Trent Thomas Walker

Liturgical manuscripts illuminate how Buddhists at particular historical moments wove together the words of their sacred texts into living rituals. By focusing on leporello, or folded-paper, manuscripts featuring Khmer, Pali, and Thai texts popular in Late Middle Cambodia (c. 1650–1863) that continue to be sung today in a richly expressive style, this dissertation explores the liturgical, literary, and soteriological sensibilities of an era from which scant historical records survive. Leporello manuscripts, by virtue of their capacity to bring together various liturgical texts and annotate them with paratextual metadata, reveal the process by which Buddhist texts become Buddhist sounds in Cambodia. They shed light on how local genres of sung texts such as vows, paeans, manuals, sermons, incantations, translations, and anthologies work in concert for end-of-life rites and Buddha-image consecrations, and how these genres in turn articulate connections between Cambodian and Siamese liturgical repertoires from the late-seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

This monograph project argues that the Indic-vernacular bilingual text, or bitext, was the key tool in the development of several new genres of Buddhist exegesis, homiletics, and literature in second-millennium mainland Southeast Asia. In parallel with other multilingual writing practices across the Buddhist world and beyond, these bitexts shaped the intellectual history of Theravada societies up through the colonial era. The palm-leaf manuscript record, particularly in Khmer, Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lue, and Siamese contexts between 1550 and 1900, reveals how bitexts afforded the circulation of new modes of court poetry, monastic exegesis, and sermons for the lay public across most of Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, as well as some regions of Myanmar, Vietnam, and Yunnan.