Journal Articles by Trent Walker
Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies, 2020
Stone inscriptions from Middle Cambodia, particularly records of pious donations carved between t... more Stone inscriptions from Middle Cambodia, particularly records of pious donations carved between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, are key sources for understanding the diverse and regionally connected Buddhist literature of this period. The epigraphical record provides three types of evidence that help build a picture of Middle-period Buddhist texts in Cambodia: 1) stylistic choices, particularly the use of bilingual Pali-Khmer prose; 2) direct quotations from Pali and Khmer texts, and 3) citations of titles of Pali liturgical chants, Pali-Khmer sermons, and a chanted Siamese poem. The cumulative force of this evidence builds a strong foundation for the historical study of Buddhist genres preserved in colonial-era palm-leaf and leporello manuscript collections.
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Journal of Global Buddhism, 2021
This article sketches the study of Theravada Buddhist literature over the past twenty-five years.... more This article sketches the study of Theravada Buddhist literature over the past twenty-five years. Drawing on Charles Hallisey’s influential essay, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism,” I survey the ways in which scholars have heeded his calls to study texts beyond the canon, to attend to issues of translation, and to examine the local production of meaning. I show how these calls correspond to three recent trends: increased emphasis on non-canonical Pali and vernacular texts; a renewed interest in multilingual texts and the cultures of translation that shaped them; and new models for charting intellectual histories of Theravada Buddhist societies beyond local confines.
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Journal of Global Buddhism, 2021
This special section celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of Charles Hallisey's groundbreaking... more This special section celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of Charles Hallisey's groundbreaking 1995 essay, "Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism," which offered both an incisive assessment of the history of Theravada studies and a generative blueprint for its future. Hallisey's introduction of the term "intercultural mimesis" and his emphasis on the local production of meaning resonated across Buddhist studies and beyond, shaping an entire generation of scholarship on South and Southeast Asia. This introductory essay first surveys "Roads Taken and Not Taken" and its impact on Theravada studies over the past quartercentury. We then explore how the three junior scholars whose essays are featured in this section take Hallisey's prescriptions in new directions. In closing, we reflect on emerging themes and voices in Theravada studies not represented here and where the field may be headed over the next quarter century.
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Journal of Vietnamese Studies 15.3, 2020
The story of how Theravada Buddhism came to be adopted among urban Kinh communities in southern V... more The story of how Theravada Buddhism came to be adopted among urban Kinh communities in southern Vietnam challenges how scholars narrate Buddhist history. Focusing on the transformation of a single liturgical text—a chant, originally in the Pali language, to invite a monk to give a sermon—as it circulates across Thailand and Cambodia before its eventual translation from Khmer into Vietnamese in the mid-twentieth century, this essay reveals how chants grow as they circulate, how Theravada liturgies unsettle distinctions between classical and vernacular languages, and how ritual and ideological necessities shape translation in new cultural contexts.
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Journal of the American Oriental Society 140.3, 2020
In the late first and early second millennia, mainland Southeast Asians created sophisticated tec... more In the late first and early second millennia, mainland Southeast Asians created sophisticated techniques to accurately and efficiently render Pali into local vernaculars, including Burmese, Khmer, Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lü, Mon, and Siamese. These techniques for vernacular reading, parallel to approaches for reading Latin in medieval Europe and Literary Sinitic in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, led to the development of bitexts that contained a mix of Pali and vernacular material.
Such bitexts, arranged in both interlinear and interphrasal formats, gradually allowed second-millennium Southeast Asian writers to sprout a vernacular literature from the established branches of Pali genres. Bitexts themselves formed the basis for a new literary style that stemmed from the techniques of vernacular reading, a style that set the standard for belles-lettres until the early twentieth century. The spread of Pali-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia allowed for the literary elevation of the vernacular without renouncing the cosmopolitan idiom of Pali.
To support these arguments, this article draws on some of the earliest examples of bitexts in Central Thailand (Siam) and Northern Thailand (Lanna). These include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam; two of the oldest palm-leaf documents surviving in any Tai language, from sixteenth-century Lanna; and the oldest known Pali-Siamese literary work, thought to be composed in 1482. These bitexts provide detailed evidence for vernacular reading and the emergence of vernacular literature in mainland Southeast Asian in general and Thailand in particular.
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Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 41
This article presents an overview of the texts, melodies, and aesthetics of the performance of “... more This article presents an overview of the texts, melodies, and aesthetics of the performance of “Dharma songs” (Khmer: dharm pad) in contemporary Cambodia. Dharma songs, also known as smūtr (sometimes smūt or smūdhy), are a corpus of narrative, didactic, and liturgical texts in Khmer and Pali, sung with complex melodies in various Buddhist rituals. I first survey how the Pali concepts of saṃvega and pasāda function in classical South Asian and contemporary Khmer Buddhist contexts. Within the Cambodian Dharma song tradition, I argue that saṃvega and pasāda can be understood as aesthetic experiences (Sanskrit: rasa) that are essential to Buddhist soteriology. By exploring how Dharma song texts and melodies are centered around the evocation of saṃvega and pasāda, I demonstrate how these aesthetic experiences define the performance of Cambodian Dharma songs. This particular Khmer tradition exemplifies the importance of recognizing, studying, and documenting the ways Buddhists live their religion through music.
