Dear Lennart,

Thank for the Stede link and thank you for your arguments. I agree with everything you said about Pali. It was very interesting.

As for Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, I am not sure; I wonder if the North Indian Prakrit of 100 BCE, when writing materials began widely available, was the foundation of BHS. Such a Prakrit would have been a descendant of the Pali of the suttas, which I believe would have been almost unchanged since about 400 BCE.

With metta,

Stefan

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Lennart Lopin <lenni_lop@...> wrote:
>
> 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
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>