Pali

The word Pāli means “a scriptural text.” However, western scholars have used the term to mean the language in which those scriptures were written. Hence, over a period of time, the word has come to mean as “the language of the Buddhist scriptures.” This meaning can be said to be a slight extension of the original use of the word.

Pali refers to that ancient language in which canonical works and commentaries could be found thereon, in addition to several other writings of the Southern Buddhists, that is, those belonging to the countries of modern Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. In fact, these are the only works of Hīnayāna Buddhism that exist today.

Many centuries ago, Hīnayāna Buddhists also wrote their scriptures in languages other than Pāli. However, with the early extinction of Buddhism from India, all those non-Pāli texts were lost. Since, Pāli at that time was the language for writing scriptures for most Buddhists throughout India – both northern and southern – it would be incorrect to term Pāli as the language of Hīnayāna Buddhism or Southern Buddhism.

As a Middle Indic or Middle Indo-Aryan language, Pāli is sometimes grouped in the Prakrit languages. Most of the features of the Pāli language seem to be borrowed from other Middle Indo-Aryan languages, and hence, its actual origin is not known. The main idea or core of the Pāli language is from the vernaculars used in west and west-central India and is different from the vernacular language used by the Buddha, who hailed from the north and northeastern part of India. Buddha’s own language was neither Pāli nor Māgadhī, as claimed by several historians, and both Pāli and Māgadhī differ from each other in many parameters.

It is said that the Buddha permitted his disciples to learn and teach his preaching in their own languages. So, initially Buddhism spread in various local languages, as the followers were from different parts of the country. And when the process of compiling canon of scriptures began few centuries after the death of the Buddha, some of those local dialects were able to influence the language of the scriptures, thus forming a dialectical mixture. While it is difficult to accurately determine the period when the language to be used in the writings of scriptures was finalized, it is very likely that the first canon was written between the third and the first centuries B.C.E.

The linguistic tradition must have been fixed during that time with rules and practices laid down. As the Pāli canonical texts and their commentaries began to be written, they were exported to Ceylon and became a part of their Hīnayāna Buddhism or Southern Buddhism. When the Indian subcontinent was invaded by Muslim and Arab rulers, Pāli became extinct along with Buddhism and was preserved only in the countries that are today referred to as Southern Buddhist countries.

Tipiṭaka is the collective name given to the canonical texts and their commentaries in Pāli language. Besides Sri Lanka, these texts are currently preserved in Myanmar and Thailand, where they were carried from the ancient Ceylon. Tradition says they originated in India and were carried to Ceylon by Emperor Asoka’s son Mahinda in the third-century B.C.E.

During the time of Buddha, Sanskrit was already a language of the learned and not readily comprehensible by common masses. Hence, the Buddha wanted to have another language as a medium to spread his teachings. Due to the Buddha’s preference for non-Sanskrit local vernaculars, several Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars prevailing at that time were used by his followers to spread his teachings. With the passage of time, many different linguistic versions of the Buddha’s teachings evolved. These words and sermons of the Buddha in different languages were preserved at the evolving centers of Buddhist learning, which in turn added to their prestige.

Since none of the different linguistic versions was unmixed, some of the dialect versions were adopted by the great learning centers through the wandering teachers. The multiplicity of dialects, all enjoying equal acceptance, is what makes it difficult to assign a place of origin to Pāli.

The Buddha preached in Kosala (modern Ayodhyā in Uttar Pradesh of India) and Magadha (modern Patna and Gaya districts in Bihar of India). In Ceylon, the language of Magadha, for reasons not well-known, was referred to as Pāli, considered to be the synonym of Māgadhī.

Pāli scriptures have three chronological dialects. First is the “gāthās” or verses of the canon. The other two are the canonical prose and postcanonical prose. There is also postcanonical verse in which older and younger forms are found to be mixed indiscriminately. Neither of these dialects has close relation with Māgadhī Prakrit, but some Māgadhī-like forms are definitely found in the Pāli works. However, grammarians consider such forms to be borrowings from the Māgadhī dialect, first into various non-Māgadhī dialects, and later on, through them into Pāli. Some grammarians have suggested Takṣaśilā (modern Taxila), a great place for learning in ancient times, and Ujjayini (modern Ujjain) to be the places where Pāli initially developed as a language.

