Hi Yong Peng,

Sorry for getting your name wrong last time.

> Having checked with Exercise 8-A, do you think I can translate the
> sentence as follows?
>
> Faith arose in the king after hearing the Doctrine from the sage.
> saddha.m / uppajji / narapatino / sutvaa / Dhamma.m / munismaa
> Munismaa Dhamma.m sutvaa narapatino saddha.m uppajji.
> Lit: To the king, faith arose after hearing the Doctrine from the sage.

I don't see how the change of saddhaa to accusative saddha.m is an
improvement. Saddhaa is not an object (kamma) that is being acted
upon, but an actor (kattaa) that is doing something (i.e. arising).
The difficulty in translating this sentence is that the king is also
an actor, so we have a stated nominative, 'faith', and an implied
nominative, 'king', and we have to find a way to make it clear what is
doing what: it is the king who hears, and it is faith that arises.

In the Attantaapa Sutta (A ii 203ff) this difficulty is avoided by
speaking of faith being acquired rather than arising:

So ta.m dhamma.m sutvaa tathaagate saddha.m pa.tilabhati
He, having heard that Doctrine, acquired faith in the Tathaagata.

Following this formula we might translate:

Narapati munismaa dhamma.m sutvaa saddha.m pa.tilabhati
The king, having heard the Doctrine from the sage, acquired faith.

But if it's really necessary to speak of faith *arising*, rather than
being acquired, then I think we first need to tweak the English
sentence so that it can be unambiguously translated into Pali:

"Faith arose in the king after hearing the Doctrine from the sage"

= "Faith arose in the king after the king had heard the Doctrine from
the sage." (this makes the implicit nominative explicit).

= "After the king had heard the Doctrine from the sage, faith arose in
him." (this removes the duplication of 'king' by replacing it with a
pronoun).

Yesterday I translated this:

So narapati muninaa dhamma.m sutvaa, tassa saddhaa uppajji.

Today I showed your rendering and mine to some of the Pali teachers at
my temple. Regarding my translation they said the construction "so ...
tassa" should be replaced by "yo ... tassa" or just "tassa":

(Yo) narapati muninaa dhamma.m sutvaa, tassa saddhaa uppajji.

As for your translation...

munismaa Dhamma.m sutvaa saddhaa narapatino uppajji

this lead to a rather lengthy and inconclusive discussion. Some of the
Thai acharns thought it was just wrong, others thought it was correct
but not natural Pali. Sayadaw Ujjota, a Burmese scholar who is
spending vassa with us, agreed with me that it was passable but
ambiguous. He also suggested changing the word order from "saddhaa
narapatino" to "narapatino saddhaa".

> The sentence I referred to is: Dhamma.m sutvaa gahapatiina.m
> Buddhe saddha.m uppajji.
> Dhamma / having heard / to householders / in Buddha / faith
> / arose
> Having heard the Dhamma, faith in the Buddha arised in the
> householders.
>
> The nominative is conveniently missing from the sentence. Is
> this a proper construct in Pali? Please correct me if I am
> wrong.

As I mentioned above, I don't see why saddhaa should be in the
accusative case. If we were to change it to nominative, then perhaps
the sentence would be okay (as Sayadaw Ujjota maintains), but I
should be a little surprised if there is a sentence of this pattern in
any Pali text. It just seems a bit bizarre to have an absolutive
(sutvaa)
followed by a nominative noun (saddhaa) which refers to something
other than the actor of the absolutive (gahapatii).

Best wishes,

Dhammanando

__________________________
Dhammanando Bhikkhu
Ho 2, Wat Benchamabophitr
Rama V Road
Bangkok 10300