Palm Leaf Manuscripts

—This paper gives an overview about different metadata schemas used for preserving digital documents. The resources specified here gives us a head start in understanding various metadata standards. They are used for several purposes in efficient data retrieval from database. However major standards are addressed where more research work is needed to retrieve data efficiently.

During the summer of 2007, a collection numbering over a thousand leaves of rare and important Indian paintings on palm leaf and paper were rediscovered during a renovation and storage relocation project within The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian Art Department.  The first exhibition, in a series of permanent collection rotations, focused on a remarkable select group of forty-five early palm leaves that cite the Buddhist Sutra of The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines (Ashtasahashrika Prajnaparamita). 
Historic evolution of the structure, the sacred ceremonial functionality and utility of the manuscript traditions, and technical background, material composition, support preparation, painting techniques, pigment analysis, condition assessment, and inherent deterioration mechanisms of both the support and media will be examined and described.  Conservation treatment materials and procedures such as structural stabilization of the aged palm leaf, including ethical considerations in compensation and reintegration of design, mounting, housing, display and storage; topics pertaining to the care and understanding of these early Indian paintings on palm leaf will be discussed in detail.

Rekonstruksi  penulisan  dan  penyalinan  naskah  lontar  Sunda  merupakan  sebuah upaya menyambung kembali benang merah tradisi yang  sempat terputus ratusan tahun lalu. Dengan demikian nilai-nilai kearifan, kesabaran, ketekunan, ketelitian, dan kejujuran para leluhur Sunda pada masa lalu dapat menjadi pelajaran penting untuk disampaikan kepada  generasi  berikutnya.  Upaya  ini  juga  merupakan  sebuah  bentuk  sinergi  antara preservasi,  konservasi  dan  regenerasi  khazanah  budaya  Sunda.  Selain  itu,  kekayaan budaya  dalam  bentuk  naskah  lontar  merupakan  asset  tak  ternilai  dan  dapat  menjadi alternatif destinasi wisata budaya dan tradisi Sunda yang berpotensi untuk dikembangkan.

Architecture is mother of all arts. Every other art form like painting, sculpture, dance, music, drama etc developed under the shelter of architecture. But sometimes it is vice versa as Indian paintings also provided space to architecture which added a new dimension to world art. The typical style of representing architecture is one of the notable features of Indian paintings. The distinctive style of representation shows multiple views of architectural elements placed in the painting to narrate stories. Surprisingly this typical characteristic has been observed since the tradition of paintings began. Evidences are found in the early paintings like Ajanta caves followed by Jain palm leaf manuscript, Mughal manuscripts and finally in Rajasthnai miniature paintings. The method of representation of architecture is considered as a special feature of Indian paintings that correlate the ideology of 20th century Cubism.

The history of India is ever changing which ruled by different monarchy. The examples of their establishments discovered through ancient art works. These evidences tell us the development of various art forms, philosophy and life style of rulers and the common men. This study would be a fundamental understanding of artistic expression and application in the art of painting.

This study is also being made to understand the method of representation according to story, variety of architectural composition in paintings, the traditional thought process of a painter, transformation of architectural elements in different regions.  This research is an attempt to bring a logical clarification to understand the paradigms of architecture in Rajasthani miniature paintings.

Palm-leaf manuscripts are important objects in Southeast Asia. Their value often goes beyond the meanings of the written texts. They also have historical, religious, literary, symbolic and ritual importance. This paper investigates textual materiality as it applies to a story about palm-leaf manuscripts owned by the ethnic Heuny (Nha Heun) group in Paksong District, Champasak Province, southern Laos. This story links material texts to oral history, rituals and efforts by the Nha Heun to legitimize their culture. It demonstrates how palm-leaf manuscripts can serve to legitimize claims handed down through oral traditions and ritual practice.

In Claude Laroque (ed.), Papiers et protopapiers : les supports de l’écrit ou de la peinture, Paris : HiCSA, pp. 119-135, 2017. URL : http://hicsa.univ-paris1.fr/documents/pdf/PublicationsLigne/Actes%20Laroque%202017/07_Colas.pdf.

Note: p. 124. Read pan[ital.]ai-maram instead of panai-maram; pan[ital.]ai instead of panai

A hitherto unidentified manuscript conserved at the Archives of the Abbey of Pannonhalma (Hungary) is identified in this article as a fragment of a Sinhalese palm-leaf manuscript from the nineteenth century. It is a fragment of a prayer for the health of a certain Seneviratne mantri, who is tentatively identified in this article as Albert L. De Alwis Seneviratne, the Sinhalese unofficial member of the Legislative Council of Ceylon in the years 1881–1899.

The article is written in Hungarian; it is followed by a detailed abstract in English, and is accompanied by photographs of the manuscript fragment.

Illustrated Buddhist manuscripts of South Asia are books that were produced in abundance throughout the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. These illustrated Buddhist books are monastic products transcribing Buddhist sutras, and nearly all of the manuscripts in existence cite the Ashtasahashrika Prajnaparamita or The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines (Leidy 2008, 137), one of the most important and earliest Mahayana texts put down in writing as early as the second century B.C.E. This vast body of literature referred to as the Prajnaparamita is essentially a compilation of philosophical and metaphysical teachings on the nature of reality and the universe. The basic premise is a radical non-dualism, in which every and any dichotomist way of seeing things is denied, so phenomena are neither existent, nor non-existent, but are marked by sunyata, emptiness, and an absence of any essential unchanging nature. The sacred character of the manuscripts is revealed not only in the writ...