Features of Pāli language

A Middle Indo-Aryan language, Pāli is closest to Old Indo-Aryan language, that is, Vedic and Sanskrit. In general, it has the same type of relationship with Old Indo-Aryan language as all other Middle Indo-Aryan languages have. However, it is not easy to derive it completely from any of the well-documented older dialects. Hence, it is probable that the basis of Pali might be some other Old Indo-Aryan dialect. For instance, the enclitic third personal pronoun in Pāli se is found in Avestan se, Old Persian saiy, but not in Vedic or Sanskrit.

In Pāli phonology, Sanskrit vowel ṛ is represented by a, i, or u. And the long diphthongs ai and au coalesce with e and o. Normally, long vowels get shortened in close syllables and are present only in open syllables, which results in two new vowels in Pāli, short e and o, for example, oṭṭha- “lip”; Sanskrit oṣṭha. Moreover, single Sanskrit consonants nearly remain unchanged, except that d and dh become l and lh, respectively (as in the ṛgveda), and the three sibilants coalesce as s. Also, consonant clusters normally get simplified and assimilated as two consonants only, for example, tikkh a- “sharp”; Sanskrit tīkṣna, aggi- “fire”; Sanskrit agni and satta “seven”; Sanskrit sapta. All final consonants disappear, for example, vijju “lightning”; Sanskrit vidyut.

Talking about nouns in Pali, the declension seems to have been simplified compared to that of Sanskrit, for example, the dual number is lost and the eight-case system is reduced. The dative almost completely gets coalesced with the genitive. In the commonest declension, that in a, it does not denote direction of motion and a few less common meanings. In the a- declension, the instrumental plural ends in -ehi (e.g., dhammehi), deriving from a form like Vedic -ebhis rather than from Sanskrit -ais. In all declensions, the dative plural gets coalesced with the genitive plural and the ablative plural with the instrumental plural. In addition, stems ending in consonants are usually converted to vowel declension types, either by addition of a vowel after the consonant, for example, Sanskrit āpad- “misfortune” is represented by āpada- or by loss of final consonants of the stems.

In the Pali verb system, changes are even greater than in that of the noun. In the younger dialect than in the older, the middle voice is generally obsolescent. There are active endings instead of middle in the passive system. There is almost no perfect tense. The past tense is an amalgam of aorist and flawed forms, which have complicated rules for the appearance or nonappearance of the prefix a-. The optative is, however, found in Pali. There are also traces of the Vedic subjunctive in the old dialect.

Several of the verbs of the many types of the present Sanskrit system are found in the commonest type which has a suffix -a-, the thematic type. There has also been a spread of a type with suffix -e-, which derives from Sanskrit denominative verbs with suffix -aya-, for example, maññeti “he thinks” as well as maññati; Sanskrit manyate, Pāli katheti; Sanskrit kathayati “he tells,” and vadeti “he says” as well as the old type vadati. Although some verbs retain a few historically correct forms, in addition to the new ones, in the future or the past participle or elsewhere, the present stem usually tends to spread through all other parts of the verb system. An example of this can be seen in forms of the verb meaning “to drink,” which in Sanskrit has a reduplicated present pibati “he drinks,” but future pāsyati “he will drink” and gerund pītva “having drunk”; in Pāli corresponding forms are pivati, pivissati (and pāssati), and pivitvā (and pītvā), and there are past forms pivāsim “I drank” and apivi “he drank.”

Pāli Literature

Majority of the existing older literature in Pāli language is collected in the Tipiṭaka Pāli, the canon of the Theravada school of Buddhism. Although Theravada claimed to be the only orthodox tradition, actually it was only one of a number of schools that gradually became separated when Buddhism began to be propagated over northern India after the Nibbāna (Pāli; Sanskrit, Nirvāṇa) of the Buddha.

