ABSTRACT
The study of palm leaf manuscripts reveals two important facts about Buddhist literature from Sri Lanka. First, historical encounters with Buddhist texts were highly circumstantial affairs where finding manuscripts that were complete and consistent could hardly have been taken for granted. Second, the actual process of producing palm leaf manuscripts involved a great deal of physical labor and generated certain expectations about their value as material objects and their efficacy for realizing a variety of religious goals. However, when working with critical editions of canonical texts, it is often easy to forget that premodern Buddhists in Sri Lanka and other parts of Asia encountered texts that often took very different forms. This chapter will argue that surviving Sri Lankan manuscripts and manuscript collections offer critical insights into how materiality and merit functioned as key variables in reading and writing the Buddha’s Dharma in premodern Sri Lanka.
