ИСТИНА

The paper will analyze historical manuscript collections with identifiable ownership and usage patterns. The research is based on a survey of a number of extant lists of manuscripts once held by monasteries and individual monks as well as of several collections from village monasteries in Upper Burma documented by the author. The paper will distinguish between collections made primarily with the aim of reproducing and preserving the body of Buddhist texts deemed authoritative in Burma (that corpus included Buddhist canonical texts, commentaries and handbooks, Pali grammar, lexicology, prosody, historiographic works, cosmological texts and nissaya translations) and collections build around practical concerns and interests of individual abbots and monks (education, preaching, textual production, etc.). Collections of the first type were mostly found in the monasteries and libraries sponsored by the royalty and court elites while the second type was common throughout the country. Emphasis made by Burmese elites on the preservation of Tipitaka together with dynamic histories of Burmese monasticism, monastic education, and textual culture created a highly diverse landscape of manuscript collections that the paper will seek to explore.