The Theravada school of Buddhism was originally located in central and western India. During the fifth to third-century B.C.E., this school seems to have orally rehearsed its canon in the region’s local dialect as per the Buddha’s command that his disciples should preach his teachings in their own language rather than in Sanskrit. Comparing with other canons, one learns that the Pāli canon mainly consists of a common source of teaching that is ascribed to the Buddha. There might have been minor modifications, and some secondary texts would have been appended.

The compositions of around the second-century B.C.E. are the significant latest additions to the compositions. Owing to the common similarity with the older texts of other schools, including their contents, it can be assumed that the Pāli canon is essentially the literature of the empire of Magadha and the middle Ganges basin during the sixth to fourth centuries B.C.E., with a later extension to the west.

It is assumed that some time before the fifth-century C.E., the language of the canon came to be treated as the Buddha’s own language or the northeastern dialect of Māgadhī. As a result, Pāli emerged as the standard and international language of Theravada Buddhism. Pāli, as a literary language, flourished in India till the Turk invasion, especially in south India till the fourteenth-century C.E.

Pāli was introduced in Ceylon by the third-century B.C.E., from where it spread to Burma by the eleventh-century C.E. Pāli was in use till the twentieth century in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. In Indonesia too, it existed in about the eleventh-century C.E. In Ceylon, the Pāli canon was written during the first-century B.C.E. due to the need to put orally transmitted teachings of the Buddha from further misinterpretations. Literature after that period was all completely written.

Divisions of the Tipiṭaka

The Tipiṭaka, meaning “Threefold Basket” (Sanskrit, Tripiṭaka), consists of three parts: Vinaya Piṭaka, Sutta Piṭaka, and Abhidhamma Piṭaka. Vinaya Piṭaka is an elaboration of 227 rules of the Buddhist monastic discipline. It includes explanation of the founding of each rule by the Buddha. It also briefly discusses the Buddha’s life, his founding of the order, and a record of events in the order down to the first great schism. It was written around c. 386 B.C.E. Content-wise, it is mainly legalistic, though it has a few incidental narratives of literary merit, besides much matter of sociological interest.

Sutta Piṭaka, the second of the Tipiṭaka, consists of doctrines (dhammā) of Buddhism developed in dialogues (sutta or suttanta), stories, and poems. The dialogues contain discussions on philosophical and metaphysical topics like the nature of the universe, the presence of a soul, free will, causation, immortality, ethics, transmigration, and the deity. It also contains discussion on the good life, including the unsatisfactory nature of the pursuit of transient worldly happiness, self-possession, harmless living, the Buddhist way of renunciation, self-control, wisdom, and meditation leading to detachment, upekkhā, and the state in which nibbāna or Enlightenment can be attained.

Here, the Buddha is depicted as a traveler to different parts of eastern India where he engages in dialogues. It is given in direct speech in an incisive and lively style on meeting with wandering philosophers, kings, priests, ascetics, nobles, and other people from various professions in the towns and cities. For those people who have not renounced their life and become a wanderer, good friendship and social virtues are suggested for increasing the happiness of the individual as well as the society. In these discourses, humor exists, for instance, when the Buddha narrates tales to portray the degeneration of the society resulting from the attempts of a king to do away with crime in his own manner, in utter disregard of external law (dhammā).

Another instance is of a deity, who claims to have created the universe and says he is omniscient and omnipresent but is mainly concerned with protecting his own ignorance before the other inhabitants of heaven. The longer dialects are considered to be the best and are collected separately in the Dīgha-nikāya (collection of long dialogues), which is supposed to be the most ancient and authentic part of the Sutta, due to the fluency and richness of the language and also because of the originality and the variety of its episodes.

At times, short poems or verses occur in the dialogues. It may be a spontaneous verse (udāna) uttered under the inspiration of some experience or incident. It is usually told with metaphorical reference to Buddhist teachings. Sometimes, it may be a brief summary of Buddhist doctrine. There is a dialogue that is said to have been added later by Buddha’s disciple Ānanda. This dialogue has several incidental verses in elaborate lyric meters that vividly describe the qualities of the Buddha. There is yet another dialogue that contains few inquisitive verses from common folklore about the guardian spirits of the four parts of the earth, one of whom rules over a utopian territory that has neither work nor property.

