Dear friends,
I'm back from a brief absence from the list. And I
see there is lots of interesting activity going on!
Well done, on your new initiatives, Yong Peng.

I have a Pali puzzle for the group. A friend of mine
who just came back from a 2-month retreat in Burma
sent me the following snippet in her email:

"I picked up a bunch of devotional cards at
the Shwedagon Pagoda, and they all have the following
passage on them. A nun friend of mine who's
studying Pali in Burma transliterated the Burmese
characters to Roman script but didn't have time
to translate it. If you're interested, I'd be curious
to know what it means:

ahtaanemetan bhikkhave anavakaasoo,
yam parukkamena tathaagatam jiivitaa voropeyya.
anupakkamena bhikkhave tathaagataa parinibbayanti.
etena saccavajjena antaraayaapi vinassatu!"

Well, I looked at this and came up with the following
quick gloss, but I still can't quite put it all
together into something very meaningful. I'll bet
someone on this list has seen this before. At the
least, some of you Pali experts could figure this out
in flash!

ahtaanemetan - ?? can't figure this out. The 'ht'
combination looks odd to me too, could be a typo.
bhikkhave - monks (voc.)
anavakaasoo - s/b anavakaso, I presume - opportunity,
time (nom.)
yam - that
parukkamena - s/b parakkamena, I presume - effort,
exertion (inst.)
tathaagatam - Tathagata (acc.)
jiivitaa - life
voropeyya - voropeti - deprives, takes away
(conditional)
jivitaa voropeyya - he would kill
anupakkamena - not by attack
tathaagataa - Tathagatas (nom. pl.)
parinibbayanti - they reach complete extinction
etena - by this
saccavajjena - truth which should be told
antaraayaa - obstacle
pi - and
vinassatu - let it be destroyed

Any help greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
John

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