How a rare Buddhist text led to a legacy of learning at UW and beyond

In 1895, a fleet of texts landed unsolicited at the doorstep of University of Wisconsin librarian Walter M. Smith. Thirty-nine volumes, of varying heft and bound in leather, constituting the sacred Buddhist scripture known as the Tipiṭaka. 

A simple request accompanied their arrival: “It may be interesting to His Majesty to receive some account of your Institution, showing what has been accomplished in your quarter of the ‘New World’ in the cause of letters and education during the last twenty-five years,” the letter, signed by Consul-General to Siam Isaac Townsend Smith, requested.

The 39 volumes, known also as the Pāli Buddhist canon, had been printed and gifted to the university to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the reign of King Chulalongkorn of Siam. Part of the Chakri dynasty in Siam (now Thailand), Chulalongkorn was the successor to King Mongkut the Great, whose reign inspired the novel Anna and the King of Siam and, later, the musical The King and I. 

Despite their accompanying dispatch, the volumes’ arrival on campus was a mystery. They were written in Pāli, one of most widely used scriptural languages in Thailand and South and Southeast Asia. Further, a Thai student would not enroll at the University of Wisconsin for another 25 years. Marked by a simple response, Smith hadn’t grasped the canon’s significance.   

“On behalf of the University of Wisconsin I beg you to present to His Majesty the King of Siam our best thanks for this magnificent gift and to assure him that we appreciate this mark of his interest in the cause of education in the ‘New World,’” Smith, the librarian, replied, promising a portfolio outlining the university’s accomplishments to date.

Yet here was a rare artifact of great historical value at the librarian’s fingertips: the first printed Pāli Tipiṭaka in the world, one of just 1,000 created. Only 49 public and private libraries across the United States would receive a set of their own. The University of Wisconsin was the sole recipient in the Forward State.

More than a century later, the volumes now known as the King of Siam’s edition of the Tipiṭaka still reside at UW–Madison, resting within a secured corner of Memorial Library. While the passing of time has lifted the veil on their contents, it’s also conferred the volumes with dimension that transcends their printed teachings. And by one UW–Madison doctoral candidate’s telling, their lessons and narratives extend far beyond the words on the page.

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In August 2020, Napakadol Kittisenee was preparing to leave his home in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for a doctoral program at UW–Madison when a colleague gave him a piece of advice: When you get to campus, contact UW–Madison librarian Larry Ashmun immediately. 

Ashmun, the colleague told Kittisenee, had a collection of rare Buddhist texts — the King of Siam’s edition of the Tipiṭaka — within a “safety vault.”

“I think that was briefly the first moment, almost the first moment I heard about the first printed Buddhist canon in the world,” Kittisenee says, adding. “I was surprised that UW has this [in] its holdings … I was so moved by seeing the actual manuscript.”

Despite centering them in his coursework, Kittisenee wouldn’t lay eyes on the pages of the manuscripts themselves for another five years. All 39 volumes, threatened by the corrosive promise of time, had been carefully sealed in plastic to preserve their precious contents.

That changed in June 2025, when a delegation from Chiang Mai University arrived at UW–Madison as part of a larger campus visit. Ashmun, Distinguished Southeast Asian & Hmong Studies Bibliographer and Language Sciences Liaison, arranged an opportunity to briefly unwrap the UW Libraries’ holding of the King of Siam’s edition of the Tipiṭaka and showcase its pages to the group of scholars. 

“It was as much a mystery to them as it was to us back in 1895,” Ashmun said. “They’d never seen this material either.” 

That glimpse inside the volumes was the spark Kittisenee needed to curate his fall 2025 Memorial Library exhibit, Lotus in the Heartland of America. Capitalizing on his years of doctoral research, the exhibit was centered on a bold narrative: that the 39 volumes in UW–Madison Libraries’ holdings are actually the catalyst for the expansion of Buddhist studies programs across North American universities today.

Anchored by the King of Siam’s edition of the Tipiṭaka, the Lotus exhibit tapped into the Libraries’ wealth of resources, spanning nations, languages, and Buddhist traditions. The Therīgāthā, a book of poems composed by the first Buddhist women more than 2,000 years ago, was displayed alongside The Introduction of Buddhism to Korea. In another display case rested the Buddhismus für das Abendland, a German-language book on Buddhism published in 1971.

“It was just very moving to see different texts pulled from the collection because we have a lot of important scholarly material,” says Anne Hansen, a UW history professor and Kittisenee’s academic adviser. “ … For scholars, just that act of browsing in the library can be so powerful. We can show you things that you didn’t know.”

For UW alum Ryan Bakko, a student of Kittisenee’s who helped organize the exhibit, the materials were just as much an invitation for contemplation and connection.

“We all have somewhere to go … but if you can take a few more steps and just look at one or two of the pieces — the beads, the book, the prayer bowl — a lot of these little things that you may never see again in your life, they’re kind of rare,” Bakko says. “It has impacted you. It has touched you in a way that you may not know at the present.”

That theme of reverence was reinforced by a seemingly divine sequence of events that brought in Lotus exhibit visitors from across the world, drawn in by the rare Tipiṭaka and Kittisenee’s bold narrative.

Initially planned to open for visitors during the Annual Conference on South Asia hosted by UW-Madison’s Center for South Asia, the exhibit welcomed a group of Buddhist monks and laypeople from Thailand on its first day on October 20, 2025. The group had initially planned their time in Madison around visits to local monasteries and community organizations, but they made a surprise stop at the Lotus exhibit. It was a serendipitous moment, says Kittisenee, “as if the monks and laypeople intentionally hailed from Thailand just to bless the ‘opening ceremony’ of the exhibit.” 

