Re: Decline of Pali: reply to Lance Cousins

This reply is rather more brief --I was rather hoping that L.C. would find
more ground to disagree upon,

> The same rule was applied to Pali as to 'Church Latin' i.e. the
> attempt was made to adopt a historically more accurate pronunciation.
> In practice, of course, this is only partially successful (in both
> cases). I personally spent a week a few years back learning to chant
> the Mahaasamayasutta in a Thai style. It is very beautiful and I only
> wish I could keep it in my memory properly. But learning some of the
> Thai pronunciation is quite difficult and unnecessary for reading
> Pali. More to the point, it is plain wrong. Pali was not pronounced
> like that in Ancient India. The same goes for Burmese pronunciation.
> There might be a case for following Sinhalese pronunciation, since
> that is much closer, but still not correct in all respects. Perhaps
> that is why the PTS offers a CD to accompany Warder, with the Pali
> passages pronounced by Ven. Saddhaatissa.

I just want to say directly that I am in complete agreement that much of
(e.g.) the Thai pronounciation is "wrong" from the standpoint of historical
linguistics, but I don't think that's an excuse for the paucity of matierals
on subjects like this.  L.C. and I seem to agree that learning your way
around the local shibboleths (and learning to "hear" Pali) is a difficult
but worthwhile endeavour --all that I'm saying is, reliance on Romanized
texts and Romanized pronounciation is an additional degree of alienation
from those spoken traditions.  Theravada Buddhism is supposed to exalt the
RECITAL of the suttas as a central rite --yet recitation (and understanding
it as a hearer) is nowhere the subject of Pali education as the PTS has
defined it.  The difficulty is not absolute, but it is an additional
obstacle to overcome if first you depend upon it; and it is an obstacle that
the existing literature does little to help a student overcome.  In any
case, I think L.C. and I are in agreement as to the substance of the issue.

> Where do you find living manuscript-based traditions these days ?
> Monks, these days, seem mostly to use printed editions (and very
> uncritical ones at that). This is a very big change from the monks I
> knew in the 1960s.

I find them all over the place.  Pakbeng, for instance, or the Khmer-Krom of
Vietnam.  I choose these as particularly obscure and empoverished regions;
wandering around S.E.A., manuscript traditions aren't hard to find.  Even if
they were, the accumulation of the past 500 years of palm leaves in massive
repositories around S.E.A. (and, disgracefully, in Imperialist collections
in Europe, I might add!) would provide many incarnations worth of reading
material, even if nothing new were being written.

> Also responding to some of Eisel's comments (although I agree with
> much that Rett has said...

I hope this does not include his very vague and contradictory notions about
the history of 20th century S.E.A.  It is a remarkable fact that even Ronald
Regan (who seemed to genuinely beleive that communism involved
devil-worship) directly funded and armed the Khmer Rouge, the single most
notorious communist government/cabal in the history of the world, but it is
an historical fact --and one of recent minting.  In fact, the official
opposition of (communist) Vietnam and (communist) Laos to the (abhorrent,
but nominally communist) Khmer Rouge was the basis for the U.S. excluding
Laos from a variety of trade agreements.  Trade relations with the U.S. were
normalized only in 2004.  The U.S. insisted that the Khmer Rouge was the
legitimate government of Cambodia right up to 1992, and advocated for their
formal presence in a variety of U.N. forums.  This is well documented
history; it is rather sad that so many choose to ignore it.  Conversely, the
peculiar and pragmatic relationship of the Lao communists to Buddhism is a
very interesting study; it is a striking contrast to either China (to the
north) or Cambodia (to the south) --both of which were, likewise, Communist
by their own differing definitions of the term.  The moral of the story is
not to make generalization about subjects in which one knows nothing.  There
was as much diversity among communist states as "democratic" ones in the
20th century.

