Buddhism in Central Siam has a history of at least a thousand five hundred years as evidenced by the archaeological findings of Dvāravatī. It is still a religion that is widely practiced today. Even though many events have taken place since the time of Dvāravati, the Buddhist textual heritage that is passed down to us is both rich and wide. Some of them appear to us in palm-leaf manuscripts, folding papers (samut khoi), and inscriptions. For example, the National Library of Thailand preserves one of the finest and biggest collections of Khom-script manuscripts in the world with a staggering 225,733 titles of palm-leaf manuscripts in its treasure trove. Taking an example of the Pāli Milindapañha (Questions of Milinda) manuscript, the library kept almost seventy sets of them.
These Milindapañha manuscripts, though not all are complete, are not necessarily direct copies of each other or of a single original exemplar; they are, rather, distinct recensions that were copied in different periods of Thai history. By the late eighteenth century, at least three recensions were in circulation in the region. They are the Lamphun recension, the Ayutthaya recension, and the Krung Thep (Bangkok) recension. The first two were in circulation in Central Siam since the second half of the seventeenth century, if not earlier. The last one came into prominence in the second half of the eighteenth century. While Lamphun recension shares a similar textual tradition with the Pāli Text Society’s edition (Trenckner 1880) which was primarily derived from Sri Lankan manuscripts, the Krung Thep recension is the primary recension used to edit the Siamese (Syāmaraṭṭha) printed edition (Cattasalla Thera et. al. 1923).
These recensions differ, to a certain extent, in syntax, contents, and doctrinal points. For example, in one of the Siamese recensions, King Milinda asks the Monk Nāgasena; ‘When a being goes to the next world (after death), does it do so as a blue, yellow, white or crimson [in colour], or as a radiance—in what shape does it go? Or does it go in the shape of an elephant, in the shape of a horse, or in the shape of a chariot? Despite this dialogue addressing an important yet delicate issue in Buddhist philosophy—what is transferred from life to life, it is not found, at the moment, in other recensions outside Thailand. Nāgasena replies by negating the idea of a transmigrating substance. He gives a simile of the word that has left his mouth and entered the king’s ear, doing so without traveling in any shape or colour.
Another example is pertaining to the number of meals the Buddha was partaking in a day. Certain recensions, including those of non-Siamese recensions, indicate that the Buddha partakes of meals up to three times a day. Putting aside certain exceptions, this could hardly be reconcilable with other texts as the Buddha has repeatedly advised his disciples (as recorded in the Majjhima Nikāya M I p. 124 and p. 437) to eat a meal a day just like him. But if we turn to one of the Siamese recensions, in the same passage, it does not state that the Buddha partakes up to three meals in a day, in fact, it was recorded that the Buddha does not partake in a second meal.
As we can see from the above examples, the Buddhist textual traditions in Thailand may have better preserved certain parts of the text that others have lost or corrupted during the copying of manuscripts. As such, the Buddhist textual tradition in Thailand could serve as an important resource for readers and researchers alike. The differences among the Milindapañha recensions also show that the shape of a textual tradition is dynamic and fluid, and it could be a function of the textual community that preserves them.
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