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After the XIVth Dalai Lama, Thích Nhất Hạnh is perhaps the most famous living Buddhist teacher... more After the XIVth Dalai Lama, Thích Nhất Hạnh is perhaps the most famous living Buddhist teacher in the world. He is known primarily for his Buddhist-inspired peace activism in 1960s Vietnam and, especially since the 1980s, his popular books emphasizing a simple application of meditation in daily life. This article focuses instead on his rarely-discussed scholastic writings, in particular his interpretations of the Yogācāra school of Buddhist philosophy. It begins by tracing Nhất Hạnh’s narrowing hermeneutical strategies before surveying his extant writings explicitly concerning Yogācāra. Three interpretative issues salient to Nhất Hạnh’s understanding of Yogācāra are highlighted: the fate of the “storehouse consciousness” (ālayavijñāna) after the “transformation at the base” (āśrayaparāvṛtti), the tension between pivotal and progressive models of the “three natures” (trisvabhāva), and question of whether Yogācāra can properly considered a form of idealism or phenomenology. Taking his poem “Cognition’s Embrace” as an example, this article argues that Nhất Hạnh’s understanding of Yogācāra cannot be pinned down to single text but must instead be contextualized in the arc of his intellectual development over the past half-century.
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Book Chapters by Trent Walker
Routledge Handbook of Theravāda Buddhism, 2022
This chapter centers the structures and histories of Indic-vernacular bitexts: bilingual composit... more This chapter centers the structures and histories of Indic-vernacular bitexts: bilingual compositions that stitch together portions in an Indic prestige language (usually Pali but also Sanskrit in rare cases) and a local South or Southeast Asian vernacular, such as Arakanese, Burmese, Khmer, Mon, Sinhala, Tamil, Vietnamese, or various Southwestern Tai languages (Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lü, Siamese, etc.), typically in an interphrasal or interlinear arrangement. The first part of the chapter details the three primary steps—selection, analysis, and presentation—in the creation of Theravada bitexts, based on a comparative study of bilingual compositions across South and Southeast Asia. This practical foundation serves as the basis for the second half of the chapter, which outlines how these techniques gradually developed into a range of bitextual genres in first- and second-millennium Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. Theravada bitexts are much more interconnected across space and time than is commonly assumed. Their shared techniques and historical trajectories bring to life the currents of intellectual and linguistic exchange that have shaped this essentially bilingual religious tradition.
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Inventaire provisoire des manuscrits du Cambodge, deuxième partie , 2018
“Siamese Manuscripts in Cambodian Collections,” in Olivier de Bernon et al (ed.), Inventaire prov... more “Siamese Manuscripts in Cambodian Collections,” in Olivier de Bernon et al (ed.), Inventaire provisoire des manuscrits du Cambodge, deuxième partie (Bangkok and Lumbini: Lumbini International Research Institute and Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation), xcv–cvi (95–106).
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Katā me rakkhā, katā me parittā: Protecting the protective texts and manuscripts, 2018
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Exhibit Catalogs by Trent Walker
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Book Reviews by Trent Walker
Reading Religion, 2019
http://readingreligion.org/books/buddhas-wizards
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International Journal of Asian Studies 13:1 (January), 2016
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Papers by Trent Walker
This special focus section celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of Charles Hallisey’s groundbr... more This special focus section celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of Charles Hallisey’s groundbreaking 1995 essay, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism,” which offered both an incisive reassessment of the history of Theravada studies and a generative blueprint for its future. Hallisey’s introduction of the term “intercultural mimesis” and his emphasis on the local production of meaning resonated across Buddhist studies and beyond, shaping an entire generation of scholarship on South and Southeast Asia. This introductory essay first surveys “Roads Taken and Not Taken” and its impact on Theravada studies over the past quarter-century. We then explore how junior scholars, including the three authors whose essays are featured in this section, take Hallisey’s prescriptions in new directions. In closing, we reflect on emerging themes and voices in Theravada studies not represented here and where the field may be headed over the next quarter century.
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Journal Articles by Trent Walker
Such bitexts, arranged in both interlinear and interphrasal formats, gradually allowed second-millennium Southeast Asian writers to sprout a vernacular literature from the established branches of Pali genres. Bitexts themselves formed the basis for a new literary style that stemmed from the techniques of vernacular reading, a style that set the standard for belles-lettres until the early twentieth century. The spread of Pali-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia allowed for the literary elevation of the vernacular without renouncing the cosmopolitan idiom of Pali.
To support these arguments, this article draws on some of the earliest examples of bitexts in Central Thailand (Siam) and Northern Thailand (Lanna). These include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam; two of the oldest palm-leaf documents surviving in any Tai language, from sixteenth-century Lanna; and the oldest known Pali-Siamese literary work, thought to be composed in 1482. These bitexts provide detailed evidence for vernacular reading and the emergence of vernacular literature in mainland Southeast Asian in general and Thailand in particular.
Book Chapters by Trent Walker
Exhibit Catalogs by Trent Walker
Book Reviews by Trent Walker
Papers by Trent Walker
Such bitexts, arranged in both interlinear and interphrasal formats, gradually allowed second-millennium Southeast Asian writers to sprout a vernacular literature from the established branches of Pali genres. Bitexts themselves formed the basis for a new literary style that stemmed from the techniques of vernacular reading, a style that set the standard for belles-lettres until the early twentieth century. The spread of Pali-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia allowed for the literary elevation of the vernacular without renouncing the cosmopolitan idiom of Pali.
To support these arguments, this article draws on some of the earliest examples of bitexts in Central Thailand (Siam) and Northern Thailand (Lanna). These include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam; two of the oldest palm-leaf documents surviving in any Tai language, from sixteenth-century Lanna; and the oldest known Pali-Siamese literary work, thought to be composed in 1482. These bitexts provide detailed evidence for vernacular reading and the emergence of vernacular literature in mainland Southeast Asian in general and Thailand in particular.