Пāli мәтіндерін зерттеу қоғамының тарихы

Text publication society founded in 1881 by Thomas William Rhys Davids for the study of Pāli texts

The Pāli Text Society is a text publication society founded in 1881 by Thomas William Rhys Davids "to foster and promote the study of Pāli texts." Pāli is the language in which the texts of the Theravada school of Buddhism are preserved. The Pāli texts are the oldest collection of Buddhist scriptures preserved in the language in which they were written down. The society first compiled, edited, and published Latin script versions of a large corpus of Pāli literature, including the Pāli Canon, as well as commentarial, exegetical texts, and histories. It publishes translations of many Pāli texts. It also publishes ancillary works including dictionaries, concordances, books for students of Pāli and the Journal of the Pali Text Society.

Thomas William Rhys Davids was one of three British civil servants who were posted to Sri Lanka, in the 19th century, the others being George Turnour, and Robert Caesar Childers (1838–1876). At this time Buddhism in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) was struggling under the weight of foreign rule and intense missionary activity by Christians. It was an administrative requirement that all civil servants should be familiar with the language, literature, and culture of the land in which they were posted, so the three men studied with several scholar monks where, along with an introduction to Sinhala culture and language, they became interested in Buddhism. The Pāli Text Society was founded on the model of the Early English Text Society with Rhys Davids counting on support from a lot of European scholars and Sri Lankan scholar monks. The work of bringing out the Roman text editions of the Pāli Canon was not financially rewarding, but was achieved with the backing of the Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka who underwrote the printing costs. Childers published the first Pāli English dictionary in 1874.

This was superseded in 1925 by the new dictionary which had largely been compiled by T. W. Rhys Davids over 40 years, but was finished by his student William Stede. Currently another dictionary is being compiled by Margaret Cone, with the first of three volumes (A Kh) published in 2001. By 1922, when T. W. Rhys Davids died, the Pāli Text Society had issued 64 separate texts in 94 volumes exceeding 26,000  pages, as well a range of articles by English and European scholars. The Pāli Text Society signed an MoU between the Dhammakaya Foundation, Thailand, on 1996 for collaboration and published the entire PTS edition of the Pāli canon on CD ROM.

In 1994, the Pāli Text Society inaugurated the Fragile Palm Leaves project, an attempt to catalogue and preserve Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts from Southeast Asia. Prior to the introduction of printing presses and Western papermaking technology, texts in Southeast Asia—including the Pāli scriptures—were preserved by inscription on specially preserved leaves from palm trees. The leaves were then bound together to create a complete manuscript. While palm leaf manuscripts have likely been in use since before the 5th century CE, existing examples date from the 18th century and later, with the largest number having been created during the 19th century. Because of the materials used and the tropical climate, manuscripts from earlier eras are generally not found intact in palm leaf form, and many manuscripts have been badly damaged. During the colonial era, many palm leaf manuscripts were disassembled and destroyed, with individual pages of texts being sold as decorative objets d'art to Western collectors. The Pāli Text Society created the Fragile Palm Leaves project to collect, catalogue, and preserve these artifacts, including scanning them into electronic formats in order to make them available to researchers without threatening their preservation. In 2001 the project was formalised as a nonprofit in Thailand as the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation. In February 2013, the Pāli Text Society, Sendai University, and the University of Toronto, along with local partners, began an ongoing initiative to digitise and catalogue Myanmar's palm leaf manuscripts, including collections from U Pho Thi Library in Thaton, and Bagaya Monastery in Inwa. The digitised manuscripts are available at the open access Myanmar Manuscript Digital Library.

The Pāli Text Society was founded with the goal of spreading the academic merit of Buddhism across Europe. It is a learned Society, dedicated not only to the translation of the Pāli Canon, but to the publication of a variety of Buddhist literature, the teaching of the Pāli language, and to spread their publications to libraries across Europe. The Pāli Text Society, specifically its founder, Thomas William Rhys Davids, and his wife, Carolina Augusta Foyley Rhys Davids,  have been attributed to creating the discipline of Buddhist studies. Scholar George D. Bond writes that the historical significance of the Davids’ family work, as well as the Society’s work, “contributes to a new understanding of the British Raj in India and Ceylon”. Furthermore, the Davids’s understood that not only did Buddhism in Sri Lanka hold a rich religious history, but that Pāli itself was the second oldest language East Asian religious texts had been recorded in, the first being the Vedanic tradition. The linguistic merit of Pāli was so culturally significant because, as Foyley writes, the language was “as dead as is Latin, and yet as alive, built out of old Indian dialects as the vehicle of the Canon ”.

Thomas William Rhys Davids founded the Pāli Text Society in an effort to render Buddhist literature accessible to others. With the Pāli Text Society and Dr. William Stede, Rhys Davids successfully finished the first Pāli dictionary. Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids was almost able to complete the work of her husband, Thomas William Rhys Davids. William Stede co authored the Pāli English Dictionary with T. W. Rhys Davids. To celebrate her election as the new PTS president, Isaline Blew Horner produced a new translation of the Milindapañha to replace the one Rhys Davids made. Kenneth Roy Norman was on the Council of Pāli Text Society for the longest out of everyone else.