The lecture will present the results of the speaker’s fieldwork on the circulation of Buddhist textual material in Upper Burma. Primary data for this research are manuscript collections, historical lists of such collections, and Buddhist murals. The presentation will provide an overview of surviving manuscript collections and mural programs and discuss approaches to building textual repositories and depicting the life of the Buddha on the basis of these sources. These approaches reflect facets of the process of superscription of the Buddhist canon – understood as the corpus of texts promulgated by the Buddha and recited by Buddhist councils – over more heterogeneous selections of Pāli, Sanskrit and vernacular texts that were circulated, read, and used in the region historically. Though the earliest evidence of this process dates at least to the seventeenth century, the rate of its development was quite uneven. The presentation will highlight the varying pace of reform and the ascendancy of elite-sponsored notions of scripturality in monastic curriculum, donations of manuscripts, and murals.

Alexey Kirichenko is an assistant professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University. He received his doctorate in history in 2003 with a thesis focused on the study of Burmese royal chronicles. In 1997-1998 and since 2004 onwards he has been doing field and archival work in Burma that includes both personal and collaborative projects focused on Burmese monastic Buddhism, manuscript culture (and transmission and circulation of Buddhist texts in particular), religious infrastructure and Buddhist mural sites, and royal and monastic historiography.