It also publishes ancillary works including dictionaries, concordances, books for students of Pāli and the Journal of the Pali Text Society.
Thomas William Rhys Davids was one of three British civil servants who were posted to Sri Lanka, in the 19th century, the others being George Turnour, and Robert Caesar Childers (1838–1876).
The work of bringing out the Roman text editions of the Pāli Canon was not financially rewarding, but was achieved with the backing of the Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka who underwrote the printing costs.
In 1994, the Pāli Text Society inaugurated the Fragile Palm Leaves project, an attempt to catalogue and preserve Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts from Southeast Asia.
During the colonial era, many palm-leaf manuscripts were disassembled and destroyed, with individual pages of texts being sold as decorative objets d'art to Western collectors.
The linguistic merit of Pāli was so culturally significant because, as Foyley writes, the language was “as dead as is Latin, and yet as alive, built out of old Indian dialects as the vehicle of the Canon…”.
Since he had familial connections to ministry, and he received his education in Germany, studying both Greek and Sanskrit, Rhys Davids was employed by the British government to serve as an administrator in Sri Lanka from 1864 to 1872.
During this decade of his career, Rhys Davids was posted in both Galle and Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, serving as a clergyman, a judge, Secretary to Governor William Henry Gregory, and as Archeological Commissioner.
[8] Although, in Europe during this period of time, Buddhist studies did not exist as an academic discipline, Rhys Davids sought to challenge Eurocentric ideas of Christian supremacy in order to argue in support of Buddhism as a valid religious area of knowledge.
According to Foyley, Rhys Davids’ goal for the Pāli Text Society was to “fructify the new attention that had just begun to be given to monastic libraries of ‘palm-leaf manuscripts.”[6] In Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Carolina Augusta Foyley Rhys Davids recounts how by 1936, the society was losing financial support due to the economic state of the country during The Great Depression.
[11] Upon acknowledging how little time she had left, she wrote in a diary entry "It is not likely I shall be here to finish to our work”, referring to the re-issuing of the original translations of Vinaya, Milinda, and Jataka.