The vast majority of the Rylands’ Pali manuscripts arrived in the Library from Thomas William Rhys Davids’ collection in 1915 and 1917 (Figs. 3-4). Sri Lankan scholar Professor Nicholas Abeydeera Jayawickrama (1920–2012) provided brief descriptions of these manuscripts in his article on the Pali collection published in 1972-1973. Professor Jayawickrama relates that a large number of the manuscripts were expressly copied for T.W. Rhys Davids. Others “were bought by Professor Rhys Davids or were received as presents from monasteries, while a fair number are erstwhile ‘prizes of war’ which had eventually come into the hands of British administrators who later presented them to Professor Rhys Davids.” Though the article sheds some light on the provenance of these items, it also raises some important questions.
Professor T. W. Rhys Davids and the Pali Text Society
Who was Rhys Davids and how did he come to possess such a large collection of Pali manuscripts? T. W. Rhys Davids (1843-1922) was the son of a Congregational minister, who served as a civil servant in Ceylon (current-day Sri Lanka) between 1864 and 1872. Having studied Sanskrit at the University of Breslau (Germany), he had no difficulty in learning Tamil and Sinhalese to communicate with the locals. One of his obituaries describes his encounter with the Pali language: “The production, as evidence in a trial, of a Pali sacred text that no one present could read led to the work of his life by making him resolve to master the unknown language.” 1
In Ceylon, Rhys Davids learnt Pali from Buddhist scholar-monks and revivalists Yātramulle Unnanse, Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thera, and Waskaduve Sri Subhūti. Pali is the language of the sacred texts of the Theravada Buddhism, the oldest form of Buddhism, and apart from the language skills, Rhys Davids also acquired a deep understanding of Buddhist literature.
Upon his return to England, Rhys Davids pursued his academic career. In 1882, he was appointed Professor of Pali and Buddhist Literature at University College, London and in 1904 he became the first Professor of Comparative Religion at the Victoria University of Manchester. He was also Secretary and Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society (1885-1904), and a founding member of the British Academy (1901).
Rhys Davids’ passion for Buddhist literature led him to found the Pali Text Society in 1881 on the model of the Early English Text Society. He was the Society’s president until his death in 1922, at which point his wife and fellow scholar Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids (1857-1942) took over for the next twenty years. The aim of the Society was to publish critical editions and English translations of Buddhist texts and promote the study of the Pali language and Buddhist literature. To publish these works, the Pali Text Society had to get hold of reliable manuscripts. If texts were not readily available, Rhys Davids and later Caroline Rhys Davids had them copied. The person who arranged the copying of these manuscripts was the Edmund Rowland Gooneratne, a Ceylonese British administrator (Mudaliyar of Galle), literary scholar, and secretary of the Pali Text Society.
In the first issue of the Pali Text Society Journal (1882), Rhys Davids appeals for good quality manuscripts:
“We can also assure our friends in Ceylon that we recognise as fully as they do the paramount importance of making use of good MSS. We have enough such already available for some of the publications of the next year; but for others, and for the texts to be published in the following years, we must appeal for help from Burma, Siam, and Ceylon. … The Society is willing either to receive MSS. of these books on loan, or in place of subscriptions [to the Society], or to give printed Pali books of the same value for them, or to pay for them in money. … All inquiries on the matter, and MSS. intended for the Society, should be sent to the Atapattu Mudaliyar of Galle [i.e. E. R. Gooneratne].“
Pali Text Society Journal 1 (1882): pages 6-7.
The Rhys Davids family archive, Cambridge
And who were the British administrators who presented the prizes of war to Professor Rhys Davids that Prof. Jayawickrama refers to in his article? Where did he obtain this information? In his description of Pali MSS 14, 43 and 68 (none of which has been digitised yet), he mentions a certain Mr Robert Gordon who donated these three Burmese manuscripts to Rhys Davids in 1887. In his description of Pali MS 69 (also not yet digitised), he says that it was a gift to Rhys Davids from Mr W. R. Macdonell, presented on 29 January 1903. Robert Gordon was probably the imperial agent by the same name who was sent to Burma to survey and report on the ruby mines near Mogok in 1886 (see his report for the Royal Geographical Society 1888).2 W. R. Macdonell might be identical with the East India merchant and representative of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, father of Scottish writer Archibald Gordon MacDonell.3 Could MacDonell and Gordon have been among those British administrators to whom Jayawickrama refers in his introduction? Where did they acquire the manuscripts that they later presented to Rhys Davids?
