|
Page 1 of 2  
 
A Special Lecture with Mutimedia Presentation
entiled
The Printing of Chulachomklao of Siam Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in 1893 :
Knowledge Management of Technology and Strategic National Security par Excellence
by Major S. Bunnag, Senior Instructor in Public Administration of Law & Social Sciences Department
with an Opening Address by Lieutenant General Woravit Pansamai, Superintendent of the Royal Military Academy
and
Closing Remarks by Major General Prasert Wanchum, Deputy Superintendent of the Royal Military Academy
Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy
July 3, 2008
Announcement Ceremony
The New Publication of King Chulachomklao of Siam Pāḷi Tipiṭaka (Digital Preservation Edition 2009, 40 Vols.)
(Preface from the Digital Preservation Edition 2009)
The World Tipiṭaka :
From 1893 Edition in Siam-Script to 2009 Roman-Script Edition
Foreword
by Maj. Suradhaj Bunnag
In the 112th year of the Rattanakosin Era (B.E. 2436/A.D.1893) the Kingdom of Siam was buffeted by events that seriously threatened the nation’s sovereignty. It is, therefore, all the more amazing that in the same year, the ruling sovereign monarch, King Chulalongkorn Chulachomklao of Siam, managed to publish a 39-volume edition of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka, then written in ‘Siam script’, the first time that the sacred text of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition had been printed in this script. Intended to mark the 25th anniversary of the king’s accession to the throne, some 500 sets were given as a dāna to monasteries throughout the country. Soon after, an additional 260 sets were presented as a royal gift to various institutions around the world. Today, these books are considered to be the earliest printed versions of the Tipiṭaka, and one of the most important milestones in the dissemination of the sacred scriptures in the history of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition.
As the world’s first printed edition of the Theravāda Buddhist scriptures, the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Siam script is a testament to the genius of the Thai forefathers. It required a wealth of cultural and technical knowledge acquired over generations and six years of hard work to complete the final phrase of the publication over a century ago. The publication marked a significant step forward in the early printing technology for reproducing the Tipiṭaka and the means of disseminating the Buddha’s words. In fact, the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Siam script broke with centuries of tradition in five important ways:
1. With this publication in the B.E. 2436 (1893), the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka was printed not on traditional palm leaves but on industrial paper, the first time paper was used in the production of a book-form set of the Tipiṭaka since the oral teachings were first recorded in written form in the 4th century B.E, breaking a world historiographic tradition dating back over 2,000 years.
2. The Pāḷi text was transcribed not in ancient Khmer script but in contemporary Siam script during the reign of King Chulachomklao of Siam, breaking with a regional scriptural tradition dating back no less than 1,000 years.
3. For the first time, the Pāḷi text was not inscribed by hand but printed by machine, using the most advanced printing technology of the time.
4. Also for the first time, the Tipiṭaka was treated as data-centric document printing, the most advanced IT concept of the time, with systematic page numbering and an innovative printing of the table of contents. It was no longer simply an artifact hand-printed on a series of palm fronds.
5. In addition to the religious tradition of keeping the Tipiṭaka in “scripture halls” in monasteries around the country, copies of the 39-volume Pāḷi Tipiṭaka were distributed to and housed at important international learning institutions all around the world, creating a new additional network of Tipiṭaka repositories worldwide.
In 2004, to celebrate the 112th anniversary of this great historic achievement, the Dhamma Society, in conjunction with the Information Technology and Communications Ministry in Bangkok, held a special lecture on “King Chulachomklao the Dhamma Protector Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Siam Script of 1893 : 112 Years of Thai Dhamma Technology for the World.”
Graciously presiding over the commemorative lecture was His Majesty the King's Elder Sister, Her Royal Highness Princess Galyani Vadhana, who showed tremendous interest in the historic edition of the Siam-script Tipiṭaka. Her presence at the lecture marked the start of a renewed interest in and appreciation for the country’s contribution to the dissemination the wisdom of Tipiṭaka around the world. It also signaled the subsequent success of the on-going project to publish the World Tipiṭaka in Roman script, the first time that the B.E. 2500 (1957) Great International Tipiṭaka Council Edition was to appear in an international alphabet. An edited and revised version of the 2500 Buddhist Era Great International Council Pāḷi Tipiṭaka, this work was finally published by the Dhamma Society, in Bangkok in 2005.