— Identifying the text is one of the promising field of research in the domain of computer vision and pattern recognition. This paper copes with identity of kannada text. Eliminating noise and extracting the textual content from the scanned or captured picture is first step. Segmenting the lines and characters is the second step which is essential. Noise removal and extracting the textual content can be done by way of the usage of any noise filter and foreground subtraction algorithm. Otsu set of rules facilitates to gain the task of foreground extraction. Horizontal and Vertical Profiling is a method of extracting lines and words from the image document. Extracting the knowledge from the dataset the use of Hu's Seven variations and Zernike Moments features helps to come over many problem. After training method knowledge is being generated through the usage of the above mentioned methods. KNN classifier is used to understand the unknown characters through the quest approach through calculating the capabilities.

This research aims to study the concepts and working processes for recreation the Pali Canon of Buddhism in Lanna kingdom (Northern Thailand) and Shan state (Myanmar). The reseach found that the concepts of recreating the Pali Canon are divided into 2 periods: 1) to gain merit and to ensure the durability of the Buddhist teaching are in the hand writing period, script in palm leave or mulberry paper, 2) to gain merit, to ensure the durability of the Buddhist teaching and cultural identity are in print books period. The working processes are composed of leader, team, plan or project and budget, the steps taken are the same: form the team, selecting the manuscripts and assembling them, recreating Pali Canon by hand writing or print. Celebration was organized after their completion.

Automatic pattern detection has become increasingly important for scholars in the humanities as the number of manuscripts that have been digitised has grown. Most of the state-of-the-art methods used for pattern detection depend on the availability of a large number of training samples, which are typically not available in the humanities as they involve tedious manual annotation by researchers (e.g. marking the location and size of words, drawings, seals and so on). This makes the applicability of such methods very limited within the field of manuscript research. We propose a learning-free approach based on a state-of-the-art Naïve Bayes Nearest-Neighbour classifier for the task of pattern detection in manuscript images. The method has already been successfully applied to an actual research question from South Asian studies about palm-leaf manuscripts. Furthermore, state-of-the-art results have been achieved on two extremely challenging datasets, namely the AMADI_LontarSet dataset o...

Catalogue includes descriptions of 232 items acquired by the Manuscript department of the National library of Russia in the years 2001-2005, among them 203 manuscripts in Arabic script (in Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages). The other materials are in Crimean-Tatar, Hebrew,  Chinese, Armenian, Pali, Tibetan.

This article presents the colophons of a Buddhist text, the Questions of King Milinda, as seen in manuscripts found mainly in Central Thailand. Through a survey of over seventy Pāli palm-leaf manuscripts and a Thai samut khoi (folding book), the colophons reveal information not only related to textual transmission, but also to the social and soteriological ambitions of the communities that created them. Inspired by the ideology of merit, which promises good karmic returns for presenting and preserving the Dharma in this world, donors and scribes produced various kinds of aspirations (Pāli: patthanā). These aspirations are recorded in colophons. In this group of manuscripts, it is not uncommon to find that the preferred path to Nirvana among stakeholders is to become a Buddha. This is somewhat contrary to the general assumption that the way of arhat is preferred for a community that upheld the Theravāda tradition. Moreover, the quest to be fully awakened and omniscient is shown not to be confined to kings or to the nobility, but shared by a wider layer of society. The colophon of the samut khoi was sponsored by the noble royal ladies (pavaranārī) from the court of Ayutthaya. It gives us a glimpse into what—in a past era—was considered good and righteous, both materially and spiritually, by the inner circle of the ruling establishment. Accordingly, colophons deserve special attention as they provide information not only about their respective manuscripts but also about the socio-cultural aspects of the community that preserved and transmitted them.

The Pāli Commentaries are a tremendous source of useful information for the study of the Pāli canon. The role of the commentaries becomes even more essential when used as a tool to help to determine an original reading among variant readings found in both palm-leaf manuscripts and printed editions of the Pāli canon. This paper will raise interesting issues on variant readings found in the Dīghanikāya and explain how to utilize its commentary, so-called the Sumaṅgalavilāsinī,  to help determine the original reading. From five traditions of palm-leaf manuscripts namely Sinhalese, Burmese, Khom, Tham and Mon, all forty-eight manuscripts used in this paper were collected by the Dhammachai Tipiṭaka Project. Four different ways to use the commentary are described with examples and detailed explanations: (1) Using a commentary as a common reference point among scholars; (2) Using a lemma in a commentary as an ancient reading from Buddhaghosa’s time; (3) Utilizing information found from commentarial explanation; and (4) Acquiring alternative ancient variants from Buddhaghosa’s time. The practice of utilizing a commentary as described can be regarded as an effective way to study Pāli commentaries in a new landscape that promotes active learning of Pāli texts. Students should read Pāli texts, consider commentaries from different aspects by comparing variant readings they encounter, and then continually think, analyze, ask questions and seek proper answers by themselves.