Re: a peculiar form

This is interesting.

Sp has (VRI etext): jiridanti (sic) ti jiranti abbhaacikkhantaa na
jiranti; abbhakkhaanassa anta.m na gacchantiiti attho.
I take this as meaning:
'they will never get old while they slander the Buddha' i.e. there is
no end to doing that.
So I take the root to be j.r 'grow old' and the underlying form to be
from Skt jiiryati. I would therefore suppose that the Vinaya
commentator had the form jiriyanti or jiiriyanti and glossed that
with jiiranti. In the one case, the unusual form has dropped out and
been replaced by its gloss. In the other, the form jiridanti has
replaced jiriyanti. This could either be a graphic confusion at some
point or perhaps a mistaken back-formation in some branch of the Mss
of the canonical text.

Buddhaghosa i.e. the author of Mp (followed by Sp-.t) finds this
unconvincing and offers his preferred alternative (atha vaa):
VRI: atha vaa lajjanatthe ida.m jiridantii ti pada.m da.t.thabba.m;
na lajjantii ti attho

I suppose this must be an interpretation in terms of some form of
hrii. ? BSkt intens. jehriiyate. I am not sure if we know what
happens in Pali if -hr- assimilates. perh. cp. rassa < hrasva.

Lance Cousins

>The story of the general Siiha A IV 179ff retold Vin I 233ff contains an odd
>verbal form jiiranti p. 188 and 237, respectively, according to the
>Sinhalese tradition. The Burmese reading, however, is jiridanti sic! The
>commentators give two mutually exclusive explanations of the term: the first
>is that the verb means "to be ashamed," the alternative is that it means "to
>come to and end", "to stop." The first explanation evidently derives the
>verb from the root hrii, cf. Sanskrit jihreti, jihriyat etc., the second one
>would seem to rely on the root jri "to go." The first one fits the context
>very well, but the readings cause difficulties. One would expect a form like
>jirihanti or possibly jihiranti, but not jiiranti (< jihiranti?) or
>jiridanti; the latter form is possibly a mistake for jirihanti as it is
>difficult to explan the presence of /d/ on phonological or etymological
>grounds (there is no matching root). I have never met with anything
>comparable in the Pali canon. My question is therefore: would it be possible
>to explain the peculiar Burmese reading on paleographical grounds?
>
>Ole Pind