Nandapañño’s Bicāraṇā Ālambanasaṅgaha (1638 CE): Toward an Intellectual History of Northern Thai Exegesis

24 May 2023

A lecture by Trent Walker  (Postdoctoral Fellow, Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford University)
Date and time: 24. Mai 2023, 4:15 pm

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries have long been described as a golden age of Lanna or Northern Thai intellectual culture. Most of the key works by Lanna authors in Pali, including the impressive oeuvres of Sirimaṅgala and Ñāṇakitti, were composed prior to the establishment of Burmese suzerainty in 1558. By contrast, we know almost nothing about the intellectual culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This lecture seeks to change that by revealing how new exegetical techniques were developed by Lanna monks and lay scholars during the first century of Burmese rule. 

Rather than writing exclusively in Pali, the leading exegetes of this period pioneered a distinctive bitextual Pali-Lanna style that drew on their deep erudition in and fidelity to Indic commentarial norms. My focus is on an autographed composition by the former monk Nandapañño of Chiang Saen in 1638, namely his Bicāraṇā Ālambanasaṅgaha. This elegantly carved one-fascicle manuscript offers a learned excursus on a short section from the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha and its ṭīkā, the Abhidhammatthavibhāvinī. By situating Nandapañño’s work within the context of other Pali-Lanna and Pali-Lao Abhidhamma commentararies inscribed between 1553 and 1638, I show how his use of bitextual analysis, ingenious mnemonics, and extensive quotations from scholastic and grammatical treatises reflects how Buddhist exegesis became a bilingual affair in the century that followed Lanna’s golden age. 

Trent Walker is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies and a Lecturer in Religious Studies at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and has published widely on Khmer, Lao, Pali, Thai, and Vietnamese Buddhist texts and recitation practices. He is the author of Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia and the co-editor of Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages, both published in 2022. In Fall 2023, he will be Assistant Professor of Theravada Buddhism at the University of Michigan.

A recording of this lecture can be found here.