Chapter 7 - Local Projects and Transregional Modalities: The Pali Arena

Summary

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how persons in Southern Asian locations leveraged travel, other forms of communication, and the institutional, intellectual, and symbolic resources of the Pali arena to achieve local goals. This essay contests the “metageographic divide” between South Asia and Southeast Asia, and does so through several interlocking concepts involving space, time, and language. Empirical examples are drawn from the early second millennium AD – a period of quickening Buddhist circulations linked to changes in the Indian Ocean trading ecosystem – and from the colonial era. Looking through the lens of “Southern Asia” rather than standard post- World War II areal frameworks invites new ways of analyzing differences within the larger region, and frees conceptual space to investigate the geographic imaginaries of Buddhists prior to the twentieth century.

Keywords: Buddhism; Indian Ocean; Pali; sovereignty; colonialism

The pages that follow show how persons in Southern Asian locations leveraged travel, other forms of communication, and the institutional, intellectual, and symbolic resources of the Pali arena in order to achieve local goals. Participants in the Pali arena are connected and partly unified through Pali language and textual traditions but retain strong internal local and sub-regional differentiation. Local aims and projects drive and embrace transregional connections; such connections presume mutual intelligibility via Pali language and concepts. However, the Pali arena is multilingual, since persons drawing on its resources are also shaped by – and communicating within – local languages (such as forms of Tai language, Sinhala, Mon, Burmese, and Khmer) as well as other transregional languages (such as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and Tamil). The persons and locales participating in the Pali arena vary historically. Such participation expands and contracts in relation to particular historical conditions. Thinking and writing of the Pali arena open a way to examine – according to the historian's specific analytical needs and concerns – all of what occurs when persons orient themselves towards a buddha-sāsana anchored by authoritative Pali-language texts, and when they draw on the intellectual resources transmitted in Pali. While some scholars have used the term “Pali cosmopolis” in discussing Buddhist transregional connections, I do not follow suit. The weight of Sheldon Pollock's concept of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” among historians of Southern Asia and Indologists can easily lead to misapprehension of the Pali arena's distinctive history