Buddhist Studies Workshop with Trent Walker
Speaker: Trent Walker (University of Michigan)
Date: September 30, 2025, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: Princeton University,
Abstract:
The ongoing production of new scriptures was one factor in how Buddhism continued to flourish across Asia in the late first and early second millennia. The cases of Tibetan terma and Chinese apocrypha are relatively well-known; how and why new sutta texts were composed in Southeast Asia remains obscure. This talk considers the development of the ānisaṁsa (“karmic benefit”) genre, comprised of sutta-format sermons preached to lay audiences in connection with specific acts of merit-making. Apocryphal ānisaṁsa texts from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and beyond are exceedingly numerous in nineteenth- and twentieth-century manuscript collections.
But what are the origins of this genre? How did such a rich corpus of invented scriptures come to be? By focusing on the oldest surviving layer of manuscript evidence from seventeenth-century Laos and northern Thailand, I argue that these ānisaṁsa texts first developed in bitextual Pali-vernacular formats before being translated into Pali. The very earliest examples stand out for their brevity, formulaic diction, and circulation in sets, features which shaped the production of more voluminous ānisaṁsa collections in subsequent centuries. The manuscript evidence demonstrates that many apocryphal scriptures in Southeast Asia developed through a composite, piecemeal process, drawing as much on the vast databank of Buddhist narratives as on the bilingual systems of exegesis that came to dominate local monastic culture by the late sixteenth century.
Trent Walker is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Thai Professor of Theravada Buddhism in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. His publications include Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (winner of the 2024 Khyentse Foundation Prize for Outstanding Translation) and several dozen articles, translations, and essays on Khmer, Thai, Lao, Pali, and Vietnamese Buddhist texts, histories, and recitation practices. He shares his work at .
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required to attend the lecture. Dinner registration has closed.