The Dīgha-nikāya, along with three other Nikāyas – the Majjhima (medium length), Saṃyutta (classified), and Aṅguttara (enumerating) – form the Four Nikāyas, which are interlocking but not quite uniform.

A fifth nikāya, called the Khuddaka-nikāya (collection of minor texts), is a collection of the poetry of the canon, except as noted above and the songs (geyya) in the first section of the Saṃyutta. This probably started as a collection of poems by followers of the Buddha, including few short dialogues attributed to the Buddha himself. Although the Buddha recommended the hearing of songs, he is believed to have disapproved poetic compositions as a worldly means of earning a livelihood. Hence, initially the official version of the doctrine may not have included the Khuddaka texts.

The discourses of the Buddha were abounding with stories, similes, and some verses that give a lead to the poetic presentation of dhamma. The Khuddaka texts were perhaps greatly expanded down to at least the third-century B.C.E., and new genres were used for the propagation of Buddhist philosophical teachings.

Pāli poetry may be divided into lyric and epic. In a lyric, around 30 different meters are used. There prevails a great variety of rhythmical patterns and musical words. In an epic, there is a single narrative meter that has a very flexible line, and monotony is avoided. While the old meters were narrative and permitted variation of rhythm except in the final cadence, Pāli meters are quantitative.

In the old or archaic meters, the variation was possible by substituting a short syllable for a long one and was based on the number of syllables in a line. While in the Pāli lyric meters, two short syllables are exactly equal to one long. Sometimes, the two short syllables are substituted for one long.

Majority of Pāli lyric meters have a musical phrase as a basis and possess a structure that was unknown to Indian poetry in the fifth-century B.C.E. Along with certain features of style, content, vocabulary, and figures of speech, these new meters of Pāli poetry are the prototypes of those of the kāvya literature in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhraṃśa, and classical Hindi. Some dramatic dialogues in verse that imply some kind of performance have been adduced as proof concerning the growth of the Indian drama during this period.

The best examples of Pāli epic poetry are found in the Khuddaka, in its longer stories, the Jātaka. Some stories are common to both the Dīgha and the Jātaka. The Dīgha contains a few Jātakas, that is, stories of the Buddha’s births or incarnations in prose. However, an epic narrative (akkhāna) could be either in prose or verse. Later on, these two forms diverged greatly from their basic well-known tradition of storytelling and became the kāvya and verse mahākāvya (epic).

Several Jātaka pieces have too few verses to narrate a story. These give only the climax or most significant speech or the moral of a once well-known story. However, in certain cases, the complete story is preserved in ancient form in the Dīgha or elsewhere. The Jātaka is a significant treasury of ancient folktales, with only a layer of Buddhist ethics. These possess rich data on ancient society.

The Khuddaka also includes four inferior narrative books in verse. These were compiled as edifying material for routine preaching, for instance, the lives of Buddhas, Buddhavaṃsa, and legends of monks and nuns, Apadāna. Moreover, there are the lyric anthologies, which are the work of several hundred authors, both men and women. There is also the Dhammapada, Suttanipāta, Theragāthā, and Therīgāthā, which (except the Dhammapada) contain the ballads and some short epic episodes. In addition to five other miscellaneous books, the Khuddaka includes also an extensive philosophical compendium (Paṭisaṃbhidāmagga) similar to the Abhidhamma books.

The Abhidhamma Piṭaka is a collection of treatises that systematically elaborate the Buddhist philosophy in accordance with Theravada teaching. While the Sutta is the most interesting of these divisions, as it contains the largest and earliest texts, the Abhidhamma is a secondary systematization of the doctrines of the Sutta.

