Photo: Sarah Kenderdine & Ben Healley

King Mindon (reigned 1853–1878), Myanmar’s penultimate king, is often remembered today as a particularly devout patron of Buddhism. He founded Mandalay in 1857 and ordered the construction of some of the city’s earliest religious sites, including an ordination hall, a monastery, a library for religious texts and the Kuthodaw Pagoda (“Pagoda of Royal Merit”). This site, which can still be visited today, is famous for preserving an authorised mid-nineteenth century Myanmar recension of the Pali canon, the primary scriptures of Theravāda Buddhism.

Unlike previous royally commissioned copies of the Pali canon, which were handwritten on palm leaves, this recension was also inscribed on stone. Spread over 5.2 hectares, the 729 marble stelae are arranged in seven concentric squares around the site’s central gilded pagoda. Each stela varies in size, though a typical one is approximately 1.3 metres high, a metre wide, has around 75 lines of inscribed text on each side and is housed in a separate open-sided mini-pagoda around 3 metres in height.

Some time after the Pali text was inscribed, four additional marble stelae were added to the site, meaning that the site has a total of 733 marble stelae. These Burmese language stelae have not yet been translated into English; however, they include descriptions of historical events relating to King Mindon and also list the contents of the Pali language stelae.

Additionally, the Kuthodaw Pagoda has an unusually rich collection of donative inscriptions, often small plaques written in Burmese attached to the outside of the mini-pagodas which house the marble stelae, or placed high on the inner walls. This collection, most likely numbering in the thousands, demonstrate the ongoing religious patronage and religious aspirations of generations of local Buddhists, and attest to the important role the site has played in the lives of those who patronized the site.

Throughout the history of the site, various renovations and additions have been made. In the early 1890s, two avenues of starflower trees (Mimusops elengi) were planted. Some of these trees are still alive today and provide some welcome shade during the warmer months. On several occasions, the inscribed text on a stela has been reinked with a mixture of shellac and carbon black, though more recently with black enamel paint. Additionally, the metal umbrellas on top of the mini-pagodas have been replaced, the floors of the mini-pagodas have been tiled and some of the large wooden gates to the site have been replaced.

The Fifth Buddhist Council

The recension of the Pali canon inscribed on the Kuthodaw Pagoda stelae is part of a broader effort by King Mindon to preserve Buddhist texts. This project began in 1857 when the king commissioned the copying of a new set of the Pali canon onto palm leaves, one copy of which is now housed at the British Library. This edited text was then used as an exemplar to inscribe the Kuthodaw Pagoda stelae between 1860 and 1868. Following this, King Mindon revived the early Theravāda tradition of holding a council (saṅgīti) for the recitation and verification of the words of the Buddha. The “Fifth Buddhist Council” was held in 1871, reportedly involving 2,400 monks orally reciting the entire canon for 150 days.

The Kuthodaw Pagoda as model for other sites in Asia

King Mindon’s carving of the entire Pali canon on marble stelae was unprecedented in the Theravāda Buddhist world and it subsequently became the inspiration for further stone inscriptions of Pali literature at several sites in Myanmar and abroad. The first example of this was the Sandamuni Pagoda, directly adjacent to the Kuthodaw Pagoda, which preserves the Pali commentaries and sub-commentaries carved on 1774 marble stelae at the instigation of the hermit U Khanti in 1913. Pali and Burmese writings of the famous monk Ledi Sayadaw, who participated in the Fifth Buddhist Council, have been inscribed on 550 marble stelae at his monastery at Monywa, Myanmar. The entire Pali canon was inscribed in Thai script on 1418 marble stelae at Phutthamonthon Park in Thailand, Nakhon Pathom Province, and was completed in 1957. A Karen language translation of the Pali canon is currently being constructed in lower Myanmar. At Devram Vihāra in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a similar project has been underway since 2005 and has thus far completed inscriptions for a substantial portion of the Suttapiṭaka of the Pali canon. These sites demonstrate the strong influence the Kuthodaw Pagoda site has had, and continues to have, on the Theravāda Buddhist world.

Printed editions of Pali texts in Myanmar

The earliest printed editions of Pali texts in Myanmar used the Kuthodaw Pagoda recension as their exemplar, further underscoring the importance of this recension. As far as we know, the first complete printing of the Pali canon in Myanmar was published by the Hanthawaddy Press in Yangon, beginning in 1893. This book series printed the Kuthodaw Pagoda recension, though with occasional minor textual changes. In order to emphasize its reliance on the Kuthodaw Pagoda recension, from 1900 the title pages of the Hanthawaddy Press series explicitly refer to the Mandalay stelae, using wording that is strikingly similar to the sentence found at the top of the verso side of each stela. Following this example, other publishing companies produced editions of Pali texts based upon the Kuthodaw Pagoda recension, e.g. Thudhamawadi, Ratanādīpa and Zabu Meit Swe Presses. Held at Yangon, Myanmar, in 1954–1956, the “Sixth Buddhist Council” produced a newly edited version of the Pali canon which also had the Kuthodaw Pagoda recension as its basis. The digital versions of the Pali canon most widely used today (e.g. Vipassana Research Institute, Digital Pāli Reader, SuttaCentral, etc.) are transcriptions of this printed series, meaning that they are also related to the Kuthodaw Pagoda recension.

UNESCO status

The international significance of the Kuthodaw Pagoda was publicly recognised in 2013 with acceptance of the site on UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” register, which aims to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity by preservation, increased universal access and worldwide awareness of its existence and significance.