>>  I did not even bother to mention in point #1 above that
>>there is a paucity of texts on indigenous scripts; if you want to learn to
>>read and write Pali in the Sinhalese script, good luck finding a single
>>published source.  Even when limited publications can be found on type-set
>>script, materials on cursive or manuscript forms are more rare still (or:
>>non-existent).
>
> Very true. If someone would only produce it (to an accurate
> standard), the PTS is probably waiting to publish it.

On the contrary, it would be very much against the PTS's stated policies! 
Roman only when in Rome, they say!

> But are there
> 20 Pali scholars in the western world who can even read those scripts
> ?

No, far fewer than twenty; Peter Skilling's estimate was closer to 5.

> That would hardly characterize the work of Richard Gombrich, like it
> or not. Or his various pupils.

Gombrich's work I do know (and I've recently praised it on this very list,
on the occasion of his retirement) --I would be sincerely interested to
learn of any students of his who have written social/political analyses.  If
they exist in print, please do let me know.

>>  and, to be very blunt, the explicit racism and
>>British empiralism that was preached by Rhys-Davids (founder of the PTS) is
>>nowhere dealt with by the inheritors of the PTS tradition.  On the contrary,
>>they are very much in denial about the racism and overt imperialism of so
>>many of Rhys-Davids lectures and writings,
>
> I agree. I, at least, am in complete denial on this point.

Most of the biographies (including, e.g., the one written by his wife) don't
give allow the reader too clear a notion of Davids' faults of any kind;
Wickremeratne's biography (_Genesis of an orientalist_) goes far out of its
way to justify and excuse Davids' racism (etc.), but it does include it
rather than "cover it up" outright.  For the latter I am thankful.  That
being said, no Sanskrit scholar can get away with "not knowing" what Max
Muller says about the Aryan race; it's part of responsible scholarship to
know the _ad hominem_ material on your sources, as it likely shapes the
material you may otherwise rely upon uncritically.

> The only people I can remember who liked or admired Caroline Rhys
> Davids's work were I.B.Horner and G.P.Malalasekera, both of whom owed
> her a considerable personal debt.

I recently read an article from the JPTS "vindicating" her early work, and
arguing that its value had been unjustly overlooked because of her later
work's obsessions.  Can I find the article on the internet?  Let me see.

> My own understanding of Rhys Davids himself is that he was removed
> from Ceylon precisely because he was on excessively good terms with
> the 'natives'. He certainly remained very well thought of there.

That is not at all true, but is precisely one of the unexamined myths that
the PTS itself has concocted to glorify the man.  He was dismissed for a
long list of offenses, including levying illegal fines on his own staff and
the local populace.  His misconduct was not imaginary, and the impression I
get is that various of his "social" campaigns, such as denying free cattle
pasture to peasants and trying to forcibly convert the locals from Sinhalese
slash-and-burn farming methods to more British ones, had made him singularly
unpopular with many of the locals (many of whom wrote formal complaints,
etc.).  All of this rather misses the point: glorifying Rhys Davids and the
British administration in Sri Lanka *is* a form of holocaust denial.  Does
nobody here think of the Uva rebellion and the unspeakable atrocities of the
"scorched earth" policy the British visited upon that city?  So much of the
material on Davids overlooks that he was complicit in one of the
blood-thirstiest and most exploitative empires the world has ever known
  --and one that did (and does) have a very long list of massacres and
genocides on its record.

Perhaps I should not presume so much; everyone here knows Rhys Davids, but
does anyone else here know the history of the Uva rebellion?  Let me ask:
what does it mean to evaluate the one when it is divorced from the context
of the other?  I think this is a substantive problem, and I do not raise it
merely to be provocative.

E.M.


--
A saying of the Buddha from http://metta.lk/
Get your Dhamma Books from http://books.metta.lk/
He who has developed a wish for the Undeclared (Nibbana), he whose mind is
thrilled (with the three Fruits), he whose mind is not bound by material
pleasures, such person is called an "Upstream-bound One".
Random Dhammapada Verse 218