Pali and its dialects:A study

Generally its stated Buddha was preaching in Pali and that canon in Pali Nikayas are transmission of Buddha's teachings,as well as the Orthodox theravadins have equated Pali language with language of Maghada( Modern Bihar in India).
But is Pali really a variant or dialect showing traits of Maghadism ?

One of the most foremost authority in Middle Indo Aryan Philology K.R Norman has this to state:

In Pali nikayas there are words which have characteristics which were typical of Magadhi,i.e s,l and the nominative ending -e( Note: such words are called anomalous words for ex Bhikkave is classical Maghadism)

The evidence from Pali(je jantaghara and the hyperform Yamataggi) shows that there was also a dialect which changed initial y- > j-,and the last of these three examples gives additional evidence for the voicing of -t- > -d-
The puns in the Sabhiya-sutta in the Sutta-nipata show that the sutta was composed in a dialect where intervocalic consonants had become -y-, which supports suggestion  that the name of the Buddha's mother Maya is to be  derived < mata "mother".
The variety of dialect forms which can be seen in Pali represents traces of a number of dialects through which Buddhist texts were transmitted prior to their being canonised and written down by the Theravadins. This is in accordance with the  commonly accepted belief that the Buddha preached in a number of dialects, and goes against the suggestion that there was a single language/dialect into which the Buddha's teachings had been translated.In short,I find difficulty in accepting the theory that the Buddha's teachings were reduced to one standard dialect before transposition into another (western) dialect began to be made. Nor can I see any firm evidence of one BMI dialect from which Pali and other Buddhist languages developed.  As in the case of everything else in this field, however, little is certain, and the data which such studies produces can almost always be explained in another way.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Indo-Muslim Culture in Hyderabad: Old City Neighborhoods in the 19th Century

Hyderabad city’s culture was Indo-Muslim or Mughlai, terms that need definition here. I use Indo-Muslim in preference to Islamic, Indo-Persian, Persianate, or Islamicate. I prefer Indo-Muslim to the other four commonly-used alternatives because, first, Muslim rather than Islamic emphasizes a civilizational and not a religious culture (Islamicate has the same meaning but probably not to the general reader). Certainly Hyderabad was not an Islamic state: the Nizams never tried to impose Islamic law or to convert people.Second, IndoMuslim puts the emphasis on the Indian location, although undeniably the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan from the mid-fourteenth century, its five successor Deccani sultanates (Bijapuri, Golconda, Bidar, Berar, and Ahmednagar) from the early sixteenth century, and the Nizams, starting as Mughal governors after the conquests of Bijapuri and Golconda by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1686 and 1687, modeled their court culture on that of Persia. I use the term Mug...
Read more

Skull Imagery and Skull Magic in the Yoginī Tantras

The Buddhist tantras constitute a unique class of Buddhist literature. While developing from earlier trends in Buddhist thought and practice, they also constituted a serious challenge to Buddhist identity, largely due to the fact that many of them contain passages that appear to transgress the tenets of Buddhist morality.1 Tantric literature also departed, gradually, from the rhetorical norms of Mahayana Buddhism. While early tantras maintained the rhetorical style of the Mahayana sutras, later tantras, and most notably the Yoginī tantras, radically departed from this style.2 This essay will explore one small facet of the vast array of unusual elements that can be found in this literature, namely, the image of the skull, as well as the use of skulls in tantric ritual. Like other elements, this deployment of skulls in the tantras was disquieting to some, evoking as it does the uncanny atmosphere of the charnel ground. Through this exploration, I will argue that skulls are multifaceted...
Read more

Fate (Buddhism)

In Buddhism, the concept of destiny or fate is called  niyati. Niyati  refers to predetermined, inevitable, and unalterable events. In some religious traditions of India, such as the Vedanta school of Hinduism, an external or divine power or outside agency is seen to be able to influence one’s fate. However, in Buddhism, which is doctrinally an atheistic religion, there is no supreme being or force which is seen to control or influence the course of an individual’s life, and essentially, the concept of  niyati  plays only a minor role compared to the concept of karma (Sanskrit; Pali:  kāmma ). The Buddha did make a distinction between karma and  niyati , in the sense that some events are not karmically determined but are rather the result of  niyati.  For the most part, however, individuals are viewed to possess the capacity to manipulate future events through interventions to karma. The law of karma is seen to determine the conditions of rebirth ...
Read more