The Abhidhamma originated as an explanation and elaboration of certain lists and summaries of points of doctrine called Mātikā (notes). Majority of the mātikās in the Abhidhamma and much of their explanations are found scattered in the Sutta. The basic list is promulgated in the Dīgha account of the Buddha’s instructions to the monks before his Nibbana. It consists of the Vibhaṅga, the Dhammasaṅgaṇi and Dhātukathā, the Puggalapaññatti, the Kathāvatthu, and the Yamaka. The Vibhaṅga is the basic synopsis of mātikās and explanations. The Dhammasaṅgaṇi and Dhātukathā are primarily cross-classifications of points of doctrine on ethics, psychology, physics, etc., leading to a synthetic system of natural and moral philosophy. The Puggalapaññatti enumerates types of characters. The Kathāvatthu consists of polemic on points disputed with other schools of Buddhism and exemplifies early techniques of debate and logic. The Yamaka is a manual of exercises in formal logic. The Paṭṭhāna is a grandiose elaboration of a general theory of causality synthesized from elements of causal theory in the Sutta and Vibhaṅga. The causal theories were fundamental to the early Buddhist doctrine about the nature of the universe and of man’s predicament in it.

Later Pāli Literature

It is found in the historical novel (akkhāyikā), the Milindapañha, in which it begins with a long Dīgha style dialogue. Gradually, the work seems to have grown by large additions to important points of perhaps the first-century B.C.E. At around the same period, theoretical works on exegesis like Netti and Peṭakopadesa were written. Both these works were Indian. The earliest existing grammar of Kaccāyana is also an Indian work.

The Mahāvihāra (Great Monastery) in Anuradhapura, the ancient capital of Ceylon, became the main center of Theravada learning in the fifth-century C.E. In India, new languages were adopted by new movements and schools of Buddhism, eclipsing the Theravada school that followed the canon in the ancient Pāli.

In order to interpret the canon, the Sinhalese translated oral commentarial (Aṭṭhakathā) traditions into the ancient Sinhalese language from the third-century B.C.E. onward. This commentary got comprehensively completed by around 100 C.E. Successive writers in Ceylon compiled the Dīpavaṃsa or the “History of the Island” in Pāli (verse form) by the fourth-century C.E.

Indian Buddhists getting education at Anuradhapura in Ceylon translated the essential parts of the Sinhalese commentary into Pāli language in the fifth-century C.E. Then a person by name Buddhaghosa wrote an introductory account of the whole range of Sinhalese doctrine called the Visuddhimagga. He also wrote commentaries on the Vinaya, Abhidhamma, Four Nikāyas, and two Khuddaka texts. Subsequently, commentaries on the remaining Khuddaka books and the Netti were written by Dhammapāla, Buddhadatta, Upasena, Mahānāma, and the anonymous authors of the Apadāna Commentary, Jātaka Commentary, which includes full stories for all the Jātakas, and Dhammapada Commentary, which possess more than 400 illustrative stories.

At the beginning of the sixth-century C.E., Mahāvaṃsa (Great History), a verse chronicle based on the Dīpavaṃsa, was written by Mahānāma. It was unified in treatment and much more polished in style compared to the Dīpavaṃsa. It, in fact, marked the beginning of a new phase in Pāli literature, referred to as the later kāvya, which is not continuous with the old Pāli kāvya in the canon, the direct successors of which were in Sanskrit and Prakrit. It derives its style after old Pāli kāvya had undergone several centuries of refinement at the hands of various successors.

The aim of the Mahāvaṃsa, according to Mahānāma, was to inspire good people with religious emotion. Like the Dīpavaṃsa, Mahānāma’s chronicle narrates the history of Buddhism from the Buddha’s complete Enlightenment to the third-century B.C.E. in India and the fourth-century C.E. in Ceylon. Mahānāma is influenced by the conventions of an epic kavya, and he interrupts his annals to celebrate the deeds of Devānaṃpiyatissa (third-century B.C.E.) and Vaṭṭagāmani (first-century B.C.E.). These two great Sinhalese kings were primarily responsible for the introduction and firm establishment of Buddhism in Ceylon.

In Ceylon, Vaṭṭagāmani is regarded as a national hero who freed his country from Tamil rule. Later poets in Ceylon wrote supplements to the Mahāvaṃsa, which are often called Cūlavaṃsa or “Little History.” The first and longest Cūlavaṃsa was written by Dhammakitti in the thirteenth-century C.E. It centers on the epic treatment of Parakkamabāhu I (twelfth-century C.E.). The last supplement covers up to the arrival of English in Ceylon.

