sinhalese manuscripts can differ quite a bit, especially of the Samyutta Nikaya, the Sutta Nipata and the Jataka, of which Sri Lanka had an independent tradition which survived the dark period in 15-18 century when many Pali texts were lost, and were re-imported from Burma and Thailand in the 18th and 19th century. Of course, the Pali texts mostly came to Burma and Thailand from Sri Lanka earlier. There is still a lot of work to be done on how Pali manuscript traditions and their relation to each other, and in the field of creating new, critical editions of Pali texts, but there generally is not much interest in this field as scholars nowadays tend to want to do research which can produce a lot of smaller articles, rather than large works, to fulfil their university's article requirements.

I hope that this is of use.

Best wishes,
                         Bhikkhu Nyanatusita

 
 

I find it interesting that immediately after the sixth Buddhist council (1954-1956), the Buddhajayantī Tripiṭaka series began to be published (1957–1989) in Sri Lanka. The fact that this was a new version with readings that differed from the Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka series (as opposed to a simple transliteration from Burmese script into Sinhala script) implies that the Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka series was not well embraced in Sri Lanka. Can anyone tell me whether the Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka series has ever been used much in Sri Lanka? Is the Buddhajayantī Tripiṭaka series the most widely used version of the Pāli canon there? Have any of you heard the Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka series discussed in Sri Lanka and, if so, what was said?

Best regards,
Chris

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Chris Clark
PhD candidate
University of Sydney