President gifts PM Modi Pali Tripitaka and its English translation

During his two-day official visit to India, President Ranil Wickremesinghe gifted a full set of Pali Tripitaka and its English translation to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, symbolizing the deep spiritual and cultural connection between the two countries.

Following his meeting with Prime Minister Modi, at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, President Wickremesinghe presented the Indian Prime Minister with the copy of the Dhammapada volume from the collection of the Pali Tripitaka as a symbol of the gift. President Wickremesinghe also handed over to Prime Minister Modi, the photographs of the bookcase containing the full set of volumes together with an explanatory note on the Tripitaka and its significance to the civilizational relationship between Sri Lanka and India.

The set of Pali Tripitaka and its English translation consist of 91 volumes published by the Pali Text Society (PTS). Transliteration of the Tripitaka into Roman script was pioneered by the Pali Text Society founded in 1881 by T.W. Rhys Davids, with the support and patronage of Sri Lankan scholarly monks. Rhys Davids, an English scholar of the Pali language and one time Professor of Pali at the University of London, had learned the Pali language from Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, where he was a civil servant from 1863 to 1872.