ИСТИНА

Bitexts or bilingual translations and adaptations of Pāli and Sanskrit works have been a distinct format of transmission of both Indic and indigenous texts in mainland Southeast Asia and Laṅkā. Attested since the first millennium C.E., this form of literary composition and exegesis arguably left its biggest footprint in Upper Burma where, by the nineteenth century, between eight and ten hundreds of works were circulating in such a way, the most popular available in up to ten different versions or editions. Despite its continuing significance in curricular, preaching, and liturgical contexts, the development and the nature of Buddhist bitexts in Burma has received only cursory scholarly attention so far. Echoing the self-presentations of compilers of certain bitexts, the existing studies tend to interpret this format as a linguistic adaptation by which Indic source texts are made accessible to local audiences whose limited training hindered their grasp of original compositions. Such interpretations privilege the inherent hierarchical relationship between Pāli (and Sanskrit) and vernacular and tend to instrumentalize the latter, emphasizing how vernacular passages are shaped to convey syntactic, lexical and contextual intricacies of the source text. The current presentation which is based on comparative reading of manuscript exemplars of some of the earliest surviving Burman bitexts and their later adaptations seeks to complicate the relationship between Indic and vernacular elements in Upper Burmese bitexts. It explores the ways in which vernacular had a formative impact on Indic passages of bitexts, the transmission of monolingual Pāli texts in Upper Burma, and the cumulative tradition of bilingual exegesis. This discussion is further contextualized in the framework of ongoing scholarly debates on scripturalism and canonization across Buddhist cultures.