Pariyatti Executive Director Brihas Sarathy, flicks through one of the original books by the Burma/Myanmar Tipitaka Association.
Photos by: Courtesy of Pariyatti

Northwest-based Pariyatti is broadening its global dharma publishing by printing in India a less-expensive collection of the Pali Canon, and by printing new versions of commentaries from Burma.

The non-profit organization, which operates a warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon, and a headquarters, warehouse and retail store in Onalaska, Washington, already ships books worldwide, and offers digital dharma books and audio products to people around the  world.

Of particular importance is Pariyatti’s “Indian Editions” project: creating for people in India a lower-cost hardcover print version of the Pali Canon. While these already are published as “Teachings of the Buddha” by U.S. based Wisdom Publications, most people in India can’t afford $75 or $85 for a book, the price of the U.S. versions. Already more people from India download dharma offerings than people from any other country.

The second important development is Pariyatti’s most recent imprint, which is republishing titles from the Myanmar Pitaka Association, formerly known as the Burma Pitaka Association. The new line is called MPA Pariyatti Editions.

Both of these efforts are aligned with Pariyatti’s mission: “Pariyatti exists to bring people into contact with the teachings of the Buddha. We provide resources in the Theravāda tradition, and support Pāli language students and Vipassana meditators, in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin as taught by S.N. Goenka. We serve meditators, scholars, educators and the public by providing ready access to hard-to-find titles, a large collection of online resources, pilgrimages, and Pāli workshops.”

Pariyatti is the distributor of Pali Text Society titles in the Americas, and the North American distributor of all Buddhist Publication Society (BPS) titles. By agreement with the society, Pariyatti also republishes BPS books worldwide. The content is generally unchanged, but Pariyatti editions are printed on thicker paper and have a stronger spine. Pariyatti welcomes donations to continue its work.

Books to India

The current president of the Pariyatti Board of Directors, Nishant Choudhary, learned in early 2019 that Western Theravadā monk Bhikkhu Bodhi was traveling to India. There Bhikkhu Bodhi was to officiate at a ceremony at the Mahabodhi Buddha Vihara in Hyderabad, to enshrine relics of the Buddha.

Choudhary travelled to Hyderabad to see if he could meet Bhikkhu Bodhi, to ask permission for Pariyatti to make available the Wisdom series of the Pali Canon. Most of these texts were translated from Pali to English by Bhikku Bodhi.

When they finally met, Choudhary learned that Bhikkhu Bodhi had been thinking the same thing, recognizing how expensive the U.S. Wisdom Publications editions are for people in India.

Ven. Bodhi promised to connect Pariyatti with the CEO of Wisdom Publications. Once the connection was made gears started turning, and by the end of October,2022, three softcovers of the series were available in India.

Now in 2024 the first two hardcovers have been released for the Indian market, with three more to follow. The books are printed by Thomson Press, the best printer in India. Embassy Books in Delhi takes care of the distribution.  Here they are listed on the Pariyatti website.

The Wisdom hardcovers Pariyatti publishes in India feature a foil-stamped cloth binding, as well as a dust jacket. For such a cover a designer first creates the artwork, and then a print technician creates a metal die etched with a mirror image of the artwork. When printing the cover the die is pressed through a sheet of colored foil, leaving an impression of the artwork.

In partnership with Pariyatti, India-based non-profit Su Savaka Sansthan plans to freely distribute in India 400 sets of the five wonderful hardcovers to monasteries, colleges, scholars, vipassana teachers, and serious old students.

Books from Burma

 The volition to print books from the Myanmar Pitaka Association first came up around 2005, when Brihas Sarathy, Pariyatti’s executive director, was volunteering with the association and serving as a board member.

“A couple of popular titles from the Myanmar Pitaka Association had been made available by The Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India, but they were hard to come by,” Sarathy said. “In 2005, while I was in India, I wanted to see if these books could be republished and made more widely available.”

While initial efforts to contact the The Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies failed, by May of 2006, a friend found the Myanmar Bookshop website, which had launched earlier that year. We were thrilled to see that they carried the entire catalog of books from the Myanmar Pitaka Association. This included an abundance of titles on numerous nikayas (collections) and suttas (discourses), as well as commentaries by eminent Burmese scholar-monks. 

“We started ordering them for ourselves and our dhamma friends, and found the books were always bound the same; they had an orange cover and were printed on what looked like recycled paper,” Sarathy said. “For a fixed rate of about $12, the Myanmar Bookshop offered all-inclusive shipping back then, and we were amazed at how quickly batches of books arrived from Burma to the U.S.  and Canada.

“We were trying to collect all their English Myanmar Pitaka Association books, and eventually you would end up with a whole segment on your bookshelf  filled with these orange covers,” Sarathy said. “At that time I kept thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to offer high-quality editions of these books’?”

About a decade later, in January 2015, Sarathy —by then executive director—conferred with one of Pariyatti’s board members who was originally from Burma, about getting permission to republish the series. By December of that year they were successful, with the arrival of an official letter from the Myanmar Ministry of Religious Affairs and Culture, giving Pariyatti permission to republish the titles.

Long process

“Dhammapada: Verses & Stories,” was the first Myanmar Pitaka Association title to come out, in 2019. Four titles have been published so far. The process of releasing the texts will be far quicker than we had first thought, because it turns out digital versions are available through the Kaba Aye Buddha Research Library (KBRL) website. This means we won’t have to scan in the physical copies, as we had first feared. Several staff members and volunteers will be involved with this.

“Although it is going to be a long process, we are going to end up with this beautiful set of bound books. It will be a wonderful resource for scholars, as there are only a limited number of English translations of the Piṭaka,” Sarathy said.