To Revise and Reimagine: On Tradition and Theories of Language in Theravāda Buddhism

Across Buddhist literary traditions, texts are often rewritten and repurposed. Multiple tellings of stories appear in a range of forms, excerpts of certain texts are interpolated into others, editors expand and contract sources, and translations abound. This paper asks what Buddhists are doing when they engage in such practices, and with that, what revisions can reveal about South Asian Buddhist theories of language. A close, comparative reading of three related texts serves as the basis for exploring a few of the ways Theravāda Buddhists have utilized language creatively, both to bring entirely new texts into being by altering the language of earlier texts, and also to re-imagine and re-present other texts by engaging with language’s surplus of meaning.