SuttaCentral
There seems to be a Chinese translation of the Suttas. The original text is in the Tai Lue language which is spoken in the Xishuangbanna district of Yunnan province. This is just one volume though.
Additionally, there is also a larger 100 volume collection on Amazon but it is $6000 USD. There isn’t much literature on this.
https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Chinese-Pattra-l-100-volumes/dp/7010054487
It would be extremely helpful if someone could purchase this so it could be studied.
I made an attempt at skimming the Chinese translation in the PDF on archive.org, but it’s a little difficult for me because it’s modern simplified Mandarin. I’m an odd duck who skipped learning modern Chinese and know mainly classical middle Chinese. Still, in the first couple slips that were translated, I see references to paramita and prajna sutras … so I wonder what these texts really are … pretty interesting find though!
If possible, do you think someone could put a group together to acquire the whole canon and scan the texts into PDFs, let alone translate them? It’s a large collection, but I think it would be quite valuable to have access to these texts democratized.
I’m not sure how to go about that. I made some more attempts to research it. It really is priced at 60,000 yuan, which is over 8,000 USD. And it has lots of other texts besides Buddhist scriptures - which are supposed to be “Hinayana” texts that entered Sri Lanka during the 7th c. and then ended up in Southwest China when that region bordering Thailand was converted to Theravada, apparently.
It’s outside of my area of expertise (and funding, yikes!), really, but I would think it might be of interest to Theravadins if it’s not known about in their community. Anyone who can read Thai can access it. The phonetic transcription of the Chinese doesn’t look like Mandarin to me, probably its in the local Chinese dialect.
Hi,
As far as I know, these are mostly Buddhist texts from the Dai/Tai ethnic group in Yunnan.
Here is a series of papers about them by German experts, Volker Grabowsky (Hamburg) and Harald Hundius (Passau):
Tai Manuscripts in the Dhamma Script Domain: Surveying, Preservation and Documentation
From what I remember from 20 years ago, researchers were saying that the quality of textual transmission in these Dai texts had seriously deteriorated many centuries ago, so many (most?) of these texts are not really readable / comprehensible.
I don’t know (yet) what scholars say about them now.
Thanks for the articles. What we’re discussing looks like a Chinese government publication of these texts. The OP posted a pdf of the first volume that someone had scanned and put on archive.org. I was reading the introduction and summarizing it in my last post. Apparently they are comprehensible enough to translate to Chinese and (I think?) Thai. The text consists of photos of the original and then a bilingual translation. It looks like the last ten volumes were published in 2010.
I wonder if @Sujato or anyone else at SuttaCentral like @Brahmali is aware of these texts? It seems like it would be of interest to them.
Apparently they are comprehensible enough to translate to Chinese and (I think?) Thai.
Here is a quote about the readability, quality and character of these texts:
Justin McDaniel
Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand (University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 144-146Orthographic inconsistencies also abound in manuscripts composed
in the Yuan (Northern Thai) script. This shows that (1) there was no over-
arching authority in place that determined what was the proper spelling of
different words; (2) that scribes were poorly trained in both vernacular and
classical composition; (3) that spelling was phonologically determined, and
that scribes wrote texts that were dictated to them and changed the spelling
of words based on what they heard rather than having a standardized way of
spelling any individual word; and (4) that the highly mobile nature of monks
and of the population in general led to speakers of Shan, Khoen, Leu, Lao,
Yuan, Thai, Khamtu, Mon, Hmong, Burmese, and other languages living
and working together. 41 There is overwhelming evidence collected from
many different pedagogical manuscripts. These examples are so numerous
that they would be best demonstrated in a chart that would have the added
benefit of providing a guide to the mutable orthography of manuscripts of
the region. 42 However, a script chart, no matter how many alternatives it
offers, creates a false sense of consistency or base standard from which scribes
were deviating.
These orthographic inconsistencies are not just found in nissaya, voh1ra,
and n1masadda. They are found in magical, medical, astrological, and ritual
commentaries and in canonical texts in Pali and the vernacular. They are
numerous and often present a word spelled three or four different ways on
one line of a folio. While inconsistency in script can be attributed to the
four reasons listed above, an unsystematic way of teaching various spellings
suggests that these frequent, unsystematic, and widespread orthographic
inconsistencies are reflections of the oral composition/orthophonic spelling
of these texts and the lack of an overarching editing, publishing, or educa-
tional system or standards. Heightened attention to orthography demonstrates
the benefits of using manuscripts rather than printed texts or transliterations
when studying Southeast Asian religion and literature. These apparent “mis-
takes” actually provide valuable evidence on how these texts were composed.
