Overview of Theravāda Buddhist Manuscripts in China : หน้า 88/141

I will give a brief overview of the manuscripts that have been discovered and catalogued, an explanation of some current research projects, and I will discuss some of the problems that threaten China's palm-leaf manuscript culture with extinction.1 I. An Overview of Theravāda Buddhist manuscripts in China Most of China's Theravāda Buddhist manuscripts come from the border regions of Yunnan Province in Southwestern China. This is where China's Theravāda Buddhist communities are located: the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Pu'er City, Dehong Autonomous Prefecture, Lingcang City and Baoshang City. The ethnic groups who follow Theravāda Buddhism – the Dai, Palaung, De'ang and sections of the Wa and Yi nationalities – live in this area which is known in Tai Lü as Sipsong Panna, or สืบสองพันนา, which means "twelve thousand rice fields." The Dai group, which has a population of more than 1,000,000 people, is the largest group of Theravāda Buddhists in China.2 There are Buddhist temples in almost every Dai village, and Buddhist belief and ritual is an important part of Dai social life. The Dai people value their Buddhism and their Buddhist manuscripts highly. The Administrative Department for the Religious Affairs of the People's Government, Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, has set about collecting and collating the Buddhist manuscripts that are kept in Buddhist temples, the State Archives, academic institutions and in private collections. 1 The analysis of the contents and scope of the Buddhist manuscripts of the Sipsong Panna region is beyond the scope of this article, and is the subject of a future publication. 2 Dai people are part of the Tai ethnic group that can be found living in northern Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam as well as Southwestern China. The Dai group is one of the 55 minority groups in China. According to the officially published investigation results of 1990 Chinese Population Census, the total population of the Dai in China is about 1,115,900, and 98.55% inhabit in Yunnan Province, of which those in Xishuangbanna State are 296,930, the rest are mainly distributed in places like Dehong Autonomous Prefecture (nearly 700,000 people), Gengma, Menglian, Jinggu, Yuanjiang, Xinping and Jinping.