On March 6, 2005, to officially mark the 112th anniversary of the “Chulachomklao of Siam Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Siam Script,” Her Royal Highness Princess Galyani Vadhana, as King Chulalongkorn Chulachomklao’s granddaughter and Honorary President of the project to present the World Tipiṭaka in Roman Script to countries around the world, personally escorted the inaugural set of the World Tipiṭaka to Sri Lanka in order to present this 40-volume edition as a royal gift of Dhamma to the President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka in Colombo, the cradle of the world's written Tipiṭaka.
Consequently, the royal gift generated a great deal of interest in the Tipiṭaka in Siam-script edition, both in Sri Lanka and in other countries throughout the Buddhist world, since the Siam-script edition had laid the foundation for the meeting of the 1957 Great Buddhist Council for the Collation of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Burmese script and had served as the basis for the transcription of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Roman script.
To preserve the historic Pāḷi text in Siam scrip, the Dhamma Society took digital photographs of each page and stored them in an electronic archive over a period between 2003 and 2004. Then in 2005, this archive began to be made available over the Internet at www.dhammasociety.org.
Two years later, the Dhamma Society announced a new project to publish a printed version of the digital preservation edition of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Siam script. Completed in 2007, it incorporated not only all 16,248 pages of the digital archive images but the newly printed Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Roman Script as well. Entitled “King Chulachomklao of Siam : A Digital Preservation Edition 2008”, it features the following:
1. Siam-Script to Roman-Script Transliteration for Tipiṭaka Romanization & Roman-Script to International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for Pāḷi Transcription. This feature shows the transliteration of Pāḷi into Siam and Roman scripts. It also shows the transcription of the 8 vowel sounds and 33 consonant sounds of the Pāḷi language into the new set of International Alphabet for Pāḷi, the Pāḷi IPA. This information appears in columns in the left and right-hand margins of all 16,248 pages.
2. The World Tipiṭaka Structures & Titles in Roman Script. This feature provides a general comparative structures of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in the Siam script and Roman script editions. The Roman-script edition is from the B.E. 2500 (1957) Great International Council Manuscript. This information appears in the lower left-hand corner of each page.
3. The e-Tipiṭaka Quotation Number. This feature provides a system of electronic links for obtaining digital information of the Siam-script and Roman-script editions of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka on the Internet at www.tipitakaquotation.net . This feature also allows Internet users to copy and print information with ease from any of 118,280 paragraphs of the Roman-script edition in a variety of media formats.
4. Examples of Parallel Corpus in Siam-Script/Roman-Script Tipiṭaka. This feature helps to compare Pāḷi sounds in Siam and Roman scripts and appears in the lower right-hand corner of each of the 16,248 pages.
5. Uniform Resource Locater (URL) of the Siam-Script Digital Preservation Edition 2009. This feature allows Internet users to search the digital archive using imaging technology on each of the 16,248 pages at www.tipitakahall.net .
6. The Endnotes of the Tipiṭaka . This feature contains a total of 7,414 variant readings between the Siam-script Tipiṭaka and Roman-script versions. Previously printed as footnotes in the original manuscript from the B.E. 2500 (1957) Great International Tipiṭaka Council Edition in Burmese script, here they have been newly proof-read, edited and printed in an open-standard format at the end of the book.
7. Pāḷi Word Indexes in Roman Script . This feature lists a total of 109,629 words in Roman script and identifies their location in the Siam-script version of the Pāḷi text. The indexes appear at the end of the book.
 |  |
| Historic Archive Edition 1893 | Digital Preservation Edition 2009 |
Not only does the Tipiṭaka Digital Preservation Edition 2009 take advantage of the latest electronic multimedia; it also represents an innovative means of presenting the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in parallel corpus in both Siam and Roman scripts. This should prove a boon to researchers, especially those attached to the more than 260 institutions around the world which received the original copies of the Siam-script edition at the end of the 19th century. These same institutions will be given priority in receiving copies of the 40-volume World Tipiṭaka Edition in Roman Script as a royal gift from the Kingdom of Thailand for research purposes.
Those involved in this latest publication of the Tipiṭaka Digital Preservation Edition learned a great deal about the Siam-script Tipiṭaka in the course of their work. This was especially true of the computer science and electrical engineers responsible for creating the database, who gained a greater appreciation for the system of transcribing Pāḷi sounds using Siam script. They were particularly surprised to learn that all of the Pāḷi sounds contained in the Tipiṭaka could be successfully transcribed and easily pronounced in Siam script, thanks to an ingenious typesetting system of printing developed by their Thai forebears.
