Pali Week: Texts and Research

Abbidhammâvatāra (Pali MS 10). Source: John Rylands University Library of Manchester, R38602.

Oxford Pali week provide intensive readings and research talks in Pali literature and manuscripts at a level more advanced than the Pali teaching usually available at university level courses. For five days experts in traditional Pali grammar, Abhidhamma, pre-modern meditation, commentaries, cosmological treatises and chronicles, as well as manuscript editing in different Southeast Asian scripts gave master classes to a group of 25 advanced students, scholars and professionals in this area. There were also two public lectures and a hands-on display of Pali manuscript holdings from the Bodleian library.

Week of May 26–30, 2025

Contributors

Kate Crosby is the Numata Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford. She works on Sanskrit, Pali and Pali-vernacular literature, on Theravada practice in the pre-modern and modern periods, and on Buddhist ethics. Her books include The Bodhicaryavatara; The Dead of Night & The Women; and Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity, Identity; Traditional Theravada Meditation and its Modern Era Suppression and Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia.

Giuliano Giustarini taught Theravāda Buddhism and Pāli language at the PhD Program in Textual Buddhist Studies at Mahidol University (Thailand). He is currently translating the Majjhima Nikāya for the Fondazione Maitreya and parts of the commentary on the Dīgha Nikāya for the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (OCBS, UK). Among his recent publications: (2024) ‘The Sleep of the Good: Meditation on buddho in the Sudattasutta and its aṭṭhakathā,’ Kervan, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 303-321. (2024) ‘The concept of pariyogāhaṇa in the epistemology of the Paṭisambhidāmagga: An immersion in knowledge and liberation’ in Neri, Chiara, Sferra Francesco (eds.). Teaching Awareness in the Buddhist Tradition – Essays in Honour of Professor Corrado Pensa. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, United Kingdom. pp. 14-28.
Email: giulianogiustarini@gmail.com

Pyi Phyo Kyaw is Departmental Lecturer in Buddhist Studies at University of Oxford. She is also Senior Lecturer in Theravada Studies at Shan State Buddhist University, Taunggyi, Myanmar. She studied BA in Economics and Management at Oxford University, before completing her MA in Buddhist Studies at SOAS, University of London, in 2010, and her PhD in Buddhist Philosophy at King’s College, London in 2014. She has undertaken meditation practice within different meditation traditions in Myanmar since 2005. She also teaches Vipassana meditation in Budapest, Hungary.

Aleix Ruiz-Falqués graduated in Classics at Barcelona University (Spain), followed by MA Sanskrit at the University of Pune (India) and PhD in Indian Studies at the University of Cambridge (UK). He was worked on research projects involving Pali manuscripts, such as the Project to Digitize Myanmar Manuscripts (https://palitextsociety.org/project-to-digitize-myanmar-manuscripts/) as well as the Dhammachai Tipiṭaka Project in Thailand. He is Lecturer in Pali and Head of the Department of Pali and Languages at Shan State Buddhist University. He is currently Khyentse Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). Apart from research in Pali grammatical and scholastic literature from Burma, he teaches Pali in various platforms and is involved in translation projects.

Eviatar Shulman is Chair of the Department for Comparative Religion and member of the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work focuses mainly on different aspects of Buddhist religion and philosophy, with special interest in recent years in early, or more generally in Pāli, Buddhism. Among his publications are Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Visions of the Buddha: Creative Dimensions of Early Buddhist Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2021). The latter work outlines a new approach to the composition of the early discourses attributed to the Buddha.

Ujval Sidhu-Brar is a 2nd-year BA Religion and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies student at Harris Manchester College, focusing on Buddhism and Judaism. He began learning Pāḷi in October 2023, reading Jātaka stories, excerpts from the Dhammapada, and commentarial texts with Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton. His interests are still developing, but he is most curious about narratives that offer insight into the dialogue between early Buddhist communities and members of other religious traditions and philosophical schools, as well as how contemporary Theravāda Buddhists draw on Pāḷi literature to inform their interactions with people of different faiths.

Andrew Skilton is a Faculty Associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Oxford, where he teaches on Pāli and Buddhist Sanskrit texts in Oxford. Currently, he is writing an introduction to the study of Pāli, and researching aspects of the boran kammathan meditation tradition, the vīthicitta in Jie tuo dao lun 解脫道論 (*Vimuttimagga), as well as revising the Dīpavaṃsa from new manuscript evidence. He has recently been writing on surgery in the vinaya, coercive control in the Jātaka, and monastic waterbottles. He is also contributing to a study of a Gāndhārī manuscript containing a key passage from the Samādhirāja Sūtra.

Oli Thomson is an MPhil student in Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford. Their current research interests are on the complexities of contemporary and historical Thai religion and culture – paying specific attention to how Theravada Buddhism interacts with other belief systems such as Thai Chinese Mahayana and indigenous pre-Buddhist Tai folk religion; as well as the interplay between contemporary issues such as modernity, politics and environmentalism. Their methods include textual studies in Pali, alongside modern anthropological and other social science research. Oli’s master’s thesis focuses on the psychological anthropology of beliefs in ghosts in contemporary Thailand, seeking to understand how these beliefs are navigated through Buddhism and other Thai spiritual practices.

Paolo Visigalli is Associate Professor of South Asian and World History at Shanghai Normal University (SHNU). His main area of research is Indian and Chinese Buddhism, with a burgeoning interest in Manichaeism and Church of the East in China. He holds a PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining SHNU within the framework of Thousand Talents Plan, he was a Postdoc at the University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and taught Sanskrit and South Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

David Wharton has worked on Southeast Asian manuscripts for over twenty years, including projects such as the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts and Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts (based at the National Library of Laos). His PhD is on Tai Nuea lay manuscript culture in northern Laos. He is currently a research fellow at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.