Australian team members
- Dr Mark Allon (Chair, Department of Indian Subcontinental Studies, University of Sydney)
- Dr Tamara Ditrich (Professor [Research], Department of Asian Studies, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Honorary Associate, University of Sydney)
- Dr Chris Clark (Honorary Associate, University of Sydney)
- Dr Royce Wiles (Associate, New Zealand South Asia Centre, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand)
- Dr Wendy Reade (consultant conservator; Principal Conservator, Objects and Outdoor Heritage, International Conservation Services, Sydney; Honorary Associate, University of Sydney)
- Dr Ian McCrabb (project consultant; Prakaś Foundation)
- Dr Bob Hudson (consultant archaeologist; Honorary Associate, Department of Archaeology, University of Sydney)
Myanmar collaborators
- Department of Archaeology, Mandalay: Directors, Assistant Directors, conservators and general staff members
- Mandalay conservation project manager: U Wai Lwin, retired staff member of the Department of Archaeology, Mandalay
- The Sitagu International Buddhist Academy, including Mandalay transcription project manager Dr Venerable Dhammācāra
- Kuthodaw Pagoda Trustee Committee
- Photographers U Kyaw Thu Win and team of Hla Gon Yee, Mandalay
Mark Allon is Senior Lecturer in South Asian Buddhist Studies at the University of Sydney. His primary research interests are the composition and transmission of early Buddhist literature, the ways in which texts have been used by Buddhist communities and the Indic languages of early Buddhist texts (Pali, Gandhari, Sanskrit). He is involved in two major research projects. The first concerns the study and publication of the recently discovered Gandhari Buddhist manuscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The second involves the conservation, photographing and study of the Kuthodaw Pagoda marble stelae recension of the Pali canon in Mandalay, Myanmar. He is the author of Style and Function: A Study of Dominant Stylistic Features of the Prose Portions of Pāli Canonical Sutta Texts and Their Mnemonic Function (1997), Three Gāndhārī Ekottarikāgama-Type Sūtras: British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragments 12 and 14 (2001) and The Composition and Transmission of Early Buddhist Texts with Specific Reference to Sutras (2021).
Tamara Ditrich is Professor (Research) in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney. In addition, she has held research and teaching positions at several universities in Australia (Australian National University, University of Queensland) and Europe (University of Ljubljana) in the areas of Asian religions, philosophies and languages. Her main research foci encompass languages of ancient India (particularly Sanskrit and Pali), ancient Indian Linguistics and Vedic Philology. In the last decade, she has dedicated a large part of her research to Buddhist textual studies, mainly investigating the Theravāda Pali Canon and its commentaries. She has an extensive record of publication, having authored a monograph, edited several books, and published many book chapters and articles in international research journals.
Chris Clark is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney with expertise in Pali and Sanskrit language and literature. He has lectured in Sanskrit and Buddhist studies at the University of Sydney, Australian National University, Deakin University and University of Edinburgh. His published articles explore aspects of early Buddhism, particularly narrative texts, and he is currently completing the first volume of an edition and translation of the Apadāna, a collection of hagiographies belonging to the Pali canon. He has worked extensively with palm leaf manuscripts preserving Theravāda literature. He has won research grants from numerous funding bodies, including the Pali Text Society and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.
Royce Wiles was formerly Senior Lecturer in Buddhist Studies, Nan Tien Institute, Wollongong. His works include the edited volume Collected Articles of LA Schwarzschild on Indo-Aryan 1953-1979 (1991); a critical edition and translation of the Jain canonical text, the Nirāyavāliya (Prakrit) with commentary (Sanskrit) based on manuscripts from Jaisalmer facilitated by the late Muni Jambūvijaya (2000); and a bibliography of the Śvetāmbara Jain canon to be published by Brill in the Handbook of Oriental Studies series (in preparation).
Wendy Reade is Principal Conservator, Objects and Outdoor Heritage, at International Conservation Services in Sydney. She has a Postgraduate Diploma in Ancient Documentary Studies from Macquarie University and a PhD from the University of Sydney. Wendy is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sydney, where she lectured in Archaeology and Archaeological Science from 1999 to 2015. She works as an archaeologist and conservator on projects in the Middle East, Egypt, Greece and the Balkans, Myanmar and Australia. She is a Professional Member of the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material, a Fellow of the International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, and has published widely on conservation and archaeology in academic and popular platforms. Her most recent publication is The First Thousand Years of Glass-making in the Ancient Near East: Compositional Analyses of Late Bronze to Iron Age Glasses (2021).
Ian McCrabb is the founder and managing director of Systemik (systemiksolutions.com), a Sydney based IT consulting group focused on enterprise websites in the corporate and government sectors. Ian is the designer of READ Workbench (readworkbench.org) a corpus collaboration framework which delivers philological research capability, configured for individual projects, as software as a service. Ian is the founder and director of Prakaś Foundation (prakas.org), a non-profit association established in 2005 to support digital scholarship in Buddhist studies and Indic languages. Ian has an MA in Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies and PhD from the University of Sydney. His PhD had focussed on methodologies for the analysis of donative inscriptions and characterisation of the ritual practices and religious significance of relic establishment in Gandhāra.
Bob Hudson is an Australian archaeologist specialising in Myanmar. He has been an adviser to UNESCO & the Myanmar Ministry of Religious Affairs & Culture for the Bagan, Mrauk-U & Pyu Ancient Cities World Heritage Bids. He has been a visiting lecturer at Yangon University and at the Field School of Archaeology, Pyay. He is Patron of the Myanmar Archaeology Association.