Pali Text Society

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pali Text Society was founded in 1881 by Thomas William Rhys Davids with a single stated purpose: "to foster and promote the study of Pāli texts." At that moment, Buddhist studies did not exist as an academic discipline anywhere in Europe. The scriptures at the heart of Theravada Buddhism were locked away in a language few Western scholars could read, preserved on fragile palm leaves in monastery libraries across South and Southeast Asia. How did a British civil servant posted to Sri Lanka come to dedicate his life to changing that? And what happened to those texts once the society he built began to fall into debt during the Great Depression? This is the story of a scholarly institution that helped bring Buddhism into the Western academic world, one painstaking volume at a time.

• 2. A Civil Servant in Ceylon

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  Thomas William Rhys Davids arrived in Sri Lanka in 1864, sent there by the British government as an administrator. He served until 1872, holding posts in both Galle and Anuradhapura. His roles ranged from clergyman and judge to Secretary to Governor William Henry Gregory and Archaeological Commissioner. His education had been in Germany, where he studied Greek and Sanskrit, and he came from a family with connections to ministry.

  Despite those ties, his wife Carolina Foyley Rhys Davids later documented that her husband was atheist. His interest in Sri Lankan culture, she wrote, came from genuine academic curiosity rather than religious conviction. That curiosity was sharpened by a specific social context. Members of the Anglican clergy regularly held public debates against Buddhist clergy and laypeople in Ceylon. These debates were meant to demonstrate Christian superiority, but they had the opposite effect on Rhys Davids. They deepened his fascination with Buddhism.

  He went on to study Pāli and Sinhalese with a Ceylon monk named Yatramulle Sri Dhammarama. It was Dhammarama who introduced Rhys Davids to the Pāli Canon. Scholarly reviews by George D. Bond and Ananda Wickremeratne note that Rhys Davids' civil service work was officially dedicated to Anglicization, to "instilling English ideas of industry and liberty among people." His private intellectual journey was running in a very different direction. According to Foyley, his goal for the future society was to "fructify the new attention that had just begun to be given to monastic libraries of 'palm-leaf manuscripts."

• 3. Building the Archive

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  The Pali Text Society was founded on the model of the Early English Text Society. Rhys Davids counted on support from European scholars and scholar monks in Sri Lanka. The financial reality was stark. Producing Roman-script editions of the Pāli Canon was not commercially rewarding. The work was sustained largely because the Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka underwrote the printing costs.

  Robert Caesar Childers, one of the three British civil servants who had studied in Ceylon alongside Rhys Davids, had already published the first Pāli-English dictionary in 1874. By 1922, when Rhys Davids died, the society had issued 64 separate texts across 94 volumes, exceeding 26,000 pages, alongside a range of articles by English and European scholars.

  Childers' dictionary was superseded in 1925 by a new one that Rhys Davids had been compiling for roughly 40 years but did not live to finish. His student William Stede completed it. A third dictionary was later begun by Margaret Cone; the first of its three volumes, covering A through Kh, was published in 2001. In 1996, the society signed a memorandum of understanding with the Dhammakaya Foundation in Thailand and published the entire Pāli Canon on CD-ROM.

• 4. Carolina Foyley Rhys Davids

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  When Thomas William Rhys Davids died in 1922, his wife Carolina Augusta Foyley Rhys Davids took over as president of the society. Her scholarly credentials matched his. She was a scholar of both Pāli and Sanskrit, and her own career had been in Buddhist studies. But she brought something her husband had not: formal training in economics. When the society's finances began to deteriorate during the Great Depression, it was Foyley who pulled it out of debt.

  She published two editions of the Journal of the Pali Text Society during her presidency, each taking roughly three years to complete. She also continued work on translations of classical Pāli texts, including two volumes on the Apadāna, published in 1925 and 1927. A 1926 annual report, printed in the second edition of the Journal covering the years 1924-1927, shows that the society had just released the new Pāli dictionary, funded by donors in Japan, to replace Childers' edition, which Foyley described as "antiquated and imperfect."

  The subscription plan she recorded in that same report gives a precise picture of the society's financial model. Members paid one guinea per year for texts, or a text and journals. Translations cost ten shillings per year. Back issues from before 1901 carried a fifty percent surcharge. In a diary entry written near the end of her life, Foyley wrote: "It is not likely I shall be here to finish to our work", referring to the planned reissuing of the original translations of Vinaya, Milinda, and Jataka. She died in 1942. The presidency passed to William Henry Denham Rouse.

• 5. Fragile Palm Leaves

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  In 1994, the Pali Text Society launched the Fragile Palm Leaves project, an initiative to catalogue and preserve Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts from Southeast Asia. Before the introduction of printing presses and Western papermaking, texts across the region had been inscribed on specially treated palm leaves, then bound together into complete manuscripts.

  Palm-leaf manuscripts have been in use since at least before the 5th century CE, but the oldest intact examples date from the 18th century and later. The largest concentration of surviving manuscripts was created during the 19th century. Tropical climate and the nature of the materials mean earlier examples rarely survived intact. The colonial era made things worse. Many manuscripts were disassembled and individual pages sold as decorative objects to Western collectors.

  The project's goal was to collect, catalogue, and scan these manuscripts into electronic formats so researchers could access them without further risking their physical condition. In 2001, the project was formally incorporated as a nonprofit in Thailand called the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation. In February 2013, the Pali Text Society joined with Sendai University and the University of Toronto, along with local partners, to digitize and catalogue palm-leaf manuscripts from Myanmar. The collections digitized included those held at the U Pho Thi Library in Thaton and the Bagaya Monastery in Inwa. These digitized manuscripts are now available through the open-access Myanmar Manuscript Digital Library.

• 6. The Shape of a Discipline

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  George D. Bond, writing on the historical significance of the society's work, argues that it "contributes to a new understanding of the British Raj in India and Ceylon." Scholar Bond and others credit Thomas William Rhys Davids and his wife Carolina with effectively creating Buddhist studies as an academic discipline.

  Foyley herself articulated why Pāli mattered beyond its religious content. She described the language as "as dead as is Latin, and yet as alive, built out of old Indian dialects as the vehicle of the Canon." The Davids understood Pāli to be the second oldest language in which East Asian religious texts had been recorded, after the Vedic tradition. That linguistic standing gave the society's publishing work a significance that extended well beyond any single religious community.

  Isaline Blew Horner, who served as president from 1959 to 1981 and held the honor OBE, marked her election by producing a new translation of the Milindapañha to replace the one Rhys Davids had originally made. Kenneth Roy Norman, who followed Horner and served until 1994, sat on the society's council longer than any other member. Rupert Mark Lovell Gethin has held the presidency since 2003, carrying an institution now more than a century old into its ongoing work of publication and preservation.