The Vimana-vatthu in nineteenth-century Pali scholarship

Record summary

The Vimana-vatthu, a Pali Buddhist collection describing heavenly mansions and their inhabitants, became increasingly accessible to English-language readers through nineteenth-century Pali scholarship and translation. Its vimānas are religiously and karmically framed celestial abodes, not aircraft reports. The text is relevant because later writers have used the shared word vimana to connect Buddhist cosmology with modern flying-machine narratives. Comparing Pali terminology, translation choices and commentarial context can show how a traditional genre was detached from its original religious setting.