They demonstrate that there was a lack of large-scale educational institu-
tions to enforce the use of certain spellings and scripts over others. Histor-
ical evidence of a highly mobile monastic population is reinforced, since
letters (as well as vocabulary) from Shan, Yuan, and Burmese scripts are found
interspersed throughout Lao manuscripts and vice versa, and strongly sug-
gests that these manuscripts were composed orally/aurally. What the mod-
ern scholar sees as orthographic anomalies, the original composer and scribe
did not. These texts were for oral performance and teaching, not for read-
ing silently alone. The spelling is phonetic.William Johnson’s study of Latin and Greek orthography and manuscript
text layout is helpful here. First, he emphasizes that all scripts are “inade-
quate in conveying prosodic and paralinguistic features like tone of voice,
facial expression, eye contact, body language, and other elements that make
spoken utterances quite different from written scripts. Writing not only
records incompletely the locutionary act (what is said) but is poor as a con-
veyance of the illocutionary force (how the speaker intends what is said to
be taken).”43 This is especially true with early Roman and Greek manuscripts,
which have no breaks between the words (scriptio continua) or punctuation,
paragraph markers, highlighting or underscoring marks (all qualities shared
with Northern Thai and Lao manuscripts). This type of writing makes it
extremely difficult (and some argue impossible) to read silently, because of
the lack of a “Bouma shape,” or separate word unit or sign that acts as a point
of “ocular fixation” so that the natural saccadic movement within the bounds
of parafoveal vision—fifteen to twenty letters in Yuan or Tham script—is
not overtaxed. According to the bounds of this basic human cognitive/ocu-
lar ability, Northern Thai and Lao manuscripts would be extremely difficult
to read silently (as they were for me and my teachers) at any semi-rapid pace.
Moreover, these manuscripts often break words at the end of lines with no
apparent attention to syllable breaks or word separation. This lack of mor-
phemic boundaries cannot proceed line by line efficiently without the text
being read out loud. Finally, Johnson helps one to understand that many man-
uscripts were written (or dictated and copied by a scribe) with the intended,
usually “professional,” reader/audience in mind (the way a physician writes
prescriptions for a pharmacist) and hence do not have to have every word
spelled out or be overly concerned with proper orthography.
So, basically, as far as I understand, they are hardly comprehensible without fluency in Pāli and some of those Southeast Asian languages.
The Chinese translation must be the result of such “decipherment”.
This is what I meant by old scholars writing that these texts are “incomprehensible”, etc.
From Finot’s monograph Recherches sur la littérature laotienne (1917)
Le mélange de mots empruntés aux deux idiomes pāli et thai, dont chacun a ses
particularités orthographiques et un système différent de romanisation, est une grande
cause d’embarras : en général, j’ai préféré la forme pālie, plus reconnaissable et plus
voisine de l’écriture que la forme thai, qui fait subir aux mots les plus étranges
métamorphosesThe mixture of words borrowed from both Pali and Thai, each of which has its own spelling peculiarities and a different romanization system, is a major source of confusion: in general, I have preferred the Pali form, which is more recognizable and closer to the original writing than the Thai form, which subjects words to the strangest metamorphoses.
…
TEXTES CANONIQUES
Le Tripitaka forme, comme il est naturel, la base de la littérature préservée par les manuscrits du Laos. Du texte original il subsiste certaines parties, mais ce sont les épaves d’un naufrage. A mesure que disparaissait la connaissance du pâli, les livres incompris ont cessé d’être copiés ; la plupart n’ont survécu que sous la forme de nissaya, de gloses, où des bribes de pâli ne servent que de prélude à de longues amplifications en langue vulgaire. Certains même ne sont plus représentés dans la collection : l’intérêt s’est détourné d’eux pour se porter sur des œuvres plus attrayantes et ils sont peu à peu tombés dans l’oubli. Le Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de Luang Prabang nous fournit de précieux renseignements sur l’état actuel de la collection canonique au Laos et indirectement sur les tendances qui ont abouti à ce résultat.
The Tripiṭaka naturally forms the foundation of the literature preserved in the manuscripts of Laos. Of the original text, certain parts remain, but they are the wreckage of a shipwreck. As knowledge of Pali disappeared, the books that were no longer understood ceased to be copied; most survived only in the form of nissaya—glosses—in which scraps of Pali serve merely as a prelude to long expansions in the vernacular language. Some are no longer represented in the collection at all: interest shifted away from them toward more appealing works, and they gradually fell into oblivion. The Catalogue of the Library of Luang Prabang provides us with valuable information on the current state of the canonical collection in Laos and, indirectly, on the tendencies that led to this result.
…
(about Lao/Tham scripts)
Elle est loin d’avoir la régularité de l’écriture cambodgienne: elle fait une usage immodéré des contractions, au point de rendre assez souvent la lecture douteuse; quelques abréviations ont même le caractère de veritables sigles qu’il faut connaître d’avance pour les lire.
