Re: sati meditation

Quoth Jim Anderson:
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"Because both 'pari' and 'mukha' each have a
number of possible meanings by themselves, putting the two together
significantly increases the number of possible interpretations and it
would be up to the well-informed reader to sift and sort it out."
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I disagree; taking a "decoder ring" approach to translation can be
time-consuming and dangerous.

Testing all possible combinations against a self-defined criterion (as
to which one might be correct) will be less effective than Ole's
method of pre-determining the possible meanings allowed by the known
terms, known grammatical structures, and known prior usage, forming
the context of the unknown term.  I should emphasise the word "prior"
in the phrase "prior usage" --Ole has already pointed out that
examples of usage from 1,000 years after a text was written are not
admissable in the same way as examples of contemporaneous or earlier
usage.

Considering, e.g., the debate that arose over "island vs. lamp" in
translating the Buddha's last words (in the Maha-Pari-Nibbana Sutta),
one may generally say that this has been something of a problem in
Western scholarship: the assertion of "all possible meanings" as
comparatively probable interpretations comprising any given passage
has proliferated incorrect readings among the Pali illiterati.  This
is particularly striking when comparing some translations of the
Dhammapada, where it seems that "all possible meanings" have been
considered, and the one selected seems simply to reflect the
ideological agenda of the translator --not the grammatical context,
nor prior usage.  As Mason says, etymology tells us nothing about
meaning; for the latter we must rely solely on usage as our guide.  If
etymology determined meaning, then "a tragedy" would be a song about a
goat.

E.M.