For instance, in words containing a final consonant cluster, a yamakkarn (ยามักการ) ( ๎) was placed above the first consonant in the cluster, while a mai han akart (ไม้หันอากาศ) ( ั ), which normally represents the short /a/ sound, was placed above the initial consonant of the preceding syllable. Together, these diacritics clearly indicated that the consonants formed a final cluster. In the preparation for publishing the 2008 Roman-script transcription using International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, a similar spirit of inventiveness was applied. Because of the special nature of certain Pāḷi sounds, most notably consonant sounds that function both as the final sound of the preceding syllable and the initial sound of the subsequent consonant cluster, a new set of phonetic symbols specific to the transcription of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka was created to facilitate accurate pronunciation of the text.
To explain the special phonological features of the Pāḷi used in the sacred Buddhist texts, the Dhamma Society, invited Professor Emeritus Dr. Vichin Panupong to prepare a handbook on the pronunciation of Pāḷi words used in the Tipiṭaka and their transcription in Roman script entitled “Pāḷi and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).” Her work is a milestone in the academic study of the Tipiṭaka recitation, integrating current knowledge from various fields and setting an example for internationalizing the study of the Theravāda Buddhist scriptures, i.e., Tipiṭaka Studies, a new academic discipline envisioned by Her Royal Highness Princess Galayani Vadhana, who in 2004, expressed her gracious support for disseminating knowledge of the Tipiṭaka to people all around the world.
The article “Pāḷi and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)” is research in response to the wishes of the late Princess and is humbly dedicated to Her Royal Highness in respectful gratitude for her patronage of this project. The article appears at the end of each volume of the new 40-volume publication, “Chulachomklao of Siam Pāḷi Tipiṭaka : A Digital Preservation Edition 2009”.
At this time we would like to express our gratitude to Master Siri Petchchai, Chairman of the Dhamma Society, for providing additional information on Pāḷi and the Tipiṭaka and to Thanpuying Varunyupa Snidvongse for information on the historical background about the Tipiṭaka in Siam script.
The World Tipiṭaka Project is grateful to individual scholars from various academic institutions for their invaluable advice and support : Professor Emeritus Dr. Kanchana Ngawrungsri from Naresuan University, Professor Emeritus Dr. Amara Prasitratsin from the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Associate Professor Dr. Nitaya Kanchanawan from the Faculty of Humanities, Ramkhamhaeng University, and Associate Professor Pornthawee Pungratsamee, Head of the Department of Photography and Printing Technology Sciences. The Project also extends its thanks to Ajarn Theera Piyakhunakorn, Associate Professor Dr. Aran Harnsuebsai, Ajarn Chulapong Panichkriangkrai, and the student volunteers from the Department of Photography and Printing Technology Sciences at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Science for their invaluable advice and preparation of the photographic information; to Associate Professor Dr. Manop Wongsaisuwan from the Electrical Engineering Department and all the students, past and present, from the Computer Engineering Department, notably in the Faculty of Engineering at Chulalongkorn University for their creation and implementation of the World Tipiṭaka Database.
In addition, we would like to thank the members of the Dhamma Society who were involved in the publication of this groundbreaking international version of the Tipiṭaka in Siam Script. This includes those who worked on the archive image database for the King Chulachomklao of Siam Pāḷi Tipiṭaka : A Digital Preservation Edition 2008, those responsible for creating the multimedia software, and those who designed and implemented the graphic layouts and page numbering.
We are also grateful to Assistant Professor Arwin Intarangsee of the Department of Decorative Arts at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Silpakorn University, for his contribution to the project’s artwork and the design of the cover and font selection for the Siam script.
Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to the Law and Social Sciences Department, Academic Division at the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy for supporting research on the King Chulachomklao Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Siam Script, from 1999 to the present in 2008. This new digital preservation 40-volume set was unveiled for the first time in Thailand to faculty and staff of the Academy in Nakorn Nayok on June 3, 2008, as part of a special lecture presented by the Law and Social Science Department entitled “Knowledge Management & Learning Organization: The Printing of the King Chulachomklao Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Siam Scirpt (1893) : A Case Study of Wisdombase Technology par Excellence”.
Maj. Suradhaj Bunnag
Head of Research, Chulachomklao of Siam Pāḷi Tipiṭaka Edition
Department of Law & Social Sciences, Academic Division
Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy
and
Chancellor of the M.L. Maniratana Bunnag Dhamma Society Fund
Under the Patronage of His Holiness Somdej Somdet Phra Ñāṇasaṃvara
The Supreme Patriarch of Thailand
|
e-Tipiṭaka 