Next came two visits from members of the Lao Buddhist Temple of Madison, complete with lectures from Kittisenee that left the group “very impressed.” So much so that their final visit — on the exhibit’s closing night in December 2025 — saw a return to a tradition begun 130 years ago: the donation of a new, 45-volume version of the Tipiṭaka.

Some may call it happenstance, but not Kittisenee. In religion or faith, he says, “there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

“These are the magic moments because, you know, the opening ceremony was also from a group of monks from Thailand, and the closing ceremony, also Temple of Madison,” Kittisenee says. “I don’t know who planned this, you know?”

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How Buddhist studies became a force on the UW–Madison campus is another story. But by Kittisinee’s account, there’s little coincidence in that. 

That story begins in 1893.

That was the year the King of Siam’s edition of the Tipiṭaka first went to the printing press, in a new edition commissioned by Chulalongkorn. That would also be a pivotal year in the ways of international diplomacy, Kittisenee says: In the Midwest, Chicago hosted the World’s Parliament of Religions and birthed the worldwide interfaith movement. A world away, in Southeast Asia, the Franco-Siamese crisis of 1893 was unfolding. The conflict saw Siam ceding large swaths of territory (including modern-day Laos) to France.  

In the face of colonizing forces encroaching on his country, Chulalongkorn sought to showcase his country’s modernity with his printed Tipiṭaka, says Ashmun. “They wanted to show that they had a civilized core of something to share with the world,” he says.

Kittisenee contends that Chulalongkorn’s gifting of the Tipiṭaka across the world, and specifically to academic institutions, was a show of diplomatic persuasion and an opportunity to reach “future leaders, future influencers in several fields.” 

“From the Siamese looking glass, handing over this … canon is like handing a precious gem to a friend. That’s why it’s about a kind of soft power,” Kittisenee says. “No matter [if] the receiver realizes its value or not, but perhaps they would, you know, realize its value 100 years later.”

Following that initial dispatch in 1895, the relationship between Siam and the University of Wisconsin library would grow over the next 30 years — and with it the library’s collection of rare Buddhist texts. Many of those texts, including historical correspondence collated by Ashmun, are still among the 20,000 Buddhism-focused texts held by Libraries today. These include a 1925 dispatch sent with the “object of promoting the study of the Buddhist Scriptures by students,” and a 1931 Tipiṭaka — the nation’s final donation, just before its revolution in 1932.

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Though the university wouldn’t receive another gift from Siam, Kittisenee says the collection of texts, coupled with UW–Madison’s strong South Asian studies program, provided fertile soil for the cultivation of Buddhist scholarship across many traditions. And so, in 1961, a group of UW scholars led by Professor Richard Robinson did just that: They established the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Buddhist studies doctorate program — the first in North America. 

“Because the university received these types of donations of Buddhist canons early on, over half of the century … Thinking in the eyes of administrators, it makes total sense that we already have resources,” Kittisenee says. “Why don’t we start a program? Why don’t we open a program based on available resources?”

That program attracted the attention of scholars and religious leaders from across the globe. One early champion of the nascent doctorate program included His Holiness Somdej Phra Ariyavaṃsāgatañāṇa, the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand, whose June 1961 visit to Wisconsin was met with wonderment and media coverage in publications like The Capital Times and The Daily Cardinal. 

But it was an invitation in 1967 that would be the most consequential contribution to the expansion of UW–Madison’s influence on Buddhist studies from coast to coast. That year, Robinson welcomed Tibetan Buddhist monk Geshe Lhundub Sopa, the Dalai Lama’s debate partner, to the UW–Madison campus to serve as a teaching assistant for a literary Tibetan course. (It was a move Robinson’s colleague compared to “having the Pope [help] out with a Latin class.”)

Over his 30 years on campus, Sopa became a prominent member of the UW–Madison faculty, eventually gaining tenure and becoming one of the world’s most revered educators in the study of Tibetan Buddhism. Off campus, Sopa is credited with expanding awareness of Tibetan Buddhism both nationally and on the local level: He solicited the Dalai Lama’s historic, first-ever trip to the United States in 1979. Three years prior, in 1976, he established the Deer Park Buddhist Center, a Tibetan-style Buddhist monastery that operates in Oregon, Wisconsin, to this day.

But if the King of Siam’s edition of the Tipiṭaka was the seed for UW–Madison’s Buddhist studies program, then Sopa’s classroom was the garden, and he its tender. As students passed through Sopa’s program, they unfurled their learnings like petals. Many would go on to become prominent scholars of Buddhism in their own right, launching Buddhist and religious studies programs of their own at higher ed institutions from Virginia to California. 

That, Kittisenee says, is what makes UW “a birthplace of Buddhist studies.”

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Today, the 45-volume Tipiṭaka donated in fall 2025 is being processed into the Libraries’ holdings. Soon the texts will join the Tipiṭaka from 1895 on the shelves of Memorial Library. But their stories don’t end in the stacks. The volumes are more than bookends of a timeline; they’re chapters of an enduring story.

It’s one story Kittisenee says he isn’t done telling.

As members of the original Buddhist studies doctorate cohort grow older, he says it’s more important than ever to capture their memories of the program’s early days. Kittisenee hopes to one day create an oral history archive that includes interviews with the original UW–Madison Buddhist studies doctorate students and peers, to continue their legacy.

“If we lose this history, no one will be able to tell us what happened back then because it’s only these people who possess these memories,” Kittisenee says. “This is the whole story. It’s not only about the history of Buddhist studies on campus … But for the broader picture, this is the history of Buddhist studies for the entire U.S. academia and perhaps the world.”