Catalogue of the Pāli printed books in the India Office Library

Abstract

• The present catalogue includes all the Pali texts and translations from the Pali, whether in Sinhalese, Burmese, Devanagari, Thai, Bengali or romanised scripts, held by the India Office Library. (Burmese nissaya books, Pali texts in which each phrase is followed by its Burmese translation, are included in a separate catalogue as yet unpublished.) Approximately 1600 titles are included, the earliest being Tumour’s edition of the Maha-vamsa, chs 1-20, published in Ceylon in 1836. Judged by the timescale of western scholarship applied to other languages of South Asia this may seem relatively late for a first milestone. It must be remembered however that this was only a decade after the virtual discovery by a handful of western scholars that Ceylon possesses a rich chronicle history preserved in manuscript, and some twelve years before the earliest attempt at a bibliography of Pali and Sinhalese books by the Reverend Spence Hardy in 1848. The subsequent diffusion of the Pali scriptures has been achieved, in this country, most notably by the publications of the Pali Text Society, founded in 1881; while contributions have been made, on a smaller scale, by the Simon Hewavitarne Bequest Series, the Nalanda Devanagari Pali Series, and the Union Buddha Sasana Council in Rangoon. While the collection as a whole is strong in nineteenth and early twentieth century text editions, the acquisition of Pali books from South and South East Asia, particularly the non-canonical texts published in small print-runs, has proved difficult since the cession of the (Indian) Press and Registration of Books Act in 1948. This Act, passed in 1867, meant that the Library could acquire by copyright requisition any work printed or lithographed in Burma as well as India. Whereas the Sanskrit and Persian collections benefited from the patronage of oriental scholarship by servants of the East India Company who had begun to acquire books and com¬mission manuscript copies well before the Library’s foundation in 1801, there was no such prolonged British presence in the countries where Theravada Buddhism was and is still practised. Indeed except for the brief spell 1796-1802 Ceylon was governed by the Colonial Office, not by the East India Company or its successors, to whose Library these books belonged, during its comparatively short period of British administration. The decision to publish what was then a catalogue on cards of the Pali books in the India Office Library was taken some twenty years ago. Since then the job of editing the entries to establish consistency has been undertaken sporadically, much of the preliminary retyping having been done by Mr T C H Raper, Assistant Keeper in charge of the collections in Classical Indian Languages from 1963 to 1970, and carried through to completion by his successor Mr M J C O’Keefe. The form of the Catalogue is as follows: main entry under title, with cross- references from alternative titles, author, editor, compiler, series, commentary, commentator. Capitals are employed for titles, alternative titles and commentaries wherever they may occur (i.e. either as entry word or in the body of an entry). Italics are used for see-type, ed. and etc. references, for the distinguishing epithets of authors (e.g. Dhammapala of Badaratittha Vihara), and for the name of non- Roman scripts. When it is necessary to classify the different forms of a major classical text a preliminary note is given, printed in bold, and inset, under the name of the text; thus complete text; incomplete text; selections; abridgements; with commentaries; etc. It is hoped that despite limitations, notably the gaps in the collection referred to above, the present publication will be of considerable value for scholars and students of Buddhism as the first published catalogue of a major collection of Pali printed books in the UK.