The Significance of Donations in Thai Buddhism: From the Manuscript Literature of the Sabbadāna-ānisaṃsa Collection

As a characteristic feature of Thai Buddhism, one may imagine a scene of laypeople enthusiastically donating to temples and monks. Such daily acts of donation are an act leading to merit accumulation and are a typical practice of Thai Buddhism. The literature that plays a key role in explaining the significance of merit-making is the Ānisaṃsa literary genre. Since text belonging to this genre exist only in palm-leaf manuscripts, little research has been done.Many of the Ānisaṃsa texts exist in a concise form, comprising a single bundle of approximately 24 leaves. However, the existence of two extensive collections has also been confirmed. We examine one of these collections, namely, the Sabbadāna-ānisaṃsa （The Fruit of Merit for All Donations）. The Sabbadāna-ānisaṃsa is a text describing acts concerning various donation items （food, clothing, etc.） that laypeople offer to monks. The basic structure of this text comprises ten bundles. In contrast, the royal edition of Sabbadāna-ānisaṃsa, preserved at a well-known academic temple, Wat Pho, has twenty bundles. What is the meaning behind compiling and preserving a text that originally existed in a basic structure of ten bundles into a royal edition with twenty bundles, copied by the order of King Rama III （reigned 1824–1851）? We aim to clarify the differences between these texts by unraveling the expanded content of the text from the shared part of ten-bundle structure, identify common points in the expanded portions, and reveal the hidden meaning therein. By doing so, we examine how the meaning of laypeople’s acts of donation was recompiled in the royal edition, thereby shedding some light on the development of the Ānisaṃsa literature.