Her writing is far from having the regularity of Cambodian writing: she makes excessive use of contractions, to the point of often making reading difficult; some abbreviations even resemble acronyms that must be known in advance in order to be read.
FINOT-RECHERCHESSURLA-1917.pdf (13.8 MB)
That’s why I said that it may be a good idea to put a group of people together to crowdfund the money. I don’t doubt that there are many people that might be interested in this.
Purchasing the set might not be needed, because the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture Library
http://www.xsbnlib.com/index.aspx#
actually has all the volumes digitized
http://106.58.209.101:8080/opac/search?&q=中国贝叶经全集&searchWay=title&scWay=dim&searchSource=reader
Although when I click on UBOOK电子书: [开始阅读] (start reading E-Book) in a particular volume
it returns an error
https://u.dataesb.com/ubook/mobile/read?libcode=P2YN0691035&access_token=null&isbn=7010054487&type=2
But if you find someone from China, they might be able to access all the scans.
The trouble is, I don’t believe we know anyone from China.
I know some people; I’ll ask around.
If anyone can get access to PDFs that would be much appreciated,
but I hate to disappoint, but looking at the list of volumes briefly they are quite common texts transmitted in various Northern vernacular languages such as Lao, Lanna, Shan etc
The volume on Archive is the text that has been briefly described by Donald Swearer, I think in Becoming the Buddha but would need to check. It’s a type of chronicle called a Tamnan in Thai, showing how the Buddha visited various locations, made predictions and gave out relics etc and why different places have such name usually related to the Buddha’s visit.
Obviously each manuscript will reflect the local culture. For a taste of what these texts are like:
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/101d99b8-dfa7-43aa-8b9b-0fc343fb08ab
(On the most famous Stupa in North East Thailand that was probably a Shiva shrine 1200 or so years ago…)
Other texts mentioned include the Sudhana Manohara Jataka, the Laws of King Mangrai and probably some Kammatthan Boran meditation texts, the Perfection of Wisdom sutta (which is the 30 parami of the Pali tradition) etc
For an example of a similar style of Jataka from same cultural area: OPUS 4 | Language, Orthography and Buddhist Manuscript Culture of the Tai Nuea - an apocryphal jātaka text in Mueang Sing, Laos
And for a whole set of related texts, with a very similar style, i.e. the odd Pali word interspersed in a vernacular text. Including typical Anisong, that is merit making sermons, a local telling of the Vesantara Jataka and even a translation of a version of the aforementioned Pannaparami Sutta:
The Tham Vessantara-Jataka: A Critical Study of
If anyone can get it in any form, I know some who would like to have, though perhaps only somewhere like the University of Chiang Mai or Mahidol have space for the 100 volumes!
So when I have time I will have a check of the volume on archive.org to double check but pretty sure it’s this text:
Tamnan Pha Chao Liap Lok or the legend of the Buddha’s journeys is a Buddhist literature that is prevalent in Southeast Asia. It is a story of the Buddha’s journeys to Lanna, Isan, Xishuangbanna, Shan State, and Lan Xang region. The legend explains the geography, history and culture of various communities and ethnic groups along the route the Buddha took in his journeys to disseminate his teachings. The legend also says that the Buddha gave some of his hair to various communities and left the footprints in places he visited. The creation of stupas and temples containing the Buddha’s relics and footprints in these places sprang from the legend. This seventh fascicle tells the Buddha collected alms food in various villages and gave some his hair to Ananda Thera to install on a mountain.
Thank you for all the infos! 
Is there a precise (or at least approximate) list of those particularly Tai/Dai texts?
I am pretty sure that SuttaCentral people are mostly interested in “canonical” literature, and particularly in the Sutta- and Vinaya-piṭakas, so it would be great if we could get a rough estimate…
The last 5 Volumes out of the 100 seem to be devoted to the canonical texts (at least using Google Translate)
Volume 96; *Ekottara Āgama*,
Volume 97; *Samyutta Āgama*,
Volume 98; *Short Āgama* ,
Volume 99; *Madhyama Āgama*,
Volume 100; *Dirgha Āgama
New York Library seems to have access to the first 90 volumes:
https://web.nypl.org/research/research-catalog/bib/pb9953122343506421/all
I’ll use Deepseek and Google Translate to back translate the Chinese into Lao and Thai to see what are the names of the texts (or likely candidates) behind the Chinese.
If anyone can see these 5 Volumes with the Canonical texts in them, they’d only need to photocopy the contents page to see what texts the Yunnanese Dai preserve as it’s highly unlikely that each volume preserves complete nikaya collections. Still would be interesting to find out either way.