Rare book donated to The Friends: “A Pali Primer”

Special thanks to Roger Atlas, Friends of The Seattle Public Library Board Trustee, for this blog post!

Seattle has a diverse population which reveals itself daily in the donations of foreign language books to the Friends of the Library. We are accustomed to books from about 40 major foreign languages that are received almost daily. However, today was a surprise donation in Burmese and Pali.

Pali is the language of ancient Buddhist scripts. Pali was in widespread use in south Asia, but Pali died out as a literary language in mainland India in the fourteenth century. Religious centers still kept the knowledge of the language and a revival began in the late 1800s. This was an important link to many ancient documents. Books began appearing which helped translate Pali into modern languages. Maung Tin published “A Pali Primer” in multiple languages including English. The Burmese version of the primer was reprinted in 1913 and then again in 1948.  The 1948 Pali Primer in Burmese was donated to the Friends of the Library last week.

Why is this book exciting? Three reasons come to mind. First, it is one of the very few books in Burmese or about Pali that we ever received. Second, preserving ancient languages is vital to understand the roots of the world’s culture. Imagine the impact if we were unable to understand ancient Greek or Latin, which are the languages of the source material for 2.2 billion Christians. Pali has a similar role for half a billion Buddhists. Third, as a work of art, Pali writing is simply beautiful. The cursive style is so distinctive because the writing was made with a sharp stick on large leaves. Straight lines would have destroyed the leaves. Curves did not. Pali Book Cover

L0026479 Burmese-Pali manuscript. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Oriental Manuscripts in Burmese-Pali.  Floral designs between lines in a Kammavaca text. Published:  -  Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Pali Book Contents

L0026479 Burmese-Pali manuscript.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
Oriental Manuscripts in Burmese-Pali.
Floral designs between lines in a Kammavaca text.
Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/