“Simavicarana” presents an annotated romanized edition of a letter composed in Pali by Thera Vajiranana - that is, by King Mogkut (Rama IV) of Siam when he was a monk before he took the throne. Sent in 1844 to Thera Lamkagoda Dhirananda in Sri Lanka, the long and learned letter is effectively a monograph on practical aspects of ceremonial monastic boundaries. the letter is supplemented by a shorter letter on the same subject. The volume includes a bibliography, an index locorum, and an index of names, titles, and place names.
““Simavicarana,” here superbly edited and introduced to the academic world for the first time by Petra Kieffer-Pülz, is one example of the great wealth of Pali works composed by King Rama IV of Siam (Thailand) [...] The corpus of King Rama IV’s Pali works takes up more than two hundred printed pages, or more than five hundred pages together with Thai translations [... but] despite the fact that the royal monk was international in outlook, and that works like “Simavicarana” itself were international in scope, these works are scarcely known to international scholarship - and without a knowledge of these works, the understanding of Thailand’s Pali literary heritage may be deemed incomplete. Petra Kieffer-Pülz has performed a great service to the academic world by editing a new window into the Pali scholarship of Siam.”
From the preface by Assistant Professor Dr. Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, Dean, The Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok
Petra Kieffer-Pülz
studied Indology, Classical Archaeology and Tibetology in Germany and Switzerland. In 1989 she received her Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen with a thesis on the Buddhist ceremonial boundary (“Die Sima”, Berlin 1992). From 2001 to 2010 she worked on the Pali Ganthipada literature (Seminar for Indology, Halle-Wittenberg) a project funded by the German Research Foundation (“Die Ganthipadas in der Vajirabuddhitika”, to appear). She currently investigates scholastic Pali, a project of German Research Foundation at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Her research centers on historical, cultural and legal aspects of Buddhism.
