Tipitakadhara Tipitakakovida Selection Examinations

The Tipiṭakadhara Tipiṭakakovida Selection Examinations (Burmese: တိပိဋကဓရ တိပိဋကကောဝိဒ ရွေးချယ်ရေး စာမေးပွဲ) are the highest-level monastic examinations held annually in Burma since 1948, organized by the Ministry of Religious Affairs.[1] It tests the candidates' memory of Tripiṭaka (or "Three Baskets") both in oral (five levels) and in written components (five levels).[2] The examinations require candidates to display their mastery of "doctrinal understanding, textual discrimination, taxonomic grouping and comparative philosophy of Buddhist doctrine." A Sayadaw who has passed all levels of the examinations is often referred as the Sutabuddha (lit. 'The Buddha of Knowledge').[3][4]

Tipitakadhara Tipitakakovida Selection Examinations
Tipitakadhara Tipitakakovida Examinations, Mahapasana Guha Cave, Yangon
TypeMonastic examinations
Developer / administratorTipitakadhara Tipitaka Kovida Selection Examination Board, Ministry of Religious Affairs and Culture (Myanmar)
Knowledge / skills testedfive levels of reciting (Tipiṭakadhara)
five levels of idea by writing (Tipiṭakakovida)
Duration33 days– from last week of December to third week of January
Offeredonce a year
Countries / regionsMyanmar
LanguagesBurmese
Websitemahana.org.mm
dra.gov.mm

History
Convening of the Sixth Buddhist council at the Great Cave.

In order to held Sixth Buddhist council at Burma in the Buddhist era 2500, the other Theravada five countries asked Burma whether there was the Tripiṭaka reciter in Burma. Therefore, the Burmese government held the Tipiṭakadhara Tipiṭakakovida Selection Examinations since 1948. The examinations are so difficult that no one could pass until 1953.[5] Mingun Sayadaw became the first winner of the exam in 1953, and was appointed the position of Chaṭṭhasaṅgatisajaka (Chief Respondent) to answer the Dhamma questions asked by Mahasi Sayadaw.[6]

Eligibility criteria

To take the examinations, the candidates must be only monks and novices who passed the examinations of Pathamagyi, Vinayavidu level, third level of Thamanaykyaw, or lecturer level of Cetiyangana and Sakyasiha.[1]

Content

Recitation

The recitation content includes a cumulative 8026 pages of Tripiṭaka:[1]

  1. 851 pages from the first two texts of the Vinaya Piṭaka
  2. 1409 pages from the second three texts of the Vinaya Piṭaka
  3. 779 pages from the three Dīgha Nikāya texts of the Sutta Piṭaka
  4. 1390 pages from the first five Abhidharma texts of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka
  5. 3597 pages from the second two Abhidhammā texts of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka.

Ideology written answer

All texts are taken at the oral-based examination plus its relevant commentaries, sub-commentaries, and treatises.[1]

Procedures
Mahāpāsāṇa Guhā Cave is where the Tipiṭakadhra Tipiṭakakovida examinations are held annually.

The whole examinations process takes 33 days in total – from last week of December to the third week of January – at the Kaba Aye Pagoda's Mahāpāsāṇa Cave in Yangon.

At the reciting part, candidates have to take a text for three days, and four times in the morning, and five times in the afternoon each day (25 minutes and 10-minute break per time). They will be prompted only five times in the whole day.

Those who passed the exam without being prompted are marked as "visiṭṭha" (distinguished).

Titles offered

Sayadaws who have passed five levels of ideology writing are awarded the degree of "Tipiṭakakovida" (lit. 'Tripitaka expert'), and the degree of "Tipiṭakadhara Tipiṭakakovida" (lit. 'Expert who keeps Tripitaka in mind') is awarded to those who have passed all levels of the examination. Five years after receiving Tipiṭakadhara Tipiṭakakovida Degree, the Government of Myanmar offers him the title of Tipiṭakadhara Dhammabhanḍāgārika (lit. 'Tripitaka expert and Dhamma treasurer').

Reciting
  1. If one passes on one Piṭaka, a white Kanakkadan umbrella with red handle.
  2. If one passes on two Piṭakas, two white Kanakkadan umbrellas with red handles.
  3. If one passes on three Piṭakas, three white Kanakkadan umbrellas with red handles.

They are offered Sāsanā flags bearing the above emblems.[2]

Ideology written answer
  1. If one passes one Piṭaka, a white Kanakkadan umbrella with a yellow handle.
  2. If one passes two Piṭaka, two white Kanakkadan umbrellas with a yellow handle, Sāsanā flag bearing above emblems, degree-certificate, water-land travel upper-class free ticket, rice for every month, and Navakamma-Vatthu money are offered monthly.
  3. If one passes three Tipiṭaka, three white Kanakkadan umbrellas with yellow handle. Sāsanā flag bearing above emblem, Tipiṭakadhara Tipiṭakakovidha pass-certificate, and water-land travel upper-class free ticket, monthly rice for alms-food and nāvakamma-vatthu are offered.[2]

Recipients
See also: List of Sāsana Azani recipients

The late Venerable Mingun Sayadaw is the first title-winner of the Tipiṭakadhara exam in Burma.[4] As of 2020, only 15 monks have passed both the oral and written components, who are recognized by the Burmese government as "Sāsana Azani" (Pali: Sāsanājāneyya, lit. "Noble Hero of the Buddhist doctrine").[7]

The awarded 15 Tipiṭakadhara Tipiṭakakovida, Tipiṭakadhara Dhammabhanḍāgārika Sayadaws are as follows.[8][6]

