ABSTRACT
Theravada cultures in mainland Southeast Asia have long cultivated distinct bilingual approaches to translation. Indic-vernacular bitexts, which typically combine portions from a Pali source together with their translation into a Southeast Asian language, dominated the region’s religious, technical, and aesthetic writing between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter explores a botanical metaphor for such bitextual translations, namely plants that are structurally dependent on other plants, including the epiphytes that make Southeast Asian forests appear so lush. Examples explored include those that best demonstrate the epiphytic dimensions of bitexts across several genres in Vietnamese, Shan, Khmer, Lao, and Siamese contexts. These bitexts offer more than a mere translation of their Indic sources; like vines, orchids, or even strangler figs they transform their hosts, whether through processes of abbreviation, expansion, reinterpretation, exegesis, or versification. These complex interactions between Pali hosts and vernacular epiphytes have the capacity to metonymically evoke the distinct historical landscape of how Indic-language scriptures came to be adopted in Southeast Asia.
