Pind's article on Buddhaghosa

I read the (recently uploaded) article on Buddhaghosa during one of
what will be be many 12-hour bus rides.

I have little to say, and so would mostly offer a note of appreciation.

This kind of article is, in a sense, the most difficult to construe,
as the argument relies on presenting evidence to the reader, making a
normative judgement (based on reading and understanding the Pali)
--and then inviting the reader to either accept or defy the
proposition, given the evidence.

This is only convincing for those who actually can (and do) read Pali.

Sadly, the thesis that Buddhaghosa's sources were primarily Pali (not
Sinhalese, by language) will be rejected or ignored by many --without
staring for very long at the words in italics.

For myself, I had already accepted/assumed this thesis to be true,
simply from a vague normative judgement based on reading the Pali, and
having an appreciation of the mutual-relations of various parts (or
"strata") of the literature (and, I must add, not reading very much of
it; I am certainly incapable of translating technical commentarial
passages, such as Pind's article focusses on; the way that grammar is
discussed by Buddhaghosa is utterly alien to the formulaic expression
of the Kaccayanavyakarana, etc.).

My own feeling about "the Buddhaghosa colophon" and related quotations
is that they may primarily indicate that the author(s) deleted or
removed Sinhalese language that had "crept into" (or "leaked into")
what the earlier sources relied upon --but that these were, so to
speak, in impure Pali prior to Buddhaghosa.

We should recall that, in our own era, when Anandajoti sat down to
prepare a simple edition of the Dhammapada, he found that all of the
Sinhalese sources had (inappropriate) Sinhalese spellings (including
pseudo-Sanskritizations) of Pali words.  His job was, in effect, to
delete or remove these, and find appropriate "pure Pali" spellings (in
a few cases I've noticed, he made the wrong choice, but still the
service is laudable and important).

Precisely because of the close proximity of Pali, Sinhalese Prakrit,
and other lingual influences that likely shot through pre-Buddhaghosa
commentarial sources, I must imagine that part of his job was as a
(lexical and grammatical) purifier of prior, secondary sources.

This general picture fits well with Dr. Pind's secondary thesis in the
same essay, that Buddhaghosa was a master of Paninian/Sanskrit
grammar.

In order to "purify" pali text (in that context) one would need to
know very well what was un-Pali --viz., what was Sanskritic, and
Prakritic.

In general, I think that K.R. Norman has demonstrated in numerable
instances that canonical Pali text was "scrubbed" to remove what
redactors (sometimes falsely) considered lingual impurities.

These impurities may also have hastened the disappearance of
pre-Buddhaghosa commentaries; and, of course, it is also simply
possible that they were of inferior quality (or inferior orthodoxy) to
B.G.'s output.

The assumption that, prior to B.G., there were many profound and
brilliant commentaries written in Sinhalese seems to simply reflect
the dogmatic assumption that everything ancient is superior to
everything new.

E.M.