Having searched our own Library Archive in vain for information, I decided to explore the Rhys Davids Archive in the Library of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, at the University of Cambridge. It is a very rich archive, so I decided to focus on correspondence with E. R. Gooneratne, the secretary of the Pali Text Society based on Ceylon, the relevant years of his general correspondence, and on a bundle of bills and receipts.
I found a good number of letters by Gooneratne sent from Ceylon to Professor Rhys Davids and later Caroline Rhys Davids discussing the copying and purchasing of manuscripts and issues regarding subscribers (including many local Buddhist monks) and publications of the Pali Text Society (Fig. 7). In his very first letter, dated 5 July 1880, Gooneratne, a passionate Buddhist revivalist himself, offers his services to Rhys Davids (Figs. 8-9):
“Having read your little work on Buddhism 4 I have been induced to open up a correspondence with you to aid you in any way I can, in supplying you with book or other information from Ceylon to help you in your valuable researches.“
In another letter from Gooneratne to Rhys Davids, I found mention of a Buddhist priest donating a manuscript to the Pali Text Society, which probably refers to Pali MS 10: “I send by this mail in a tin case to your address ‘Suchittalaṅkare & Abhidhammavatare” comments on the Abhidhamma that Saddhananda Priest of Ratgama has presented to the Society at my suggestion. “5 According to these letters, the manuscripts were copied or gifted to the Pali Text Society and not to Prof. Rhys Davids himself.
My trip to the Rhys Davids Archives was not entirely successful. Sadly, I did not find any information on British administrators’ presenting prizes of war to Rhys Davids. The names Robert Gordon or W. R. Macdonell did not appear in the documents I was able to decipher. Luckily, we have not exploited all sources of information on Professor Rhys Davids and the Pali Text Society. There are still archives to explore and documents to decipher, and thus my pursuit to trace the provenance of its Pali collection continues.
Further readings
Rylands’ Pali Manuscript collection guide
Ridding, C. Mary, and Pe Maung Tin, “Obituary: Professor T. W. Rhys Davids.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 3,1 (1923): 201-210.
Dewaraja, Lorna S. “Rhys Davids Memorial Lecture: T W Rhys Davids (1843-1922) : ‘Haunted and Pursued by the Spiritual Legacy Bequeathed to Him from Ceylon.’” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 41 (1996): 1–12.
The complete works of TW Rhys Davids: https://www.discoveringbuddha.org/scholarly-societies/the-scholars/the-rhys-davids/the-complete-works-of-tw-rhys-davids/
Footnotes
- Ridding, 1923, page 201
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︎ - Robert Gordon, “On the Ruby Mines near Mogok, Burma,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 10 (1888): 261-275; see also John C. Walsh, “Robert Gordon and the Rubies of Mogok: Industrial Capitalism, Imperialism and Technology in Conjunction.” Asian Culture and History 3 (2011): 94-100.
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︎ - See Raymond Kevin Renford, “The Non-Official British in India, 1883-1920,” (PhD Dissertation, University of London, 1978), page 264; N. Havely, Dante’s British Public: Readers & Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present (Oxford: OUP, 2014), page 207; and W.R. Macdonnel, “On the MS of Dante’s Divina COmmedia in the Library of the Society,” The Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 18 (1891): pages 56-70.
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︎ - He may be referring to the Buddhist Birth Stories (1881) or the Hibbert Lectures (1881).
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︎ - Gooneratne’s letter to Prof. Rhys Davids, dated 23 May 1883; see also Pali Text Society Journal 1 (1882): page 4.
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