The mode of chronicle epic was adopted for writing the histories of various countries of Southeast Asia as well as for writing other narratives, especially the life of the Buddha. Some such writings were the Medhankara’s Jinacarita written in Ceylon in the thirteenth century and the anonymous Mālālaṅkāra written in Burma in the eighteenth century. The Buddhālaṅkāra of Sīlavaṃsa (Burma; fifteenth century) narrates the popular story of the Buddha’s previous incarnation as Sumedha, when he first resolved to become a Buddha.

There are many other books that deal with certain other aspects of religious history. The prose (Mahā) Bodhivaṃsa by Upatissa (c. 970 C.E.) on the bringing of a cutting of the Buddha’s enlightenment tree to Ceylon is of great stylistic interest. It displays much of the vocabulary of contemporary Sanskrit kāvya assimilated to Pāli. In Dhammakitti’s Dāṭhāvaṃsa (Ceylon, c. 1200) on the Tooth Relic, the style of the true Sanskrit mahākāvya with its several cantos in different meters, often of lyric origin, is exemplified. Then, there are twentieth-century mahākāvyas such as Medhānanda’s Jinavaṃsadīpa (published 1917 in Ceylon) on the life of the Buddha. Other noted biographies include Mahāmaṅgala’s Buddhaghosuppatti, considered to be a popular religious novel on the life of the saint, and the learned Ñanābhivaṃsa’s Rājādhirājavilāsini (Burma; eighteenth century) which celebrates the deeds of the contemporary king of Burma, Bodopayā.

The Pajjāmadhu of Buddhappiya, an Indian monk living in Ceylon in thirteenth century, describing the Buddha epitomizes the later lyric kāvya. The Telakatāhagāthā on renunciation, recited by a monk thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil, who miraculously remains alive for a time because of his innocence also illustrates the later lyric kāvya. The much longer Samantakūṭavaṇṇanā of Vedeha (Ceylon; thirteenth century) is on the borderline of epic and lyric. It describes the Buddha’s life and mythical visits to Ceylon, culminating with his visit to its highest peak, the Adam’s peak. Vedeha remarkably describes the Sinhalese scenery in his work.

The Jinālaṅkāra of Buddharakkhita (Ceylon; twelfth century) on the life of the Buddha represents the genre of citrakavya, or poem displaying virtuosity in wordplay and in the mere technicalities of kāvya composition as an end in themselves. In late twelfth century, Ānanda wrote Saddhammopāyana, a simple but effective didactic poem in 19 cantos. It urges the reader to seize the opportunity of following the Buddhist way. A fine example of his art is the description of the sufferings of animals, especially as beasts of burden.

The anonymous thirteenth-century attanagaluvihāravaṃsa (history of the attanagalu monastery) is a kāvya in mixed prose and verse (a campū). In it, Pāli prose has been given a very elaborate and significant treatment, imitating the style of the Sanskrit novels of Bāṇa. Vedeha’s Rasavāhini is another outstanding collection of popular old stories.

However, much of the old Sinhalese literature remains untranslated. Pāli commentaries written after the eighth century were provided with sub-commentaries (ṭīkā) which explained the words therein and thus ended up elaborating the exposition of the basic canonical texts. All ṭīkās are more technical than the commentaries and as such provide a sufficient basis for modern lexicography. The earliest cycle of ṭīkās, of the eighth or ninth centuries, consists of Dhammapāla’s work on the Four Nikāyas and the Jātaka, Vajirabuddhi’s on the Vinaya, and Ānanda’s on the Abhidhamma. Dhammapāla, a pupil of Ānanda, wrote a sub-commentary on his teacher’s ṭīkā.

In the twelfth century, Kassapa in south India wrote a succinct Vinaya ṭīkā which might be more easily assimilated by his pupils. At around the same time, Sāriputta in Ceylon wrote detailed ṭīkās on the Vinaya and the Four Nikāyas. In addition, there is a cycle of undated ṭikas on the Khuddaka and many ṭīkās on such treatises (commentaries) as the Visuddhimagga. A “new” Dīgha ṭīkā was also written in Burma in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Still, exegesis neither came to an end with the Pāli versions of the commentaries nor with the numerous handbooks on various aspects of philosophy and the discipline.