동남아시아의 빨리어(Pāli) 문자와 불교사본

Abstract

Important Buddhist manuscripts of Southeast Asia dated between 16～19th centuries were transcribed from Pali in a variety of ancient scripts. This makes it difficult for Buddhist scholars wishing to study their contents. However, there are other obstacles facing today's researchers. majority of ancient manuscripts have been lost and destroyed due to successive wars, chaos and upheaval that occurred in Sri Lanka in the 15th century. This is also true in Southeast Asia, and many manuscripts dating from after the 15th century are actually reconstructions of earlier texts. Tipitaka, published in late 19th century by PTS (Pali Text Society), is a significant collection of works, taken from the manuscripts. However the work is far from complete, many of the texts are only partial, their sources scattered, and a lot of canons still need to be compared with other versions of the manuscripts. Furthermore some texts of the manuscripts are unique - sort of non-canonical texts and are not included in Tipitaka. This can be regarded as a kind of pseudepigrapha. access to the manuscripts is generally a difficult undertaking. To the monasteries where the manuscripts are kept, their religious worth is deemed to be more important than their academic value. When allowed access to the manuscripts, without a deep knowledge of local culture and social issues of the time scholars can't grasp a lot of the texts' contents. recently, study of Buddhist manuscripts has been typically limited to areas around Northwest India such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tibet. The Southeast Asia region should be regarded as significant to the 'realm of Buddhist manuscript study'. Original forms of almost all ancient scripts of Southeast Asia are closely connected with Brahmī script. For this reason they are important pieces of the Indian scripts map.translation remains a key obstacle. The manuscripts are written in a wide range of ancient languages, a problem which lead to the invention of Ariyaka script by King Mongkut in 19th century Thailand. If we are to objectively assess the original form of Pali Text, we should study the ancient scripts of Southeast Asia first.study of these manuscripts and the ancient scripts of Southeast Asia is nowadays being undertaken by scholars specializing in Southeast Asian Buddhism. One such case is the FPL (Fragile Palm Leaves)-LIRI (Lumbini International Research Institute), a joint research project which has already published a few manuscripts, including editing and translation and published a list of manuscripts about a group of texts. We can gain more authenticity and multi-formity of Pali Texts through comparing manuscripts of Southeast Asia with as like PTS and CSCD etc. other standard Pali versions.