No. Dharma name Common title Name in Burmese Pass year Location of study
1 Bhaddanta Vicittasārābhivaṃsa (1911–1993) Mingun Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ဝိစိတ္တသာရာဘိဝံသ (မင်းကွန်းဆရာတော်) 1953 Dhammanāda monastery, Mingun
2 Bhaddanta Neminda (1928–1991) Pakkhoku Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ နေမိန္ဒ (ပခုက္ကူဆရာတော်) 1959 Mahāvisutārāma monastery, Mawlamyine
3 Bhaddanta Kosalla (1921–1995) Pyay Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ကောသလ္လ (ပြည်ဆရာတော်) 1963 Pañcanikāya monastery, Yankin
4 Bhaddanta Sumaṅgalālaṅkāra (1946–2006) Gandarum Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ သုမင်္ဂလာလင်္ကာရ (ဂန္ဓာရုံဆရာတော်) 1973 Mahāgadhāruṃ monastery, Mayangon
5 Bhaddanta Sīrindābhivaṃsa (1943 – ) Yaw Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ သီရိန္ဒာဘိဝံသ (ယောဆရာတော်) 1984 Mahāvisuddhāruṃ monastery, Bahan
6 Bhaddanta Vāyāmindābhivaṃsa (1955 – ) Yayzagyo Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ဝါယာမိန္ဒာဘိဝံသ (ရေစကြိုဆရာတော်) 1995 Tipiṭaka monastery, Dagon
7 Bhaddanta Sīlakkhandhābhivaṃsa (1964 – ) Mawgyun Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ သီလက္ခန္ဒာဘိဝံသ (မော်ကျွန်းဆရာတော်) 1999 Tipiṭakanikāya monastery
8 Bhaddanta Vaṃsapālālaṅkāra (1965 – ) Myinmu Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ဝံသပါလာလင်္ကာရ (မြင်းမူဆရာတော်) 1999 Tipiṭakanikāya monastery, Mingun
9 Bhaddanta Gandhamālālaṅkāra (1968 – ) Myingyan Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ဂန္ဓမာလာလင်္ကာရ (မြင်းခြံဆရာတော်) 2000 Dhammanāda monastery, Mingun
10 Bhaddanta Sunada (1955 – ) Tipiṭakadhara Sunlun Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ သုနန္ဒ (စွန်းလွန်းဆရာတော်) 2004 Sulun Vipassanā monastery, Thingangyun
11 Bhaddanta Indapāla (1960 – ) Rammawadi Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ဣန္ဒပါလ (ရမ္မာဝတီဆရာတော်) 2004 Tipiṭaka monastery, Dagon
12 Bhaddanta Abhijātābhivaṃsa (1968 – ) Sagaing Tipitaka Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ အဘိဇာတာဘိဝံသ (စစ်ကိုင်းဆရာတော်) 2010 Mahāsubodāruṃ monastery, Sagaing
13 Bhaddanta Indācariya (1964 – ) Butalin Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ဣန္ဒာစရိယ (ဘုတလင်ဆရာတော်) 2012 Tipiṭakanikāya monastery, Mingun
14 Bhaddanta Vīriyānanda Kanbawza Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ဝီရိယာနန္ဒ (ကမ္ဗောဇဆရာတော်) 2017 Tipiṭakanikāya monastery, Dagon
15 Bhaddanta Paññāvaṃsābhivaṃsa Kyaukpadaung Sayadaw ဘဒ္ဒန္တ ပညာဝံသာဘိဝံသ (ကျောက်ပန်းတောင်းဆရာတော်) 2020 Mahagandawinnikaya monastery, Dagon Myothit (East)

References
  1. "တိပိဋကဓရရွေးချယ်ရေးစာမေးပွဲ – Department of Religious Affairs".
  2. "Tipitakadhara Selection Examinations – The State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee".
  3. "Titles, certificates conferred on winners of 72nd Tipitakadhara Tipitaka Kovida Selection Exam | Myanmar State Counsellor Office". www.statecounsellor.gov.mm.
  4. "သက်ရှိထင်ရှား တိပိဋကသုံးပုံအောင် ဆရာတော် ၁၀ ပါး ဟောကြားမည့် (သုတဗုဒ္ဓ အထူးတရားပွဲ) စက်တင်ဘာ ၂၇ ရက်မှ အောက်တိုဘာ ၆ ရက်အထိ ၁၀ ည ကျင်းပမည်". Eleven Media Group Co., Ltd (in Burmese).
  5. "BBC Burmese – အစီအစဉ်များ – မိုဘီဂျီနိုနဲ့ တိပိဋကဆရာတော်". www.bbc.com (in Burmese).
  6. "တိပိဋကဓရရွေးချယ်ရေးစာမေးပွဲ – www.mahana.org.mm".
  7. "တိပိဋကဓရတိပိဋကကောဝိဒ စာမေးပွဲအောင်မြင်တော်မူသည့် တိပိဋကဓရတိပိဋကကောဝိဒ ဘွဲ့တံဆိပ်တော်ရ ကျောက်ပန်းတောင်းဆရာတော် အပါအဝင် သာသနာအာဇာနည်အရှင်သူမြတ် ၁၀၆ ပါးတို့အား အောင်လက်မှတ်နှင့်ဘွဲ့တံဆိပ်တော်များ ဆက်ကပ်လှူဒါန်းပွဲသို့ နိုင်ငံတော်၏အတိုင်ပင်ခံပုဂ္ဂိုလ်တက်ရောက် | Myanmar State Counsellor Office". www.statecounsellor.gov.mm.
  8. "၁၅ ပါးမြောက် သာသနာ့အာဇာနည်ပေါ်ထွန်းပြီ". MDN – Myanmar DigitalNews (in Burmese).
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