Hi Stefan @all,

Just finished reading your article (the short version :-)

It is funny, just 2 weeks ago while reading some material on Mahinda's
mission to Sri Lanka and re-thinking this whole topic for the 100th time, I
could not help myself as to write down some of the argument on both sides
for myself - but especially those arguments in favor of Pali being the
Buddha's language. In that little resume of mine I came to similar rational
(not philological) conclusion as you. This was not always the case. When I
learnt Pali I was under the impression it was Buddha's language. Then, like
most, I learnt about the scholar's objections and had no way to argue
against it...however, over the last decade my doubts grew and now I am back
to my former position. Here some of my thoughts on this matter:

The first time I ever came across someone making a case for Pali as the
language of the Buddha, was Wiliam Stede (Pali <goog_1264813484893> English
Dictionary.<http://books.google.com/books?id=dHWHmHnMLtAC&pg=PR5&dq=pali+kosala+stede&ei=xotjS9y6FKiuyQTnkYki&cd=1#v=onepage&q=kosala&f=false>He
made the convincing argument, that Kosala, and not Magadha, was the
center of affairs at the time of the Buddha. Yes, Kosala's dominant power
was about to fade during the next few centuries, but we should never
interpret history based on future events. Buddha was raised in Kosala, lived
in Kosala, spent most of his adult life in Kosala. Most rain seasons start
with Sāvatthiyam and not Nalanda or Rajagaha. Yes, it may have been that
Magadha was "hip" and "cool" as the Aryan conquest had pushed further and
further eastward and the power-centers of the Veda time shifted further and
further east. But still, the culture and learning was in the West and so the
Buddha's Kosalan dialect may have well been influenced by
Magadha-dialectism. What would that result in? Right, a nice mix. A prakrit
with some heavy vedic/sanskrit features...et voila, "Pali" is born.

Now, fast forward to the time of Ashoka. Kosala is gone, swallowed up by
Magadha. It is the heartland of Magadha now as well. The Buddha is seen as a
son of the Magadhan empire - at least from the perspective of the Sinhala!!
They of course take Mahinda's transmission to be "Magadhan". Even Mahinda
may have felt that way.

Also: (But maybe some of the very knowledgeable philologists can help me
understanding) why does Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit read like someone trying to
translate Pali into Sanskrit...and not just any Prakrit - it reads just like
a Sanskritized pali text. The amount of Pali vocabulary and forms are so
staggering (esp. compared to other brahmanic Sanskrit texts) that I would
not look at a few examples which time and place may have changed, but at the
overall picture...to me it seems so blatant that Brahmanic Buddhist monks
pushed the usage of that "new" and "hype" Sanskrit, but because most of
their terminology was so influenced by the Buddha (in Pali?!) the best way
to move Buddhist philosophy into a Sanskrit language (as a medium to express
new philosophic ideas because Pali became to sacred to touch) was by simply
basing it on Pali and then formulate the new ideas in Sanskrit.

There is that other argument you brought up, Buddhaghosa's interpretation
that the Buddha did not want a translation of his teaching...I am ambivalent
about that, as from a teaching standpoint the Buddha clearly advocates that
we should not grasp at nirutti - but, at the same time, we see the monks and
lay people at the life time of the Buddha take extreme care (!) not to
misrepresent the Buddha's words (unlike today, unfortunately)...

Now, if for a moment I acknowledge however, that it was understood to mean
that you are supposed to learn the Buddha's word in your own language, then
why did Mahinda not tell that the Sinhalese people? Why did they
"misunderstand" Mahinda in such a big way that they were supposedly the only
ones learning Mahinda's "dialect" by heart and not keeping the canon in
their own Sinhalese dialect. This does not make any sense at all! It only
makes sense, if we acknowledge that Pali was indeed Buddha's language and
they were instructed by Mahinda to keep it that way.

So any way, Geiger, Windisch, Stede seem to be - at least on the grounds of
reason - much closer to the truth than the idea that there has been this
"mysterious" Pali coming out of nowhere - at the same time while the
Buddhist tradition was able to transmit one of the best and most complete
literary canons in the world through 2500 years... I just guess when in
doubt one would favor the simplest solution and that would just be that Pali
was the Kosalan dialect of the Buddha, influenced by his tours through
Magadha and probably filled with altenative forms as the centuries passed by
before it was "solidified" in writing.


thanks Stefan, Bryan, Dhivan for your interesting insights,

Lennart

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Dhivan Thomas Jones <thomas@...>wrote:

>
>
> Dear Stefan Karpik,
>
> Hello and thanks for getting in touch directly with this group concerning
> your article "The Buddha Spoke Pali". I have already found and read the
> 'short' version available on-line and found it thought-provoking. I am not a
> linguist, rather a Pali scholar with a knowledge of Sanskrit, but I foresee
> several objections to your line of thinking:
> 1. You doubt that the oral tradition which preserved the Buddha's teaching
> would have translated that teaching from one language or dialect into
> another language or dialect, which we now know as Pali. Hence you infer that
> Pali was in fact the language originally spoken by the Buddha. However, it
> is well known that the Pali canon is simply the one surviving complete
> version of the early Buddhist scriptures, that happens to be in the Pali
> language, probably because missionaries who travelled to Sri Lanka knew this
> version of the Buddhist scriptures. There is evidence from the Chinese
> translations, for instance, that suggest that the early Buddhist teachings
> were also preserved in other Prakrits, no longer extant. So your argument
> assumes a privileged position for Pali among the vernaculars in which the
> Buddha's teaching were memorised, which I do not think is warranted.
> 2. My understanding from the scholarly work of Norman, Von Hinuber, etc.,
> is that the 'translation' involved between versions of the Buddha's teaching
> would have been between various Middle-Indo-Aryan dialects, which may have
> been mutually intelligible to some well-travelled people like Buddhist
> monks. This possibly gets round the problem you raise, that of the
> unlikelihood of an oral tradition translating between languages.
> 3. The idea that Pali corresponds to any single original language or
> dialect is problematic. The Pali of the early records of the Buddha's
> teaching has gone through a 'Sanskritization' process which blocks our
> knowledge of many original forms, though some, like 'baahma.na' for '
> braahma.na', can be reconstructed. Because we do not have very much
> evidence for actual languages that existed at the time of the Buddha except
> for the language preserved as Pali, which has been Sanskritized and
> modified, it is going to be difficult to pin down the relationship of Pali
> to the language actually spoken by the Buddha, except as conjecture.
> 4. Your idea that the Buddha spoke Pali sounds like Theravadin orthodoxy
> but given a new twist.
> But in conclusion it seems to me very reasonable to say, from a certain
> point of view, that it is likely that Pali is more or less similar to
> whatever language or dialects the Buddha spoke, and it is a marvellous thing
> that we have access to a language that may preserve echoes of the Buddha's
> very words.
> Best wishes
> Dhivan
>
> www.dhivan.net
>
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>
>
>


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