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In the 112th year of the Rattanakosin Era (B.E. 2436/A.D.1893) the Kingdom of Siam was buffeted by events that seriously threatened the nation’s so...
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In the 112th year of the Rattanakosin Era (B.E. 2436/A.D.1893) the Kingdom of Siam was buffeted by events that seriously threatened the nation’s sovereignty. It is, therefore, all the more amazing that in the same year, the ruling sovereign monarch, King Chulalongkorn Chulachomklao of Siam, managed to publish a 39-volume edition of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka, then written in ‘Siam script’, the first time that the sacred text of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition had been transliterated and printed in this script. Intended to mark the 25th anniversary of the king’s accession to the throne, some 500 sets were given as a dāna to monasteries throughout the country. Soon after, an additional 260 sets were presented as a royal gift to various institutions around the world. Today, these books are considered to be the earliest printed editions of the Tipiṭaka, and one of the most important milestones in the dissemination of the sacred scriptures in the history of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition. In fact, the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka in Siam script broke with centuries of tradition in five important ways:
1. With this publication in the B.E. 2436 (1893), the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka was printed not on traditional palm leaves but on industrial paper, the first time paper was used in the production of a book-form set of the Tipiṭaka since the oral teachings were first recorded in written form in the 4th century B.E, breaking a world historiographic tradition dating back over 2,000 years.
2. The Pāḷi text was transcribed not in ancient Khmer script but in contemporary Siam script during the reign of King Chulachomklao of Siam, breaking with a regional scriptural tradition dating back no less than 1,000 years.
3. For the first time, the Pāḷi text was not inscribed by hand but printed by machine, using the most advanced printing technology of the time.
4. Also for the first time, the Tipiṭaka was treated as data-centric document printing, the most advanced IT concept of the time, with systematic page numbering and an innovative printing of the table of contents. It was no longer simply an artifact hand-printed on a series of palm fronds.
5. In addition to the religious tradition of keeping the Tipiṭaka in “scripture halls” in monasteries around the country, copies of the 39-volume Pāḷi Tipiṭaka were distributed to and housed at important international learning institutions all around the world, creating a new additional network of Tipiṭaka repositories worldwide.
Entitled “King Chulachomklao of Siam : A Digital Preservation Edition 2008”, it features the following:
1. Siam-Script to Roman-Script Transliteration for Tipiṭaka Romanization & Roman-Script to International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for Pāḷi Transcription. This feature shows the transliteration of Pāḷi into Siam and Roman scripts. It also shows the transcription of the 8 vowel sounds and 33 consonant sounds of the Pāḷi language into the new set of Pāḷi IPA. This information appears in columns in the left and right-hand margins of all 16,248 pages.
2. The World Tipiṭaka Structures & Titles in Roman Script . This feature provides a general comparative structures of the Tipiṭaka in the Siam script and Roman script versions of the Pāḷi text. This information appears in the lower left-hand corner of each page.
3. The e-Tipiṭaka Quotation Number . This feature provides a system of electronic links for obtaining digital information about the Siam-script and Roman-script editions of the Tipiṭaka on the Internet at www.tipitakaquotation.net . This feature also allows Internet users to copy and print information with ease from any of 118,280 paragraphs of the Roman-script edition in a variety of media formats.
4. Examples of Parallel Corpus in Siam-Script/Roman-Script Tipiṭaka . This feature helps to compare Pāḷi sounds in Siam and Roman scripts and appears in the lower right-hand corner of each of the 16,248 pages.
5. Uniform Resource Locater (URL) of the Siam-Script Digital Preservation E
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