Nītimañjarī

This is a translation into Pali, not an original Pali work — and the distinction has to be made first, because the Sanskrit book it renders carries the very same title.

The Sanskrit Nītimañjarī was finished in 1494 CE (samvat 1550) by Dya Dviveda, son of Lakṣmīdhara and Lakṣmī, grandson of Atri: 164–166 gnomic verses, each illustrated by a Vedic legend and by Vedic texts, modelled on Kṣemendra's Cārucaryā and drawing its Vedic passages through Sāyaṇa's commentary on the Ṛgveda. Ikeya describes it the same way — “a collection of versified moral maxims, written in Sanskrit and accompanied by a commentary that cited from the Hindu Vedic scriptures” — and says of a verse of it quoted in Burma that “the Pali verse … was itself a translation from Sanskrit into Pali”.

The Pali is the work of Ledi Pandita U Maung Gyi (1878–1939 CE), a scholar-monk and writer, whose “Pali and Burmese translation of the Nītimañjarī was published posthumously in 1956, with a foreword dated 3 September 1920” (Ikeya 2024, p. 128). He worked in the nissaya manner — an interphrasal rendering of the Pali followed by a fuller vernacular gloss — a form which, as Ikeya notes, “often function[s] more as commentarial texts than as simple translations of Pali source texts”. Verses from it were still being quoted in the Burmese press in 1932.