Over the last few years, a collaborative project has been developing between the Sinhala Buddhist organisations the International Centre for Theravada Buddhism (ICTB) UK and Paramaththa Foundation (Sri Lanka) and the London-based Wellcome Collection. Wellcome currently holds several hundred palm-leaf manuscripts in Sinhala and Pali with Sinhala script. Through conversations and meetings, the project has sought to evolve a model for collaborative cataloguing practices for global heritage material. In this piece, members of all three institutions share some of their thoughts and experiences.
ICTB UK and Paramaththa heritage work
International Centre for Theravada Buddhism UK (ICTB) UK is a UK based non-profit organisation working with Theravada Buddhist monks in the world (especially in Sri Lanka), to provide a tangible communal platform to reinforce the practice of Theravada Buddhism in the UK. A large part of our organisation’s mission is to initiate and prosper an effective repository of Theravada Buddhist texts, literature and cultural articles, and make them readily accessible to the public. We believe this will not only be of immense value to the practitioners and devotees of Theravada Buddhism, but also prove extremely beneficial to the broader artistic development of the Buddhist culture.
Paramaththa is a non-profit organisation based in Sri Lanka that is striving to develop and promote research and theological studies of Theravada Buddhism, positioning its secular and religious discourse within the context of contemporary society. Paramaththa is the platform of a forest monastery in North Central Sri Lanka that was established with the aspiration of sharing the sacerdotal Dhamma knowledge of the most venerable forest monks with the wider society.
Sinhalese manuscripts at Wellcome Collection
Wellcome Collection is a free museum, library, and archive based in London. According to the latest estimate, Wellcome Collection holds about 22,500 manuscripts from all over the world, and spanning at least three millennia. About one third of these manuscripts stem from South Asia, making the collection one of the larger of its kind globally.
Within this collection, around 500 are either in Sinhala or in Pali, written in the Sinhala script. The collection is familiar to many Sri Lankan doctors for its emphasis on Ayurvedic and other medical texts, but it also contains–like most other parts of Wellcome’s collections–a range of rare, more informal texts; such as recipes, physician handbooks, and even items not directly related to medicine. The main source of information for these manuscripts has up till now been Dr K. D. Somadasa’s 1996 catalogue, which covers 469 manuscripts.
Co-creating TEI records
Since 2019, Wellcome Collection has embraced cataloguing using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) across its manuscript collections. We have written extensively on the benefits and opportunities of TEI for cataloguing, including at The Digital Orientalist. In the context of this project, it’s worth highlighting that TEI is particularly apt at working with multilingual, multiscript input, facilitating a variety of textual and material structures, including palm-leaf manuscripts, and crucially, collaborative work.
Sinhalese manuscript digitisation project
The project started with the ICTB UK and Paramaththa teams visiting Wellcome Collection onsite to view a selection of Sinhala manuscripts and offering initial input on their metadata. While Somadasa’s 1996 catalogue is available, Ven. Kothmale Kumarakassapa Thero was able to provide even richer contextual and specific information for both the manuscripts and the texts they contain. 19 manuscripts were recommended for digitisation, and these are now all digitised and available in open access.
In the next step, members of Wellcome Collection prepare TEI files, drawing on the 1996 cataloguing data, while ICTB UK and Paramaththa use the digitised images to contribute metadata in both Sinhala and English. The added metadata provide rich insights into the manuscripts, and the multilingual records become more discoverable, searchable, and accessible to a wider audience. This is in keeping with Wellcome’s vision of a world where truly everyone’s experience of health matters and cultural heritage contributes to create a more equitable future, and ICTB UK and Paramaththa’s mission to initiate and prosper an effective repository of Theravada Buddhist texts, literature and cultural articles and make them readily accessible to the public.
Venerable Kothmale Kumarakassapa Thero studying a Sinhala palm leaf manuscript in the Wellcome Collection Rare Materials Room.
Metadata enriched Sinhalese manuscripts listed below are now made freely available to individuals worldwide through the Library’s Digital Collections platform. This list is being continuously updated as further manuscripts are added.
Parting thoughts
Looking at the future for this project and others like it, it is tempting to look at such brilliant examples of union catalogue databases such as Fihrist, which efficiently draws on open-access TEI repositories to provide an overview of every manuscript from the Islamicate world currently held by UK institutions. Other examples of union databases featuring multilingual, global material include India International Centre’s pioneering SAMHiTA. Would there be a place for a similar union catalogue for Sinhala manuscripts in the UK and even globally? If there is, we hope it will be built on the spirit of open and friendly collaboration we have enjoyed by sharing these manuscripts and their immeasurable insights!
Written by Ven. Kothmale Kumarakassapa Thero, Madhurika Jayawardena, and Amila Perera, and Adrian Plau.
