This is the wisdom-and-conduct literature: how to live well, told as maxim, admonition and proverb. The catalogue files all 175 witnesses cleanly as Didactics, and the titles fall into two clear registers.
On the learned side sit the Pali nīti classics — above all the Lokanīti, which appears here several times over: the great anthology of moral maxims that travelled from Indian nīti through Burma into the north, the standard gnomic reader of the region. Around it cluster the ovāda literature (owāda, admonition — Owata tipani, Owatanusasini katha) and the subhāsit (subhāsita, "well-spoken" sayings — the proverb collections).
On the vernacular side sits something warmer and more domestic: the folk-didactic of elders instructing the young. Pu thao son lan — "grandfather teaches grandchild" — Manglai son luk ("Mangrai teaches his children"), kham son teaching-verses, and the sayings of Phaya In (Indra) as folk wisdom-figure. Alongside them run texts on householder conduct (gihi-cariyā, Kihicaritta) — worldly ethics for the layperson, not the monk.
For the wider collection this is the ethical layer: adjacent to the canon but not soteriological, adjacent to the wichaa but not efficacious. It is where the tradition records its values rather than its doctrine or its power — the voice of the teacher and the elder rather than the scribe of scripture.
The physical profile is ordinary for a learned genre — 88% palm-leaf, 94% Tham Lanna, overwhelmingly Pali-and-Lan Na — and it skews late, the 20th century (46 dated witnesses) edging out the 19th, consistent with a living folk-wisdom still being copied within living memory.
But its geography is extraordinary, and is the real finding here — see the first note.