Re: 1915 Burmese "-suci" (Abhidhanappadipikasuci)

On 2 Apr 2006, at 3:12 pm, Eisel Mazard wrote:

> I remain generally baffled by the history & authorship of these
> "-suci" texts.  I twice happened upon such texts in Sri Lanka (I
> believe I mentioned them in my postings of the time) and they had
> extremely scant information on their origins and authorship --but they
> seemed to be largely (if not wholly?) modern concoctions --but I do
> not understand in what way they are concocted from classical
> components.
>
> One text seemed to gather together word-glosses from the commentaries
> in a more lexical schema; this is unsurprising for a modern Sinhalese
> author, but I would be interested to know what earlier precedents
> there are for this (if any) or in what way the Burmese tradition
> differs from it.

In the case of the Abhidhaanappadiipikaa-suuci I don't know
of any pre-19th century precedents. Having said that, there
seems to be nothing especially innovative in Subhuuti's work,
other than his presentation of the glosses in alphabetical
order, instead of following the Abhidhaanappadiipikaa's
order of gaathaas. Compared with the 14th century .tiikaa
Subhuuti's focus seems to be more on grammar (esp.
word-formation) than semantics. His grammatical glosses
don't appear to be original: whenever I search for them on
the CSCD I invariably found that he is quoting from the
Atthakathaas or the Saddaniiti.

> I think that several of Jim's proposed projects on this list would
> ammount to the creation of an electronic "suci" --and the genre seems
> well-suited to the digital era. However, I still really do not feel
> that I understand what the genre is,

Perhaps its defining feature is simply authorship by monks
who had been taught Latin by Christian missionaries, using
mid-Victorian Latin grammars and lexicons, and who then
decided that the format of these works would work well for
Pali too.

Best wishes,
Dhammanando